Chương 576: Chapter 571: Two Seconds To Ruin

Sun Tao kept his focus on the boy standing across from him, Hou Hongyun, a name that meant nothing to him, just another nobody from nowhere who had managed to reach Oneiric Sovereign before age thirty and had decided that made him something worth noticing. Sun Tao had encountered hundreds of young prodigies across five centuries of cultivation and most of them ended up dead or broken well before their hundredth year because talent without experience was nothing more than potential that had not been wasted yet.

He began channeling his cultivation while they stood waiting for Song Wei to officially begin the match, which was an old trick he had been using for longer than most people in this courtyard had been alive.

The rules said you couldn't attack before the signal but nobody had ever said anything about preparing, and by the time Song Wei gave the command Sun Tao would already have his techniques primed and ready to release and the boy would have barely registered that the fight had started before Sun Tao's flames were already tearing through him.

The Sovereign Flame Mandate was five hundred years of Sun Tao's life condensed into a single method, five hundred years of understanding that fire in the dream realms was pure destructive will made real through dream qi.

Most fire cultivators he had encountered treated flames the way a craftsman treated tools, controlling temperature and directing the burning, and that approach worked well enough for them because regular qi responded to conscious direction and manipulation like how tools respond to skilled hands, but dream qi didn't work that way.

Dream qi responded to conviction, to the belief that what you imagined was already real, so when Sun Tao manifested flames through dream qi he was creating it through his certainty that fire existed exactly where and how he willed it. The hotter he needed his flames to burn, the more complete and unshakeable that certainty needed to be.

It had taken him two hundred years of meditation and testing and burning away every trace of doubt and hesitation until his will was sharp enough to cut reality before he had finally reached Oneiric Sovereign through that method, and his Crown of Clarity burned like a miniature sun when he pushed his cultivation to its limits.

Thirty-seven formal duels over the past three centuries and thirty-five victories, the two losses coming early when he had been a Fresh Oneiric Sovereign making mistakes he would never repeat again. Since reaching Late Stage, he had not lost once across sixteen consecutive victories, and most of those fights had ended within the first ten seconds because the key was overwhelming force delivered faster than an opponent could form a response.

Cultivators spent far too much effort trying to be clever with their techniques, constructing elaborate attacks and manipulating terrain and trying to outthink their opponents, and all of that required time that a properly committed opponent wouldn't give them. Sun Tao's approach had always been simpler than that, hit first, hit hard, make sure they never got a chance to use whatever they had prepared.

He had permanently crippled seven cultivators across those sixteen victories because hesitation in the cultivation world got you killed, and if you showed mercy, you created enemies who would spend the next century building toward revenge. It was cleaner and more practical to make certain they couldn't threaten you again and to make them an example that discouraged others from challenging you, so he felt no guilt about any of them.

Everyone who stepped into an arena understood the risks, if you couldn't accept the consequences, you had no business being there. Sun Tao would open with the Sovereign's Burning Fist at eighty percent power aimed at the boy's chest, it wouldn't be enough to kill outright but enough to shatter the sternum and collapse one lung.

Then while the boy was trying to breathe through coughing blood, he would follow with the Crown's Fury technique which would burn through the boy's spiritual channels and permanently cripple his cultivation foundation. All of this would happen before this junior's eyes could register that anything had happened.

The other cultivators stood at the edge of the training ground watching, Xu Feng with his round face looking openly concerned, the thin nervous boy looking visibly relieved that he hadn't been the one chosen for this, Xie Ling showing nothing at all, and Song Wei watching with the same flat expression he had maintained since revealing himself.

This was exactly as Sun Tao wanted it because they would all see what happened when someone tried to behave above their station, this Hou Hongyun who had sat beside Xie Ling without asking, who had spoken to Sun Tao without appropriate respect, who had refused to acknowledge the natural order that existed in the cultivation world, all of that required correction, and Sun Tao was more than happy to be the one to do it.

The boy was just standing there with his hands at his sides and not even in a basic combat stance which was either incredible arrogance or no training at all, it was probably both. Sun Tao was going to enjoy this. Song Wei raised his right hand, and Sun Tao felt every muscle in his body coil tighter in preparation and then Song Wei's hand came down.

"Fight." Sun Tao crossed the distance between them like something fired from a siege weapon, his body accelerating across twenty feet in less than a second with the Sovereign's Burning Fist condensed around his right hand into a physical construct that warped the air around it from the heat. His strike drove toward the boy's chest carrying enough concentrated force to crater the ground behind the point of impact and he was already calculating the follow-up technique before the first one had even landed.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. The boy disappeared. One moment Hou Hongyun was standing exactly where he had been standing since the beginning of the match and the next moment the space he had occupied was empty with a flash of red light and nothing else left behind.

Sun Tao's fist kept moving because the momentum had already carried him forward past the point where he could redirect it, the strike continued through completely empty air until it connected with the ground five feet beyond where his target had been standing. The result of a Late Stage Oneiric Sovereign's Burning Fist at eighty percent power hitting packed earth with no resistance to absorb any of it cratered the ground in a circle fifty feet across.

