Chapter 104: Chapter 104
“Hm? Brother, you…”
Watching Shen Xiuhan’s retreating back, Wang Jindao’s pupils contracted. He reached out instinctively to grab him — and grasped nothing but air.
Beside him, Li Han’s face filled with astonishment. His lips parted, but no words came.
A keen gleam flashed through Luo Feng’s eyes. Anticipation surfaced on his features.
Every guard on the dock jolted as though struck by lightning — like men in the dark catching sight of a torch. Dozens of gazes converged on the lone, pine-straight figure in blue, walking toward the open ground.
At the same instant, Tu Xiaotian’s glacial stare snapped to him like an arrow.
Shen Xiuhan halted. Lake wind caught the hem of his robe.
CRACK. CRACK.
Tu Xiaotian rolled his neck. Bone ground against bone with a string of dry pops.
He looked down at this young man, lips peeling back on both sides into a bloodthirsty leer, baring two rows of yellowed teeth.
“Brave enough, I’ll give you that… Who are you? State your name! Your Grandpa Tu never cuts down a nobody without—”
BOOM!
The last word never left his mouth.
Tu Xiaotian erupted from stillness to motion, his body blurring into an afterimage.
A sneak attack!
The stone beneath his feet detonated, shrapnel spraying outward like hidden weapons.
No windup, no warning — one heartbeat talking, the next hurtling like a loosed arrow straight for Shen Xiuhan’s face.
The opening move was the Overturning Heaven Palm’s killing technique — Returning Dragon Caps Heaven!
“Die!”
Tu Xiaotian’s roar shook the air, carrying across the entire dock.
His right palm rose high, qi-blood raging through him like a tidal bore. The broad palm took on a sheen of dark light — a monstrous black seal — crashing down toward the crown of Shen Xiuhan’s skull.
The bone-cutting wind hit him full in the face, whipping his hair wild, snapping his blue robe like a battle-flag.
The entire dock froze.
The crowd held its breath in terror, the silence so absolute that only the shriek of palm-wind filled their ears.
The instant the dark-gleaming palm was about to meet the crown of Shen Xiuhan’s head —
He moved.
Startled Swan, Roaming Dragon!
His lower body — both knees — rooted into the ground like old vine.
His upper body, however, bent backward at an impossible angle, as though a great tree snapped by a gale.
The massive palm-blast grazed past his ear with a thunderous rush. The shockwave set his eardrums ringing — yet it hadn’t so much as touched a corner of his sleeve.
And simultaneous with the evasion, his hands — coiled and waiting — struck.
Ten fingers snapped shut like iron hooks. Qi-blood force surged and pulsed at his fingertips.
In a flash, Shen Xiuhan’s arms became a great eagle spreading its wings for the kill — razor-edged force thrumming between his fingers.
Heavenly Vulture Twisting-Wind Hand!
Riding the momentum of his backward lean, Shen Xiuhan’s body snapped upright like a spring rebounding from full compression.
His right hand whipped upward — a viper striking from its den — and latched onto the back of Tu Xiaotian’s still-extended right palm with lightning speed.
“No!”
Tu Xiaotian’s pupils shrank to pinpoints. Ice flooded up his spine and crashed against the crown of his skull. Cold sweat erupted across his back.
The old bandit’s combat instincts were razor-sharp.
Without a thought, Manifest Strength flooded his left arm. Body following intent, he swung a vicious backfist hammer straight at Shen Xiuhan’s face.
SWISH!
The crack of air was shrill, the fist-wind stinging his skin.
But Shen Xiuhan’s face was stone. He ignored the incoming iron fist entirely.
His right hand, clamped onto the back of Tu Xiaotian’s hand, locked five long, unyielding fingers around four of the man’s digits like steel talons.
Force detonated. He wrenched backward.
CRACK! CRACK!
The sound of shattering bone rang across the dock — crisp, stomach-turning — like snapping dry branches.
“AHHHHH!”
In the next heartbeat, Tu Xiaotian’s expression twisted into a mask of agony. A shriek of raw, animal pain tore from his throat.
His four thick fingers had been bent completely backward into a grotesque fold. Beneath the skin, veins and bone-white shafts snapped clean through. Blood sprayed. Splintered bone punched through flesh, baring jagged white stumps.
At the same instant —
Shen Xiuhan’s left forearm rose, elbow forming an unbreakable iron shield before his body, catching Tu Xiaotian’s retaliating left fist head-on.
CLANG!
A sharp, metallic crack — the ring of iron striking iron — echoed outward.
Iron Bone Art!
“A body-hardening method?!”
Tu Xiaotian felt the savage recoil through his left hand — tiger’s mouth numb, arm gone to jelly. Shock crashed through him like a tidal wave.
The ten-fingers-linked-to-the-heart agony twisted his face into something barely human. He was on the verge of losing all reason.
He didn’t dare linger. His footwork shifted, and he made to wrench himself free and retreat.
“Think you’re leaving?!”
Shen Xiuhan’s eyes blazed cold. With a snort, he stuck to Tu Xiaotian like rot on bone, pressing in.
Both hands surged to their absolute peak in a single breath. Ten fingers dissolved into a storm of afterimages — dozens of vibrating strikes and clutching grabs launched in the space of two heartbeats.
Claw-shadows swept like a gale stripping leaves, like an eagle tearing living flesh — layer upon layer, wave upon wave — sealing Tu Xiaotian inside an inescapable cage.
Blinded by pain, Tu Xiaotian could only block with one hand — a desperate, ragged defense.
Stumbling left, exposed right. Driven back step by step.
In the blink of an eye, a continuous SHRRR of tearing cloth filled the air.
