Chương 139: The Follower

"This Follower had hoped you would choose wisdom." He glared at Leo. He had somehow realized that Leo had rejected the Enlightened's offer. The Cultivator's hand darted to his chest. A defensive amulet flared beneath his robes. His other hand drew a spear from his storage ring, a T5 Deity Transformation weapon materializing in his grasp. Leo was already moving, already circling. He fired a blob of Scholar's Ink. The ball slammed into the man's spiritual sea. The Follower flinched. The man's eyes went wide.

For a fraction of a second, his divine sense showed him two versions of himself occupying the same space. Two identical spiritual signatures overlapping, creating noise where there should have been clarity. Leo read his Si in that fraction of a second. Strong for Gold Core, probably around forty-five thousand Si, but slightly below his own. He grinned. This fight was going to be easy. Lord Flockfeather had stripped the Scholar's Ink away like brushing dust off his sleeve.

Raw Si could overwrite Leo's forgeries through sheer force. But this man couldn't do that. He was close enough in strength that the paint would stick. It would accumulate. Leo just had to keep hitting him. The Follower recovered. His face twisted in fury as he charged, T5 spear leading. The weapon shrieked through the air, formations carrying power that dwarfed anything Leo's Sunshifter could match. Leo didn't try to match it. He moved.

The g-force bleeding formations on his flying sword screamed as he jerked sideways. The acceleration would have blacked out any normal flyer. But the formations bled off the lethal forces, converting momentum into gravity bombs that scattered behind him. The spear cut empty air. Leo was already fifteen feet away, firing another missile of Scholar's Ink. This one hit the man's left side as he tried to dodge the gravity bombs. The Follower snarled and pressed forward.

The air crackled from the sheer power emanating from his T5 weapon. His spear technique was good. Each thrust came wickedly fast, the strikes flowing together in combinations that spoke of years of brutal training. The man was probably the strongest fighter Leo had to ever faced one-on-one. But unlike his fights with Mateo, now Leo had an effective ranged option. All he had to do was create space and dodge. The spear strikes came faster.

The Follower tried to overwhelm him with volume, boxing in his escape routes, forcing him into a corner where raw power would decide things. Leo painted him again. Another forgery layered onto his spiritual sea. The man's next swing went slightly wide. His jaw clenched. He stopped chasing. The T5 spear's formations ignited. Power flooded the weapon. The tip blazed white-hot, formations cycling along its length. The cultivator planted his feet and swept the spear in a wide horizontal arc.

A wave of force exploded outward. The blast filled the chamber. A sphere of crushing pressure expanded from the spear's tip at speeds that should have been impossible to dodge. The ancient stone walls cracked. The formation scripts on the ceiling flickered and died. The pressure wave hit Leo before he could clear the radius. It wasn't a direct hit. He'd read the buildup and was already moving when the technique fired. But T5 was T5. The edge of the blast caught his shield, and the Sunshifter screamed.

Red light flared and dimmed. Leo felt the force rattle his bones. His flight path buckled. For a fraction of a second he was tumbling, not flying. He caught himself four feet lower than he'd been, ears ringing. The shield was intact, but the Qi reserves had taken a visible hit. One graze from the edge of a T5 technique, and his sword had burned through a tenth of its capacity. A direct hit would erase him. The Follower saw the stumble. He snarled. He swept the spear again.

Another blast, this one aimed lower to cut off ground-level escape routes. Leo threw himself upward. The pressure wave passed beneath him, close enough that the turbulence spun him half a rotation. He corrected mid-spin and fired ink. The blob caught the man on the shoulder while he was mid-swing. The Follower barely noticed. He was grinning now. The T5 weapon was his trump card. It didn't matter that Leo could dodge the spear itself.

The area attacks were nearly unavoidable at close range, and each one pushed Leo closer to death. He started chaining them. Blast after blast after blast, the T5 formations cycling so fast the spear became a continuous fountain of destruction. He burned through the sword's stored spiritual Qi at a reckless pace. Leo stopped trying to counterattack. He poured everything into evasion, reading each blast's origin point through his omnidirectional awareness and threading the gaps between overlapping pressure waves.

