The Tortoise and the Bird

Boom! At that moment, the ground beneath everyone's feet, the vast dueling arena, and even the entire island seemed to shudder violently, rocking without pause. A furious tide erupted, and a blast wave surged into the sky as if a bomb had detonated in the center of the ring. Swept up in the shockwave, debris shot out like bullets, only to be stopped by hastily raised barriers. Had the spectators not braced themselves in advance, the terrifying force would have blown everyone off the stands. Now, everyone instinctively rose to their feet, staring into the arena in stunned disbelief. Speechless. A full-strength strike from the Desolate Ruins, carrying the terrifying mass and explosive power of the Exaltation rank—a hammer blow charged with all of Kozobel's might—hung suspended in midair. It was halted right before a single raised finger. It was... blocked! A squishy Entropy mage, clashing head-on against the sheer mechanics of the Desolate Ruins through brute force alone, and the result was an even draw? What kind of bizarre dream was this? Did this make any sense?! Even if she had wiped Kozobel out in one exchange by blasting him with raw magic damage, it wouldn't have been half as absurd! "Whoa—" Within the perceptual acceleration of Chunjun, Ji Jue, who had witnessed the entire sequence, couldn't help but clap in awe. "You can micromanage it like that?" The answer was "mechanics." A mechanic that was equally familiar to Ji Jue: Blessing Chain—Shock Terrifies! It was the can-opener specially forged by the Entropy branch to deal with high-magic-resistance turtle shells. It could convert explosive energy into pure physical force—a crude, brutal swap from magic damage to physical damage. It looked simple, but once put into practice, its depths were boundless, its variations endless. A Celestial Chosen thoroughly versed in it could even execute partial, incomplete conversions through exquisite control, allowing both to coexist fifty-fifty. In a single strike, both physical and magical damage were delivered: physical damage broke through armor first, followed immediately by magical damage to deal devastating internal trauma... Beyond that, Ji Jue could use his mastery over Zhanlu during the split second of impact to switch between purple lightning, black flame, and physical concussive force multiple times, maximally bypassing an opponent's targeted defenses and damage-distribution mechanics like Immovable as a Mountain, which could only focus on one front. And now, Lou Yanyue's operation opened an entirely new door for him. She truly was a professional; she played this system to absolute perfection. In that fleeting fraction of a second, Lou Yanyue had completely converted the destructive output of Entropy within her own body into pure physical strength. Under microscopic, pinpoint precision, she hadn't suffered the slightest harm to her frail physique. Instead, through the physical force converted via Shock Terrifies, she had forcibly repelled an all-out strike from the Desolate Ruins! A squishy glass cannon transforming into an absolute juggernaut with maxed-out stats! This was nothing short of flexing! When it came to handling that strike, Lou Yanyue had any number of methods at her disposal. Yet she had chosen the hardest, most troublesome, most ostentatious, and most openly contemptuous one... "That's it?" Beneath the abruptly halted warhammer, Lou Yanyue raised her eyes, finally looking her opponent straight in the face. She let out a sneer and delivered her verdict: "Mediocre." If that was all he had, he could go die! Before Kozobel could even react, blazing radiance burst once more from that raised fingertip, unleashing a terrifying might far exceeding what came before. This was an Entropy Celestial Chosen—widely recognized across the Twelve Supreme Goodnesses as the most proficient in destruction—going all out! No wind-up, no startup delay, and no need to gather power. With a mere thought, endless light and heat gushed from her fingertip. Yet it did not scatter; it converged into a single, focused line, lashing out toward the warhammer and straight at Kozobel! It looked like an ordinary projection of spiritus, a casual strike, but it made Ji Jue sit bolt upright, eyes wide, drawing in a sharp breath. Efficiency! The efficiency was absurdly high! There was no sign of flame or lightning in this attack, nor could any scattered spiritus or ash be felt. It was as if spiritus had been incinerated in the blink of an eye under the extreme, ideal conditions of a laboratory, converting every shred of that energy into the purest, most direct heat. The ratio of consumed spiritus to converted energy was infinitely close to one hundred percent! Precisely because of this, it was unbound by any upper limit, maximally eliminating the drag of diminishing returns to achieve boundless explosive output! Just ram it down his throat! Pour spiritus in by the bucketful, and the damage would skyrocket. Theoretically speaking, as long as enough was fed into it, it could infinitely approach the destructive force of a fusion bomb! "This is called Bright as the Sun and Stars! Never seen it before, have you?" Lou Feng's sneering voice rang in his ear, mocking Ji Jue's dumbfounded look. "Ascension into Entropy is the mainstream path of my clan, followed by Mirror. "The Embers legacy started with me, after all..." "Oh! Impressive indeed!" Ji Jue had an epiphany. Not in the least bothered by Lou Feng's taunts, he sighed with genuine heartfelt admiration: "No wonder you're so trash." "You little bastard Ji, I'll f—" The furious curse trailing behind was completely drowned out by the thunderous roar from the arena. Drowned out entirely; impossible to hear! Empowered by the art of Bright as the Sun and Stars, the searing beam blasted forward in a straight line. In the span of a finger-snap, it burned