The two hyper-dense spheres of black qi screamed. It was not a metaphorical sound. The compressed rotational gravity tore at the oxygen in the courtyard, producing a high-pitched, metallic shriek that forced junior disciples in the front rows to clamp their hands over their bleeding ears.

  Luo Jian threw his entire body weight behind the double-strike, aiming straight for the face of the sleeping scholar.

  The fists arrived.

  They met the invisible, two-inch boundary separating Wei Tian’s white robe from the rest of reality.

  There was no explosion. There was no dramatic flare of clashing spiritual energies.

  The black qi simply compacted. It hit the absolute void of Wei Tian’s suppression and flattened, like a rotten tomato thrown against a cast-iron vault door. The kinetic force of a Peak Sage-layer cultivator had to go somewhere. Denied forward momentum, it sought the path of least resistance.

  It went down.

  The white jade tiles beneath Luo Jian’s boots disintegrated instantly. Not cracked. Not shattered. Vaporized into a fine, choking white powder.

  Luo Jian’s wrists folded backward. Both of his shoulders dislocated simultaneously with a wet, heavy pop that echoed clearly over the ringing in the crowd's ears.

  He staggered, dropping to one knee in the center of the newly formed crater. His arms hung uselessly at his sides. He stared at the scholar.

  Wei Tian shifted his weight slightly to his right foot. He smacked his lips, letting out a soft, rhythmic snore.

  Luo Jian tasted copper.

  The primitive, lizard-brain instinct that had kept him alive through a hundred border wars completely hijacked his nervous system. It wasn't just fear. It was the absolute, reality-breaking terror of a predator realizing it was actually an insect crawling on the boot of a god.

  He was kneeling in a crater, his shoulders torn from their sockets, and his opponent was having a nap.

  "Die," Luo Jian whispered. Blood leaked from his mouth, staining his chin.

  He didn't care about the tournament rules. He didn't care about the Sect Master watching from the dais. He burned his own lifespan.

  He ignited his foundational core, drawing raw, unrefined life force directly into his right leg. A blinding, searing pillar of red-black light engulfed his calf. The air in the courtyard caught fire.

  Strike five.

  Luo Jian launched himself upward from his good knee, throwing a catastrophic, sweeping crescent kick aimed directly at Wei Tian’s neck. It was a suicide technique. It was designed to separate a mountain peak from its base.

  The violent influx of heat and noise was finally too much to ignore.

  Wei Tian’s eyelids fluttered. He opened them.

  The midday sun was bright. He frowned. He had barely slept for three minutes. The disruption was profoundly annoying.

  He didn't look at the screaming, blood-soaked warrior hurtling toward his throat with a leg wrapped in burning atmospheric plasma. He slipped his right hand out of his opposite sleeve.

  He reached into the breast of his robe. He pulled out the worn, blue-covered book.

  Luo Jian’s flaming kick reached the two-inch boundary. It froze perfectly in space, vibrating with trapped, apocalyptic kinetic energy.

  Wei Tian opened the book. He found the dried birch leaf he used as a bookmark. He needed to finish the paragraph about the agricultural collapse of the third stellar era. He read the last three words.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  He raised his thumb.

  He turned the page.

  The heavy, dried paper made a dry rasp.

  To turn the page, Wei Tian had to move his thumb. To move his thumb, he inadvertently adjusted the microscopic spatial anchor he maintained around his physical body by exactly two millimeters.

  The trapped, compressed kinetic energy of a suicide strike, layered on top of the residual force from the previous four attacks, suddenly lost its structural container. It rebounded.

  Luo Jian didn't fly backward. He was deleted from the immediate airspace.

  The impact sounded like a cannon firing inside a small cave.

  Luo Jian skipped across the ruined jade floor like a flat stone across a still pond. Crack. Crack. Crack. Every skip shattered another ten feet of ancient tile.

  He covered thirty meters in a fraction of a second. He slammed into the defensive ward protecting the eastern spectator stands.

  The third-tier array flickered blue, groaned under the impossible physical weight, and shattered like cheap glass.