His black martial jacket was ripped to ribbons. Across his chest, arms, and even his cheeks, seven or eight gashes appeared — deep to the bone, streaming blood.
Skin peeled back, exposing the raw crimson of muscle beneath. Blood poured from every wound, dyeing half his shirt dark red.
“Little bastard — you go too far!”
A mighty Ninth Chief of Chenjian Wu, beaten down by some young upstart — even crippled in one hand before a live audience.
Tu Xiaotian’s humiliation and fury shattered the last wall of reason inside him.
With Tang Jin and Pang Yi at his back, he abandoned all caution. Sanity burned away in a white-hot blaze.
A roar tore from him. Manifest Strength boiled and surged, flooding into both legs.
CRACK!
The stone beneath his feet caved in, inch by inch, and he launched himself like a siege-bolt from a fully drawn crossbow — hurling himself at Shen Xiuhan, fiercer and more savage than before.
“I’ll kill you today if it’s the last thing I do!”
Tu Xiaotian’s howl was deafening. His good left hand and the ruined right — four fingers still folded backward, still pumping blood — were forced together, palms merging in defiance of the agony.
In an instant, qi-blood thickened across his palms to the point of near-solidification. A blue-black sheen erupted, radiating a suffocating aura of savage menace.
Overturning Heaven Palm — Sea-Overturning, River-Flipping!
Tu Xiaotian bellowed like thunder, the sound carrying a hundred paces.
Both palms drove forward — not splitting left and right, but merging into a single strike of absolute, overwhelming force.
Like twin axes that could split mountains and overturn the sky, carrying an irresistible, earth-shaking blast, they slammed toward Shen Xiuhan.
Where the palm-edge passed, the air compressed to its limit and burst with a piercing sonic crack.
Even the rubble on the ground was swept up by the wind and flung to either side.
“Bring it!”
Against this cataclysmic blow, Shen Xiuhan advanced.
He sank his waist and planted his stance. The great dragon of his spine reared upward, vertebrae detonating joint by joint in a sound like dragon-song and tiger-roar.
Qi-blood poured through him like a dam bursting — every last drop, without reserve — flooding into both legs.
In a flash, Shen Xiuhan erupted off the ground like a seedling torn from dry earth, stone shattering under his feet, rocketing skyward.
His right leg locked straight, transforming into an indestructible steel whip. It tore through the air, unleashing a shrill, scalp-prickling whistle.
Thirty-Six Paths of Sky-Collapsing Legs!
Airborne.
Shen Xiuhan torqued waist and hip, compressing every ounce of his body’s power and qi-blood force into this single lashing kick.
That leg-shadow fell like a heaven-cleaving axe, like an earth-splitting hammer — trailing a tearing, sky-rending gale — aimed dead at the center of Tu Xiaotian’s onrushing double-palm, sweeping across in a head-on collision.
BOOM!
BANG!!
Palm drowns the ocean. Leg collapses the sky.
A world-shaking blast erupted above the dock — as though two boulders of ten thousand jin had collided in mid-air.
Savage force radiated outward from the point of impact in a shockwave.
A visible ring of white concussion — like a hurricane born from flat ground — ripped every shard of stone, every dead leaf, every loose inch of turf within several zhang clean off the earth and into the sky.
Dust erupted, blotting out the sun.
And at the heart of the storm —
Shen Xiuhan twisted in mid-air with the agility of an eagle spreading its wings.
One knee touched down, carving a three-foot furrow in the ground as he skidded backward — only then bleeding off the monstrous recoil.
A corner of his blue robe had been torn away by the blast, revealing the black inner lining beneath. Otherwise, he was completely unharmed.
Tu Xiaotian, on the other hand —
Under the impact of that supremely ferocious collision, he flew backward like a kite with its string cut.
His body slammed into the ground first, punching out a shallow crater.
The momentum didn’t stop. He bounced, crashed through two thick stone mooring-posts in succession, and finally struck a waist-thick old pagoda tree with a muffled BANG.
CRACK!
The old tree shuddered violently, dead branches and leaves raining down.
Half the trunk had been sheared through, exposing pale-yellow heartwood.
SHUNK!
Tu Xiaotian sprayed a cloud of blood-mist, spattering his front, staining the black jacket a dark, wet red.
The meridians inside him felt like they had been sawn apart inch by inch — pain like grinding knives, clearly the mark of severe internal injuries.
Yet the old bandit was ferocious to the bone. He bit his teeth to splinters, clawed at the rough bark with both hands, fingers digging deep, and fought to rise.
Blood seeped from between his fingers, staining the trunk red.
But before he could stand, the sound of death’s approaching footsteps filled his ears.
TAP TAP TAP!
A wraith-like blue figure tore through the dust, momentum carrying it at terrifying speed.
Shen Xiuhan planted a straight kick squarely beneath Tu Xiaotian’s jaw.
Thirty-Six Paths of Sky-Collapsing Legs — Mountain-Collapse Form!
Tu Xiaotian’s face contorted in horror. Instinct screamed at him to channel qi-blood into a block.
But he was too slow.
BANG!
In the next heartbeat, the kick connected — dead on the point of the jaw.
Six or seven shattered yellow teeth, a spray of blood, and a small, glistening chunk of crimson tongue-meat erupted from his mouth.
Tu Xiaotian’s features twisted in agony. Eyes bulging, face a rictus of terror, his mouth gaped open — trying to scream for Tang Jin, for Pang Yi.
But Shen Xiuhan’s second kick was already there, following like a shadow.
Another Mountain-Collapse Form.
The sledgehammer whip-kick landed flush on the root of Tu Xiaotian’s ear.
A deep HUMMM detonated inside his skull — a thunderclap in the cranial vault — and the tower of a man went limp, consciousness snuffed out on the spot.
…