Wen Ruzhi had never meant to pick a fight with Nangong Xi.
After the annual tournament ended, she spent a few days wandering the Imperial Capital with Yino. Once she had had her fill of that, the two went their separate ways. He returned to the Dragon Palace to enter seclusion, and she went obediently back to the Divine Abyss Gate.
But as word of the capital tournament spread, people began to say that Wen Ruzhi had lost in the second round, and that her real strength fell well short of Nangong Xi's.
Talk like that made no sense to her.
As she saw it, Nangong Xi was nowhere near her level. She had dragged Yino into the Dual Pupil World and traded blows with him for a solid hour, while her rival had not lasted fifteen minutes on the Dao Testing Pavilion before conceding.
So she did what the two of them always did and challenged Nangong Xi to a spar on the Dao Testing Pavilion, to see how far each of them had come.