straight through the colossal hammer, vaporizing a gaping hole through the center of the solid mass as it whistled directly toward Kozobel's heart. Kozobel roared. The four eyes of the two-headed giant widened, glowing with an iron-gray sheen. Before him, walls of stone and iron erupted from the ground, glittering like gold, their presence towering like mountains. Bancheng Bloodrock. The precipitous defense once hailed as the pride of Bancheng shot up before him. Damn it all, who was afraid of whom?! Kozobel unleashed his full might: Come on, let's see whose skull is harder! Then, he saw Lou Yanyue's contemptuous smirk. Wild, self-taught hacks were always so full of themselves, indulging in such unrealistic daydreams! She flicked her finger. The straight, piercing beam of intense light took a sharp turn right in front of the Shield of Bancheng! A ninety-degree turn! A spiritus crystal manifested like a prism, refracting the radiance of Bright as the Sun and Stars to alter its trajectory. Then another prism relayed it. After navigating the bend, the blinding beam drove straight into Kozobel's undefended back, tearing through the iron-stone carapace with unstoppable momentum and gouging a breach into the heavy armor encasing him, piercing inward to detonate completely! Boom! A muffled blast echoed from within that burly physique. Blood seeped from Kozobel's eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It was as if he had swallowed a live bomb whole—no, even more exaggerated than that. He had been burned straight through! The blazing light jutted out from his chest, striking the Shield of Bancheng he had only just raised. Yet when he tried to turn back to defend himself, he saw prisms floating in the air, swirling ceaselessly like a constellation of stars. They split the beam from one into two, two into four, four into eight... until finally, the entire dueling arena was saturated with crisscrossing streaks of blinding light. At first glance, it was like stepping into an old-fashioned disco, with dazzling mirror balls spinning to induce vertigo. But to Kozobel, such a magnificent spectacle was nothing less than a brutal execution by a thousand cuts. Even if the damage of Bright as the Sun and Stars diminished by a tier with every refraction and split, when the base values were astronomical enough, even four or five rounds of division still carried enough heat to gouge long, deep ravines into the arena floor and slice straight fissures across the walls with ease. Everything in the ring was tossed into a blender, shredded beneath the high-speed spinning blades of light. Even the faintest ripples of the aftershocks shook the stands until they groaned, leaving the terrified onlookers scrambling backward step after step. Yet precisely at this moment, the horrifying defensive resilience of the Desolate Ruins was laid bare! Kozobel bellowed, Kozobel roared, Kozobel was wounded, Kozobel looked battered... yet despite taking such a relentless barrage of damage—enough to kill a hundred Ji Jues—his roars remained full of vigor. Sorry to break it to you, but I have stats too! For an Exaltation of the Desolate Ruins, as long as he was careful not to let an attack like Bright as the Sun and Stars strike a fatal weak point, any amount of injury was little more than broken skin. Though as for where his vital spots actually were... Well, that was a great question. Whether the Desolate Ruins even had such a thing as a vital point was up for debate. There was no helping it; the scale was simply too immense. The Desolate Ruins prioritized mass and volume above all else. Once both mass and volume were dialed to the peak, paired with an array of exquisite mechanics, the entire package possessed a sickening, mouthwatering resilience. You bring a spiked mace? I'll take it with my skull! That was just how turtle builds worked. As a result, the situation in the arena devolved into a tedious cycle between the Desolate Ruins and Entropy. A war of attrition! Stack armor! Stack armor! Stack armor! Pump damage! Pump damage! Pump damage! Either your armor stacking couldn't keep pace and I grind you down, or my mana pool empties, halting the onslaught, and you outlast me! Lou Yanyue's expression darkened by the second as old shadows crept back into her mind... Back when the Security Bureau held internal competitions, Chaocheng and Yacheng had clashed, leading to a duel between her and Wen Wen. Empowered by Minerva's domain, offense and defense were pushed to the absolute extreme. Wen Wen hadn't even used any special techniques, hadn't even brought out dragonfire; under the rank suppression between Exaltation and Regeneration, sheer, unadorned stats had completely overwhelmed Lou Yanyue, leaving a lasting trauma on a spirited young girl that she could never wash away. To make matters worse, when they all went out to eat afterward, they had forcibly replaced the liquor Lou Yanyue wanted to drown her sorrows with a glass of juice! Drinking alcohol? At your age? Minors sit with Xiao An! And in the end, Xiao An had drunk the juice anyway! From cultivation rank to combat prowess, from bust size to age, from professional standing to the dinner table—a comprehensive, multi-dimensional, inescapable cycle of bullying that had driven Lou Yanyue into total sullen withdrawal. Now, watching this scene mirror that past humiliation step by step... Lou Yanyue was triggered! "Fight back, you bastard!" Lou Yanyue's face turned ashen, a chilled glare shooting from her eyes while her smile grew increasingly vicious. "Fine, fine, fine! You love turtling, don't you? I'll let you turtle until you drop!" Boom! Maintaining the tempestuous deluge of Bright as the Sun and Stars with one hand, she raised her other hand toward the heavens and made a grasping motion. In an instant, dark clouds stretched for thousands of miles, and lightning cascaded