Immortal Paladin

[POV: Kong Bo]

Kong Bo sneered at the corpse of the wolf beastkin sprawled amid the ruins.

“The fool got himself killed.”

Lai Lan had always struck Kong Bo as more cunning than he let on. The wolf was loud, reckless, and often seemed incapable of thinking beyond the next moment, but lately, Kong Bo had begun to suspect that there was more behind that foolish facade. Unfortunately, Lai Lan had chosen today to prove the opposite.

He had died to a single enemy. Someone they had ambushed. It was an enemy who should have been outnumbered and, by all accounts, just as outclassed as the wolf himself.

Kong Bo clicked his tongue.

The battlefield around them looked nothing like the pavilion that had stood there moments ago. Its elegant structures had been reduced to rubble, the stone floor shattered into countless pieces, and the surrounding streets had been obliterated beneath the force of their clash. A quarter of the city had been caught in the destruction. Buildings had collapsed, roads had been torn apart, and dust still drifted through the air like pale mist.

Considering that immortals had fought here, the destruction was surprisingly limited. If they had truly unleashed their full strength without restraint, there would have been nothing left of the city. Instead, most of the devastation had been concentrated around what used to be the pavilion.

Kong Bo glanced toward the corpse beneath his feet.

Their enemy had been alone, and Lai Lan had still died.

“We should go,” said Zhao Zhen.

The two-faced asura hefted his enormous axe onto his shoulder. He was a towering man whose body was covered from head to toe in heavy armor. Two different faces occupied either side of his head, both wearing expressions of growing impatience.

“We’re wasting time here.”

“We have our orders,” Hu Mu replied.

The undead assassin stood nearby, his body concealed beneath a dark cowl. A foul stench of death emanated from him, lingering even amid the dust and blood.

“The leader said we should acquire the equipment that this Mai Duyi carried within his pocket dimension. Since he’s dead, we can only bring him back with us. Nongmin can resurrect him and take the equipment himself.”

Hu Mu’s gaze shifted toward Lai Lan’s corpse.

“There’s also the issue of our comrade dying just now.”

Zhao Zhen scoffed.

“I’d rather the stupid mutt stay dead. Didn’t you notice how he’s been acting around Nongmin lately? That stupid newcomer.” His gaze shifted toward Kong Bo. “Even you, Kong, have mellowed down toward the young stripling. Take charge. You’re supposed to be the eldest among us.”

Kong Bo said nothing for a moment.

Then he walked toward Lai Lan.

“We do what the youngest tells us.”

He crouched beside the wolf beastkin and placed a hand against his body. With a thought, his qi surged outward.

Lai Lan’s corpse disappeared into his pocket dimension, revealing the body beneath him to be Mai Duyi. The marksman had fallen in the middle of the battlefield, his body nearly buried beneath Lai Lan’s corpse and the debris surrounding them.

They’ve hit the marksman with there biggest spells, ravaging the entire area.

Kong Bo stared at the strange weapon lying beside the man’s hand. It was a weapon, one for each his hands..

According to Nongmin’s explanation, the weapon was called a gun, although guns apparently came in countless different shapes and sizes. Kong Bo had already seen Mai Duyi wield one before in a previous encounter when he and Lai Lan had been hunting factories around the world.

And just moments ago, it was this very weapon that had torn Lai Lan apart.

Hu Mu crouched beside the corpse and began collecting the weapons scattered around it. His rotten fingers carefully lifted one of the guns, examining it with interest.

“I think I’ll keep these as trophies.”

Kong Bo glanced at him.

“Suit yourself.”

Hu Mu’s mouth curved beneath his cowl as he grabbed them for himself.

Zhao Zhen, meanwhile, looked increasingly irritated.

“This is getting irksome. This Mai Fuyi isn’t worth all of our time. Why did Nongmin even send all of us here?”

“It’s Mai Duyi,” Hu Mu corrected.

Zhao Zhen frowned.

“Whatever.”

“Did you not listen to the briefing at all?” Hu Mu sighed. “As expected, brother, you have a carefree spirit and care little for subtleties. And here I thought Lai Lan was the brute of the group.”

Zhao Zhen’s two faces both darkened.

Hu Mu continued without concern.

“But I suggest you pay more attention to what the youngest says. There’s a reason Father put Nongmin in charge of this competition. Regardless of what you feel, we must follow his lead.”

He paused.

“Or do you want to end up like Wu Yong? Pursuing personal valor, only to end up smearing Father’s name because of her failure?”

Zhao Zhen gritted his teeth. The veins on his armored arms bulged.

Kong Bo ignored their argument.

Something had caught his attention. The wind had stopped. The dust hanging in the air suddenly seemed strangely still. He looked toward the ruined streets, then toward the eastern horizon. His expression gradually became serious.

