[MA] 204. By Elimination (Patreon)

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[A/N: Sorry for the delay.

Chapters this week: 2/3

Late chapters: 3

Next release: In a few minutes]

| Yinhu Lanfen (G) — 2920 / 3000 | -80 HP

Yinhu Lanfen's body wasn't as resistant as Shen had expected from a C-rank.

The reason was simple: she wasn't a Guardian; the system had said she was G-rank. Shen had been focusing on the difference between mana and qi, but another difference was that Guardians had stats and a straightforward way of improving them.

The Eternal Empire had had techniques and treasures to improve one's body, but they were expensive and not as widespread as the system. Yinhu Lanfen either hadn't cared much about her natural defense or lacked the resources to improve it.

That became even more obvious when he turned her arm into five-inch-wide cubes with a twist of his will, and it felt like his aura was cutting through paper.

Yinhu Lanfen kept getting away after losing her arm. Her blood flowed from the injury for a moment because she wasn't a Guardian, but she stopped the flow quickly enough using qi.

The woman could reach peak speed almost instantly, making them almost always faster than Shen. Almost. There was a tiny window of opportunity while she accelerated in which she was slower. That had let him cut her arm off, and he would keep exploiting it.

Shen started pivoting his swing even before it had gone through her shoulder.

Her body was already beyond his reach, but he had intended a long-distance attack from the moment he changed the attack. His aura took the dust out of his Sharp spearhead's way. The edge cut the air with all the power of his qi and Path, and the resulting atom-splitting invisible blade traveled ahead faster than Shen could. Right now, it was also faster than his enemy.

It traveled straight at the woman's neck.

Yinhu Lanfen seemed to grab the air with her remaining hand and moved her arm as if swinging a sword—which materialized in her hand out of nowhere.

The implications were clear: she had a spatial treasure and was not a brawler. As he had guessed, she had been holding back so as not to get humiliated in needing to do her best to kill a Fate Origin cultivator.

Her weapon of choice was a jian, the sword favored by cultivators in the Eternal Empire. The doubled-edged thin straight blade was silvery and shone with inscribed blue mystic runes. The hilt was made of slightly golden wood with a beautifully crafted metal silvery tiger head.

Yinhu Lanfen's sword edge touched Shen's invisible blade. Shen's attack faded into nothingness. She stopped getting away from him.

It was Shen who then put some distance between them while using defensive techniques.

His qi doppelgangers hadn't worked, which suggested she had ways of finding him regardless of visibility, but he kept the dust twisting around her. It didn't interfere with his ability to feel her, and he kept it vibrating and producing the magnetism that prevented new lightning bolts from materializing around her. There was no reason to drop it.

He also used his aura to make him invisible and move around. He elected not to use qi because she would sense it more easily.

Lastly, he kept the area around him with a much lower dust and air density—almost nonexistent, really. He wanted to try something when she attacked in a certain way. He did the same with other places, so his position wouldn't become obvious.

"You gave up on your cultivator roots," Yinhu Lanfen said with barely restrained anger, her voice clear despite all the dust. "It was foolish of me to fight you as if you were an honorable cultivator. Feng clansmen are no better than mad dogs, and rabid animals must be swiftly put down."

Her argument was pathetic. Any cultivator would incorporate better techniques in their fighting style if they could, and he had only used qi to fight her. Not that he expected her to calmly discuss it over tea.

It was better to keep fanning the flames of her fury, which would hopefully cause her to make a stupid mistake.

Of the many tricks he had learned with the Drow Maiden, one of the most interesting ones was using his aura to talk. It let him whisper orders to allies without risking interception and communicate with enemies without giving his position away.

"Honor," Shen whispered beside her ear. "That's rich coming from an Ethereal Harmonization cultivator who sneak-attacked a Fate Origin."

She was idle while they talked. Her arm was already regenerating. It was fast but relatively slow compared to how fast she moved. Shen estimated it would take up to an entire minute for the limb to fully regrow.

Yinhu Lanfen was blatantly baiting him.

An inexperienced fighter might want to capitalize on their advantage and be tempted into killing her before she finished growing her arm back. However, her positioning was telling. She could move more than twice as fast as him and thus escape if she wanted, yet she hadn't—despite losing the limb. She knew what he was capable of and believed she had the advantage.

Shen concluded that waiting was less risky than springing the trap.

Her fist-fighting techniques were pathetic, anyway, her arm provided no defense, and he doubted she was a dual wielder. Her number of arms would make no difference unless she also managed to cut the other one off. And if he could do that, he could cut the first one off again, too.

