"Damn it…" The thrill of her improvised technique's success mixed with her genuine like of Gao Feng, and left Jun Li off-kilter and muttering under her breath. "Just give up already…"

  A few dozen steps away, Gao Feng adjusted his grip on Qin Yihua's greatsword and held the remains of his destroyed right arm close to his body. The thought that he might not leave this place alive had crossed his mind, the thought that even if he killed Jun Li, his injuries might spell his end, even if he could escape the snake beast that menaced him from the sidelines.

  He could give up now. By his understanding, Jun Li would indeed spare him if he laid down his arms.

  But he would never, could never do that. As he looked down at the blood that flowed from his destroyed arm, like the sand of an hourglass, Gao Feng felt a degree of contentment. It wasn't just his own pride he was satisfying here.

  For the sake of his fallen cousins' dignity, he couldn't throw up his arms and call it quits. Lifting his sword and holding it horizontally, Gao Feng bit his tongue and spat blood onto the blade in a spray of red.

  When the blood splattered across the sword's surface, it twisted and coalesced into swirling patterns and shone with an unnaturally vibrant red. "Gamecock's Saber - Blood Red Crest!"

  Jun Li flinched at the sight, knowing it wasn't mere mundane blood he had spilled just now; a few drops of Blood Essence were mixed in to impart energy into his technique. If not for her alchemical studies, she may not have known exactly what he had just done.

  It wasn't as simple and mild as sacrificing lifespan for temporary power. Spilling one's own Blood Essence like this was akin to cutting a hole into one's own vitality.

  It determined a human's capacity for recovery and replenishment; his Cultivation would normally ensure his ability to recover, even as his destroyed arm bled ceaselessly.

  This new lack of Blood Essence, however, stripped away the safety of his enhanced vitality, leaving his injuries to weigh as severely on him as they would on a normal human.

  'Close it off… all my routes of escape… all my prospects for survival…' Gao Feng raised his sword, now glowing bright with the power of his Blood Essence, and stepped forward slowly.

  At his approach, Jun Li raised her saber to her frozen left arm and scraped it along the ice, pressing Qi back and forth through the blade and causing ice to form along the blade's edge.

  Within a few seconds, the saber's blade was effectively twice its previous size, encased in a transparent shell of ice that bore its same shape. That shell would shatter the moment it made contact with anything harder than flesh, but it could still serve a purpose.

  Seeing Jun Li make preparations, Gao Feng accelerated, jolting forward and into range, his sword raised in an obvious stance that made the path of his incoming attack clear.

  As the greatsword tore through the air in a wide arc, Jun Li struck down towards the blade with her newly frozen saber, even if the strike was fast, its trajectory was pitifully easy to read. And with the angle of her own strike, even if the ice shattered and the blade was chipped, it would stop the greatsword in place.

  When Jun Li struck down towards Gao Feng's sword, her saber fell in two pieces in perfect silence, carved through by the greatsword's bright red blade as if it were no more than an illusion.

  The sight of the saber's blade flying through the air captured Jun Li's gaze, only for that gaze to be wrenched away by the violent red of arterial spray, expanding out to fill her vision, the thick mist of red flowing from her throat below.

  With her vision impaired and her life in danger, Jun Li forsook complex thought and shunted as much Qi as possible to her feet as quickly as possible, freezing the ground around her with the Ice Lotus Scripture.

  Within a half second, the ground within a dozen meters was covered in ice as thick as a hand's length, and even as Jun Li ceased to output her sorcery, the ice continued to grow for a few moments, trapping anything in contact with it.

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  Jun Li's right hand shot to her throat, freezing the wound shut. Bizarrely, the greatest risk posed to her from a cut throat was not from blood loss, but from her own arterial spray obscuring her vision.

  When the red of her own blood ceased to fill her vision, the red of Gao Feng's took its place. The bright red pillar that was his greatsword stood upright, planted into the ground, and frozen in place by Jun Li's own reflexive act of sorcery.

  At the top of that pillar, holding himself up with his one hand, was Gao Feng himself. Looking down at Jun Li, the moment he saw her eyes move to him, he gripped his frozen sword as an anchor and kicked down, leveraging the full strength of his body, from the muscles of his hand to the muscles of his foot.

