Chubbs was trapped in a vise of agony. Yuan's grip was more than physical; the corrupting energy of the **Marojav's Palm** seeped from his fingers into Chubbs's neck, actively **dissolving** the simple, honest **Jingdao** that fortified his flesh. He gasped, the air thin and burning. He dangled, kicking his feet, a massive man rendered a helpless puppet. His reinforced strength meant nothing against this devouring, alien power.
"Why do you even do this?" Yuan hissed, his face inches away, his eyes burning with furious curiosity. "Why follow them? Why risk your life for people who will always see you as the comic relief, the 'fatty'? What is in it for you?"
Chubbs could hear Lorel and Gen screaming his name, their voices frayed with terror. But in the muffled, darkening tunnel of his own mind, only Yuan's words echoed.
*Why was he fighting?*
The answer unfolded not as a thought, but as a series of flashes. The grimy streets of his past. A life of running, of taking, of surviving alone because no one would share with a big, clumsy thief. Then, Baili's towering, icy pride—a wall he could respect. And Lorel. Not her power, but the day she had seen him struggling with a basic **Jingdao** form in the palace gardens, not with pity, but with a quiet, "Would you like me to show you? I am not very good either." She had offered **friendship**, not charity. Warmth, not a role.
He was big. He was stupid, sometimes. But he wasn't just Chubbs anymore.
With a final, scraping gasp, Chubbs met Yuan's gaze. His voice was a raw, desperate rasp, but the words were clear. "I'm not… like the past. I worked hard. I have friends. I *will* be strong."
Yuan's face twisted in contemptuous amusement. "Delusion is the last comfort of the weak." He raised his left hand, the devouring darkness of the **Marojav's Palm** coiling to a focused, annihilating point aimed straight for Chubbs's face.
Out of that sheer, final despair, Chubbs remembered. A stern face in a training yard. A voice like grinding stone. *The Final Touch. Condense your reinforcement, and the space it occupies, to a point. Make a hole in the world where your enemy is.*
General Mearl's lesson.
Chubbs's face, purpling and desperate, shifted. It settled into an expression of ultimate, profound seriousness. His dangling right hand, which had been feebly clawing at Yuan's wrist, stopped struggling.
As Yuan's palm shot forward for the killing blow, Chubbs did not try to block it.
He struck his own palm forward, meeting Yuan's descending **Marojav's Palm** in a desperate, flat *clap*.
At the exact same instant, with his other hand, Chubbs reached up and **touched** Yuan's cheek. A soft, almost gentle contact.
Yuan frowned, confused. What was this fool—
Then, the space around their connected palms **distorted**.
**The Final Touch.**
Chubbs's unique sensitivity to energy—his latent **Shidow** perception—kicked in. He didn't just feel Yuan's corrupt power; he felt the *space* between their hands, the air, the very fabric of reality in that tiny, pressurized point.
He activated the principle. All his will, all his hard-won **Jingdao**, he did not spread out. He **condensed**. He focused it into a single, impossible point at the center of his own palm—a point smaller than a needle's tip, compressing not just his energy, but the physical space it occupied.
The energy did not explode outward. It **transferred**.
From the point of contact on their clashed palms, through the conduit of Chubbs's focused will and compressed reality, it leaped across the short distance to the other point of contact.
His palm on Yuan's face.
There was no beam of light. The energy moved through the **hole in space** Chubbs had momentarily created with that concentrated point.
A deafening **explosion** erupted not *between* them, but **inside Yuan's head**, as the compressed spatial energy and a backlash of his own corrupt power violently decompressed within the confines of his skull.
***KRUMP-BOOM!***
The earth cracked and spread inward in a jagged star pattern beneath them. Both men were blasted apart by the recoil. Chubbs was hurled backwards, tumbling head over heels, slamming into the base of a shattered tree with a sickening *crack* of wood before sliding to a groaning halt.
