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[!] Your passive skill, Quick Adaptation (C), has been triggered!
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As the transparent screen flickered before Ji Wuye's intense crimson gaze, the world around him seemed to crystallize into vivid clarity, each movement slowing to a crawl like raindrops suspended in mid-plummet.
Every minuscule droplet of morning dew glistened and refracted, creating a kaleidoscope of miniature prisms that danced across the warm-glow-rimed battlefield.
The majestic peaks of Kunlun Mountain loomed to the west, ancient monoliths of craggy jade ripping through the billowing clouds like celestial daggers.
Long, stark shadows rippled across the Lower Level's ground, waltzing in time with the warm rays of morning sunlight that poured through the mountain's silhouetted gaps.
Surrounding Ji Wuye, the unorthodox martial artists moved with the lethal coordination of a hornet swarm. colored martial robes snapped like agitated vipers as they advanced, the sharp crack of scraping feet on stone punctuating each relentless step forward.
In that pivotal moment, the transparent screen materialized before Ji Wuye's eyes in a shimmering wave, like frost blooming across glass.
Countless ghostly arrows of blue luminescence, shimmering with the intensity of banked spirit-fire, wove an intricate lattice through the air.
Each pulsed with ethereal radiance, unerringly highlighting the fissures and frailties in his opponents' stances.
TAP!
The ghost of a serene smile played across Ji Wuye's lips, entirely at odds with the maelstrom surrounding him. His movements flowed like liquid over polished jade, each precise footfall and flourish utterly purposeful as he surrendered himself to the ghostly play of his Quick Adaptation skill.
Even the very air itself seemed to part before him, his tattered martial robes hanging like carved jade despite the fluidity of his motions.
Two fingers wreathed in a haunting azure aura of humming qi lanced out with surgical precision, unerringly striking the Baihui acupuncture point at the crown of the unorthodox martial artist's head.
The next moment, the impact was deceptively gentle, yet utterly devastating.
The enemy's protective qi flickered and guttered like a candle's flame in a fierce wind before sputtering out entirely. Dark veins rippled in angry serpentine patterns beneath graying skin as eyes rolled back, revealing the sickly whites in stark contrast to his rapidly paling face.
However, even as his opponent began a slow crumple towards the loamy earth, Ji Wuye transitioned with cold calculation into his next flawless motion, angling his own keen jian to intersect the incoming blade.
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[!] Your passive skill, Deflecting Blows (D), has been triggered!
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CLANK!
The sound rang out. The opponent's jian exploded into a brilliant constellation of razor-edged shards that momentarily caught the morning sunlight.
The next moment, the force of the deflection launched the unorthodox martial artist backward in a slow-motion arc, his body seeming to hang suspended like a fallen autumn leaf caught in a weightless drift.
Yet, the time itself appeared to warp and bend around him, still slowed.
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[>> PRESSURE FORM PERFECTION STYLE (C) <<]
The proficiency of your passive skill has slightly increased!
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But Ji Wuye's lethal dance was far from over. In this ephemeral moment where time itself seemed to flow with the viscous languor of honey, he raised his jian.
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The wickedly curved blade sang its keening death-knell as it arced through the air, wreathed in tendrils of azure Qi that writhed and coiled like living frost.
SLASH!
The strike was sublime poetry carved into merciless violence - swift, clinically precise, and rendered with a terrible, devastating beauty.
Ji Wuye's jian separated flesh from bone with masterful economy, the razor edge parting his opponent's form as effortlessly as silk sundered by a dagger's caress.
Within this dilated world of fractured seconds, every infinitesimal detail blazed with visceral clarity: the unhurried divergence of fabric, the arrested rictus of shock frozen upon the falling unorthodox martial artist's face, the first luminous blossoms of crimson beginning to unfurl along the immaculate trajectory of the blade's passage.
TAP!
His footwork was ethereal, each step lighter than autumn's careening leaves skittering across ancient stone. The susurrant whisper of Ji Wuye's movement was the only sound pervading the battlefield's sudden stillness as he flowed with boneless grace towards his next ill-fated target.
Once more the ghostly lattice of translucent arrows materialized, their cool azure luminance limning an angular cyclone of guided death through the air.
Like a master calligrapher transcribing a kaleidoscopic meditation in virulent shades of carmine with each sinuous stroke, Ji Wuye moved through the frozen formation. His blade inscribed lethal poems through the aether, each strike a precise stanza, each flourish economical yet profoundly purposeful.
Following along were, the flickering screens arrayed before his crimson gaze.
Then, finally, as abruptly as the strange suspension had begun, the fragile stasis shattered and time's languorous flow rushed back into its frantic cadence.
The unfolding tableau blazed into gory, full-motion life - a macabre masterwork rendered in shades of viscera and shattered hopes.
The unorthodox martial artists scattered across the battlefield hung frozen in various permutations of leaps and feints, weapons half-raised or mid-swing, like a chaotic array of puppets severed from their crucial strings.
Across the vast and expanse of Kunlun's Lower Level, the surviving disciples looked on in horrified fascination. Pallid faces, already leached of vitality by the insidious poison's ravages, drained of what little color still clung to their waxen masks.
