Chapter 35

  Beneath the still-crackling skies where Han Wuqing's tribulation had passed, a gathering of power floated in silence.

  Hovering just beneath the celestial scar left behind, seven soul transformation realm cultivators gazed upward, having just felt the shift—the unmistakable ripple that signaled Han Wuqing’s success. He had stepped onto the Path of Understanding.

  The Enlightened One, Zhou Yanyue who had joined the Violet Mirror Sect, let a small smile play at the edge of her lips. A rare flicker of delight glinted in her eyes.

  Another one... how long has it been?

  The two Suppression Path cultivators nodded with all the enthusiasm of stone statues, but still offered words of formal acknowledgment.

  “A feat worthy of the title,” one said blandly.

  “Congratulations, Sect Leader Han,” the other added.

  The four Symbiosis Path cultivators dipped their heads in respectful unison. Their tones carried warmth.

  “A momentous occasion.”

  “May your Dao remain clear.”

  But the two Failure Path cultivators, hovering slightly apart, wore different expressions. The man laughed—a high-pitched, manic giggle that scraped at the nerves. The woman, still floating upside down with her black robes cascading toward the sky, clicked her tongue.

  “Path of Understanding?” she sneered. “More like Path of Pretending.”

  “We’ve seen enlightenment before,” the man cackled. “It’s delicious watching it crumble.”

  They turned to leave, flickers of distorted Qi gathering beneath their feet.

  But before they could vanish, a voice cut through the air.

  “Do you think I’m going to let you both leave… after what you tried to do?”

  The tone was calm. Too calm.

  All eyes turned.

  Han Wuqing stood above the tribulation site, his robes tattered and his body still steaming with residual lightning Qi. But there was no weakness in his gaze. No hesitation. Only a smile.

  A smile that shocked the world around him.

  Yao blinked in disbelief. Ai's brows twitched. Lu and Lin exchanged a rare look. Ying’s hand instinctively tightened around his sword, and even Elder Guo’s eyes widened a fraction.

  None of them had ever seen him give a genuine smile before.

  Not once.

  “Is that… him smiling?” whispered Peak Master Ai.

  “He never smiles…” murmured Ying.

  “What’s changed?” asked Lu.

  A terrible stillness fell.

  The six soul transformation cultivators stepped forward, aura rising. Golden Qi, red soul fire, binding threads of Dao and spirit—they were preparing for war.

  But Han Wuqing raised a hand.

  “This is my fight.”

  A few flinched. Lin spoke up sharply.

  “You don’t need to prove anything. We should strike now and end it.”

  Zhou Yanyue floated beside him, her robe swirling with quiet fire. She studied his face for a long moment, seeing the steel behind his calm.

  “Are you confident?” she asked, voice light but sharp.

  Han Wuqing met her eyes.

  “More than I’ve ever been in my life.”

  She nodded once.

  “Then speak your truth through battle.”

  Across from him, the Failure Path cultivators were grinning ear to ear.

  “Oh ho~” the man chirped. “Look at that confidence. Delicious.”

  “Let’s see how long it lasts when his bones begin to crack,” the upside-down woman said, licking her lips.

  Han Wuqing took a single step forward.

  Han Wuqing raised his hand, and the world… fractured.

  From his shadow and soul, from his breath and stillness, a second figure emerged—not behind him, not beside him, but as though a mirror folded in on itself. Two Han Wuqings now stood atop the floating void beneath the tribulation site. Identical in power. Identical in spirit. Identical in will.

  Yet neither was a clone.

  They were both him.

  “A… soul avatar?” Elder Guo whispered in awe.

  “No,” murmured Zhou Yanyue, her voice breathless. “This is different. They’re both… real.”

  Even the Failure Path cultivators stilled for a moment, their smiles faltering as they watched the impossible unfold.

  One Han Wuqing remained upright, gaze fixed on the giggling man, who hovered erratically, limbs twitching with chaotic Qi.