Flames erupted outward in every direction, the shockwave threw up a dense cloud of dust and debris, and the heat was intense enough that the formation arrays at the edges of the training ground activated their protective functions automatically. Sun Tao barely registered any of it because his combat instincts were already screaming at him that missing a strike meant exposure and he needed to locate his opponent immediately and get his defenses in order before… Something massive hit his left side.

The strike arrived with no warning at all, all he felt was sudden and overwhelming force connecting with his ribs, he heard bone crack, felt his body leave the ground, and his vision blur as he was thrown sideways through the air. Sun Tao was still trying to process what had happened when the second strike hit him from above while he was mid-air, had no way to dodge or brace, so the force drove him downward into the ground. The earth shattered under the impact and his body kept going down through it.

Dirt and stone exploded outward around him as more bones broke and his spine compressed badly, blood filled his mouth and his spiritual channels spasmed. He came to rest in a crater around twelve feet deep with every part of his body in serious pain, moving was difficult, breathing was difficult, and even thinking was difficult.

The thing that was wrong, the thing that made it different from every other time he had taken damage in his years of fighting, was that this had bypassed his defenses in a way that made no sense to him. His spiritual pressure should have provided some resistance, his body cultivation should have absorbed a significant portion of the impact, but the force had transferred directly into his physical form as though his cultivation didn't exist. How was that even possible? Voices filtered down from above him.

"By the heavens," someone said, Xu Feng from the sound of it.

"That was two seconds, the entire fight lasted two seconds."

"One and a half," a colder voice said, Xie Ling's.

"Sun Tao's strike missed, Hou's first and second strikes both connected within half a second of each other."

"Is he still alive?" The thin young man's voice was shaking noticeably.

"That much damage, surely he must be..."

"He's alive." Song Wei's voice cut through the others.

"His spiritual foundation is barely intact, and the injuries are severe but not fatal, he'll survive with extensive healing."

"What kind of technique was that?" Xu Feng asked.

"I've never seen anything move at that speed and what was that red light?"

"I don't know," Song Wei said.

"The energy signature was not standard dream qi." There was a pause and then a younger voice spoke, sounding apologetic, which somehow made everything worse.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean for it to be that brutal. This was the first time I used this technique in actual combat. I thought I'd calculated the force right, but apparently I underestimated how much damage it would cause." Sun Tao's blurry vision managed to focus slightly and a figure was approaching the edge of the crater above him, young, copper-brown hair, pale blue eyes, the boy, Hou, looking down at him with an apologetic expression.

"The first strike was meant to disorient," Hou continued, apparently explaining to the others.

"The second strike was supposed to incapacitate. I calibrated them based on theoretical calculations about Late-Stage Oneiric Sovereign durability, but I guess I overestimated his defence."

"You certainly did," Song Wei said dryly.

"Sun Tao is unconscious and severely injured. I'll need to use healing techniques immediately to prevent permanent damage."

"Again, I apologize," Hou said, and he was speaking directly to Sun Tao now despite Sun Tao not being able to respond, "but I did warn you that you would regret the challenge, if only you had listened." The concern in his voice made Sun Tao angrier than the pain did. Being beaten was one thing but being pitied by the person who beat you was something that five centuries of cultivating a sense of pride hadn't prepared him to absorb with any grace at all. He tried to speak but his mouth wouldn't form words.

Everything hurt and his vision was still doubling so he could barely see or think through the pain, but he could see well enough to notice that something was wrong with Hou's right arm, it couldn't even be called an arm anymore. Where the shoulder ended and where a hand should have been, there was instead a massive appendage made up of red vines, thick as cables and moving against each other with a slow writhing motion.

They glowed with the same red light Sun Tao had seen during the fight, and each individual vine had thorns along its length, sharp ones, that had torn through his flesh just a moment ago. But that wasn't the part that made his stomach drop. The part that made his stomach drop was that the vines looked hungry. They were reaching toward him, straining against whatever was holding them back and trying to get closer to where he was lying in the crater. This was demonic dream cultivation.

Dream cultivation was built on the principle of imposing belief onto reality and making imagination into truth, that was what made it powerful and that was what made it inherently dangerous in ways that other cultivation paths were not. Demonic dream cultivation took that principle and pulled it in the opposite direction, instead of imposing your own beliefs onto reality, you opened your consciousness and let something else's beliefs in.

You opened a door to whatever lived in the nightmare realms, the things that existed in the spaces between dreams, the entities that were always hungry and always reaching and always trying to cross over into reality and find something to feed on. Most cultivators who attempted demonic dream cultivation were consumed by it and the entities took over their consciousness and wore their body until it fell apart.

The lucky ones died quickly while the unlucky ones remained aware inside themselves for years, fully conscious that something else was controlling them but unable to do anything about it. However, a very small number of cultivators managed to hold the line, they let the entities in just far enough to access the power without being consumed by it and they walked the exact boundary between what they had been born as and what the technique wanted to make them.

Those were the most dangerous people in the entire cultivation world because they had all the power of something that didn't think like a person and all the strategic capability of someone who did. The boy standing above the crater looking down at him with that apologetic expression was one of those people. And he had destroyed Sun Tao in under two seconds.

As Sun Tao's consciousness finally began giving out on him and the darkness started closing in from the edges of his vision, his last coherent thought was a desperate prayer that Song Wei wouldn't allow that thing anywhere near him.