“There’s something wrong.”

Zhao Zhen looked at him.

“What?”

Kong Bo closed his eyes.

His Qi Sense spread outward. Four powerful auras appeared simultaneously from four different directions. It was Immortal-level cultivators. They had already surrounded the city. The four presences did not bother concealing themselves.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Instead, their spiritual pressure spread across the ruins with deliberate provocation, crushing against the remnants of the battlefield like invisible mountains.

Kong Bo opened his eyes. It almost felt like déjà vu. Except this time, they were the ones being surrounded.

Zhao Zhen’s expression hardened as he finally sensed them as well.

Hu Mu slowly rose to his feet.

Kong Bo reached for his sword. The corners of his mouth lifted. “Look how daring our enemies are.” His eyes swept across the four directions. “It almost looks adorable.”

“I believe we have bigger issues at hand,” said Hu Mu. “There are four of them, when there should only be three. On top of that, we just killed one of them. How is it possible that there are four?”

Kong Bo turned toward Zhao Zhen.

“What do you think?”

Among them, Lai Lan had possessed the keenest senses. His instincts had always been frighteningly sharp, even if his personality made him appear like a reckless brute. Still, Zhao Zhen was not far behind.

The two-faced asura narrowed both pairs of eyes.

“It’s real.”

His grip tightened around his axe.

“There’s no need to overthink this. We kill them!”

A soft note suddenly resounded.

Pluck.

The sound came from a string instrument somewhere in the distance. At first, nothing happened. When Kong Bo noticed something strange, it was already too late. The city was silent.

So silent that he could hear a pin drop.

He turned his head and swept his gaze across the surrounding streets. The civilians who had been fleeing the destruction or were hiding in the safety of there homes were lying motionless on the ground. Some had collapsed against buildings. Others had fallen in the streets.

They were asleep.

The music continued.

It was so subtle that he had failed to notice it spreading through his senses. The sound seemed to seep into his mind, bypassing his ears entirely and dulling his awareness before he could recognize what was happening.

A yawn escaped him.

Kong Bo immediately bit down on his tongue. Blood filled his mouth, snapping his mind awake. “They are about to do something.”

He barely finished speaking when a crimson figure appeared beside Zhao Zhen. A man clad in crimson armor materialized without warning, a crimson spear already swinging toward the asura.

Boom!

The spear struck Zhao Zhen’s armor and sent the enormous asura flying through several buildings.

“Zhao Zhen!”

The crimson-armored man pursued him without hesitation.

At almost the same moment, a woman wielding chains on both arms appeared beside Hu Mu. The chains lashed out. Hu Mu’s figure blurred. The undead assassin vanished together with the woman, space twisting around them before the two were whisked away from the battlefield.

So that was it.

The song had not merely put the city to sleep. It was fooling their senses. It had concealed the approach of the enemy, allowing them to get close enough to launch their attacks without being detected.

Kong Bo looked forward. A woman stood before him. Her presence was calm. Her expression was composed. He recognized her immediately.

“You must be Tian Mei.”

The woman smiled faintly.

“I am honored that you know me.”

She inclined her head.

“Indeed, my name is Tian Mei. Nongmin would be something like a senior uncle to me. Should I address you as such?”

“There is no need.”

Kong Bo drew his sword. The moment the blade left its sheath, the surrounding atmosphere changed.

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[POV: Tian Mei]

Tian Mei’s expression became serious.

She had been studying Kong Bo’s records long before arriving here.

The Sword Emperor was one of the champions they had gathered extensive information about. They knew his feats, his techniques, his fighting style, and the abilities he had displayed throughout his long history.

The man before her was exactly as dangerous as the records suggested.

But Tian Mei did not feel intimidated. If anything, she felt confident. She could deal with him. Doubly so. Triply so if she had allies beside her. Tian Mei glanced toward the battlefield.

“Buy me time.”

A woman appeared behind her. It was Anna. The Holy Speaker held a harp in her hands. Her fingers swept across its strings. This time, the music became far more aggressive. The melody that had previously lulled the city into slumber transformed into a violent symphony.

Whoosh!

Wind blades erupted from the air from one, ten, and then hundreds as they tore toward Kong Bo from every direction.

Kong Bo’s sword flashed.

Clang!

Clang!

Clang!

Every wind blade was cut apart. His sword moved with astonishing precision, each strike perfectly timed. None of the attacks managed to touch him.

Tian Mei did not waste the opportunity. She turned and rushed toward Mai Duyi’s corpse. She had only taken several steps when Kong Bo’s sword suddenly changed direction. His attention shifted from Anna’s attacks to her.

Despite being bombarded by countless wind blades, he had noticed her movement.