  The other Han Wuqing casually inverted himself in midair, rotating like a leaf caught in reversed gravity. His expression matched the upside-down woman’s orientation, and for the first time in centuries, she frowned.

  He looked her straight in the eye, now face-to-face. Upside-down to upside-down. Equal and opposite.

  “Tired of looking at the world the wrong way?” he asked, voice like distant thunder.

  The giggling man chuckled with renewed glee.

  “This junior has teeth!”

  “Two sets,” Han Wuqing replied flatly.

  A pulse of spatial force rippled from him, not as an attack, but as presence. Space folded gently around his figure, reality curving like water around a stone. The ambient Qi around both Wuqings responded to his gravity, pulled in, tightened, focused.

  The upside-down woman's smirk was gone now.

  “No tether to dual cultivation. No outside force helping him split.”

  “This isn’t symbiosis…”

  “It’s self-replication through sheer understanding,” the enlightened one said.

  And it was true. This wasn’t a spell. It wasn’t a technique passed down.

  This was Han Wuqing’s path. Understanding made manifest.

  One version of himself to fight each of them—not because he needed help.

  But because he had always been forced to carry too much alone.

  Because no one ever taught him to enjoy his own strength.

  Because until this moment… he had always held himself back.

  Now?

  Now he would fight.

  And for the first time in years—he would smile while doing it.

  A storm of silence washed over as Han Wuqing raised one hand. In the vacuum of stillness, space itself trembled.

  Lines of shimmering runes and spatial coordinates etched themselves in the air—concentric circles intersecting at impossible angles. A complex spell array, woven from Gravity Qi, bloomed like a flower of inevitability.

  From its center, a black sphere blinked into existence—dense, cold, utterly silent. A black hole, no larger than a baseball, pulsed like a hungry star collapsing inward.

  Across from him, the giggling man tilted his head and grinned like a child presented with a new toy.

  “Hehe... not bad!” the man chuckled, stepping forward. He pulled out a dagger—thin and curved, forged from obsidian-like metal. A gem embedded in the pommel pulsed softly, like a sleeping eye.

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  “Name’s Huan Xin. I laugh ‘cause the world’s a joke. And you, new boy? You brought the setup—so what’s the punchline?”

  Han Wuqing didn’t smile, but his voice held dry amusement as he flicked his finger, sending the black hole spiraling forward.

  “I don't think you understand the gravity of your situation.”

  Huan Xin froze—then burst into genuine, roaring laughter, doubling over. “Pfff—ah! HAHAHA! Oh, I like you. I really do.”

  Still laughing, he flipped the dagger in his hand so the gem faced outward. The wind around him screamed in response.

  FWOOOSH!

  A towering tornado drill, nearly a hundred meters high, tore into existence, its compressed winds spiraling with razor intensity.

  With a gleeful howl, Huan Xin hurled it forward. “Let’s see if your sense of humor holds up under pressure!”

  The two attacks collided in the center of the battlefield. The tornado twisted violently, its shape distorting, spaghettified by the overwhelming pull of the black hole. It stretched and unraveled like threads of silk into the singularity.

  Then—

  BOOM.

  The black hole imploded, releasing a shockwave of natural Qi in a 50-meter burst, distorting light and rupturing sound as the atmosphere cracked under strain.

  On the other side of the floating battlefield, space warped quietly.

  Two figures hovered mid-air—both upside down, their robes flowing above their heads like banners caught in still water.

  Their gazes met.

  Han Wuqing stood inverted in perfect symmetry with his opponent, his hair unbothered by gravity, his presence calm, even playful.

  Then, he lifted his hand slowly—fingers curling around nothing.

  But the air trembled.

  The space around his palm bent, folded, compressed without collapsing. It was subtle, yet the sensation of something being drawn filled the world around them.

  The upside-down woman’s eyes narrowed with fascination. She saw nothing—and that was the problem. Something invisible, formless, yet unmistakably sharp… was being held.

