Chương 186: Imperial Qi

The first wave of spirit wolves hit the defensive line and the sound it made was the sound of fangs and bodies and spiritual energy all colliding with the barriers and cultivator techniques at once.

"Hold your positions!" Liu Chang called out.

"Don't let them pull you out of your assigned sectors!" It was not advice that any of these cultivators actually needed, none of them were inexperienced enough to require that particular reminder, but there was a function to familiar commands that went beyond the information they contained, and Liu Chang understood that well enough to use it anyway. It steadied people. It kept their attention where it needed to be.

Su Yue's steam barrier converted the front rank of wolves into cooked matter, their spiritual cores breaking apart under the combined pressure of heat and hostile qi working together. The Heavenly Jade disciples brought their lightning techniques across the valley entrance in overlapping curtains of jade colored energy. And the Yan Clan team on the western position was doing what the Yan Clan team did, which meant they were destroying everything within twenty feet of their location.

For the Yan Clan that qualified as restraint.

"Stage 8 incoming on the eastern flank!" somebody shouted. Liu Chang turned and saw it, a spirit wolf that was easily twice the body mass of the others in the wave, its fur scorched black from passing through the steam barrier but apparently undamaged by the experience. Su Yue's fire techniques were impressive at the level she operated them, but they hadn't been built to stop something in that stage.

"I have this one," Bing Lan said, already moving with the grace that had earned her the nickname 'Dancing Blade' among the sect's disciples. The wolf committed to its leap with its jaws spread wide enough to take a person whole and Bing Lan stepped directly into the attack's path rather than away from it and her sword moved through the air in a motion that looked more like someone practicing calligraphy than someone in a fight.

"Azure Moon's First Quarter." The slash caught the wolf mid-leap, bisecting it so cleanly that both halves continued their forward momentum for several feet before the beast realized it was dead. The spiritual core broke apart with a sound like glass fracturing and the released energy dissolved outward into the night air.

"Show off," Liu Chang murmured, even though his tone didn't have any real criticism. Bing Lan had been a senior cultivator longer than he had been cultivating, and her reputation had been built through decades of work that justified this level of confidence. If anyone had earned the right to make this look simple, it was her.

A vibration moved through the ground beneath Liu Chang's feet, subtle enough that the majority of people standing on it would have registered nothing at all, but he hadn't survived this long by treating subtle warnings as unimportant. Liu Chang pushed qi down through his feet and into the earth beneath him, this enhanced his ability to read what was happening below the surface. Something was moving down there. He brought his foot down hard and drove a concentrated pulse of qi into the ground.

Twenty feet to his left, the earth erupted upward and pushed out the crushed body of something that had once been an oversized mole.

"Earth Digging Moles in the ground below us!" he called out.

"Every earth attribute cultivator needs to maintain ground awareness! They are trying to undermine our footing!" The warning landed just before it would have been too late to matter. More moles broke through the surface at multiple points along the defensive line, the timing distributed to create maximum disruption and confusion, but the cultivators were now ready for them, so the burrowing beasts came up into prepared responses rather than the surprised targets they had been built around encountering.

"Senior Brother, second wave is coming in!" a younger disciple called out. Liu Chang looked up to see the large dark forms of Ironclad Bulls arriving, and behind them the distinctive body shapes of Blade Mantises were visible, their cutting limbs clicking against each other in a rhythmic pattern as they moved.

"Heavenly Jade disciples, target the bulls!" he ordered.

"Their armor has the weakest resistance to lightning techniques, hit them there! Azure Peak on the mantises, they move too fast for standard barrier coverage!" Shen Xuanyu and Zhang Wei moved with the synchronization that came from years of training the same forms together and their jade swords began tracing patterns in the air that connected into a networked energy structure spreading across the valley entrance.

The first Ironclad Bull that ran into what they had built had its armor blown outward in fragments by the lightning working through it from every direction at once, the core exposed and destroyed before the beast understood what was happening to it. Bing Lan took the Azure Peak side of the response to the mantises, and the insectoid beasts were a problem that most cultivators struggled with because their speed and the precision of their cutting limbs let them work around standard defensive techniques.

Azure Peak's sword arts had never been the sect's primary reputation, but they were far from standard and what Bing Lan built with the disciples around her demonstrated that clearly.

"Lunar Cascade Formation!" The disciples moved into the configuration around her and their combined techniques produced overlapping waves of azure energy that met the mantises inside a framework of moving blades that gave the beasts nowhere to move that wasn't already covered. Liu Chang was in the process of ending the existence of a Qi Condensation Stage 8 Ironclad Bull with his hands when he felt pride at how this group was functioning together.