Some he dodged cleanly. Others clipped him. Each graze cost him. Sunshifter's barrier flickered with every hit, the red light growing dimmer. The sword's Qi reserves dropped in lurches. Thirty percent gone. Forty. The temple groaned. The walls had absorbed the punishment meant for Leo. Cracks spiderwebbed across the ancient stone. The hexagram formation scripts died in spreading patches as structural integrity failed. A section of ceiling collapsed.

Massive stone blocks tumbled through the space where Leo had been hovering a moment before. The floor buckled. Support columns that had stood for millennia began to lean. The entire chamber was coming apart, thousands of years of stability undone in seconds by Deity Transformation level attacks. The Follower saw it. His eyes went wide. He ran for the exit. His movement technique carried him through the collapsing chamber as stone rained down around him. A pillar toppled across his path.

He vaulted it without breaking stride. Leo pursued. The corridor shook as they flew through it. Cracks raced along the walls, chasing them. The structural damage propagated, each failure triggering the next. They burst into the temple chamber with the two Nascent Soul puppets. The Follower's hand dove into his storage ring. He pulled out a jade slip covered in hexagram scripts and crushed it. The constructs responded instantly. Blue light raced through their wooden frames. The staff puppet's crystal began charging.

The spear puppet took a lurching step forward. The cultivator positioned himself between them, using the constructs as a screen. His breathing was controlled but heavy. Sweat gleamed on his forehead. Leo flew through the doorway. The constructs attacked. The spear puppet thrust first, its jerky windup exploding into that same impossible acceleration. The staff puppet's beam fired a half-second later, cutting a burning line across Leo's flight path. Leo dove under the spear and banked around the beam.

The last time he'd faced these puppets, he had felt helpless. He couldn't hurt them. He couldn't protect his friends. He had watched Arthur and Mike die in this same room. Now he had a squishy target that was much more fun to hit. Leo dove straight for the Follower. The spear thrust passed over his head. He rolled under it, Sunshifter trailing Ferrari Red, and came up on the puppet's blind side. The staff puppet's beam swept toward his new position. Leo was already gone.

A sharp jerk to the right, g-force formations screaming, and the beam scorched stone where he'd been a fraction of a second earlier. The Follower watched from behind his puppet screen. Confidence drained from his expression. Now he began to look concerned. Leo painted him through the gap between the constructs. The man's next command to the puppets came a beat too late. The coordination between the three of them broke down as his cluttered divine sense fed him contradictory information. Leo painted him again.

The Follower stumbled. He looked down at his hands as if they belonged to someone else. The accumulated forgeries were reaching critical mass. His spiritual perception was drowning in noise. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. He couldn't win this fight. Leo could see the moment he realized it. The cultivator turned and ran. He abandoned the constructs, abandoned his defensive position, and sprinted for the temple doors.

He deactivated the barrier and burst through onto the bridge beyond. Leo pursued. The puppets lurched after him, but their jerky movements couldn't match his speed. He shot past them before they could reorient. The Follower was fast. His movement technique sent him hurtling across the bridge in massive leaps. Suddenly he veered left, diving off the bridge and into the city below. Leo followed him over the edge.

The Follower's POV The Follower had seen enough. He had offered the junior everything. The Enlightened's guidance. A path beyond the limitations of conventional cultivation. Knowledge paid for in countless deaths. And the boy had stood there in the ruins of a dead empire, surrounded by Slaughter Qi thick enough to taste, and refused. It was time to kill Leo Chen. This Follower landed on the roof of a warehouse. He reached into his storage ring and pulled out every command token he had inside.

Once he activated them, every single puppet he had cracked and controlled would awaken. They would fill the air with spell arts and swat the junior out of the skies. He snarled and activated the token. He folded his hands behind his back, and turned to watch the junior die. Every single dormant puppet within range activated and began attacking. Beams crossed the air in overlapping grids. Crossbow bolts stitched lines of spiritual fire across every viable flight path.

A force sufficient to annihilate a small sect, wasted on a single Foundation Establishment insect who had refused the Enlightened's generosity. The junior flew into it without slowing down. His trajectory made no sense. He moved in sharp, broken lines. Instantaneous direction changes that defied momentum. One moment he flew left. The next he had already reversed, then dropped, then climbed at an angle that should have torn his meridians apart from the forces alone.