  “Ah,” she murmured, upside-down lips curling into a curious smile. “You're grasping it, aren’t you? The edge of something not meant to be held.”

  Han Wuqing responded with serene confidence, as though unsheathing a blade that didn’t exist in normal perception.

  “My name is Han Wuqing,” he said, tone polite yet teasing. “And what might this maiden’s name be, who finds herself looking at the world in reverse?”

  The upside-down woman blinked slowly, amused.

  “…They call me Meiyu,” she said at last. “But you may call me that only if you keep impressing me, Wuqing.”

  He gave the faintest of bows—still upside down. Then, his eyes sparkled with mischief as he looked down at the clouds—now above him.

  “Being upside down… kinda feels like I’m looking down on heaven.”

  Meiyu tilted her head, almost startled by the poetic phrasing. Then, for the first time, her serene detachment cracked into something warmer—a slow smirk.

  “You’re dangerous,” she whispered. “And I think… I like danger.”

  The air between them rippled.

  The invisible blade in Han Wuqing’s hand began to hum softly, though no sound passed the boundary of the silence-space it inhabited. Around them, petals of distorted light drifted through the battlefield, caught in warps of folded dimension.

  A swordfight was coming.

  And it would be like nothing the world had ever seen.

  Han Wuqing grinned.

  With a flick of his wrist, he swung the invisible, formless sword—space itself distorting around the arc. It carved through the air like a ripple through still water, unseen but undeniable.

  Meiyu’s eyes glinted with delight. She twisted in mid-air with effortless grace, her body folding like a falling petal. The sword-swing missed—barely.

  Her smile widened.

  “You’re quick,” she said, “but let’s see how you handle this.”

  She reached into her storage ring, and in a burst of swirling Qi, pulled out a glaive—long, wicked, and carved with twisting silver filigree. The metal shimmered with a pulse of deep black Qi, hungry and cold.

  She spun once, upside down still, and cleaved the air in a wide arc.

  A crescent blade of pure darkness howled through the sky, sharp and wide as a tsunami. It tore through clouds on its way toward Han Wuqing.

  But Wuqing didn’t flinch.

  Instead, his eyes danced with quiet amusement.

  He calmly raised his free hand—not in defense, but like a sculptor at work.

  The space in front of him folded, twisted slightly, like cloth being pinched and turned.

  The arc of darkness didn’t explode or vanish.

  It simply changed direction—or rather, seemed to.

  In truth, it kept going exactly as it had… but the path had warped, guided gently away from him by the tilted geometry of space.

  The darkness passed beside him, harmless.

  Meiyu blinked, then chuckled.

  “Cheeky,” she said, twirling her glaive behind her back. “Are you fighting or showing off?”

  Han Wuqing, still floating upside down, tilted his head as if in thought. “Why not both? This is the most fun I’ve had in years.”

  They circled one another slowly, dancing mid-air above the clouds, their weapons humming with anticipation.

  “You treat battle like art,” Meiyu mused, one brow raised. “I respect that.”

  Han Wuqing grinned. “And you treat it like a game. I respect that more.”

  Their weapons pulsed again—one unseen, the other soaked in darkness.

  The fight was just beginning.

  But it was no grudge match, no contest of hate.

  It was a duet. A performance. A release.

  And in this upside-down moment, the world finally felt… right.

  The skies trembled.

  Han Wuqing raised his hand once more, his expression unreadable. Twelve small black holes spun into existence around him like orbiting stars—each the size of a baseball, but dense with terrifying force. They shimmered with hungry gravity, their edges warping light and space.

  Across the battlefield, Huan Xin howled with laughter.

  “Match me, will you?! I like that!”

  Wind whipped around him as he mirrored Han Wuqing’s attack, forming dozens of tornado drills, each spiraling with precise intent. With a clap of his hands, he layered a spell for aerial agility, his body becoming like a leaf on a tempest—light, agile, and untouchable.

