The emerald clover beneath Yan Zixuan’s boots tightly packed. He surged across the lawn in a burst of focused, disciplined speed.
He didn’t charge with the blind, bloodthirsty roar of a barbarian, nor with the petulant vanity of his former self. His stance was balanced and compact, his balance point dropped into his hips. His folded-steel blade drawn along a low, rising slanted flight path. Every breath he took was timed together with the quiet rustle of the surrounding peach trees.
In that single strike, Yan Zixuan blended every painful, precious lesson he had absorbed across ninety-nine floors of the trial dungeon.
From Old Man Tie Shan on Floor 70, he channeled the unshakable grounding of the earth, drawing strength not from his arm muscles, but from the bedrock of the mountain itself. From Da Peng on Floor 90, he drew the wind-cutting slipstream, shaping the air around his blade so that it parted with zero drag. And from Gu Qingfeng on Floor 99, he drew the calm clarity of the autumn water. That kept his mind free of malice, hatred, or the desperate thirst for personal glory.
It was an honest, beautiful strike—a mortal reaching out to touch the infinite with clean hands and an open heart.