"You trespassed my territory, dog," she stated. "How I kill invasive pests is of no concern to the pest."

Yinhu Lanfen's words suggested she was open to dialogue. She hadn't called him out on his wrongings before. Now, she pointed out he had trespassed. Shen could probably escape alive if he was willing to pay reparations for the offense, now that he had proven he might be more trouble than it was worth.

Shen wasn't willing.

The Drow Maiden had taught him that while he would be forced to fight many desperate battles, he should talk or bribe his way out of potentially lethal situations when possible. Some things were simply not worth his life, and if his Path couldn't deal with small losses, be it of riches or pride, he would simply lack the willpower to reach great heights.

Bending was often better than breaking.

However, that didn't mean becoming a pushover. Cowards were even less likely to advance. Shen had to draw lines that he couldn't let anyone cross unpunished. Lines he would kill or die for.

Yinhu Lanfen had crossed one of his lines.

She had thrown that Law-filled lightning bolt at him twice. It would've struck his head if he hadn't dodged the first time. It would've killed him.

Shen might be willing to seek potentially peaceful resolutions for some offenses, even some attacks, but any attempt at his life could only end with the perpetrator or him dead. If anyone could try to take his life and get away with it, everyone would try, from archenemies to random opportunists.

Even the Eternal Empire would see such opportunism from time to time, despite the following unrelenting pursuit of the law, and the Drow Maiden had claimed the Alliance was much worse.

The multiverse needed to know that he was open to dialogue up to a point but would fight to the end if they tried to kill him, even against an overwhelmingly stronger opponent. He would choose certain death merely to inflict some pain on his enemy. That conviction wouldn't keep his determined foes away but would prevent half-assed attacks—and even weak attackers might get lucky eventually.

More importantly, if someone had shown they were willing to kill him, he would have to be monumentally stupid to allow them to try again later—especially after paying them and thus financing their growth, no less!

Of course, he could think of some exceptions, but they didn't apply here. He was a Feng. She was a Yinhu. Her clan had maliciously moved against his in the past. Now, she tried to kill him.

Treachery, not blood, ran in her veins.

One of them would die today; he would accept no other outcome.

So instead of trying to escape or apologizing for trespassing, instead of negotiating, instead of seeking a safe path out, he said, "What territory? Haven't you heard? I'm the Human Rising Star. The Human Maiden begged to join the Feng Clan. Earth is mine."

Earth wasn't his, but although he was bad at trash talk, the very basics of War were simple: repay in kind with double the force.

She called him dog; he called her pig. She called herself his superior; he called her out on her moral and cultivation failings. She claimed he had trespassed into her territory; he argued she was inside his considerably larger territory.

He didn't fish for information this time, only threw a jab at her. It was a bit childish but the best he could do.

It was a bit sad to see it work.

Yinhu Lanfen's face twisted in rage. She pointed her weapon in his general direction, despite him keeping himself moving around. As he expected, the dust didn't affect her ability to find him, but now he also knew his aura's invisibility was subpar at best and useless at worst.

"You!" she roared, and the very skies followed suit. Lighting cut the night sky, and furious thunder shook the ground. "I am the Empress of the Human Empire! For disrespecting me, I sentence you to death!"

Shen smiled; he had stuck a nerve again. Maybe he was good at it, after all?

Her arm instantly regrew back. She had been faking it. At least her HP didn't immediately get full, though it was passively regenerating at about 5 points per second.

Not even a second had passed since she lost her arm. They talked fast.

Then lightning struck from above. Hundreds, thousands of lightning bolts unceasingly bridged earth and heaven. Yet they all ceased to be once they touched his vibrating dust.

Shen thought it was just some side-effect of her Law, but he realized he was wrong when she growled in even greater ire. That had been an actual attack. She had wanted to smite him down like a divine being squashing an ant.

The arrogance!

His own anger rose to the occasion. He wouldn't let it blind him, but he gave it some leeway. It was right to feel offended by such a display.

"You can produce fancy sparks; I'll give you that," he mocked.

"Die, dog!" she yelled and swung her sword horizontally.

The blue runes in her blade shone bright, and the weapon produced dozens of Law-filled lightning bolts that rushed at Shen. His anti-qi dust couldn't stop them. They burned through the dust, disintegrating it further, coming for him way faster than he could move.

Shen had been expecting something of the kind and responded in three ways.

First, he dodged, obviously.