  Their attacks flew.

  The sky became a chaotic tapestry of black holes and screaming wind drills, each pair meeting in midair and canceling each other in bursts of distortion and sound. The battlefield twisted like a hurricane caught in a whirlpool.

  Through the chaos, Huan Xin shot forward, dagger gleaming.

  His target: Han Wuqing’s heart.

  But Han Wuqing had already raised his palm, casting a shimmering repulsion field—a dome of force that bent attacks just before they hit. The dagger’s tip was pushed aside with a hiss of kinetic resistance.

  Without hesitation, Han Wuqing countered.

  A black hole bloomed directly in front of Huan Xin’s chest.

  The gravity screamed.

  Huan Xin twisted, managing to slip aside—but his left hand didn’t escape.

  It stretched, warped—spaghettified.

  Without blinking, Huan Xin hacked off his own arm at the elbow, his laughter louder than the wind.

  “HAHAHAH! Now that’s a feeling! Every cell, stretched into oblivion! I felt myself become thread! Thread of ME!”

  The stump on his arm writhed.

  Flesh bubbled, twisted, regrew, veins threading like vines—his limb regenerating slowly, grotesquely, with willpower and Qi.

  But his grin dimmed for a moment.

  He understood now.

  This path—dodging, dancing, trading blows—it was a slow grind.

  A battle of attrition.

  No… it was time to go big.

  He snapped his fingers, creating a fire-element array instead of casting a direct spell. It was angular, vast, floating like a burning mandala in the air, pointed squarely at Han Wuqing.

  Then—

  He poured half of his Qi into it.

  The array exploded forward with a ten-mile wall of flame, superheated and roaring like a sun-born tsunami.

  Below, the air shimmered, warped, then screamed.

  Han Wuqing’s hands moved fast—forming a spell.

  A one-mile-wide, ultra-thick barrier of water enveloped him in a sphere.

  The two forces met.

  Sizzling. Boiling. Vaporizing.

  The sky turned to mist. The water boiled into white steam in an instant. Han Wuqing dashed out of the dome at the last second, his skin blistered and raw, hissing from the burns.

  But before the pain could settle—

  A veil of healing water enveloped his body, swirling over his wounds like silk. The blisters vanished, replaced with cool, perfect skin.

  ---

  Below them, the observers could only watch.

  Adam, Xiaoyan, Xiaomei, Aria, and the others, stunned into silence.

  Peak Masters Yao, Ying, Lin, Lu, Ai, Elder Guo, and the gathered disciples stood frozen as the shockwaves tore across the valley.

  It was only thanks to Enlightened One Zhou Yanyue, and the other six Soul Transformation cultivators that a massive barrier held the inferno at bay, shielding the crowd from certain death.

  Even they… looked tense.

  ---

  Above, in the sky of ruin and fire, Han Wuqing floated still.

  He looked at Huan Xin—not with disdain, but… understanding.

  “You laugh in pain… not because it doesn’t hurt,” Han Wuqing said calmly. “But because you feel everything so deeply, don’t you? Pain, madness, thrill, joy—you savor them all.”

  Huan Xin’s smirk softened—just a little.

  Han Wuqing floated closer, his voice low but resolute.

  “This isn’t just battle to you. This is life. Every strike, every wound, every breath—you’re dancing through it all, even as it breaks you.”

  The wind was quiet for a moment.

  “…Heh,” Huan Xin chuckled, lowering his dagger. “You really do get it.”

  Han Wuqing smiled—not coldly, not distantly, but truly.

  “Then let’s not waste this moment.”

  He raised his invisible hand again.

  “Let’s enjoy this fight with everything we’ve got.”

  Huan Xin closed his eyes, deeply moved.

  “…Thank you,” he whispered.

  Then he spread his arms wide, power bubbling around him.