Tian Mei’s expression changed.

“You are not getting through me,” said Kong Bo as he made a simple gesture with one hand. ”Scatter before the sharpness of my sword!”

The space before Tian Mei exploded.

Boom!

The invisible force struck her body and sent her flying backward, yet Tian Mei did not panic. She had already accomplished what she needed. The moment she had reached Mai Duyi’s body, her fingers had completed the final gesture of her technique.

A resurrection spell.

One she had spent a long time refining.

It was a technique created through the teachings of the Holy Emperor and the knowledge passed down by her father, Shouquan. Unlike ordinary resurrection techniques, this spell did not merely restore a dead body.

It called upon the soul. It reconstructed the connection between body and spirit. On top of that, restore there immortality in a manner reminiscent of the Holy Emperor’s godly feats as a Supreme Being.

The corpse of Mai Duyi trembled.

The dead man suddenly moved, leaving Kong Bo’s back suddenly exposed.

Mai Duyi’s hand shot toward his pocket dimension. A weapon appeared in his grasp. It was a shotgun. Mai Duyi raised the weapon. The barrel was already pressed against him at point-blank range.

When the trigger was pulled, it fired multiple projectiles from its barrel.

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[POV: Kong Bo]

The shotgun roared.

At such close range, the projectiles should have been impossible to evade. However, Kong Bo did not evade them. The Sword Emperor had mastered the tempest. His sword moved with the slightest jerk of his wrist and the tempest followed. A cutting aura formed at the edge of his sword and shot forward.

Clang!

The aura struck the first projectile and knocked it aside. But that was only the beginning. The cutting aura bounced through the air, splitting into two as it changed direction.

Clang! Clang!

Two more projectiles were deflected. Then those cutting auras split again into four, eight, sixteen, and so on. Each time a cutting aura struck a projectile, it divided into more blades, spreading through the air like a storm of invisible swords. What should have been a deadly barrage became fuel for Kong Bo’s technique.

The remaining projectiles were knocked away one after another.

By the time the shotgun’s barrage ended, not a single projectile remained on course toward him. Instead, the battlefield was filled with countless cutting auras. They hung in the air for a fleeting instant, until the dramatically accelerated forward. All of them descended upon the newly resurrected Mai Duyi.

Kong Bo’s expression remained indifferent.

Among his peers, there were few who could truly be called his equals.

That was because martial arts in the cultivation world possessed their own hierarchy.

It was not an official system. No heavenly decree had established these stages, nor was there any universally accepted standard. Yet practitioners who pursued martial arts and learned to manifest their aura gradually discovered the same boundaries.

The first great threshold beyond the mortal standard was the Martial Saint.

A Martial Saint was comparable to an Ascended Soul.

Above that was Martial Ascension.

Kong Bo currently stood within this realm, yet even that description was misleading. Martial Ascension could place a cultivator anywhere between an Ascended Soul and a Ruler of Laws.

The difference was enormous.

It was a painfully large margin of error, one that demonstrated how unreliable cultivation realms were when applied to martial arts.

Martial Ascension was not truly a stage. It was a process. A practitioner undergoing Martial Ascension was attempting to transcend the limitations of martial arts and reach the realm known as the Martial God. Unfortunately, this had created an amusing misunderstanding throughout martial arts circles.

Any practitioner who entered the process of Martial Ascension could technically be called a Martial God. That had occasionally harmed the prestige of true Martial Gods, the ones who had completed the transformation in body and blood.

A genuine Martial God was something else entirely.

To become one, a practitioner needed to reach a point where their martial arts could interact with the laws of the universe.

Kong Bo had reached that point. He could harm the laws. He could interact with them. His sword was no longer merely a weapon wielded by a cultivator. It had become an extension of the principles governing the world itself. The cutting auras multiplied.

They filled the sky.

Mai Duyi’s expression changed as the storm descended upon him.

Kong Bo raised his sword.

“Tempest of a Thousand Cuts.”

The storm erupted. Slash after slash tore through Mai Duyi’s body. Blood splattered across the ruins. Flesh was shredded. Bones were severed.

The countless cutting auras continued multiplying as they tore through everything in their path, reducing the resurrected marksman to a bloody smear before he could even fire a second shot.

The surrounding earth could not withstand the technique. The ground was gouged apart. Deep gashes stretched across the streets. Buildings that had somehow survived the earlier battle collapsed beneath the residual force of the storm.

The destruction spread outward. Half of the city was destroyed. And all of it happened within a few seconds. Mai Duyi had been resurrected, and then he had died again.

Kong Bo lowered his sword and stared at the ruined battlefield he created. His expression remained calm. To him, the result was obvious. It was going to be his father’s victory.

At least, that was what Kong Bo believed.