Chapter 56 – The Echoes of Hell's Peak
The final day of the Heaven Dou Qualifiers arrived with a sky the color of bruised plums. The stadium was packed, the air vibrating with the name Shrek. Inside the waiting room, Yu Scumgang was finalizing his "masterpiece".
"The Five-in-One Fusion," Scumgang explained, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. "We will use the Distraction Heart Control Rongrong provided to synchronize your soul power. Tang San, you will be the core. You will channel the combined power of the team into a single, unstoppable strike. Tianshui's 'Flow' cannot redirect a mountain."
Tang San nodded, but his eyes were hollow. Ever since the Canghui match, the chanting in his head had grown louder. Thief. Thief. "I'll prove them wrong, Teacher," Tang San whispered. "I'll prove that my talent is mine alone."
As Shrek and Tianshui walked onto the stage, the contrast was jarring. Shrek looked aggressive, armored in their stolen secrets and frantic energy. Tianshui, led by Xue Haiyang and Shui Yue'er, moved with the effortless grace of drifting snow.
"Begin!"
"Formation!" Tang San roared.
The five members of Shrek—Tang San, Dai Mubai, Ma Hongjun, Tai Long, and Jiang Zhu—formed a star pattern. Through the Distraction Heart Control, their soul power began to swirl, feeding into Tang San.
Shui Yue'er watched them, her hands relaxed at her sides. She didn't use a soul skill. She simply entered the Center-Point Stillness.
"Attack!" Tang San launched a massive wave of Blue Silver Grass, reinforced by the team's total soul power.
Yue'er moved. To the audience, she looked like a blur of blue light. She used the Kusa-Step, flickering through the gaps in the grass. She wasn't just dodging; she was moving within the "blind spots" of Tang San's vision.
As Tang San tried to lock onto her, the stress of the stolen control technique and the high-speed pursuit triggered the trauma of the illusion. The faces of the spectators seemed to turn into the Tang Sect Elders.
"I didn't steal it!" Tang San suddenly screamed, his voice cracking and echoing through the silent stadium. He stopped mid-motion, clutching his head while the Five-in-One energy fluctuated violently.
"I re-created the Buddha's Fury Tang Lotus! You old fossils should be grateful! I brought your names to a new world! I did nothing wrong! It's MY creation!"
The stadium fell into a deathly silence. The spectators, the nobles, and even the other teams looked at him with confusion and pity. Who was he talking to? What was a Tang Lotus? To the world, the "Genius" of Shrek looked like he was having a psychotic break.
"He's lost it," Shui Yue'er whispered. She closed the distance in a heartbeat.
Embarrassment, sharper than any blade, flooded Tang San's mind as he realized where he was. The laughter he imagined from the crowd drove him into a corner.
"Fine!" he howled. "If you want a monster, I'll give you one!"
He abandoned the Blue Silver Grass entirely. From his left hand, a black light erupted. The Clear Sky Hammer appeared, vibrating with the combined soul power of five people. It was a reckless, forbidden amount of energy. He swung the hammer in a massive arc, aiming not for a tactical win, but to erase Yue'er from existence.
"Severing Rhythm: Gunting!"
Yue'er didn't retreat. As the hammer descended, she stepped into the strike's radius. She used her palms, reinforced by the Blade's Pulse, to strike the "joints" of Tang San's arm and the hammer's handle simultaneously.
The vibration of her strike met the overwhelming force of the hammer. Because Tang San's grip was unstable due to his mental state, the "Scissor Counter" worked perfectly. The hammer was deflected upward, and the recoil slammed back into Tang San's own chest.
Yue'er followed up with a simple palm thrust. "You are not a monster, Tang San," she said coldly. "You're just a child playing with toys he doesn't understand."
Tang San was blasted out of the ring, crashing into the stone wall of the arena. The Five-in-One fusion shattered, leaving the rest of the Shrek team slumped on the floor, exhausted and defeated.
Tianshui Academy: Victory.
In the aftermath, the Shrek infirmary was a place of gloom. Tang San stared at his left hand, his voice a broken whisper. "The grass is useless, Teacher. If I had used the Hammer from the start... if I put rings on it..."
"NO!" Scumgang barked, fear flashing in his eyes. "Do you want to die? Have you forgotten the history of the twin-soul master who exploded because he tried to cultivate both at once? You are not ready!"
Scumgang paced the room, his mind racing. His theories had failed. His "stolen" fusion had been dismantled by a girl using no soul skills at all. He realized that the gap between Shrek and the Martial Soul Hall (represented by Tianshui's training) was a chasm he couldn't bridge with books.
"There is only one person," Scumgang muttered, his hand trembling. "The only one who successfully mastered Twin Souls. Bibi Dong."
"Teacher?" Tang San looked up, confused.
"I must go to Martial Spirit City," Scumgang said, a delusional spark of hope in his eyes. "She... she once loved me. For the sake of our past, for the sake of 'us,' she will tell me the secret. She won't let my disciple, my legacy, be destroyed."
•••••••••••••••
Meanwhile, in the VIP pavilion, Gu Rong leaned toward Ning Fengzhi. "The boy is a liability, Fengzhi. He's mentally unstable and he's carrying the Clear Sky legacy. Let me end this now. It's cleaner."
Ning Fengzhi watched Tang San being carried away on a stretcher. He thought of the Distraction Heart Control the boy had "stolen" through Rongrong.
"No," Ning Fengzhi said, a cold, calculating smile on his face. "The fact that he learned our secret without permission is perfect. It's not a crime, Gu Rong... it's a debt. A debt that Tang San can never repay. He is humiliated, broken, and desperate. That is when a tool is most useful. We will support him. We will make him the spear that we throw at Lakan's throat."
A week later, Yu Scumgang stood before the towering gates of Wuhun City. He looked at the guards in their shimmering armor, feeling a sense of misplaced importance. He truly believed that his arrival would cause a stir—that the Supreme Pontiff would drop everything to see her "lost love."
He didn't know that inside the palace, Lakan was sitting with Bibi Dong, finishing a training session.
"The 'Grandmaster' is at the gate, Mommy Dong'er," Lakan said, a touch of wit in his voice. "He's come to beg for the secrets of the Twin Souls. It seems his 'Ten Core Competencies' didn't cover what to do when your ego breaks."
Bibi Dong didn't even look up from her scrolls, but the corner of her eye twich at being called like that. "He dares to step into my city after twenty years of silence? He thinks my heart is a library he can check books out of?"
"Shall I have the guards throw him out?" Lakan asked.
"No," Bibi Dong's eyes flashed with a cold, poisonous light. "Let him in. I want to see the face of the man who thinks he is a 'Sage' while living on the scraps of others. I want to see how much he's willing to crawl for a 'thief' like Tang San."