Chương 49: Chapter 22 Part 2

Miles below the aerial cataclysm, the ruined, acid-scorched balcony of the Vael estate was bathed in the flashing, erratic light of the dogfight. Vice Guild Master Durgan gripped the stone railing so tightly the granite began to crack under his massive hands. Beside him, Axel the dark elf squinted against the blinding solar flares, his hand pressed firmly against his tightly bound ribs, his predatory eyes wide with disbelief.

"She's getting boxed in," Durgan grunted, his gravelly voice tight with sheer, uncharacteristic panic.

"The beast is just too massive. It's cutting off her escape routes." From their perspective on the ground, Ming Xuan Ji was fighting a desperate, agonizingly one-sided battle. The tiny streak of black and crimson silk was constantly falling back, narrowly slipping past snapping jaws and devastating tail whips that tore the clouds apart.

"She hasn't landed a single counterattack," High Apothecary Silas Vane whispered. He was leaning heavily against the wall, his medical mind frantically calculating the sheer, impossible stamina required just to survive the atmospheric pressure in that sky.

"A mortal body cannot maintain that level of evasion. One graze... just one graze from those claws, and she is dead." But standing beside them, the young Evanthe did not look afraid. Wrapped tightly in a thick wool cloak, the freezing wind entirely failing to bite her skin, Evanthe perceived the world differently now. Her newly balanced, harmonious Dantian hummed quietly in her chest.

The scorching Yang energy of her natural constitution was perfectly stabilized by the absolute-zero Yin, granting her a profound, spiritual clarity she had never experienced in her fourteen years of life. She channeled a tiny fraction of her perfect Qi into her eyes to pierce the blinding glare of the dragon's fire.

"She isn't running," Evanthe stated softly, her voice carrying a profound certainty that made the hardened, veteran mercenaries turn to look at her in surprise.

"Kid, the dragon is swinging for her head," Axel wheezed, pointing at the sky.

"Look at the rhythm," Evanthe corrected, her dark eyes reflecting the chaotic flashes of light above the Aegis Array.

"Master isn't dodging out of panic. She isn't wasting energy. She is stepping exactly where she wants to, leading the monster into a specific rotation."

In the freezing troposphere, the Ancient Gold Dragon's frustration finally boiled over. Physical attacks were too slow. The insect was entirely too slippery, possessing a highly unnatural spatial awareness. The dragon decided to stop swatting and simply crush the airspace itself. The dragon let out a deafening roar, its massive throat glowing not with fire, but with dense, complex draconic magic. Draconic Utterance: Weight of the Mountain. The ambient mana in the sky violently warped.

Dozens of localized, invisible gravity wells materialized in a massive sphere around Xuan Ji. The atmospheric pressure instantly multiplied by a factor of a hundred. Raindrops were violently flattened into mist, and the sheer gravitational pull attempted to crush the Heavenly Demon's bones to dust and drag her out of the sky.

Simultaneously, the dragon snapped its wings forward, unleashing a Solar Flare—a blinding, omnidirectional flashbang of pure UV light designed to permanently blind the human while she was pinned by the gravity. It was an inescapable, high-tier AoE death trap. But Ming Xuan Ji did not panic. When the environment turned against her, she simply stopped relying on the environment. She flooded her meridians with her supreme Qi, reinforcing her skeleton and muscles to withstand the crushing gravitational pressure.

Instead of trying to fly out of the gravity wells, she used [Cloud-Stepping Dragon] to create hardened platforms of compressed air directly inside the crushing pressure zones. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. She became a leaf on a raging river. She bounced between the gravity wells, using their own intense pull to slingshot herself forward at a terrifying velocity, perfectly timing her blinks to avoid the blinding Solar Flare.

The dragon, expecting to see the human crushed and falling, was entirely caught off guard. In its haste to cast the massive AoE spell, it had completely overextended its neck, leaving its chest and wing joints wide open. The boss was caught in a massive animation lock. The paradigm had twisted. Xuan Ji did not retreat. The cold, analytical observer vanished from her expression, instantly replaced by the terrifying, unadulterated malice of the Heavenly Demon. She unsealed her Dantian completely.

