Cultivation Nerd (xianxia)

Jiang Yeming and I stood three yards apart as the morning sun crept over the mountains and bathed us in its light. She had a sharp glint in her eyes as she stared me down, while the grass swayed in the morning breeze.

She crouched, taking the same sprinting stance Olympic athletes use before launching forward.

This sparring session had a few rules. I wasn't allowed to use arrays, among other things.

Usually, when fighting stronger opponents, arrays were the only thing I relied on, and I didn't want to become dependent on a single style of combat. Admittedly, I had gotten a little rusty.

Jiang Yeming blurred forward as she used some strange movement technique. She wasn't actually that fast, but somehow her movements still appeared as a blur. I created two jade daggers in my hands and swung them, forming an invisible X-shaped slash that shot toward her.

Jiang Yeming twisted her body mid-motion, weaving past the invisible wind blades without losing any momentum.

“Beautiful,” I commented. “It feels like trying to hit a feather.”

Jiang Yeming smirked. While still airborne, she looked as though she had stepped on the wind itself, flipping gracefully as she closed the distance. A purple ripple formed in her hand before condensing into a gaseous sword that clashed against my two translucent green daggers created from my Dancing Jade Armor technique.

But her gaseous sword suddenly unraveled. It twisted like a snake, lunging toward my neck at incredible speed. It was easy enough to dodge because I had expected something like that.

Jiang Yeming wasn't someone who ever made unnecessary moves.

Despite my disagreements with many of her decisions, her combat experience completely dwarfed mine. She was no longer the inexperienced cultivator who had once needed to relearn how to fight with a weak body.

As I tilted my head aside to avoid the purple sword, another construct formed in her other hand. This one stretched outward with a crack of air as it lashed toward my face. Intent on leaving a nice cut across my mug.

A whip?

I disengaged by jumping backward. The whip chased after me like a tracking missile, ricocheting off the ground and somehow accelerating.

At the same time, Jiang Yeming opened her mouth and fired a hair-thin needle.

Oh? She uses hidden weapons? This was the first time she had pulled something like this during a spar.

Although, in hindsight, it was also rather obvious. I had expected some sort of mouth-based attack because she hadn't replied earlier. After all, in combat, even words should serve a purpose. Either to lure an enemy into a trap or to learn something from them.

I jumped back once more. The hair-thin needle landed where my leg had been standing only a moment earlier, and the surrounding grass immediately turned gray.

“Poison?” I raised a questioning brow. “You kept that in your mouth? How did it taste?”

“One of the many skills you develop when using strategies like this,” she replied, “is learning how to make poison taste pleasant. The people I learned this from kept poison hidden in their mouths for years.”

“They kept it there even while eating and talking?”

“Of course. But they were much better than I am.”

“Was it effective?”

“Not really. They posed as mortals to assassinate cultivators by becoming their concubines, and some even went so far as to have children with their targets. They were called the Purple Flower Kissers,” Jiang Yeming explained.

While she was saying all that, she transformed her purple sword into another whip and swung both at me. The whips twisted and writhed like snakes as they rushed toward me. I used my translucent jade daggers to smash them aside, but the moment I did, the whips branched outward, sprouting countless smaller tendrils that tried to wrap around me.

This was a ridiculous amount of control over an Earth Grade Technique.

Her technique was similar to my Dancing Jade Armor, except her constructs were gaseous and far more flexible than mine.

I was forced to create an oval-shaped jade barrier around myself. The whips wrapped around it like growing vines, tightening relentlessly.

But they couldn't break through.

Her technique might have been more flexible, but mine was considerably sturdier.

Just then, the ground beneath me creaked. Silver chains burst upward and wrapped around my jade barrier.

Shit.

Immediately, the barrier began flickering in and out of existence.

Jiang Yeming's element was chains, and they had an incredibly restrictive effect on most techniques. That made her a natural counter to many cultivators.

Unfortunately, I was one of them.

The instant my jade barrier dissipated, invisible hands seized me, and a crack in space opened behind me. In the next instant, I reappeared roughly ten feet away, just as Jiang Yeming's chains crushed the space where I had been standing. However, her purple whip had already transformed into a twenty-foot wave of dark-purple tendrils rushing toward me.

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Jiang Yeming and her bullshit ability to sense spatial distortions. It was ridiculous how much of an advantage a cultivator from the future had over poor little cultivators like me from this era.

I dispersed the daggers and formed a jade spear in my hand. Then I activated the Galloping Horse Power technique alongside the Nail Piercer Spear Technique.

The latter wasn't something I normally used, but I had achieved some basic mastery over it.

Jiang Yeming's purple tendrils were numerous but fragile.

Sometimes the best plan was simple.

Fuck it, we roll.

The world exploded in a flash of white as I struck a Trace with both Earth Grade Techniques. A dark horse materialized behind me while a spiraling horn formed at the tip of my spear.

Combine!

The horse charged forward, its forehead colliding with the horn.

“Unicorn Piercer!” I shouted the name of my attack like some shounen protagonist. Because it was fun.