  “I’ll give you a gift… a spell of my own creation!”

  The sky began to darken again.

  Symbols formed around him—new, original, unstable and wild.

  Something never before seen was coming into the world.

  Meiyu's side:

  The air shimmered with mirrored gravity, and the world still felt… upside down.

  Han Wuqing’s eyes locked with Meiyu’s—the Upside-Down Woman hovering in the warped sky opposite him, her gaze glinting with challenge and mystery.

  In a blink, Han Wuqing twisted space, folding the distance between them like warping silk, as if the space itself bowed to his will.

  At the same moment, Meiyu became light.

  A streak of brilliance, she shimmered through the air in a flash, meeting him midway. They passed each other like comets, slowing only when their weapons moved.

  The invisible sword in Han Wuqing’s hand lashed out toward Meiyu’s neck—silent, unseen, deadly.

  Meiyu ducked.

  Her glaive spun upward in a vertical arc of darkness, a cleave from the ground of the sky toward the false heavens above. Han Wuqing bent away, space folding beneath his foot, and slipped aside.

  They clashed and parted—two glints in the void.

  Meiyu stepped back, her cloak fluttering as she conjured three razor-thin slashes of darkness Qi, hurling them in a fan toward Han Wuqing.

  With a flick of his wrist, space twisted again—each slash bent off-course, carving curved scars into the world behind him.

  But Meiyu was already moving.

  She stepped through her own shadow, reappearing above Han Wuqing, glaive raised for a vertical cleave down toward his head. Her strike gleamed with the promise of death.

  Han Wuqing didn’t block.

  Instead, he allowed the glaive to slash through his right shoulder, slicing down to his torso, blood spraying into the air.

  But even as he was being cut—

  Five water projections—long, thin, finger-like blades—sprouted from his back, lancing upward toward Meiyu.

  She twisted to dodge mid-air, but two pierced her legs, the rest grazing her. She winced, her blood dark and flickering like ink.

  With one clean motion, she cleaved off the projections, and the two of them broke apart, each spiraling back in opposite directions.

  Silence.

  Then, healing light shimmered across Meiyu’s body, her legs regenerating with brilliant luminescence.

  Across from her, water surged over Han Wuqing’s wounds, his flesh and bone knitting itself whole, as if the sea whispered him back together.

  They hovered again.

  Still.

  Balanced.

  Then, they moved.

  A flurry of slashes.

  Blade against glaive.

  Invisible arcs versus darkness edges.

  Each dodge, each step was graceful, measured, like a deadly dance across a shattered mirror of the world. Meiyu spun like dusk incarnate. Han Wuqing, like wind guided by moonlight.

  Then—Han Wuqing’s stance shifted.

  The formless sword transformed, becoming something new.

  He raised it.

  And when he slashed—

  Three hundred parallel cuts rippled toward Meiyu, stretched like the crests of a silver sea. Each cut a wave. Each wave a slice of death.

  Meiyu didn’t hesitate.

  She faded into shadow, her body phasing into the darkness between the slashes, passing through the attacks like smoke through a sieve.

  The sky was torn apart—silent but broken.

  When they reappeared, hovering far from each other, there was no more hesitation.

  This was the end.

  Meiyu’s hands rose.

  A beam of darkness, five hundred meters wide, bloomed from her glaive like the mouth of a god. It screamed through the sky, consuming air, light, everything.

  Han Wuqing remained calm.

  He whispered something to the space around him.

  Then raised his invisible sword.

  One deep breath. One step forward.

  He slashed.

  A vertical arc of Qi and space, glowing with raw distortion, cleaved through the world. It sliced the darkness beam clean in half—and Meiyu with it.

  The slash continued.

  It traveled a full mile before finally halting—space itself fracturing, shattering like glass in its wake.

  The rift left behind trembled, struggling to repair itself, but the damage was deep. The world would take time to heal.

  Meiyu’s form began to fall, her body cleanly split, yet her expression was peaceful.