in surging torrents. The iron-curtain cloud layer multiplied and expanded, ballooning with astonishing speed until the mortal realm fell into pitch-black gloom. Amidst rhythmic rumbles like celestial war drums, everyone found it hard to breathe. It was as if the very air had solidified, wedged tight in their lungs. The oppressive clouds weighed down on their souls, bringing their consciousness to the verge of scattering. The convergence of vast seas of lightning made everyone's scalps tingle. Gathering power, gathering power, gathering power; channeling, channeling, channeling. Within that seemingly bottomless accumulation, the magnitude began to climb exponentially. Even Kozobel felt needles pricking his back. Sensing the thunder and fire condensing endlessly within the storm clouds, he felt a long-forgotten tremor of dread. As for Ji Jue, the moment Lou Yanyue bared that sinister grin, he had already begun pulling Minkler back. Not good, the girl's lost her head! When this strike came down, it wouldn't just level the arena—it would probably blow away half the island along with it. Before anyone else could react, the heavens broke. A heaven-spanning pillar of lightning gathered, plunging down like a colossal pillar hundreds of meters wide, completely engulfing the arena's expansive grounds. Even the faintest fringe of its aftershocks caused the high boundary walls to fracture, melt, and vaporize. Even reinforced by various factions, the massive stands shook precariously, crumbling apart like the last standing stone pillars battered by a raging flood, riddled with cracks. Yet strangely, while the perimeter suffered such devastation, the center of the ring seemed only scorched into blackened earth, with flowing molten rock and a slight depression. Far from reaching its theoretical limit, the strike had dealt only its minimum possible damage! "A domain," Ji Jue remarked with a sigh. A veteran Exaltation was still an Exaltation, backed by far richer experience and deeper accumulation. Kozobel hadn't continued to trade blows head-on. Instead, during the brief window when the pressure of Bright as the Sun and Stars relented just before the thunder fell, he had activated his domain without hesitation! The phantom of a high tower piled from jagged boulders rose from behind him! Its chaotic architecture looked as if it might collapse at any moment—crooked, unstable, the domain itself not even fully formed. Yet it had miraculously blunted Lou Yanyue's full-force strike to a level he could comfortably handle. Enduring it with raw toughness once again! Ji Jue could sense that the instant the stone tower domain manifested, the flow and transformation of spiritus within its entire radius had been forcibly decelerated and suppressed. With an unbounded, radiating domain like this, the closer one got to its core, the stronger that stagnation and stillness became. By the time an attack reached Kozobel, even an earth-shattering blast would be slowed to a turtle's crawl. Yet the very essence of Entropy lay in motion and change! Kozobel's domain happened to be the perfect counter against all forms of change, forcibly retarding everything inside! It wasn't a flat rejection, but an unbearable dulling! The conduction speed of temperature and the rate of heat escalation dropped drastically, artificially raising boiling, melting, and vaporization points while maximally stifling the energy's explosive ramp-up. Consequently, even if the raw damage was there, its realized effect dwindled exponentially. A complete counter! Lou Yanyue walked the orthodox weather-shaping path of Entropy, emphasizing massive-scale bombardment and overwhelming volume. Facing a domain like this paired with the Desolate Ruins, no matter how high her numbers were, they were useless if she couldn't unleash them. Yet the longer Ji Jue watched, the deeper his brow furrowed. He couldn't shake the feeling that something was off about this domain... The instincts of an angler and the occupational hazard of a craftsman doubting everything quickly magnified that subtle discrepancy. He couldn't pinpoint exactly what was wrong, but he instinctively felt that this domain was incomplete. It hadn't fully manifested at all! Lou Yanyue, however, couldn't care less. Seeing the turtle before her pull out such a shameless counter, Lou Yanyue was already ready to explode with rage. Literally... Explode! With! Rage! Midair, that slender, youthful body suddenly shattered. Cracks spiderwebbed across her fanatically grinning face, and from behind those fractures, flames burst forth. Fire swallowed everything, including herself. In the span of a finger-snap, it burned her mortal form to ash! Yet amid the surging, rolling flames, a pair of azure-green wings slowly took shape. Outlined and defined by blazing fire, they unfurled abruptly... as though a blazing sun had descended. The fire swept out like a ravenous tide, rampaging across the desolate island and scorching the sea, bringing the deep waters to a boil as steam erupted into the sky. From the dark clouds, countless sparks rained down like a tempest, blanketing heaven and earth. Even the most insignificant spark, once disturbed, would trigger an unfathomable explosion, leaving behind a terrifying crater that vaporized every trace of stone and iron within its radius! "Damn it, my aunt's completely lost her mind again..." Lou Feng drew in one sharp breath after another, his voice turning to one of pity: "Better pray for yourself!" Dead silence fell—so quiet it seemed even sound had been consumed by the fire. The world beneath the storm clouds was steeped in gloom, yet the scorched earth of the arena was bathed in savage crimson, as if a solar wheel had descended from the darkness, crowning the azure flames of the colossal bird. Lou Yanyue's Regeneration form had manifested. The ancestral form of the Lou clan. —Bifang!