Borrowing Strength

The moment Li Jinqi’s voice fell, the wind across the wasteland came to a silent, absolute standstill.

The puddle of rainwater beneath Luo Yang’s feet remained, but its surface was motionless, reflecting a blurred and distorted sky.

An invisible force had severed this area from the real world, turning it into an arena that belonged only to them.

“It has cut this place off,” Zhang Xian muttered with a frown. He held his brass ruler at an angle. The markings along its length glowed with a faint azure light, and the word “Deliverance” engraved on the hilt grew hot in his grip.

Li Jinqi didn’t respond. He gripped his long blade, “No Return,” with white-knuckled intensity. A top-tier sixth-tier weapon, it made no sound as it left its sheath; even the wind seemed to yield to its edge. His left shoulder was slumped in an unnatural posture—a remnant of an old debt from decades ago.

The mutant he had named the Eerie Immortal stood just a dozen paces away.

No, to say it was “standing” wasn't entirely accurate. Its silhouette was like an ink painting soaked in water. It appeared stationary, yet its edges were in constant flux—one moment it seemed to have half an extra arm, the next it seemed to be missing a foot. Only its face remained that same unsettling void.

“...Who’s first?” it asked.

The voice came from directly behind Luo Yang.

Luo Yang whipped around, but there was nothing behind him. When he turned back, the Eerie Immortal was already inches from Zhang Xian’s face. It reached out a hand with withered, slender fingers, tips trailing wisps of green smoke.

“Hah!” Zhang Xian let out a sharp breath and swung his ruler in a horizontal sweep. The markings on Deliverance suddenly flared with light, and a flat sheet of white radiance swept out, cleanly severing the Eerie Immortal’s wrist.

Luo Yang charged forward, Night Owl tracing a slender arc of blade-light, but the attack was perfectly evaded by the Eerie Immortal.

Luo Yang didn’t know how it had dodged. It was as if the intervening moment of time had been completely deleted; by the time he realized what had happened, the evasion was already a settled fact of reality.

No blood flowed from the severed wrist. Instead, wisps of black mist seeped out, dispersing before reconsolidating inside the creature's sleeve.

“We can’t cut it down,” Zhang Xian said, retreating two steps and tapping the tip of his ruler against the ground. “I can’t sense any part of it that belongs to ‘reality.’”

“Then we’ll search every inch of its body until we find it!”

Li Jinqi stepped forward, his left foot sinking into the ground as the frozen puddle beneath him shattered with a crack. No Return slashed downward. There was no flashy light on the blade, only an incredibly thin, cold line. The Eerie Immortal’s entire upper body leaned back at an impossible angle, as if its top and bottom halves were separate entities. The blade grazed the tip of its nose and sliced through half of its face.

Where the face was split open, it didn’t reveal bone. It revealed another face—a skeletal, eyeless visage, withered to the bone.

That face flashed a grin at Luo Yang before being swallowed back into the void.

“What the hell!”

Luo Yang cried out in alarm, summoning three longswords from his space ring and launching them at the Eerie Immortal.

The swords pierced the creature's chest but passed right through, slamming into the wall behind it and kicking up a cloud of pale white shards.

Those shards didn’t belong to any construction material; they were manifestations of the creature's power, formed by the strange energy that defined this “arena.”

The Eerie Immortal looked down at the three holes in its chest. The interiors of the wounds were pitch black and already healing. They closed slowly, like melting wax solidifying again.

“Conserve your strength,” Li Jinqi said. “It seems these methods are useless against it for now.”

Before he could finish, the Eerie Immortal vanished.

Zhang Xian immediately held his ruler above his head. The markings on Deliverance flared once more.

This time, the back of the ruler glowed. A white line shot up three feet from the spine, physically blocking a hand that had descended from the sky. The hand was human-shaped, but its fingers had an extra knuckle, and the nails were a sickly greenish-gray.

“It’s above us!” Zhang Xian gritted his teeth, his arms shaking uncontrollably. “It can emerge from anywhere!”

“I see it!” Li Jinqi’s blade was already striking out.

No Return didn’t travel in a straight line; it lunged upward at an angle, sliding along the back of Zhang Xian’s ruler until the tip pierced the inner wrist of that hand. This was the effect of Li Jinqi’s ability—the space within half a foot of his blade was locked down by invisible pressure. When the Eerie Immortal tried to turn into mist and escape, it was half a beat too slow.

Sssst—!

The mist was pinned by the blade tip, forcing the upper half of the arm to materialize in the air. With a flick of his wrist, Li Jinqi slashed horizontally. Half the arm fell to the ground with a wet thud, only then beginning to dissolve into black mist.

The Eerie Immortal reformed thirty feet away, now truly missing a hand.

It looked down at its stump without reaction. Then, it rotated its head a full one hundred and eighty degrees to face Li Jinqi.

“Old one... does it hurt?” it asked.

Li Jinqi opened his mouth to retort, but the old wound on his left shoulder suddenly began to seep blood, soaking a small patch of his black coat. He glanced down, his mouth twitching, but said nothing as he tightened his grip on his blade.

Luo Yang caught the sight from the corner of his eye, and his heart sank.

“Old Director!”

“Don’t worry about me,” Li Jinqi interrupted. “Focus on what’s in front of you.”