The closest comparison this Follower could draw was lightning arcing through storm clouds. The same jagged, unpredictable path. The same way the eye could not follow, could only register where the bolt had been after it had already moved on. The Follower grew angry. This should not be possible. No Foundation Establishment cultivator should be able to react to overlapping Nascent Soul attack patterns at this speed. No movement technique or spiritual treasure could account for what this Follower was witnessing.

This was the junior who had refused the Enlightened's hand. Who had stood in the presence of the truth and turned away like a child refusing medicine. And now he danced through a killing field as if the world owed him passage. The Enlightened had told this Follower that the junior could die and return. He had understood the words. He had not understood what kind of monster that process could build. This Follower staggered.

The forgeries gnawed at his coordination now, dozens of false spiritual signatures swimming through his perception like silt churned up from a riverbed. He tried to filter them, to separate the real from the painted copies, but the junior kept adding more. This Follower's teeth ground together. His own divine sense was being defaced by a child. Each false signature was a brushstroke of contempt, painted directly onto his spiritual sea. He wanted to scream. The urge shocked him.

He had watched sects burn and cities fall without so much as a quickened heartbeat. But this, this defacement, this casual vandalism of his divine sense by a junior a full realm beneath him, this made him want to howl. And worse yet, he still could not shake off the junior's divine sense lock. It wrapped around him from every direction. It pressed against his spiritual sea like the ambient weight of a Nascent Soul Lord's domain. This Follower knew that feeling.

He had knelt before Lords whose domains could crush cities. He had felt the full weight of a superior realm settle over him and understood, in his bones, that he existed at their sufferance. This was that feeling. From a Foundation Establishment junior. The impossibility of it clawed at his composure. A domain was the hallmark of the Nascent Soul realm, the spiritual manifestation of a Lord's accumulated power and comprehension. And yet the junior's divine sense achieved the same result.

This Follower refused the thought. He was Gold Core. He had served the Enlightened for a century. He would not be unmade by a child's parlor tricks. But his hands were shaking. Something shifted. The realization that he was not the predator. He was the prey. He threw more command tokens. The puppets began to overload and double their rate of fire. It did not matter. The junior wove through the doubled barrage in those jagged, lightning-arc patterns.

And somehow, impossibly, through it all he kept painting this Follower's spiritual sea with every exchange. How long could he keep it up? The lightning movement style demanded perfect coordination between body, sword, and divine sense. The slightest lapse in concentration should send him careening into a beam or a crossbow bolt. One mistake should be enough. But the junior made no mistakes. This Follower waited for the stumble. The overcorrection.

The moment where the impossible coordination finally cracked under its own complexity. It did not come. He began to run. He hated the junior for making him run. He hated himself more for the relief he felt when the distance grew. The junior kept following. The impossible dodges kept coming. The forgeries kept landing. The fortress doors loomed ahead, only a hundred meters away. Within them lay four Deity Transformation constructs with wide sleeping attacks that turned entire regions of space into kill zones.

Leo's POV Leo watched the Follower's stride falter a hundred yards in front of the fortress. He wasn't really sure what was inside. But since it was the only building that was deep red in the city of blue, he kind of figured that was where the Deity Transformation puppets were stored. Leo broke into a dive. He shot forward, a blade of Ferrari red streaking toward the man's back. The Follower sensed it coming. His lips curled into a smile as he spun to face the attack. He raised his spear to intercept.

Leo changed direction like a lightning bolt. He zigzagged around the cultivator's guard and slammed into his side. The Follower's defensive amulet flared. T5 protection displaced the hit, shunting the force away from his body. But the impact still transferred momentum. The man stumbled sideways, lurching. Leo fired Scholar's Ink while exiting the dive. The blob caught the man across the chest. He came back around and kept up the pressure. Another hit to the shoulder.

The amulet flared again, displacing the damage, but the Follower had to brace against the impact to keep from tumbling. The cultivator tried to counterattack. His spear swept out in a wide arc. The swing was slow. His cluttered divine sense fed him overlapping images of Leo's position. He saw three versions of the junior, then five. He couldn't tell which was real. The Sunshifter punished the mistake. Three rapid strikes to his back, his hip, his knee.