Labored respirations birthed small clouds in the chill mountain air as they struggled to fully comprehend the impossible brutality unfolding before their disbelieving eyes.
Some moved to open their mouths in wordless shouts of futile warning, but their cries of anguish withered on extended tongues, perishing as mewls of pained incomprehension.
They thought it was the end for Ji Wuye, surrounded on all sides by countless foes, but...
SPROUT!
The concussive report was a hideous, obscene symphony - the grotesque cacophony of a hundred vermillion detonations deafening in its virulence.
Over one hundred forms separated along Ji Wuye's meticulously inscribed trajectories in a single terrible instant.
Blood erupted in sensuous arcs of glistening arterial calligraphy, each ephemeral blossom catching the morning sunlight in fractal patterns of visceral, ruby iridescence before splattering in kaleidoscopic shades of violentrendition across the ancient loamy canvas below.
Ji Wuye stood unmoving at the epicenter of the grisly bonfire, a dark and implacable pillar amid the carmine cyclone. The fine mists of sanguine offering that impacted across his robes rustled like fallen sedges caressed by the softest zephyr.
The cloying perfume of spilled vitae commingled with the crisp mountain bouquets to pervade the air with a horrifyingly intoxicating musk that clung too heavily in the aftermath.
The Kunlun disciples stood paralyzed, their faces drained of color and rendered corpselike beneath the cold mountain sunlight.
"Heaven..." The solitary word wheezed from one student's trembling lips, little more than a dying apprehension exhaled into the frost-tinged air to dissipate amongst the drifting pine-scents.
Shaking hands rose to cover agape mouths not merely to stifle gasps, but as futile barriers warding off the sourly metallic perfume carried upon each shallow inhalations.
The Elders of the righteous factions present, found themselves utterly rooted to the spot, as motionless as the ancient monoliths framing the amphitheater's mural backdrop.
Some cradled poisoned disciples, others stood slack-jawed.
"That's...the suspending attack," one Elder's reedy baritone finally shattered the gravid silence shrouding the carnage.
His eyes - narrow buckskin slits that had born witness across the turning of generations to the evolution of the martial arts.
"There's no one of the younger generation across all of Jianghu who stands a match against him..." The sigh that followed seemed to expel decades of succumbing weariness,.
"A rare talent like that, wasted...a shame for the Kunlun Sect that failed to earn his loyalty." The damning words scattered into the wind like carelessly shed leaves.
Another Elder, his beard aquiver and the delicate jade ornament in his topknot softly clinking with each infinitesimal tremble, sadly shook his head.
"Sigh...that young man...he's gone too far down this path. His methods are far too ruthless, his mindset twisted towards darkness."
Knowing Ji Wuye could even injure a Kunlun Elder who was at the 8th Realm, it was no surprise that these unorthodox martial artists—most of whom were likely in the 4th or 5th Realm—stood no chance against him.
The vast expanse of Kunlun's Lower Level, so often pulsing with the rhythmic cadences of training colliding flesh and discussion, had descended into a silence so profound it seemed to swallow even the softest mountain zephyrs.
The macabre stretch of saturated earth radiated outward in deepening shades of glistening carmine like the opening stanza of a sacrificial calligraphic masterwork.
Every survivor's attention remained utterly transfixed, their breathing shallow and synced in tremulous conjoined spasms.
All eyes inexorably locked upon the crimson-drenched form holding immovable court amidst the epicenter of devastation.
Ji Wuye remained unmoving, a solitary pillar amidst the surrounding bonfire of ruination.
Thick rivulets of clinging scarlet coursed in steady streams from his saturated robes to angularly branch outward into fanning pools at his feet, as if his mere presence were birthing springs of sacrificial libation from the hallowed loam itself.
Yet...
His attention seemed utterly consumed upon the lattice of flickering azure screen arrayed before his luminous crimson regard,
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[>> PRESSURE FORM PERFECTION STYLE (C) <<]
The proficiency of your passive skill has slightly increased!
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[>> DEFLECTING BLOWS (D) <<]
The proficiency of your passive skill has slightly increased!
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[>> SLASH BREAKER (D) <<]
The proficiency of your active skill has slightly increased!
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[>> QUICK ADAPTATION (C) <<]
The proficiency of your passive skill has slightly increased!
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...
The cascade of translucent notifications materialized before Ji Wuye's crimson regard like a shimmering cataract of aetheric light.
Ji Wuye began dexterously rearranging the hovering windows - into neatly regimented arcs bracketing the corners of his sight.
As his telepathic focus turned inward to metabolize the granular streams of notifications populating the displays, the slightest indentation marred the smooth plane of his brow. 'A pity Feline Reflex didn't easily triggered,'
However, as his eyes swept past the usual notifications, a pair of new messages appeared that were distinctly different from the rest.
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[>> INFORMATION <<]
Congratulations! The skill Deflecting Blows (D) has evolved into -> Deflecting Blows (C)!
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[!] Congratulations! Your Pressure Form Perfection Style skill has achieved a minor breakthrough!
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