Zhang Xian had already traded two more blows. The Eerie Immortal’s remaining hand split into seven or eight lines, each lashing out like a whip. They struck the ruler with dull thuds that sounded like evening drums and morning bells, yet carried a heavy air of death. Zhang Xian was forced back five steps until his back hit a broken lamppost.

The markings on Deliverance lit up for the third time, but this time the entire ruler seemed to be on fire. Azure-white light flowed across the surface as Zhang Xian thrust the ruler forward. The tip suddenly extended, transforming into a thirty-foot-long white rainbow that pierced through the center of the Eerie Immortal’s torso.

The moment the white rainbow skewered it, the Eerie Immortal simply dissipated. Its entire body scattered into the air like gray fluff, as if someone had shaken out an old, dusty quilt.

“...Did we get it?” Luo Yang didn't dare lower his blade.

The gray fluff swirled in the air and reconsolidated, looking no different than before.

But in Luo Yang’s eyes, the Eerie Immortal looked slightly more concrete than it had a moment ago.

It stood suspended in the air, letting out a terrifying laugh before raising a finger to point at Luo Yang, who was warily scanning the surroundings.

Luo Yang felt a sudden tightness in his chest, as if someone were squeezing his lungs from the inside. He stumbled, nearly dropping Night Owl, and hurriedly pressed his other hand to his chest. When he looked down, he felt as if his very strength had been diminished. A dark red stain spread across the front of his white shirt, yet there was no physical wound on his body.

“What a disgusting ability...” Zhang Xian stepped forward and pulled Luo Yang behind him. “Kid, keep your eyes on the back of my head. Don’t look at its face. It’s draining your sense of existence!”

“Sense of existence?”

“Don’t ask!”

Li Jinqi moved then.

His strike was uncanny; the blade arrived before the man did. No Return seemed to be pulled from his hand, flying across twenty feet of space to strike the Eerie Immortal’s neck.

The Eerie Immortal’s head fell off, spinning half a circle in the air until its void face met Li Jinqi’s gaze.

“That blade of yours,” it said. “What is it called?”

Li Jinqi’s expression changed instantly. The blood on his left shoulder spread further, and his entire left arm began to tremble. He didn't answer. With a flick of his right hand, No Return flew back into his palm. When he caught it, his hands were suddenly covered in wounds that hadn't been there a second ago.

“Old Director!” Luo Yang shouted.

“I’m fine,” Li Jinqi coughed, spitting out a bit of blood and wiping it on his sleeve. “It just asked for the name of my blade. I have a feeling that if I actually said it, I’d be finished right here.”

The Eerie Immortal’s head floated back to its neck and reattached itself. It cracked its neck, the bones popping loudly.

“Again,” it said.

The Eerie Immortal began to split. It tore one grayish-white shadow after another from its own body. Each shadow grew into an identical copy upon hitting the ground, until there was no visual difference between them.

Seven or eight Eerie Immortals began to slowly circle the three of them.

Zhang Xian’s Deliverance glowed for the fifth time, and the once-clear markings on the ruler began to blur. He knocked down a clone with every swing, but they simply crawled back out of the ground a second later.

“Old Li, I can’t break through this!” Zhang Xian shouted while parrying.

The flying swords Luo Yang controlled were also constantly piercing the clones, but the results were no different from Zhang Xian’s; it was all wasted effort.

“I’m trying!” Li Jinqi’s reply was curt.

But his stamina was no longer enough to sustain the fight.

No Return paused in mid-air for a split second. Li Jinqi swayed and dropped to one knee. The blood on his left shoulder had completely soaked half his coat. One couldn't see the color on the black fabric, but everyone could smell the heavy, metallic scent of rust mixed with the damp air.

“Old Li!” Zhang Xian whipped his head around.

“...The debt from decades ago,” Li Jinqi stood up, leaning on his blade, his voice raspier than ever. “It’s time to pay it back today.”

The Eerie Immortal’s true body—if such a thing even existed—strolled leisurely out from behind three clones.

Its presence was “clearer” than at the start. Its scorched black Daoist robe had turned a dark, bloody red, and white fluorescence pulsed across its void face. Every time the three of them attacked a clone, its presence grew stronger, drawing closer and closer to becoming “human.”

“It... is borrowing our strength,” Zhang Xian noted, a crack appearing on the tip of his ruler for the first time. “The more we hit it, the more solid it becomes.”

“But if we don’t hit it, how do we stop it from draining our existence!” Luo Yang was still frantically controlling his swords, but only half remained in his space ring.

Before he could think of a counter-strategy, the Eerie Immortal was suddenly in front of him.

The twenty-foot gap between them had vanished in an instant. It raised its right hand, fingers splayed. A swirling mass of dark red condensed in its palm—it looked like blood, like fire, and like... an eye curled up in its hand.

Zhang Xian tried to swing his ruler to block, but he was too late.

Li Jinqi tried to slash his blade over, but he was even later.

The Eerie Immortal’s hand was already less than half a foot from Luo Yang’s chest. The dark red mass in its palm expanded. Luo Yang could even smell the scent it gave off—like burnt hair, and like some cloyingly sweet, rotting flower.

It was too late to retreat, and too late to raise his blade.

He only had time to see the Eerie Immortal’s face flicker at close range, as if it were showing him one last smile.