  As her upper half drifted downward like a feather, she looked at Han Wuqing with the gentlest smile she had worn in centuries.

  “…Thank you,” she whispered, voice faint but sincere. “For this battle. For seeing even a little of who I am.”

  Han Wuqing hovered above her, solemn.

  He bowed.

  “May you succeed in your next life,” he said, his voice like calm water. “And may we meet again… not as enemies.”

  And with that—

  She vanished.

  A ripple in the air. A memory in the sky.

  The battlefield trembled as Huan Xin rose higher—twenty miles into the sky—and there, above all creation, he began his final act.

  With a flick of his hand, he summoned an array.

  Not just any array, but a titanic formation, spanning eleven miles across, its edges glowing with ancient, arcane geometry—a swirling mesh of runes, equations, and purpose. The entire sky lit up with its birth.

  Then, from his storage ring, spirit stones flooded out—a sea of gleaming crystal, each one a world of Qi.

  Trillions of them, a lifetime’s hoard, dissolved into pure energy and poured into the array like blood into a living heart.

  Along with it, Huan Xin emptied himself.

  All his Qi.

  Every last drop.

  His chest rose and fell, pale and flickering from exhaustion, yet his eyes—his mad, joyous eyes—burned like twin stars.

  “Behold, Han Wuqing,” Huan Xin called out, voice echoing across the heavens.

  “My original fusion of spell and array… something I forged from obsession, madness, and endless trials. I call it—The Sun Spear.”

  The formation ignited.

  From it descended a spear of flame, ten miles long and two miles wide—

  Not just fire, but something purer.

  A fusion of blue and white flame, so hot it bent the air into glass, so dense it compressed the sun’s fury into a divine weapon.

  “Though it may not rival the blue lightning that once tore through you during heavenly tribulation…” Huan Xin smiled, hair rising in the superheated wind, “…it is still everything I have.”

  Across from him, Han Wuqing didn’t hesitate.

  He raised his hands.

  Then more arms formed—extra limbs of Qi, extensions of himself, like phantom limbs obeying his will.

  One by one, he began forging black holes.

  Each one collapsed space.

  And then he compressed them.

  Over and over, fusing the singularities into one — a black hole no larger than a fingernail, yet dense enough to swallow planets, light, meaning.

  Two ultimate techniques.

  Two cultivators standing at the edge of their limits.

  Then—release.

  Huan Xin hurled the Sun Spear downward like a god casting judgment.

  Han Wuqing, with a whisper of will, launched the black hole, the tiny, dark seed of oblivion streaking forward.

  The moment they met—

  The world broke.

  The black hole touched the Sun Spear’s tip.

  A roar of resistance.

  Flame and light clashed with infinite gravity.

  The spear exploded—

  —But the black hole did not vanish.

  Instead, it swallowed the explosion.

  Consumed it.

  Drank its heat, its rage, its righteousness.

  The flames curled inward like petals burning in reverse.

  And the black hole expanded—growing from fingernail-sized to ten miles wide, ripping apart the fabric of space, drawing everything into its crushing center.

  Huan Xin could have tried to run.

  But his body, spent. His Qi, gone.

  He didn’t.

  Instead, he floated still, arms wide, hair whipping in the gravitational wind. His stump of a regrown arm half-formed. His expression—peaceful.

  “You’ve won,” he said, smiling at Han Wuqing with a laugh full of joy, awe, and unfiltered madness.

  “I… truly enjoyed every second of this fight.”

  Then the gravity took him.

  Huan Xin was pulled in.

  Body first. Then essence. Then presence.

  Gone.

  And then—

  Boom.

  The black hole collapsed and exploded, into pure natural Qi.

  An eruption spanning fifty miles, the energy wave reshaping the terrain, scat

  tering clouds, bending trees to the ground far beyond the arena.

  A brief silence followed.

  Only the wind mourned.