  Jun Li had not even realized what she was looking at until the bottom of Gao Feng's shoes struck her mouth, forcing her cut lip into her partially broken teeth and rocking her brain back and forth in her skull.

  She fell back, but couldn't fall to the ground, as her legs had been frozen up to her shins, forcing her partially upright. Leaned backward and profoundly concussed, Jun Li spat up blood both from her torn throat and the shredded inside of her lip.

  Lying limply over the frozen ground, Jun Li slowly spread her arms out, touching the ice and feeling it melt beneath her touch. Senses of dizziness and sinking mingled in Jun Li's mind, drawing her closer to her Authority over melting.

  As she lay there, slowly sinking into the melting ice, she and Gao Feng were at a strange standstill. He was stranded atop his own sword and knew that if he were to descend, the ice would creep onto him and refuse to let go. He believed the danger may be even greater if he landed on Jun Li, who, in his eyes, was surely dying from her wounds.

  "Ghkk…" Jun Li gurgled something through blood as she shifted slightly, her torn throat shifting as she tried to speak, a frozen strip of red ice holding it partially in one piece.

  With effort, Jun Li sat up, her limbs parting the solid ice like sea foam, and her left arm slipped through its own cast of ice. "...y-you…" She croaked out her words slowly, with obvious, pained strain. "...You… really should give up…"

  With those words, Jun Li rose to her full height and took a few more steps away from Gao Feng, pulling a waterskin from her Spatial Ring and pouring some water into her bloodied mouth, clearing her throat an ounce more.

  "It's just not worth dying over… You did well, but you really can't kill me…" Each sentence was bookended with a convulsion of her throat's muscles and an obvious hiss of pain. Yet, despite that apparent display of vulnerability, Gao Feng felt genuinely horrified at Jun Li's manner.

  He had cut into her skin dozens of times, torn open her lip, and broken her teeth, he had slit open her throat and kicked her in the mouth with such force that his ankles still felt the pain of the recoil… and even then, she could stand and speak.

  "How… are you still alive…!?" Gao Feng spoke not with anger or fear, but with frustration, so wretched and potent that he sank down, allowing himself to fall to his knees, onto the ice.

  Jun Li touched her throat at his words, a glassy look in her eye telling him that she wasn't entirely lucid. "Well… if I wasn't able to freeze this shut, I might have drowned. But… I'll be fine with a needle and thread…"

  As Jun Li spoke, Gao Feng began heaving for breath, blood suddenly rising from his throat and causing him to sputter as his eyes turned bloodshot. "Ah… It took a while, but that poison's kicking in now…" Jun Li spoke with a tired voice, almost entirely lacking emotion in her intonation.

  Despite everything that had happened and how hard Gao Feng had fought, Jun Li was the one standing tall, and he was the one at the edge of death. He could only lean back against his sword, still planted in the ice, and try to breathe for a few moments longer, thought and emotion roiling behind his bloodshot eyes.

  "Well… I don't think there's any coming back for you by this point." Jun Li scratched the back of her head, a mite of annoyance in her voice. "Damn it… what a sha-" A sudden lack of sound caused Jun Li's mind to hitch for a moment.

  There had been a pervasive hum in the background, a rumbling from above that she had ceased thinking about for quite some time now, yet all of a sudden, it had entirely vanished, drawing her mind to its source and the meaning behind its disappearance. 'The Earth Dragon Blood…!'

  The instant she turned her head to look, a descending spark of red fell into view, rapidly darkening mid-air as it expanded into a pitch-black sphere that absorbed all light, and slowly formed into the silhouette of a man. "I am pleased to see you still hang onto life…"

  Stepping out from that dark silhouette of himself, 'Junzi' approached the two, his body radiating light in a way it hadn't when he had first met Jun Li. The body he now possessed wasn't merely sculpted blood as his previous one was; it bore a full spectrum of human features impossible to replicate with shape alone.

  His skin was pale and glowed with the blush of life, his hair flowed out as if he stood in a void, and his robe blessed the eyes with an immensity of its fine detail and brilliant white.

  The intense red of his eyes was the most vibrant and piercing color any present had ever seen, and somehow, those blood colored eyes shone with a light of dignity and empathy that could not have been more pure.

  "I won't have you die here, young hero."