Gen walked into the arena proper, his steps measured on the worn stone. His gaze swept over the platform first, past Juo Si's smug throne, to the figures arranged below it. Lorel. Kaito. Li Fen. General Mearl, pale but upright.
They were there. Alive. Unharmed in body.
But the look in their eyes was not one of relief. It was hard, set, like stone weathered by a relentless storm. Lorel met his gaze. Her lips held a small, calm smile, but her eyes held the quiet fire of a verdict already passed. *This ends today.* He saw the same resolve in Kaito's clenched jaw, in Li Fen's tense posture. Juo Si's machinations had woven a cage around them, but the cage had only forged their determination to burn it down.
Gen stopped a few paces from the base of the royal dais. He looked up at the man on the jade throne, his voice cutting through the anticipatory silence of the gathered thousands.
"I'm here," Gen announced, the words simple and heavy. "To collect your head. So get off that prop, and fight me like a real cultivator."
King Juo Si's smile didn't falter; it brightened, as if Gen had just told a delightful joke. He tilted his head slightly, a king considering an amusing insect. With a gentle, almost dismissive wave of his hand, the ten Royal Guards flanking his throne stepped forward in perfect unison. They fanned out in a semicircular formation between the king and Gen, their polished armor catching the sun, their faces hidden behind impassive visors.
"If you are not even worth the attention of my Royal Guard," Juo Si said, his amplified voice resonating with chilly amusement, "what would be the point of me getting involved, Gen Jiang?"
Juo Si was playing a deeper game. Taking Gen's head now, in a direct duel, wouldn't serve his ultimate goal. It would be a single victory, not a global one. His eyes flickered upward for a fraction of a second, as if sensing a shift in the wind. He knew Xian and his Minions would be converging here now. Xian was a unknown wheel too chaotic, too powerful to predict or counter head-on. Juo Si had to conserve his strength, maintain his position, and let the pieces clash before he made his final move. He needed a spectacle, not a brawl.
Gen smirked, a flash of his old, challenging grin. "Too scared to act on your own? Fine. We'll deal with the gatekeepers first."
He glanced at the ten figures now fanning out to surround him and his friends on the arena floor. He remembered them. Vividly. The searing, chaotic light of **The Little Chaos** from the coronation, the spear-strike that had shattered Lorel's Supremacy Sword. In that formation, these ten cultivators could indeed clash with a Pillar. Underestimating them would be suicide.
He balled his fist, the motion drawing the eyes of his friends. "We can do this," he said, the statement for them as much as for himself.
At the arena's edge, just outside the ring of guards, Madame Su stood. Madame Su's hands were clasped tightly before her. The desire to step into the fray, to shield his charge one more time, burned in her chest like a physical ache. But the battle had already ascended to a realm where her impact would be a ripple against a tidal wave.
Four years ago, she had been his guardian, his shield against the harsh edges of the cultivator world. Now, he stood alone, taller and more formidable than any peak she had ever glimpsed. He and his friends had long since left her—and most of their generation—in the dust of their ascent. Her role now was to watch, to bear witness, and to protect those who could no longer fight.
On the arena floor, Kaito cracked his neck, then his knuckles. A sound like shifting tectonic plates echoed from within him as he activated his **Jingdao of the Walking Star**. His body illuminated from within, fissures of brilliant white light appearing across his skin like cracks in a shell holding back a stellar core. He pointed a glowing finger at the throne. "Get your ass over here, Juo! Or are you just a pretty statue?"
Juo Si ignored him completely. "Royal Guard," he commanded, his voice losing its amused edge. "Subdue them."
The ten guards moved as one entity. Their Qi exploded forth, not as a wild aura, but with disciplined, terrifying synchronization. Using **Zhidow**, they did not draw energy from around them; they created it from their own cores. In each of their hands, a spear of condensed, shimmering Qi snapped into existence, its form perfect and lethal.