This was one of the reasons the Azure Peak Sect had the reputation it did for beast wave defense work, the disciples understood that working together as a team was more effective than fighting alone. Movement at Chu Feng's position pulled his attention in that direction. Three Stage 7 spirit wolves had pushed Chu Feng into a corner against one of the defensive formation sections.

"Gale Rend!" The vacuum blades from Chu Feng's cross-slash technique caught the first wolf as it committed to its leap and the diagonal cut went through the beast before it landed. The spiritual core hadn't even finished its breaking process before Chu Feng was already repositioning for the second target. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"Skybreaker Dash!" The blur of movement left afterimages in the space he had been occupying, so the second wolf's tracking instinct followed the images rather than the actual body, and by the time it corrected, Chu Feng had already appeared behind it and put his wind wrapped fist through its skull with a clean single movement. The third wolf read that it was in a losing situation and tried to create distance.

"Stormfang Arsenal!" The wind blades materialized around Chu Feng in a dense arrangement, he directed all of them forward in a coordinated pattern and the wolf's retreat became irrelevant. Liu Chang, who was still dealing with the bull in front of him, felt a weight that had been sitting across his shoulders since Ke Yin had first raised concerns about Chu Feng begin to lift. This wasn't how someone who was working against them fought.

This wasn't the combat behavior of a person looking for openings to make the defense fail. Chu Feng was putting himself at risk to protect the position, he had done it repeatedly, and he had done it when doing nothing would have served a saboteur's purposes more.

"Senior Brother!" Chu Feng's voice came from further along the line, already engaged with the next group.

"Eastern flank, they're trying to loop around! Su Yue's barrier section is losing strength!" Liu Chang finished with the bull and accepted that they had been wrong about Chu Feng, or at minimum that whatever was complicated about his behavior and his interest in the shrine, it was not this. As he stood over the corpse of his opponent, a scream of pain drew his attention.

One of the younger disciples had been caught by a Blade Mantis strike that had gone through his defensive technique and the cut ran from his shoulder down across to his hip in a wound that was obviously beyond what he could fight through.

"Bai Chen!" The disciple closest to him moved to respond but Liu Chang's command stopped her before she took the second step.

"Hold your sector! Su Yue, cover the east gap! Bing Lan, extract him now!" Losing the formation to try to save one person was how you lost multiple people and Liu Chang had learned that lesson in conditions he didn't want to revisit ever again.

Bing Lan moved through the beasts between her and the fallen disciple using the minimum technique required to create the path she needed and had him off the field and moving toward the medical position in a time that demonstrated why decades of practice at this level produced a different category of capability entirely. Now, whether Bai Chen survived from that point was a question for the healers and not something Liu Chang could affect.

Unfortunately, the casualties continued to accumulate as the wave's intensity increased. An Ironclad Bull forced itself through the lightning web that the Heavenly Jade disciples were maintaining and its charge caught one of the female disciples before she could complete her defensive response. The impact sent her into the air, her jade sword came apart when it made contact with the bull's armor, and she hit the ground. Liu Chang didn't think she was going to get up again.

The Earth Digging Moles were developing their tactics as the fight continued, their tunneling patterns becoming more coordinated which that suggested something above individual beast intelligence was organizing them. They were starting a bore in one section of the defense and then redirecting and emerging somewhere the earth attribute cultivators were not currently focused, and two more cultivators went down before the pattern was fully identified and adapted to.

But the Symphony Shield formation was doing exactly what it had been designed to do, and more than Liu Chang had expected from Ke Yin's design in field conditions. It was reading where the heaviest pressure was being applied and redistributing its power reserves toward those points automatically. The extra seconds of protection that it gave the defenders in those sectors was translating directly into lives that would otherwise have been lost.

"Brother Liu!" Yan Li called out.

"They are here!" Liu Chang turned and saw who Yan Li was referring to. Coming out of the chaos of the main wave, there were five beasts radiating the spiritual pressure of Stage 9 cultivation, these were all Alphas of their species. The Ironclad Bull with armor that was more dense than the others of its kind. A Blade Mantis that was a completely different scale proposition from its lesser kin, standing at a height that made the ones currently engaged with Azure Peak look like a different species entirely.

