Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

Knowing didn’t help. That was the first thing Xuan learned, standing in the throne hall with the whole of his life finally laid bare in front of him. Understanding your enemy is worth a great deal, right up until the enemy is a Nascent Soul and you are a Foundation cultivator running on the dregs of a day that had already tried to kill you twice.

The Fourth wanted the sword. He’d made that plain. And a man does not hand the thing his enemy has spent twenty years reaching for across a throne room and hope to be thanked for it. So there was no version of the next few minutes that didn’t open with a fight, and Xuan, who had exactly nothing left that could touch this man, opened it anyway, because the alternative was standing still while the drunk walked over and took what he wanted.

He did it the only way he knew how. He put everyone where they could do the most and take the least, and he threw the fight at the Fourth the way he’d thrown it at Tianlong an hour before, and prayed the same lightning could strike twice.

Yan Wuji went high with Luo at his shoulder, the last two blades of the Pavilion. Bo Ren and his guard took the flanks. Qingyue laid a killing floor of ice across the marble. And Xuan worked the range, Severing Dragon Roar screaming across the hall in crescents that had cut a Golden Core general in half at Northreach.

The Fourth let the first one hit him.

It struck him square across the chest, Armorcleave edge and all, and it was like watching a wave break on a cliff and change the cliff not at all. The blue-green light guttered out against him. He didn’t stagger, and he didn’t bleed. He glanced down at the place it had struck him with the mild interest of a man who’s felt a raindrop and isn’t yet sure it means rain.

"Oh, that’s a nice one." He said it as though Xuan had shown him a card trick. "Earth-rank, with that clever shearing edge. I can see why the Golden Core boy didn’t enjoy it." He looked up, pleasant. "I’m not a Golden Core boy."

That was when Xuan tried to build the thing that had killed Tianlong, the trap of ice and timing and a sheared-open guard, and learned in about four seconds why it would never come together here.

Tianlong had been a wall, and walls have seams. You freeze the man in place, you shear the passive armor, you put a blade through the gap. But Tianlong had also been close enough to their own strength that Qingyue’s ice could hold him a breath and Xuan’s edge could bite once he was held. The Fourth was not close to their strength. Qingyue’s frost reached his skin and simply stopped being cold, the killing floor she’d laid melting to slush wherever he cared to stand. There was no holding him even for a breath. And no gap opened to shear, because he was never once under enough pressure to have to defend at all. The whole beautiful machine that had taken down the Second Prince needed an enemy nearly as strong as they were, and this one stood on a different mountain entirely, watching them try to climb it.

And he didn’t even kill them for trying. That was the part that turned Xuan’s stomach worse than dying would have. The Fourth moved through their best like a man wading through tall grass, and every time one of them committed to a real strike, he just took it away from them. Yan Wuji’s vertical, the fastest thing in the palace, met an open palm and stopped dead, and the Fourth pushed him off his feet almost kindly. Bo Ren’s blade he turned aside with two fingers on the flat, the way you’d correct a child’s grip. He plucked a guard’s sword out of the air and set it down on the throne steps, unbroken, as if he meant to give it back later.

He wasn’t fighting them. He was tidying them out of his way, and being careful about it, because none of them were what he’d come up the stair for. He wanted the thing in Xuan’s hand whole, and you can’t take a blade whole out of a hall you’ve smashed to rubble.

And still, under all of it, Xuan could see the one thing Mira had shown him: the strain. Even wading through them like grass, even barely trying, there was that flicker of effort where a being like this should have had none, the faint sheen at his temple, the way he never quite spent everything at once. He was holding something enormous shut with one hand and swatting them with the other, and it cost him, and it was the only crack in the whole hopeless picture.

’Mira. The crack’s real. I can see it. Tell me there’s a way to put a knife in it.’

[ Not like this. ] She sounded as sick as he felt. [ It’s real, and it changes nothing you can use right now, because a fraction of a Nascent Soul is still a Nascent Soul, and there is no version of the four of you reaching one with steel. You could throw everything you have and everything you don’t at that seam and it would not open. This isn’t a fight you win, Xuan. I don’t think it’s one you’re meant to win. It’s one you have to survive long enough to stop having.]

Xuan was still turning that over, still hunting the move that wasn’t there, when the Fourth got bored.

It happened between one breath and the next. One moment he was tidying them aside with that awful patience, and the next the patience was simply gone, and the temperature of the whole hall dropped a degree. He’d decided, Xuan understood, that the polite way was taking too long.

"I did try to keep this civil." He said it with a small, real regret, the way you’d apologize before putting down an animal. "But you’re all going to keep getting up, aren’t you. It’s very Skyedge of you. And it’s wasting a day I have waited two decades to finish."

He moved. Xuan didn’t see it as a motion so much as a result. One instant Luo stood at Yan Wuji’s shoulder with his sword up, the last blade of the Pavilion still on its feet; the next he was folded backward across the marble with something terribly wrong in the middle of him, a long dark ruin opened from hip to shoulder by a hand that had never seemed to touch him, and Yan Wuji was screaming a name Xuan had heard him scream once before, over another body, in another dark room.

Luo wasn’t dead. Not yet at least. But Xuan looked at the wound, and then at the mild, unhurried man walking toward the rest of them with the last of the patience burned off him, and understood that "not yet" was the only mercy left in this hall, and it was running out fast.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!