Gen's figure flickered. The deep, resonant hum of the **Eternal Body, Second Door** filled the air around him as the golden energy didn't just cover him, but sank into his bones, making his very silhouette seem to vibrate with contained power. Alongside him, Kaito became a beacon of cracking white light. Together, they acted as the front line, a moving wall of reinforced flesh and will, intercepting the paths of the advancing guards.
The first impacts were solid, percussive ***THWUMPS*** that echoed across the silent arena. Gen's crystallized fist met a created spear-head. The spear did not break, but the guard wielding it skidded back a foot, boots scraping stone. Kaito took a spear-thrust on his crossed forearms; the white light of his Jingdao flared where it hit, dispersing the force with a shower of sparks. They were holding, but the pressure was immense, each guard a master of focused, created force.
While they held the line, Li Fen moved. With a supporting arm around General Mearl, she began a swift, tactical retreat toward Madame Su and the safer ground at the arena's periphery. Her Blind Heart was a numb weight in her chest after her master's death on the Lost Triangle. Where Kaito had transcended his blockage against Buqu, Li Fen had found only a deeper, more confusing maze. She had no way to grow past this internal hurdle. All she could do now was remove the wounded from the killing floor. The feeling was bitter, a taste of ashes, but she swallowed it. Action, however small, was better than paralysis.
As she moved, one of the Royal Guards broke from pressing Gen. His helmet tilted in her direction. From his free hand, he cast not a spear, but a wave of **Zhidow**-born energy. It coalesced into a single, searing point that ignited into a dazzling ball of white-hot flames. The fire roared to life, its intensity so fierce the very air in that corner of the arena warped and heated. Then he shot it forth. The ball of creation-fire devoured the distance, a miniature sun rushing to consume the retreating girl and the wounded general.
But before it could cross half the space, pink lights descended from above like falling stars.
Seven swords of pure, dominating intent—the **Supremacy Swords**—sliced down in a perfect fan. They did not clash with the fireball; they tore through it. The blades of pink light sheared the roaring sun into ribbons of dissipating energy, as easily as cutting through silk.
Lorel floated down through the dissolving fire, stepping onto the void as if it were solid ground. An otherworldly grace surrounded her. She radiated an aura of serene, absolute dominance that, for a moment, stilled the fighting. She was not the timid girl from the Jiang Mountain, nor the frantic defender from the coronation. She was a cultivator who had answered the voice in the dark. She knew what she wanted.
She waved her palm once more. The **Unbound Lantern**, a sphere of gentle pink light etched with intricate patterns, materialized before her. It pulsed.
Then it released.
Not a beam, but a wave of Qi that spread outward like the dying breath of a star. It was beautiful and terrible. As it expanded, Lorel allowed the principle of **Fendow**—Separation—she had grasped on the Lost Triangle to infuse it. The single wave began to separate upon itself, not once, but infinitely, layering and dividing until it became an endless, overlapping array of razor-sharp force, striking from every conceivable angle at the cluster of Royal Guards.
The Guards reacted with instinctive, drilled precision. They abandoned their offensive press and retreated into a tight, defensive formation. Their own **Jingdao** flared across their ornate armor in unison, reinforcing it into a single, shimmering shell.
The impact was a raging storm of high-pitched ***PING-PING-PING*** sounds, a metallic chorus that echoed across the battlefield. The layered wave of separated force scoured over them. Armor plates visibly dented. Cracks spiderwebbed across greaves and chest-plates. But the formation held. The shell did not break.
From the side, Gen saw the feat as he drove a fist into a guard's spear-haft, forcing the man back a step. A genuine smile touched his lips. *Good.* While he too had struggled and eventually learned **Fendow**, Lorel had not wasted her time on the Lost Triangle either. It was as if their separation had been the key for them to learn the expression of their separation from each other. Her mastery was precise, elegant, and devastatingly powerful.