Yinhu Lanfen could wield the sword much faster than her fists, almost four times faster than Shen. The movement was also technically infinitely better than her brawling skills. However, he had learned to read his enemies with the help of someone whose eyelashes could be used for an attack. He had learned how to pay utmost attention to his foes.

When she started pulling her sword to swing it, he started moving out of the way.

Second, he removed all matter from a seven-yard-thick bubble around him.

That's why he had kept some places with barely any dust and air. He created an absolute vacuum without dust, air, or qi. Lightning could only happen where there was air, so maybe the Laws of Lightning were similarly limited? Shen knew electric charges could move through a vacuum under some circumstances and expected it to happen instead of a complete stop, especially because her will was controlling the bolts. Yet, he wondered if the vacuum would affect the attack at all.

Third, he created a qi cocoon around him.

The Drow Maiden had taught him three defensive ways of countering qi. One was in long range, which he was already using with the dust. The second was with his qi touching him. And the third was to nullify any qi inside him. He had already tried the latter against the Law fragments in his shoulder to no avail. Now, he hoped the second would fare better as he made the qi cocoon vibrate in a set frequency and created a specific magnetic field around him.

The bolts disintegrated the dust but didn't traverse space unscratched. The vibration and magnetism they produced stripped the lighting of almost a fifth of its power.

Laws were beyond him, but not the energy used by the attacks. Law-filled attacks were nothing but some Law strengthening a handful of energy particles in one way or another.

Yet, even a fifth weaker, the bolts were still strong enough to kill him.

To make matters worse, Yinhu Lanfen had changed her attack's direction midswing as Shen had started dodging. Fortunately, he hadn't just dumbly moved in a set direction. He randomly alternated his path, and together with his early dodge, it was enough to get him out of the way of most bolts.

Five reached the vacuum around him and kept going. They forced the vacuum to give way—at a cost. They lost another fifteen percent of their power in all ways, including speed. That let Shen further dodge three of them.

Two struck the qi cocoon, which was revealed to be the most effective of the three anti-qi techniques. The bolts lost a whooping half of their remaining power.

Shen still could feel no willpower-driven qi in the attack, so there was no energy-will battle forced upon him.

After that, his greatcoat's D+ resistance fared no better than his skin. It made no difference beyond such a power. He might as well have been naked.

Yet, all in all, he considered his defense a success. The bolts that touched his right arm—which he used to protect his neck—were only about a third as potent as Yinhu Lanfen had initially made them. They were so weak they didn't even pierce all the way through.

| Health Points: 269 / 300 | -8

| Health Points: 262 / 300 | -7

To make things better, the third technique did work this time, and no Law fragments were left inside him.

Yinhu Lanfen could control the bolts to some extent. They had made a sharp curve to follow him. Yet, her control wasn't absolute. Lightning in the skies might as well take a U-turn at any moment, as it wasn't forced to keep momentum forward. The bolts she had sent against him couldn't. Moreover, they kept going instead of homing on him and harmlessly struck the ground at the bottom of the crater he had created.

Shen felt them pierce the ground deep enough that it went beyond his aura's range, yet there was no explosion.

Not like the explosions that followed his Arc Flashes.

Feeling the considerably weaker lightning in his body this time was like a trigger that made it absolutely obvious to him what an Arc Flash was and Rupture the Concept. It was the byproduct of arc faults, the light and heat they released. That heat then caused a pressure wave—an arc blast.

Rupturing Arc Flash and noticing how inefficiently he had been using it by also using the rest of his Path let him make adjustments that pushed his max speed to Mach 52. It also allowed him to pack a meaner punch.

Only Boundlessness remained of his Concepts, and it ended up Ruptured by elimination.

It made the Rupture lesser, somehow. There had been no sub-enlightenment like with the other Concepts. Shen didn't feel as connected with it.

But it was alright.

He had Ruptured his seven Concepts.

His Rupture Pilgrimage was over.

No big mystic change happened, no tribulation, no special power-up. The Ruptured Concepts were still connected in a way that would prevent him from touching a Law. He would have to win this fight using what he already knew, his current power, and nothing else.

Fortunately, he had just ascertained he could survive if struck by the Law-filled bolts. It was time to see if his spear could also resist the lightning. If so, he would have a better chance in this fight.

Yunhi Lanfen was wasting time roaring in rage at her most recent failure.

Shen gripped his spear tightly and rushed toward her.

[A/N: It feels like so much and so little happened in this chapter at the same time. ]

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