Easily piercing through the wave of purple tendrils, I met Jiang Yeming's gaze. She winced the moment she saw the unicorn projection.

“Tch. Can you take this seriously? Since when did you learn to perform a combined Trace?” she muttered before cursing under her breath with several more colorful words.

“This is something I've wanted to try for quite a while,” I replied, accelerating with every step and leaving footprints surrounded by cracks.

I turned into a white comet. The blinding light obscured my peripheral vision, forcing me to keep a careful eye on my surroundings as I closed to within arm's reach of Jiang Yeming.

She brought both hands together, wrists touching, and a thick golden chain burst forward, forming a spiraling tunnel. The moment I entered it, I immediately felt the Qi within my technique destabilize, and the white unicorn began dissolving before my eyes.

“Also, the name of your new technique is a bit too plain. Perhaps something like Mountain-Piercing Gallop or Cloud-Piercing Charge would sound better,” Jiang Yeming said, showing that despite the situation, she wasn't under much pressure if she still had the presence of mind to banter.

The closer I got to her, the more I felt my technique beginning to dissolve. So I twisted the jade spear in my hand, dispersing the Qi throughout the weapon. By the time I reached her, the technique would have dissolved completely. Getting that close with barely any defenses was dangerous.

If I had been allowed to use arrays, that risk would've been minimal. But this was supposed to be a fair fight.

Jiang Yeming's vast combat experience, combined with techniques brought from the future, gave her a clear edge over me.

Even so...

The moment I swung my spear, I lashed out with my leg, sending a wind blade flying as I retreated. Jiang Yeming hurriedly tilted her head to avoid the point-blank attack. Only the tips of her bangs were cut.

Normally, I would've made some comment about her hair. But I couldn't afford to waste time.

“Let me show you something that even you won't be able to predict,” Jiang Yeming smiled. “Have you ever wondered what happens when two spatial techniques collide? Usually, the stronger one wins, obviously. But what if they're exactly equal?”

As soon as she spoke, her left hand became shrouded in shadowy darkness. Thin slivers of black crawled around it, as though reality itself had been crudely sliced apart.

Then she clapped her hands together.

No sound came out.

Her mouth continued moving, clearly saying something… But the world around me lost all color.

A type of spatial lock? Normally, something only an Array Conjurer could accomplish. Whoever created this technique had definitely been an Array Conjurer. Impressive. Very impressive. What kind of person had come up with something like this in the future?

Was it me? That would explain the strange glint in Jiang Yeming's eyes.

Well, future me was definitely reckless. Testing something like this could easily end with someone being torn apart. Besides, the technique wasn't even that good. It had one glaring weakness. My body was completely locked in place. Unless I possessed overwhelming power or used arrays, escape was unthinkable.

But... I could still move my Qi.

Even with space itself frozen, this proved that Qi wasn't entirely physical. It could create physical objects and strengthen them. Yet it also existed beyond ordinary matter.

I guided the Qi within my body into a spiral. Space twisted around us as countless invisible hands reached out to seize me. The effect of my own spatial technique. A sharp cracking sound echoed, and the frozen space shattered. The world immediately returned to normal, and I could move again.

That very instant, I was hyperaware of every fluctuation of Qi and every possible attack.

Jiang Yeming's lips moved. She spat something toward me.

In my mind, I had already dodged. My body, however, lagged behind by the smallest fraction of a second.

The needle grazed my cheek just beneath my eye.

Whatever moves either of us had been about to make… Both of us stopped.

I raised my hands in surrender.

“You won,” I admitted as the Qi around us settled.

“You saw through the weakness awfully fast,” she replied. “But I expected that.”

“I've never seen you smile this wide.”

“Heh, you have no idea how much this means to me,” Jiang Yeming laughed. “I knew that, in that split second, you'd be completely focused on Qi fluctuations. Also... I lied about not being able to talk with a needle in my mouth. I mastered the Purple Flower Kiss technique a long time ago.”

Good. She had started planning how to outsmart me long before the fight even began. She had taken this spar much more seriously than I had. I hadn't prepared schemes or hidden tricks and had simply wanted to improve my raw combat ability. Still, this outcome was better. I had relied on arrays for so long that they had become an inseparable part of my fighting style.

Without them, my combat ability felt rather average. At least compared to the people I surrounded myself with.

“Also...” Jiang Yeming frowned as the excitement faded from her face. “Your body is a wreck. If you were in peak condition, I'm certain you could have dodged that.”

She noticed that too?

It didn't affect my breakthroughs or cultivation. But my body had accumulated far too much damage over the years.

My arm had been cut off once when Song Song broke through to Foundation Establishment. Also, I had spent time in a coma after the Blood Step Immortal incident, where due to it, my body deteriorated quite a bit. Not to mention, three years ago, Song San had nearly killed me and that wasn't even counting the countless injuries from every other battle.

Noticing the look on my face, she let the matter go.

“Well,” Jiang Yeming let out an anxious breath, “this was a good way to calm down before the test.”

The test she meant was the one where my children would have their cultivation talent examined that afternoon.

What was she even worried about? Wasn't she supposed to be the regressor here?

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