  Luo Jian embedded himself three feet deep into the solid granite wall beneath the bleachers. The stone spider-webbed outward from his body in a massive, jagged crater. A thick cloud of gray dust plumed into the air.

  He did not fall out of the wall. He remained wedged in the stone, entirely unconscious, his limbs bent at angles that defied human geometry.

  The dust began to settle.

  A single piece of pulverized jade rolled across the courtyard floor. It hit the toe of Wei Tian's cloth shoe with a tiny clink.

  Ten thousand people forgot how to breathe.

  The silence was a physical, suffocating weight. It smelled of ozone, burnt hair, and raw panic. In the third row of the outer disciple section, a boy slowly lowered a half-eaten melon seed from his open mouth. The seed slipped from his fingers and landed in his lap. Nobody looked at it.

  On the elevated dais, the Elder Council was a portrait of paralyzed horror.

  Elder Shen Mu was gripping the carved stone railing in front of his chair. He was gripping it so hard the stone was turning to sand beneath his trembling fingers. A thick, dark vein pulsed violently against his temple.

  His primary meridian stuttered. A sharp, agonizing misfire hit his chest. He choked, swallowing a mouthful of blood, completely unable to process the geometry of what had just occurred. The mortal hadn't used an artifact. He hadn't drawn a hidden weapon. He had woken up and read a book.

  In the center seat, Bai Qian sat perfectly still.

  Her hands were folded in her lap. Her knuckles were bone-white. She had not drawn her sword. She had watched the exact moment the spatial boundary shifted. Her Saint Peak perception couldn't see the qi, because there was no qi, but she had seen the physical manipulation of reality.

  File fifteen required a new category.

  Down in the arena, Wei Tian looked at the new page in his book. The translation on the second paragraph was incredibly sloppy. The author had completely misunderstood the irrigation mechanics of a dying sun.

  He sighed, closing the book. The dry snap of the leather binding echoed across the dead-silent courtyard.

  He tucked the book back into his robe. He looked around.

  The arena was destroyed. A man was currently functioning as a load-bearing element in the eastern wall.

  Wei Tian turned his head. He looked toward the heavy ironwood table at the edge of the boundary, where the referee was currently huddled behind a cracked decorative pillar, shaking violently.

  Wei Tian looked past the referee, toward the judging table where a fresh pot of green tea sat untouched. A faint wisp of steam was still rising from the spout.

  "The tea gets cold if you stare too long," Wei Tian said.

  His voice was completely flat. A bored, uninflected drawl that cut through the silence like a dull knife through wet silk.

  He didn't wait for the referee to announce a winner. He didn't look up at the dais to gloat at Shen Mu. He didn't look at the Iron Blood emissaries who were currently staring at the wall crater with wide, bloodshot eyes.

  He tucked his hands back into his opposite sleeves. He turned around.

  He began the long walk back toward the dirt path leading to the Eastern Pavilion.

  Scuff. Drag. Scuff.

  His left heel hit the ground heavily. The boiled ox-hide patch Xiao Mei had so viciously stitched onto the sole held perfectly. The cold dampness of the ruined stone didn't seep through to his skin.

  He nodded to himself. It was a good patch.

  Behind him, the crowd parted. They didn't just step back; they scrambled over each other, creating a massive, thirty-foot-wide avenue for him to exit through. Disciples pressed their backs against the walls, terrified that moving into his peripheral vision might accidentally cause their internal organs to liquefy.

  Xiao Mei stood near the tunnel entrance, clutching her empty thermos against her chest. Her mouth was opening and closing like a landed fish.

  Wei Tian walked past her.

  "I'm going to finish my nap," he told her as he passed. "Don't sweep the porch. The noise is distracting."

  Xiao Mei didn't answer. She just stood there, vibrating with a hysterical, frantic energy, watching his cheap white robe disappear down the winding mountain path.

  Up on the dais, Bai Qian stood.

  She didn't announce the victory. She didn't look at the Iron Blood delegation. She turned on her heel and walked directly toward her private sanctum, her white robes snapping in the mountain wind.

  She needed fresh parchment. Lots of it.