The sword sheath made no sound as the blade emerged.
It wasn’t the ring of silver or the hiss of drawn steel. It was the heavy, choking thud of a high-pressure press dropping into a grease trench. The Seven Law Judicator Broadsword cleared its black-horn casing. He showed five feet of dull, dark-gold iron inscribed with the complete legalist statutes of the Canglan Sect Alliance.
Zhao Wuji rose from his chair.
With that single motion, the surrounding gravity on the roadway seemed to multiply by four.
Zhao was not merely a pampered merchant-heir. He was a Peak Foundation Establishment expert whose dantian had condensed twenty-eight drops of dense, liquid spiritual essence. His passive spiritual aura radiated outward in crushing, nested rings of legalist sword-intent. It packed the air until the shale dust stopped swirling and fell dead to the earth.
Lin Ke’s knees locked.
Inside his chest, his Vitreous Glass Spirit veins began to emit a high, silent shriek of load-bearing distress. Unlike the flexible, muscular channels of traditional fighters that could dilate to absorb deep water pressure, Lin Ke’s non-elastic glass tubes bore the full, unbuffered weight of Zhao’s spiritual field.
A sharp, hot prickling lanced behind his breastbone. A thin, bright trickle of crimson leaked from his left nostril, dripping onto his soot-caked collar.
