The wind generated by Zhao Wuji’s old family sword was light, easy, and deadly.
While Lin Ke and Meng Shan were pinned down by forty sea-weights of static gravity shear—every breath a clockwork labor, every footstep a math in load-bearing stonework—Zhao floated across the dark rock floorboards like a dragonfly skimming a pond.
A shimmering, semi-clear bell of golden light wrapped around Zhao’s body from head to toe.
The Golden Bell Gravitational Ward.
An ancient, high-grade spiritual treasure that stopped ninety percent of surrounding gravity within a three-foot ball-shaped field around the wearer. Inside the bubble, Zhao experienced a gentle, comfortable one-times terrestrial gravity, his muscles free, his movements unrestrained.
He lunged forward with blinding speed.
His sky jade sword danced through the murky red air, trailing wisps of pale green sword-light that whistled with terrifying speed.
Swish. Swish. Clang.
Meng Shan tried to intercept with his tower shield, but under forty times normal weight, the big man’s reaction time was throttled by clockwork heavy rush.
Zhao effortlessly pirouetted around Meng Shan’s flank, his blade grazing across the big man’s shoulder plate, peeling back three inches of hardened iron armor like shaved butter.
“You’re insects crawling in the mud, Lin Ke!” Zhao laughed, darting forward, his blade darting toward Lin Ke’s throat like a striking adder. “How does it feel to fight a god when you can’t even lift your chin?!”
Lin Ke took half a micro-step back, his Ashen Iron Lattice groaning as he blocked with his iron walking stave.
The jade sword struck the iron wood, cleaving it clean in two.
The battlefield froze into dead amber. The cut halves of the wooden stave hung suspended in mid-fall. Zhao’s arrogant smirk was locked on his pale features.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke ran fourteen evasive permutations.
Run 01 through 06: Try to dodge Zhao’s thrusts using micro-steps. Result: Lin Ke’s maximum lateral shifted weight under forty times normal weight is 0.4 meters per second. Zhao’s sword tip moves at 22 meters per second inside his artificial 1x bubble. Massive speed delta. Jade blade pierces Lin Ke’s chest bone across all six runs. Heart punctured. Fatal bleedout in three seconds.
Run 07 through 14: Direct offensive strike with Crimson Yang palm blasts aimed at Zhao’s torso. Result: The golden bell ward deflects seventy percent of the heat blast, and Zhao simply sidesteps the attack at normal speed, severing Lin Ke’s main neck blood vessel on the counter.
Lin Ke returned to meatspace. His chest burned with the phantom agony of a pierced heart.
He reached down with his right hand, reversed the iron metal pen in his fingers. Then he jammed the sharp needle point into his left thumb pad.
The sharp sting cut through the cold terror, dark blood welling against the iron.
“Branch checked,” he whispered softly. “Main.”
Don’t fight the sword, Lin Ke logged coldly. Target the power supply.
The golden bell ward needed huge energetic throughput to maintain a local zero-gravity bubble against forty sea-weights of external field pressure.
At Zhao’s waist, set dead-center into an ornate buckle of white mutton-fat jade, was a thumb-sized, high-grade spirit stone glowing with blinding golden radiance.
The jade housing around the stone was fine, detailed, delicate—and dangerously brittle.
Zhao drew back his sky jade sword for the killing thrust.
“Die, fire dog!” Zhao hissed, his blade lunging forward in a straight, faster-than-sound streak aimed directly between Lin Ke’s eyes.
Lin Ke didn’t lift his hands to block.
He didn’t try to dodge.
He braced his boots into the dark rock floor, locked his neck spine. Then he opened the exhaust ports of his right palm.
He didn’t fire a wide blast of flame.
He throttled the exhaust sky-slit down to the width of a sewing needle. It packed the white-hot Crimson Yang fire from his six dantian vortexes into a thin, faster-than-sound needle of white-hot heat star-fire.
FZZZZT.
A hairline jet of eight-hundred-degree heat lanced across the three paces separating them.
It bypassed the sword blade entirely.
It struck the ornate white-jade buckle at Zhao’s waist with pinpoint accuracy.
Under normal conditions, mutton-fat jade was tough and tough. But under the intense, crushing pressure of forty times normal weight, the stone was already under huge clockwork stress.
When Lin Ke’s eight-hundred-degree heat jet struck that cold, stressed stone surface, the heat swelling differential was total.
CRACK.
The jade housing didn’t merely fracture. It exploded outward in a shower of sharp white chips.
The load-bearing bracket failed.
The thumb-sized golden spirit stone popped out of its seat like a watermelon seed pinched between two fingers, skittering across the smooth dark rock floor into the shadows.
The Golden Bell Gravitational Ward blinked once.
Twice.
And vanished.
The three-foot bubble of gentle, one-times terrestrial gravity collapsed into nothingness in less than a split second.
The full, total forty-fold static gravity of Floor Seven slammed down onto Zhao Wuji’s unprotected body like a falling iron castle.
Zhao was mid-lunge.
His pampered, high-born body—unbound by fire labor, unhardened by toxic draughts, possessing soft, spongy bones cultivated in luxurious quiet focus pavilions—had never experienced more than three times normal weight in his entire life.
The downward force hit him with the weight of eight tons.
His sky jade sword was ripped from his grip, smashing into the stone floor and snapping into three pieces under its own multiplied mass.
Then came his legs.
CRACK-CRUNCH.
The sickening, wet sound echoed across the vast arena like dry timber snapping under an avalanche.
Zhao’s unbound femurs drove downward through his patellae, wildly crushing both kneecaps to powder against the unbending dark rock floor. His thigh bone heads blew out through the back of his joint sockets. It tore through flesh and silk trousers in a horrific, bloody rupture.
“AIIIIEEEEEEGH!”
Zhao’s high-born arrogance dissolved into a high, piercing shriek of sheer, primal agony.
He collapsed face-first onto the blood-smeared flat stone slabs, pinned flat by eight tons of crushing gravity weight, sobbing and clawing at the stone as his shattered legs pooled with dark crimson blood.
Lin Ke stood three paces away, his hands resting on his hips, his breathing steady and slow.
He looked down at the writhing merchant-heir, his face devoid of emotion.
“You should have invested in extra power brackets,” Lin Ke said softly. “A single point of failure is an amateur mistake.”