Chapter 150: Chapter 150
But this was a man who’d licked blood off the blade for years.
The savagery in his eyes didn’t dim — it ignited.
The straight punch he’d thrown reversed in a flash. Five fingers pressed flat like a cleaver, and the hand-blade hacked viciously at Shen Xiuhan’s arm.
Red-Rump Fist — Inverted Hanging Golden Rump!
The edge hadn’t landed, but the force-wind already had his sleeve snapping.
A glint of steel in Shen Xiuhan’s eyes. Without hesitation, he shifted.
His arm rippled like a fish flicking its tail — impossibly supple, impossibly resilient — twisting and curving to slide past the hand-blade by half an inch, just skirting the killing edge.
The Heavenly Vulture Twisting-Wind Hand was more than a web of form-within-form and endless variation. It was built for reading the fight and for grappling.
Its final five sequences, in particular, followed the path of extreme softness and tenacity — tailor-made to counter hard, linear styles.
Yielding force erupted.
Shen Xiuhan’s forearm seemed to have been oiled. It glided along the flat of Tang Jin’s hand-blade, bleeding off the bulk of its power.
Then his left hand rose — fingers loosely cupped, only the middle knuckle protruding — and descended like a dragonfly alighting on water, tapping Tang Jin’s Yintang point between the brows. A single, neat flick.
BANG!
A crisp, clean brain-tap — dead on the mark.
The sound was small, but its sharpness made the skin crawl.
Visibly, a red, swelling lump bloomed at the center of Tang Jin’s forehead — copper-coin-sized, rapidly flushing to a mottled purple.
“Hsss…”
Tang Jin sucked in a breath.
The flick looked light, but the Hidden Strength drove straight to the bone. Stars burst across his vision, a ringing filled his skull, and the world swam before his eyes.
He stumbled back two steps. A heartbeat later, the pain in his forehead detonated with a delay, sharp enough to make the corner of his mouth twitch.
Shen Xiuhan gave him no time to recover.
Right foot stamping, his figure spun like a top. The hem of his blue robe swept out in a perfect arc.
His left arm, riding the centrifugal force, swept upward from below — five fingers curled into talons, tips condensing force like hooks, trailing a piercing whistle — and drove straight for the Shanzhong point at the center of Tang Jin’s chest.
An inch short, an inch deadly!
The strike was savage and clean — zero flourish — yet so fast the eye couldn’t follow.
Tang Jin failed to guard in time. His pupils shrank to needle-points, alarm flooding through him.
He sucked in his chest and arched his back in a frantic retreat. Boot-soles dragged two long furrows through the mud.
“Think you can run?”
Shen Xiuhan gave a cold scoff, shadowing him like a phantom, closing the gap along the ground. His single arm whipped out like a steel flail, body launching skyward — and he bore down with the weight of his descent.
FWOOSH!
The crack of split air was shrill and sharp.
Tang Jin had nowhere to dodge. He could only clench his teeth, throw his left arm crosswise, and take the blow head-on.
BANG!
Single arms clashed. The impact thundered. Force-waves radiated outward, blasting loose gravel and mud-spray in every direction.
The three onlookers gaped, jaws hanging, eyes threatening to fall from their sockets.
“Th-Third Boss… is this what Hidden Strength looks like?!”
Zhong Kui opened his mouth, but his throat felt stuffed with cotton. Nothing came out.
He was Longxiang Army-trained. He’d seen plenty of Hidden Strength experts fight.
His own chief, Zheng Dadao — mid-Hidden Strength, famed for his Both-Blade Both-Palm epithet — was a name even inside the army. Zhong Kui had glimpsed that level of power from a distance.
But the more he’d seen, the more it stung.
‘Zheng Dadao is past forty. It took him over a decade of Hidden Strength and half a lifetime of tempering to reach that level. Tang Jin’s no spring chicken either — seven or eight years at least in the realm. But this Shen kid — what the hell gives him the right?!’
A seventeen- or eighteen-year-old boy, barely a month past his breakthrough, pressing an old-guard Hidden Strength expert into a corner?
Was this reasonable?
While his thoughts spiraled —
PAP PAP PAP PAP!