A Bone Gnawer the size of a small house, its teeth glowing with corrosive energy. And from the ground itself a Stage 9 Earth Digging Mole that came up leaving traces of golden light where its claws passed through the air. Five Stage 9 beasts moving toward the same defensive line at the same time wasn't something that happened in normal beast wave conditions, Liu Chang knew that, everyone knew that.

"Bing Lan take the Mantis! Shen Xuanyu, you're on the Bull! Zhang Wei, the Bone Gnawer! Yan Li, the Mole is yours!" As for Liu Chang himself, he was already moving toward the Alpha before he finished saying it.

"I have the wolf!" The Alpha crossed the distance between them at a speed that wasn't proportional to its size, and its first strike went through three overlapping barrier layers as though the barriers had been placed there for only decoration. Liu Chang met the charge with the Immutable Titan Scripture already running through his body causing his skin to shift into the living stone density that the technique produced. The impact was tremendous.

Even with his enhanced defense, Liu Chang felt bones creak under the strain. The Alpha's spiritual pressure was incredible, its qi so dense it was like fighting against a mountain. As they exchanged a flurry of strikes, each impact sent shockwaves across the battlefield. To his right, Bing Lan danced with the Stage 9 Blade Mantis, her sword techniques left trails of azure light in the air as she matched the beast's speed.

The Mantis's blades moved faster than normal eyes could track, but Bing Lan's "Azure Moon's First Quarter" technique kept pace, deflecting strikes that could have cut through mountains.

"Your speed means nothing," she taunted as she wove between the Mantis's strikes, her sword drawing blood from its carapace, "if you can't actually hit anything!" The Mantis responded by splitting its blade-arms into dozens of smaller blades. Bing Lan's eyes widened slightly since she'd never seen a Blade Mantis do that before. She was forced to unleash her "Thousand Moon Reflection" technique, her sword becoming a sphere of defensive strikes. On the opposite flank, Shen Xuanyu faced the Ironclad Bull.

His jade-colored lightning techniques seemed to slide off the beast's enhanced armor, barely leaving scorch marks. The bull charged, its horns tearing through Shen Xuanyu's defensive barriers like paper.

"Jade Thunder Empire!" Shen Xuanyu roared, his technique manifesting as a dragon of pure lightning that wrapped around the bull. The beast's armor began to crack under the sustained assault, but it didn't slow its charge, if anything, it seemed to grow stronger as its armor degraded. Zhang Wei was having his own problems with the Bone Gnawer. His jade sword techniques were powerful, but the massive rat-like beast simply regenerated any damage he inflicted.

Its teeth had already shattered three of his jade weapons, the corrosive energy eating through even spiritually enhanced metal.

"How do you like this?" Zhang Wei snarled, forming hand seals as he channeled more qi.

"Heaven's Jade Burial!" The ground beneath the Bone Gnawer crystallized into jade, trying to trap it in place, but the beast's teeth simply chewed through the transformed earth faster than Zhang Wei could maintain them. Meanwhile, Yan Li faced the Earth Digging Mole. Golden light rippled around him as he channeled his imperial qi, the very air trembling in response to heaven's authority. The mole dove underground, its tunneling ability allowing it to attack from unexpected angles, but Yan Li merely smiled.

"You want to play games?" he murmured, raising his hand. The golden light intensified until it was almost blinding.

"Heavenly Titan's Divine Grasp!" A colossal hand of pure golden qi materialized above the battlefield, each finger nine feet long. The imperial energy was so dense that the air itself seemed to crystallize around it, creating visible ripples in space. When the mole burst from the ground behind Yan Li, aiming for a surprise attack, the massive hand moved with impossible speed. The fingers closed around the beast before it could dive back underground, the imperial qi nullifying its tunneling ability.

The mole thrashed in the titan's grasp, its Stage 9 qi flaring as it tried to break free, but against the power of heaven's mandate, it might as well have been a normal rodent struggling against a steel trap.

"Insignificant," Yan Li declared, closing his own hand into a fist. The giant golden hand crushed the mole with such force that the beast's spiritual core shattered instantly. As the Stage 9 mole's corpse fell to earth, Yan Li didn't even bother to watch it land.

"Behind you!" Someone shouted, and Yan Li turned to see a blur of motion. A Stage 7 Blade Mantis had somehow slipped through their defensive line, its razor limbs already striking towards... Yan Ziheng. The young formation practitioner was focused on maintaining his section of the Symphony Shield, so hadn't noticed the threat appear behind him. Yan Li moved to intercept, but he was too far away to make it in time. He could only watch as the mantis's blade descended towards his clan member's unprotected back...