The passive, ambient golden heat surrounding her vanished, violently replaced by a blinding, freezing azure light. Since her Yang Qi had been entirely negated by the dragon's solar armor, she forcefully pulled upon the absolute zero of her Ultimate Yin. Utilizing the massive momentum she had gathered from slingshotting through the gravity wells, Xuan Ji didn't dodge backward; she practically teleported forward. She stepped directly inside the dragon's guard, right past the snapping teeth and the fading solar magic.

She materialized hovering directly beside the massive, shimmering joint at the base of the dragon's right wing—the exact critical point her Divine Eye had mapped out minutes earlier.

"My turn," Xuan Ji whispered into the roaring wind. She drew her left fist back, condensing a terrifying, hyper-dense sphere of absolute-zero Yin Qi around her knuckles. The ambient moisture in the troposphere instantly flash-froze around her arm, forming a jagged, crystalline gauntlet of pure, unbreakable ice. With a concussive boom, Xuan Ji drove her fist directly into the dragon's wing joint. The impact did not bounce off.

The absolute zero of the Ultimate Yin aggressively clashed with the absolute heat of the dragon's solar armor. The resulting thermal shock violently, instantly shattered the golden scales, driving the sheer, blunt-force trauma of a Heavenly Demon directly into the beast's underlying muscle, tendon, and bone. The sky went dead silent for a fraction of a second. And then, the Ancient Gold Dragon let out a telepathic shriek of mind-breaking agony that shattered the remaining storm clouds for miles.

The sheer, concussive force of the Ultimate Yin strike sent a violent, unnatural shudder through the Ancient Gold Dragon's massive frame. Its right wing violently buckled. The thermal shock caused a cluster of its indestructible golden scales to instantly shatter, raining down upon the pale-blue hexes of the Aegis Array below like a shower of falling stars. Ming Xuan Ji did not pause to admire her work.

In the brutal, unforgiving realm of high-level raiding, a staggered boss was a fleeting window of opportunity that a veteran never wasted. She abandoned the defensive, evasive dance entirely. The "Monster of Countless Battles" finally bared her fangs. Moving with a terrifying economy of motion, Xuan Ji flowed through the sky like a shadow cast by flashing lightning. She didn't waste a single ounce of her profound Qi on flashy, wide-area magical explosions.

Every movement, every pivot in the freezing air, was violently efficient, designed solely to keep her perfectly positioned in the dragon's blind spots while maximizing blunt-force trauma. The dragon frantically snapped its head around, unleashing a chaotic, point-blank burst of solar fire to incinerate the pest. But Xuan Ji had already anticipated the animation lock of the beast's heavy neck.

Using [Cloud-Stepping Dragon], she dropped ten feet, allowed the solar flare to wash harmlessly over her head, and drove a freezing, azure-coated heel directly into the softer, vulnerable scales beneath the dragon's lower jaw. CRACK. The dragon's massive head snapped upward, its jaw forced violently shut by the impact. Before the beast could even register the pain, Xuan Ji was already moving.

She bounced off the compressed air, blurring along the length of the dragon's serpentine neck, and delivered a rapid, devastating succession of localized Ultimate Yin palm strikes directly to the beast's spinal ridge. Every strike sounded like a cannon firing. Every impact forced the absolute-zero Qi directly through the gaps in the dragon's shattered armor, shocking the underlying nerve clusters and completely disrupting the beast's arcane circulation.

Inside the ancient, primordial mind of the Gold Dragon, the blinding haze of grief and arrogance violently shattered. It was replaced by a cold, deeply buried, entirely unfamiliar emotion: primal fear. The dragon lashed out wildly, its massive tail sweeping through the clouds, its claws tearing at the air, its scales crackling with desperate gravity wells and errant lightning storms. But it hit nothing. The human was never where she was supposed to be.

The moment the dragon committed to a strike, the human was already repositioned, slipping flawlessly through the gaps in the beast's magical weave to deliver another bone-rattling blow. The ancient guardian of the peaks realized, with mind-breaking horror, that this tiny insect had allowed it to attack earlier. The human had stood there, casually dodging its greatest physical strikes and AoE spells, simply to map out its limitations. It wasn't fighting an insect.

It was being systematically, mechanically dismantled by a master of martial arts.