On his throne, Juo Si flicked an interested eye toward Lorel, a slight surprise penetrating his regal calm. He, more than anyone in the world, understood the true weight of **Fendow** and **Heidow**. For common folk, mastery of the first three Wheels was an achievable dream. But the threshold of genius was crossed at the fourth and fifth—the opposing principles of Combination and Separation. Learning one was a monumental feat. Learning to understand both, to hold their contradiction within one's spirit… that was where true monsters were born. Lorel was announcing she had stepped into that realm.
Li Fen used the opening to finally get Mearl out of the arena, joining Madame Su in the safe observation zone.
The leader of the Royal Guard, seeing their formation stressed and their straightforward assault broken, made a swift, sharp gesture with his hand. His men disengaged from Gen and Kaito, flowing back to him with eerie synchronicity.
"Since you insist," the leader's voice echoed, metallic and cold from within his helmet, "we have no choice but to go all out."
Individually, Gen and his friends were proving too strong, too adaptable, to be taken down with simple force. Their Qi flared again, but this time the flare was different. It wasn't just power; it was a dangerous, coalescing signature Gen remembered with visceral clarity.
Gen's eyes widened. "Stop them!" he yelled, a note of urgency breaking his calm.
The **Eternal Body, Second Door** flared outwards. The reinforcement sank past his muscles, deep into his marrow. A white, heat-haze vapor bled from his pores as he became a golden-white phantom, cannoning toward the guard leader with a fist aimed to disrupt the gathering energy.
He was a heartbeat too late.
The spear in the leader's hand began to *come alive*. It was no longer a static creation of light, but seemed to be painted into reality by a divine, chaotic hand. Etchings of coiling dragons along its length writhed with multi-hued light. The leader stretched out his hand and caught it as the final particles of chaotic light condensed.
Gen arrived. His reinforced fist, capable of cratering stone, drove toward the leader's center.
The leader simply pointed the tip of the spear downward, toward the ground between them, and activated it.
**The Little Chaos.**
Gen understood his predicament in the microsecond before impact. Taking the full brunt of this attack head-on, even with the Eternal Body, would be catastrophic. He didn't try to block. Instead, he used **Fendow** and **Shidow** in a desperate, brilliant split-second maneuver. He *separated* the space directly in front of his body from the space where the chaotic force was erupting, and used **Shidow** to *manipulate* the onrushing wave of disintegrating energy, sliding it sideways along the newly created vacuum.
It wasn't a perfect defense.
The residual force of **The Little Chaos** that sheared past the vacuum barrier caught him like a giant's slap. He was flung backwards, a golden doll, and slammed into the arena floor so hard the ancient, reinforced stone cratered on impact, dust and debris exploding upward.
The leader of the Royal Guard stood amidst the swirling, fading tendrils of chaotic light, his spear crackling with unstable energy. He smirked, the expression visible in the glint of his visor. "A taste of Little Chaos," he stated.
From the crater, Gen pushed himself up. He rolled his neck and shoulder. The blow had been monstrous, but thanks to his last-second use of **Fendow** to create a buffer of nothingness between himself and the core of the attack, only the peripheral force had touched him. It felt like being hit by a mountain, but a mountain he could survive.
He climbed out, dust cascading from his white robes. "Be careful with that thing," Gen said, his voice a little rough but steady. "I've experienced it firsthand. It doesn't feel good."
In his mind, the analytical part that was his father's son raced. *Little Chaos is a spell created with **Zhidow**, giving the intent of 'destructive chaos' a pure, lethal form. Then they use **Shidow** to manipulate the Qi, creating a wave-rush along the spear from the handle to the tip, amplifying the force. Finally, **Heidow** combines the burst of power and the spear's form into the concept of 'chaos' itself. That's how it gets its monstrous, disintegrating property. The key is to disrupt it before the wave reaches the tip. Once the chaos is forged at the point… you don't want to be in front of it.*
He looked at the ten guards, now all with their spears humming with the same nascent, dangerous light. They had regrouped. The real fight was about to begin.