On the wharf, fist met arm in a rain of collisions — dense and unbroken.
Shen Xiuhan had exchanged dozens of blows with Tang Jin.
He’d used one hand the entire time, and only the Heavenly Vulture Twisting-Wind Hand. Yet his footwork flowed like drifting cloud — now left, now right, now in, now out — leaving Tang Jin scrambling, utterly outclassed.
The deeper the fight went, the more Tang Jin’s alarm grew.
That empty right sleeve whipped in the wind like a funeral pennant.
Every block came harder than the last. Sweat ran in sheets from his forehead, mixing with grime, and his breathing grew ragged and coarse.
He remembered it vividly.
The last time he’d seen Shen Xiuhan — barely two months ago.
Back then, the boy had been freshly into Sinew Tempering. In Tang Jin’s eyes, an ant — one finger could have crushed him.
Even now, having opened Hidden Strength, the kid should have only one Taichong aperture — still far beneath him.
Within Hidden Strength, the nine apertures divided into three tiers: early, mid, and late.
At each tier, the quality and quantity of one’s Hidden Strength multiplied.
Tang Jin had held three open apertures for years. By all rights, fighting someone who’d just entered the realm — even if it wasn’t a walkover — shouldn’t cost him any real effort.
And yet?
He was losing.
‘Impossible… absolutely impossible!’
Tang Jin’s eyes were bloodshot, veins webbed across the whites. He fought with everything he had, teeth grinding loud enough to hear.
‘Losing to Ji Ning’s sword gleam, fine — that black-clad brat’s swordsmanship was extraordinary, and the gleam was genuine genius. But am I really going to lose to a kid who was still at Manifest Strength two months ago?!’
His fist-style shifted abruptly — fist became elbow, the point driving forward like a spear, ramming straight at Shen Xiuhan’s heart.
Shen Xiuhan’s gaze flickered. Talons became palm. His palm cupped force and, with a light deflection — a push, a pull — he guided the elbow aside.
BANG!
They touched and separated.
The massive recoil sent Tang Jin hurtling backward, boots carving plowed furrows through the packed earth for several feet.
But shock turned to glee.
Because the retreat had opened a full three zhang of distance.
Three zhang — room enough to reset.
Tang Jin roared, and his feet launched him like an arrow from a bow. Mud detonated. His entire body hurled forward once more.
“Kill!”
His left fist transformed — no longer a duel, but a barrage. Straight punches, one after another, fast as a string of firecrackers, each one aimed at a vital.
Eyes. Throat. Heart.
Three killing targets. Every punch wrapped in biting Hidden Strength, the air between them popping in a chain of muffled blasts.
Red-Rump Fist — Triple Chain Pearls!
Shen Xiuhan appeared to give ground under the relentless assault — half a step back, his center seeming to waver, as though his balance had been shaken.
“Die!”
Tang Jin’s eyes blazed with manic joy. Every drop of qi-blood became magma, pouring into his left fist. Veins bulged across the back of his hand. He rocketed forward with the force of ten thousand jin behind the blow.
This punch — he’d bet everything.
And then —
Shen Xiuhan’s torso shifted. A slight twist to the side.
Not much. Not little. Exactly half an inch.
The angle was diabolical. The timing, exquisite to the hair’s breadth.
Tang Jin’s face warped. A bolt of ice shot from his tailbone to the crown of his skull. His scalp detonated in needles, and a drenching cold crashed over him.
“No — it’s a trap!”
Shen Xiuhan’s lips curled. Mockery glinted in his eyes.
“You call that an opening? And you dared take the bait?”
Tang Jin’s eyes went crimson. Instinct screamed at him to pull back — but the punch was a broken dam, momentum already spent, impossible to recall.
FWOOSH!
The fist grazed Shen Xiuhan’s left shoulder by a thread.
In the same breath, Shen Xiuhan’s left hand erupted — a rampaging flood-dragon bursting from the water — five fingers locking around the shoulder-joint of Tang Jin’s left arm. Fingertips sank through skin. Joints creaked and groaned.
“It’s over.”
Despair washed across Tang Jin’s face.