Static flickered across the television screen in the remote mountain village, hissing now and then. Perhaps it was the same in the cities.
The blade's hum was hardly audible, yet that invisible resonance condensed into a single line, slicing open the sea of gray clouds.
A trench carved through the cloud sea high above, giving tangible form to the sound of the drawn blade.
"Oh, even stronger," the old monk muttered instinctively.
The villagers turned to look at him.
"What?"
"What's even stronger?"
"Master, you can't be saying you actually know this guy, can you?"
Confronted with their questions, he reflexively strained to remember... but his thoughts were a muddle. Jiang Longchi drew a blank for a second. "Ah? What?"
Sure enough, the master was spouting disjointed nonsense again, unable to remember what he had just said the very next second.
Used to this by now, the villagers turned helplessly back to the television screen, watching the unbelievable scene unfold.
Jiang Longchi, however, suddenly froze, a complex look coming over his face.
He still could not recall what had just happened, anything from recent days, or anything from the past several years... A long stretch of his life felt completely blank, slipping from his grasp no matter how hard he tried.
Yet strangely enough, distant memories from decades ago—memories that by all rights should have been thoroughly buried and forgotten—began to surface slowly and clearly.
Back when First Lieutenant Jiang Longchi first met Second Lieutenant Chen Buer, both were still very young, brilliant prodigies carrying the high hopes of that era.
At first, they had not seemed like friends at all.
A mutual disdain, an inability to stand each other and a refusal to back down, had persisted for years—until forty years ago in Siberia, during humanity's first battle against a Red Shoulder...
In that final, desperate battle to the death, Chen Buer assembled a suicide squad, leaving Jiang Longchi out.
Jiang Longchi went to demand a reason.
Chen Buer told him, "If I die, you have to stay alive."
It was likely around then that both came to realize that, on the martial front of Azure's Huaxia, each regarded the other—and himself—as a pillar to be relied upon.
Later, as humanity's martial strength continually advanced over the past century, if one truly ranked them through history, the two of them were indeed the foremost and second figures in the military annals of the Huaxia Front to date.
When had the gap between them truly begun to widen? Jiang Longchi could not remember.
He only vaguely recalled walking alone across an icefield for a long, long time, killing for a long, long time.
Nor could he remember the purpose or outcome of that mission.
Perhaps it was from that point onward that his memory had begun to deteriorate, and his strength had gradually stagnated.
As for Chen Buer, he was indeed stronger.
Just how strong that meant had become difficult even for Jiang Longchi to define. Because forty years ago, back when they still wore sixth-generation apparatuses and had never even heard of the concept of life source energy, Chen Buer had already come close to slaying a Red Shoulder on his own.
"Whoa!"
The villagers before the television stared blankly, their mouths falling open in an involuntary clamor.
At that moment across the Azure world, soldiers and civilians alike—countless people—were doing the exact same thing.
At the same time, any top combatant across the globe who could pull away from the battlefield for a moment was watching, desperate to discern something, to feel something.
For they all knew that this slash would very likely be the most earnest strike in nearly forty years from that peerless existence in the mortal realm.
On the television screen.
Under a wide-angle lens pointing up from afar.
The Needlefish swept past in an arc.
A dark swarm of Great Spike craft howled in pursuit along the Needlefish's trajectory.
The blade slashed upward from below.
The trench torn through the cloud sea by the sound of the unsheathed blade allowed the sunlight to beam down.
And so, the blade named Zhanhong came into view.
It should not have been visible, for against the vastness of the lens, the blade was far too small. Yet at this moment, at the tip of the raised Zhanhong saber, a brilliant pinpoint of light condensed, dazzlingly bright.
*Swish!*
The blade struck out.
The gray clouds nearby were shoved aside like a surging wave.
The point of light on the blade shot outward like a ray and slashed down, fanning out into an expanding arc forward and downward—hundreds, thousands of beams of light.
*Hiss!* The fan of light cleaved in. The sound of it striking the "train" was not grand or resounding at first.
Because the first shuttle craft in the air parted cleanly down the middle, like a sheet of paper being snipped in two.
Then the second.
The third.
The fourth...
*Boom!* The detonation everyone had subconsciously awaited finally erupted.
The sky turned into a colossal demolition site.
A contiguous chain of shuttle craft was blasted apart, the wrecked hulls smashing into one another.
Above the rooftop, the formation of Great Spike craft was like an intact train hurtling forward at breakneck speed, suddenly slammed back, twisting section by section, exploding section by section, disintegrating section by section...
This spectacle left countless people across the world staring in stunned silence before their screens.
Those with raised arms had not even found the voice to cheer.
Naturally, many others clenched their fists in this moment, gripped by worry.
Only a very select few could tell: this was not his full power.
Chen Buer might well possess the power to shear clean through all thirty-odd shuttle craft, and the aerial footage certainly gave that impression.
In reality, however, he had only cleaved through a dozen or so. The rest were obliterated in an instant by the backward flight of those shattered hulls and flying shrapnel.
Wreckage filled the sky, dead iron littered the air, and a rain of red and blue blood sprayed down.
The fan-shaped blade radiance began to contract, converging into a single ray at its base... before fading into nothingness.
As the gray sea of clouds slowly receded.
As the debris and bloody rain gradually finished falling.
The broadcast finally cleared once more.
Amid the sprawling expanse of collapsed, ruined buildings, atop the only relatively intact rooftop high above, that figure slowly came into view... standing there, calmly sheathing his blade behind his shoulder, and turning around.
He looked somewhat aged and gaunt, yet stood steadfast as a mountain, serene as an unruffled sea.
No one knew how many people across the world were weeping with excitement and shouting at this exact instant.
Yet at the Third Fixed Exploration Site, among the Stream Vanguard fighters who had finally found a television after escorting the faculty and students of Yuejiang University, their excitement and joy were beyond words.
"Thank you."
They said thank you because they regarded Yang Qingbai as a brother. They did not yet know that on the Linzhou battlefield, Wu Xu had gone missing.
...
*Whoosh...*
The broadcast continued. Suddenly, an arcing jet stream appeared on screen as the decelerating two-person Needlefish-class craft banked back, tracing a smooth curve across the sky.
"Tsk-tsk, our Qingbai really knows how to handle things."
"Yeah, way better than certain people."
The fighters chuckled.
On the television screen, the Needlefish swung around and hovered gently by the edge of the rooftop.
Yang Qingbai had come back to pick up the Legion Commander.
Chapter 624