Reinforcements

“Shit!” Bai Cen cursed, his voice filled with genuine emotion.

Dodging Zixiao's relentless slashes left him scrambling. His robe was already torn in several places, each cut seeping blood.

The barriers he erected with his magical artifacts were like paper before Zixiao—a shield, a cauldron, an amulet, each shattering with an ear-piercing crack the moment the frost touched them, falling to the ground as heaps of scrap metal.

His footwork grew erratic, and the speed at which he summoned his artifacts could no longer keep up with the rate they were being destroyed.

He glanced at Qingwei, who was collapsed not far away, his voice cracking with urgency. “Hurry up and take them! I'll use my artifacts to stall this guy. Recover quickly!”

As he spoke, he pulled another round shield from his storage bag. Before he could even channel spiritual energy into it, Zixiao's greatsword swept across, splitting the shield in half mid-air and showering his face with debris.

Qingwei lay on the ground in excruciating pain, unable to even crawl, let alone take medicine. He glanced at the pill bottles scattered messily on the ground, his tone unfriendly. “Even if this old man is hacked to death, I won't touch a single pill you give me.”

Zixiao shattered another cauldron, the iron fragments bouncing twice on the ground before rolling to Qingwei's hand.

Shaken back half a step, Bai Cen's face was already pale. A prominent vein throbbed on his forehead. Damn it, what is this guy doing? His stash of artifacts wasn't infinite; every single one destroyed brought him closer to the limit of how long he could hold out.

“What the hell are you babbling about! Just take the damn medicine!” He squatted down, reached out to pinch Qingwei's chin, forced his mouth open, and stuffed pill after pill inside.

Qingwei's eyes went wide. He wanted to curse and push him away, but Bai Cen's strength was greater than all the muscles Qingwei could currently muster.

“Bai Cen! How dare you touch this old man! I will definitely—mph-gurgle-gurgle!” The pills blocked the second half of his unfinished sentence.

The medicinal power exploded within Qingwei's body. His shattered ribs were enveloped by a warm current, knitting back together. He could hear the tiny bone fragments slowly sliding back into place inside him, clicking faintly inch by inch.

Just as he was about to cry out in pain, Bai Cen stuffed another pill inside, choking back the groan of agony before it could even escape.

Zixiao finally lost his patience. Standing amidst the shattered remains of spiritual items, his gaze swept over Bai Cen's retreating figure and the layers of artifact barriers before him.

The corners of his mouth stretched into a grin that was pushed to its absolute limit, his voice carrying an impatience he no longer bothered to hide. “Hide-and-seek is over—”

“This is how the Rosy Light Sword Art is used! Master, do you see?”

He raised his greatsword high, and a massive ice star fell from the heavens. It was like a celestial body swollen with frost, expanding continuously as it descended, its edges covered in a dense layer of ice crystals.

Every layer pushed aside more air on its way down, bearing an unmatched momentum that instantly bent Bai Cen's layered artifact barriers downward.

He tried to summon yet another artifact, but his hand was a fraction of a second too slow. The ice star had already crashed down.

Zixiao's face was hideous, covered in deep blue veins. In his mind, the two of them would be ground into mincemeat by the ice star.

But at the exact moment the ice star was about to pierce the artifact barriers, revealing Bai Cen's pale face—

A sword light suddenly exploded, slicing the ice star cleanly in half.

“Azure Cloud Sword Art, Seventh Sword: Reverse Flow!”

The voice rang out from behind Zixiao. Before he could even turn around, a freezing sword qi had already slashed down.

The broken sword sliced through his blue outer armor, the blade barely getting caught by his flesh. Qingwei immediately redirected his sword move, changing a strike meant for the torso to slash at the wings behind Zixiao's back, forcefully shearing off half a wing.

Before Zixiao could turn to retaliate, Qingwei had already flashed back behind Bai Cen.

Stepping on the floating ice, he retreated behind Bai Cen and steadied himself, holding the half-broken sword. His feet dragged an arc-shaped trail through the ice-covered ground.

Bai Cen stared at him in utter disbelief. This old guy could actually use a broken sword to wound Zixiao, who was in the Body Integration realm.

“Azure Cloud Sword Art! Damn that Azure Cloud Sword Art!” Zixiao's furious voice echoed from ahead. The crack in his ice armor was slowly closing, but at a much slower rate than before.

He had completely lost his mind. Ripping the storage bag from his waist, he let countless spiritual pills scatter across the ground.

He grabbed a handful and stuffed them into his chest, where the pills and the remaining calamity seed fragments began to circulate chaotically inside his body.

Brilliant, colorful light sprayed out from the wound on his chest, forming a new hard shell over his body.

Ice wings redeployed from both sides of his spine, wider now and lined with sharp ice spikes. Even his cheeks were more densely covered by newly formed ice crystals.

His lips were almost entirely obscured; only his eyes remained recognizable, showing the direction he was looking.

Feeling the aura he released, Qingwei's heart sank. Zixiao was moving further away from being a “cultivator” at an accelerating pace. He was no longer Zixiao; he was becoming a complete Formless Spirit.

With a flash of movement, Zixiao rushed in front of Bai Cen. His target was clear—the storage bag in Bai Cen's hand.

Before Bai Cen could even retreat, Zixiao's greatsword cleaved down. He summoned a defensive artifact to block the head-on strike and was about to pull back when, in the next split second, an ice spear abruptly thrust out from the side, skewering his body.

Bai Cen looked down at the spear tip protruding from his abdomen, its icy edges stained with his own blood. His final thought was: Where did he get a spear?

He collapsed. The storage bag slipped from his hand and fell to the ground. Zixiao squatted, picking up the storage bag. When his spiritual energy tried to probe inside, it was repelled by a seal—Bai Cen had locked it right before he fell.

Without hesitation, Zixiao stuffed the storage bag, seal and all, into his mouth and swallowed it.

He stood up and turned to Qingwei. In his hands, he held the broken sword in one and the long spear in the other, the tip of the spear still dripping with Bai Cen's wet blood.

His voice was completely distorted, turning into the same low-pitched hum as an Ice Spirit. “No one else is coming... Die!”

Before the words could fully leave his mouth, the dome constructed of ice violently exploded. Blinding firelight poured down from the cracks, bringing a violent rush of air into the ice-walled enclosure.

A figure flew toward him. A voice trailed behind, unable to catch up with the flying figure, dragging out a long whine: “Little Ancestor, I admit my mistake! Fly slower, ahhhh—fuck, I'm gonna barf, blegh—”