After gathering they looked at each other and seemed to be discussing strategies with divine sense. After breaking through the foundation building realm, cultivators could use their divine sense and compress a lot of messages and transmit them to other cultivators who were willing to receive them. They could transmit hundreds of words in an instant. So within a span of breath, the six elders had already prepared a strategy.
They were confident in killing Punya given time, but they wanted to prevent unexpected changes. If one of the elders became crippled or worse died, then the loss for the Thapa clan would be hard to bear. Although there were many cultivators in the foundation building realm in their clan, most of them were in the initial or middle stage. There were few in the late stage and probably around a dozen who had reached the ninth stage or the peak stage of the foundation building realm. Another thing was that this was just a battle for resource gain, it was not a crisis for their Thapa clan.
So if one of the elders gets crippled or died, they were screwed. Their descendants wouldn’t get anything. And getting crippled would be worse than dying, as they would be no heroes, just some idiot who got injured by a small clan member. This was the reason they were hesitating to go all out. Maintaining a stalemate was better than getting injured after all there was a golden core formation cultivator in their midst.
Punya too looked at the six of them. Although they didn’t use much of their techniques, their coordination was almost flawless. Punya was not giving his all on that first bout. He knew they were just testing waters and he was doing the same. If the elders were to battle him one on one, then he would wipe the floor with them but battling six at once was a bit tricky even for Punya. Luckily there was no cultivator among them who was a soul cultivator otherwise sneaky soul attacks would be troublesome.
The elder stood for a few seconds and then flew in different directions. Previously they had sent a flurry of sword rays towards Punya to save the Ming clan supreme elder but these attacks were effortlessly thwarted by Punya by swinging his sword at impossible angles. He didn’t even have to look for the sword rays, his action felt like he had eyes on his back. Among the six elders, two of them went straight towards Punya and the other four stood in the four cardinal directions a few meters around him.
Their qi flared showing a mix of brown and white colored aura covering their sword. Punya too circulated his cultivation technique and his sword technique making his sword glow with brown qi. The properties of earth attributes in martial techniques mainly leaned towards defense and control. Although the offense was also good, these techniques would not compare to metal or fire attribute martial techniques.
One of the elders suddenly used his body movement technique and closed the gap with Punya slashing his sword at his chest. The sword was swift and from the sharpness it emitted, seemed lethal. Punya used the first move and blocked the sword. Punya hadn’t inserted much qi in his sword because he was planning on playing defense for a while until he got a clear picture of the strength these six cultivators held. Although he stopped the sword slash from the elder, the heaviness it carried turned into momentum when it crashed into his sword which in turn made him push back a few meters.
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The sword slash did absolutely no damage to him but he was pushed back a few meters and just as he stopped, another sword slash came from his back. His instincts were warning him like crazy so he used the sword to block the attack. This attack was also the same as the previous one. The difference was that it contained a bit of lethality and when Punya blocked it he felt the same heaviness that turned into momentum thus pushing him back once again. This elder was one of the four who had taken the position in the cardinal direction.
This sword slash pushed him towards the initial position. Punya looked around and saw everything was in initial condition. The six elders were in the same position and so was he as if the previous attacks had never happened. Punya instantly understood that the elders from the Thapa clan had used their battle formation to trap him in the middle and make him spend the energy. If this goes on then even without getting injured, Punya wouldn’t be able to last much longer as he would have to spend qi to fend off their every attack.
When Punya reached his initial position or at the center of the elders, another warning bell rang through his head as his instincts kicked in. It was the same attack as the previous one, a sword covered with brown-white qi slashing at him, He mechanically stopped this attack with his sword and was pushed back once again. The attacker this time was another elder and the direction he was pushed back was also different from the previous.
Being a battle cultivator, his battle sense was superb and although he didn’t know the way to break the formation, he did get insights about the position of the six elders and how they worked. If Punya controlled the momentum and changed the direction by himself then the elders would also change the direction maintaining the same speed as him. So it didn’t matter where he went, he was always in the central position. It wasn’t all, he didn’t get time to gather his thoughts because he was attacked constantly.
His time went on injecting his qi into the sword and blocking the sword slashes from the Thapa clan cultivators. If not for his extraordinary instincts and the sword moves, he would have had a hard time fending off all these moves. Although he found it easy to fend off the attacks because after a certain point, he grasped the rhythm, he knew since it was the contest of qi between him and the six elders, it was only a matter of time before he spent the last drop of it from his dantian.
He also knew that to break the formation easily, he would have to injure one elder gravely or attack all of them with overwhelming force. The first option was his best choice and probably the viable option. It would be even better if he could distract one of them as it would make them out of sync. All he needed was a crack in the formation to break free and all the elders needed was also a moment to land a hit on him. If he got even a slight injury, then they would get a chance to finish this easily.