Chapter 350 – The Ninefold Converging Explosive Blade, the Sun-born Child, and Li Ping'an of the Holy Tree Temple - Part 1

Fine white snow fluttered down, ushering in the start of winter on Cloudpeak Province.

Once the first snow came it rarely stopped for days on end, and by the time the sky cleared the whole world looked reborn.

Li Yuan turned toward the window, wine cup in hand, pondering the path of his martial arts.

His strange gift could not touch the powers of the Supreme Yin and Supreme Yang, the Moon and Sun.

Everything else? Effortless.

Why?

Memory tugged him back to the day he first arrived in this world.

"Li Yuan, the millet jar is almost empty."

A woman's voice, as though drifting over from the surface of the sea, had stirred him awake.

Yan Yu had awakened him. A perfectly ordinary transmigration. And yet his talent refused to touch Moon or Sun. This was another riddle.

Strictly speaking, he had three gifts.

First, any martial arts unrelated to the Moon and Sun advanced at lightning speed.

Second, everything outside those two powers appeared before him as data in a status page.

Third, he would never age.

Were these things all related?

A sharp

thud

cut his thoughts short. Tang Pang, across the table, had fallen face-down, dead drunk.

Li Yuan smiled. The Tang Sect disciples drank on guard duty but never to excess.

Tonight he himself had polished off too much wine and even laced it with a hint of burning heart flower pollen; Tang Pang tried to keep pace and paid the price.

Li Yuan rose, found a dry hide hanging on the wall, flicked it open, and draped it over the sleeping beauty. Chin in palm once more, he gazed at the snow, mind drifting as silent forms played out behind his eyes.

A lantern hung outside the Tang Sect lodge, its glow painting a faint red halo on new snow.

Creak!

Li Yuan stepped into the light. His stance was square, footwork solid, and center of gravity rooted deep.

“Hah...” He cleared his mind, then twisted his shoulders, hips, and fist.

He punched out, no supernatural tricks, only raw muscle and bone.

BOOM!

The sound cracked like artillery; snowflakes exploded.

He advanced, punch after punch, channeling nothing but a unified force, driving every shred of power into each strike.

He had written the method into the Nine Suns Martial Arts—six training forms, four combat moves, and one ultimate killing move. Disdaining fancy names, he labeled them simply as

Form One, Form Two

, and so on.

After he was finished, he drew his blade, channeling the same current of power. Then he did the same with the spear.

The blade and shaft were merely extensions of an arm; master one current and all currents flowed.

Li Yuan finished the set and stilled himself for a moment. Then he began again, adding his flame this time.

Explosive force surged into fist and blade yet never burst free.

To an onlooker each blow looked ordinary, but close up one could see rivers of flame sliding beneath his skin, flame serpents coiling inward.

The thunder was gone.

Outwardly it was calm shadowboxing; inwardly he stood on the lip of a volcano, holding the eruption down with bare hands. Each surge of Yang flame he guided, diverted, or forced back inside, and with every act of suppression the next surge grew harder to contain.

The moment he could restrain it no longer, the punch that followed would be devastating.

He had wanted to weave in the vibrational force as well. The unified force was meant only as a conduit, preparing the body to merge vibration, explosion, and stillness into one. But the explosive flame alone already pressed the limits of control.

Previously, it had taken months for Li Yuan to leash vibration. After that, he only had to allocate his mysterious points to max out his mastery of vibration and stillness.

The present explosive power, however, was born of the Sun itself.

There was no shortcut. He would have to tame it, one breath at a time.

Compared with the crude ignition of the Nine Flames, his brand of

explosion

was far harder to subdue.

The gap in difficulty was like heaven and earth.

Li Yuan was tempted to gamble, blend in the vibrational force and see what happened, but even the faintest probe told him it was unwise. He had no idea what kind of catastrophe might follow.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

The next year, early February arrived.

Deep in the snow-bound mountains, Li Yuan stood outside Xue Ning’s manor, eyes shut, Azure Serpent whistling through the air.

Xue Ning lived near the Tang Sect; whenever Li Yuan could not return to the black market ghost domain he stayed here.

Yet

staying

was all it was. The two merely shared a bed; the nightly rituals of husband and wife were long past.

The gulf between them was too vast, elephant and ant, and the ant was wrought with illness.

As for the four maids—Mei, Lan, Zhu, and Ju—attending him, Li Yuan didn’t dare to move. He lay motionless each time before waving them away at the very end.

One careless twitch from him could kill an ordinary person now.

Five months in, Li Yuan could finally begin to control the explosive force. But as expected, no new skill ever appeared in his status window. This ancient and unique path seemed too novel even for his System to record.

Surely, Li Yuan could not be the only one to seize a spark of flame; the chain of accidents leading to it felt improbable but not singular, unless no other place in the world actually had the flame.

The Everflame was born only in the Evernight tundra; elsewhere the scattered, airy Yang energy never gathered of its own accord, merely condensing passively into those meat fields.

Five fingers rotated; his hand closed into a fist.

Within that fist, wild currents of flame roamed like caged beasts. This was his ninth compression of explosive force, the edge of his present limit.

Today he meant to try a tenth. After that, his practice would have to come to a pause.

His child conceived on the frozen tundra was nearly due. Soon he would see the long-missed mother, Jen’gal Snow. His heart longed for and desired her.

“Ha!” Every thought vanished as he poured himself into the tenth converging explosive slash.

The previous nine suppressed eruptions in his fist found an outlet the moment a point of force appeared, like throttled magma glimpsing daylight roaring to be free.

Li Yuan caught the surge, twisted it, folded it into a single current.

Swoosh!

The blade fell.

No thunder, no flame, no shockwave.

For one stunned heartbeat, Li Yuan simply stared and then exclaimed with joy, “Is the baby about to arrive and bring me luck at the same time?”

Each earlier attempt had hurled a deep-crimson tide of flame on the slash, enough to scour over a hundred meters, turning earth to char and hurling dust for kilometers. Anyone within that radius would feel the tail-wind slap their face, like a runaway locomotive skimming past.

Where vibration pulverised from within, explosiveness was a savage, searing external force—crushing from the outside, cracking a thing’s shell before shattering it to dust. Vibration worked in silence; explosiveness flaunted its havoc. To fuse the stillness of one with the fury of the other, two extremes into one harmony, was a task fit to break geniuses.

As for advancing from fifth rank to fourth, the records from the Holy Tree Temple, along with plenty of living examples, spoke plainly. That was to engage in a life-or-death battle between equals, deepen comprehension, and let the five source heart undergo its first atavism and birth a second persona.