Although each strike was blocked by the amulet, it still forced the man to stumble and catch himself. Leo painted him again and the Follower's movements degraded further. Leo accelerated. This was the lightning style that had made him famous in the CFL. No pause between attacks. Strike and move and strike again, never giving the opponent time to reset or recover. The Sunshifter became a blur. It hammered the man from every angle. Left side. Right side. Back. Legs.

The defensive amulet worked overtime, flaring with each impact, burning through its stored Qi. The Follower tried to raise a barrier talisman. The Sunshifter knocked it from his fingers before he could activate it. He tried to fire his spear. Leo painted him before he could complete the technique. Around them, the puppets tracked Leo with their weapons raised. They couldn't fire. He was too close to the man now. Their programmed targeting couldn't distinguish between enemy and ally at this range.

The Follower stopped. He stood on the bridge a hundred and fifty feet from the central fortress. His spear dangled uselessly at his side. His amulet flickered with the last dregs of its power. His breath came in ragged gasps. His fingers reached for his storage ring and came up empty.

"This changes nothing." He met Leo's eyes. He tried to hold his gaze. It lasted two seconds before he looked away.

"This Follower is one of countless. When this body falls, another will take its place. The Enlightened has cultivated for centuries. He has transcended every limitation you cling to." The cultivator gestured at Leo with his dead spear.

"Your Heart of Flesh. Your precious connections. Your need for living things." He shook his head slowly.

"The Enlightened shed those chains long ago. You will never surpass someone who has spent lifetimes learning to need nothing and no one." Leo listened. Something quiet clicked into place. The Follower kept talking about Dao like it was fuel. Like the Heart of Flesh was a power source Leo had plugged into, and the Enlightened had simply found a better one. But that wasn't what Tianyi had taught him. Your Dao was how you saw the world. A lens, not a battery. Leo looked at the puppets frozen around them.

Powerful constructs. T4 materials. Ancient formations that still functioned after millennia. And completely dependent on command tokens from someone else's hand. The puppets were dead things. Hearts of stone. The Enlightened wasn't offering Leo a source of power. He was asking Leo to cut himself off from the Heavenly Dao. To become one of the dead things. Just another tool. He didn't need to feel the connection to all living things to know the Heavenly Dao was there.

The Sunshifter hovering at his side was his connection to the fans who believed in him and the Giants who funded its creation. The Scholar's Ink, a technique that Zhao taught him, was proof that his teammates didn't have to be next to him to support him. Something loosened inside Leo's chest. For the first time since entering the ruins, things became clear. There were a lot of things he didn't know how to answer. But at the very least, he found one answer. The worth of his Dao. He looked at the man.

Leo quoted a line from the Heart of Flesh technique.

"While you stand alone in the dead silence of your power, I am held by the eternal, living flow." He sent the Sunshifter forward. The Follower didn't give him the satisfaction. His hand closed around the defensive amulet at his chest. The depleted T5 spear in his other hand began to glow. Both treasures flared with unstable light as he forced them to self detonate. Leo was already retreating. The explosion swallowed the man whole. A sphere of white fire expanded outward, consuming everything in its radius.

The shockwave hit Leo a fraction of a second later, but he was fifty feet away and accelerating. The blast tore through the suspended city. Bridges shattered. Stone catwalks crumbled and fell into the abyss below. A nearby tower collapsed. The light faded. After the dust settled and the debris stopped falling, Leo swept the blast radius with his divine sense. Nothing. The cultivator's body, his storage ring, the T5 spear, the defensive amulet. All of it had been consumed in the detonation.

Leo stared at the scorched stone where the man had stood.

"Sore loser." Leo sighed. He tried not to think about how nice it would have been to have a T5 spear. He would have loved to bring it back and scare Tianyi with it. Leo turned away from the blast crater. The city spread out before him in every direction. Towers of pale gray stone rose into the darkness overhead, their windows glowing with that steady blue light. Leo looked left. A cluster of warehouses lined the cavern wall, their heavy doors sealed but unguarded. He looked right.

A tower twice the height of its neighbors stood at the city's center, its upper floors blazing with formation light. He looked down. Somewhere in the depths below, past the Slaughter Qi and the darkness, lay the secrets that the Follower had been trying to hide. Leo grinned. He had the entire Everlasting Empire to himself.