Yuan was catapulted in the opposite direction, a ragdoll of smoking, spasming limbs, smashing through a boulder and rolling to a broken, twitching stop in a cloud of dust. One side of his face was a ruin of blood and strange, scorched flesh.
Everyone froze. Gen, Lorel, Kirin—all stood in stunned, breathless silence. The sheer, impossible fact of what they had just witnessed—Chubbs, the "fatty," using a foundational **Jingdao** principle to create a spatial shortcut and turn an enemy's attack inward—left them dumbfounded.
In that brief, universal heartbeat of hesitation, Lorel's eyes sharpened.
*This time.*
She did not think. She did not hesitate. She **acted**. Her will was a clear, cold river. With a flick of her mind and a surge of **Shidow**, she unleashed three of her orbiting **Supremacy Swords**. They did not sail; they **streaked**, leaving trails of pink light like falling stars. They shot towards the crumpled, twitching form of Yuan.
*Thwick! Thwick! THUMP!*
One pinned his right forearm to the ground. The second pinned his left shoulder. The third stabbed deep into the earth beside his thigh, a warning and a barrier. He was nailed in place before he could even push himself up.
At the exact same moment, Gen moved.
His body, which had been trembling with suppressed power and rage, stilled. Then, it **crackled**. Not with light, but with a deep, internal sound like settling continental plates. The **Eternal Body** did not just flare; it **underwent a fundamental change**.
The serene jade-white light that sheathed his skin *sank inward*. It did not vanish; it solidified, becoming a deeper, bone-white luminescence that seemed to glow from within his very skeleton. The First Door had reinforced his skin as an impenetrable boundary. Now, the **Second Door** was reinforcing the fortress **within**.
He crossed the space. He did not run; he *appeared*, a phantom of solidified will. His body arched, every muscle and bone aligned into a single, perfect vector of force. His fist descended, not with a cry, but with the silent certainty of a falling moon.
It landed on the pinned Yuan's face.
***CRUNCH.***
The sound was wet, final, and deeply sickening. Yuan's head was driven down into the collapsed earth with such force that the existing crater *expanded*, the shockwave rippling outwards in a visible ring that flattened grass and shook stones loose. Gen stood in the epicenter, his fist still pressed against the ruin of Yuan's face, bright blood splashed across his own cheek and jaw.
Yet there was no rage in his eyes now. No grief. Only a terrifying, absolute **calm**. The Eternal Body around him was different. It wasn't a glow; it was a **presence**. A faint, pearlescent smoke seemed to rise from his skin and from his clenched fist, the aftereffect of power so dense it interacted with the very air.
He had done it. The **Eternal Body – Second Door**. Skin first. Then, the bones within.
At this moment, Gen looked utterly, profoundly different. Not just powerful, but **complete** in a way he had never been.
Madame Su's mouth opened in a silent gasp. Her heart hammered against her ribs. "He did it," she whispered, the words a prayer and a shock. "He did it."
For the first time since they left the Jiang Mountain, she didn't see just Gen. She saw a **shadow**. A taller, broader silhouette superimposed over him—a figure of lean, relentless muscle and long, cascading black hair, features serene yet etched with the weight of impossible battles. It was the shadow of the man Gen would become. The shadow of the legacy he was no longer just carrying, but **embodying**.
She wasn't the only one.
Kirin's smirk had vanished. Lorel, helping a dazed Chubbs to his feet, froze. Chubbs, bleeding but alive, stared.
They all saw it. The spectral shadow, there for less than a heartbeat, a glimpse of a future written in power and solemn duty.
And in that fleeting image, there was something that scared them. Not fear of Gen, but a profound, instinctual awe—the fear of deep water, of high cliffs, of standing before something ancient and inevitable.
Madame Su blinked twice.
The shadow was gone.
Only Gen remained, standing in the crater, covered in the silent, smoking light of the Second Door, the blood of his enemy drying on his skin.