The moment those words landed, Huang Yun froze.
The arrogance drained from his face like water through cracked stone—replaced by something uglier.
Twisted. Incandescent with fury.
He'd come here expecting a soft target. A nobody who'd clawed his way up from the bottom rungs...
The kind of person who'd crumble the moment real pressure was applied.
A quick show of force, a few words, and the wretch would be on his knees begging.
Instead, this Lu Xiaoqi had turned out to be exactly the same breed as the rest of these Hundred Forging Peak lunatics!
Worse, even. Wu Mang's mouth was foul—but this one was surgical.
"Fine. Fine. Good!"
Huang Yun laughed through his teeth, the sound carrying no humor whatsoever.
The killing intent in his eyes was past the point of concealment.
The humiliation was practically burning a hole through him.
"I accept! Lu Xiaoqi—don't come crying to me later when I don't hold back!"
He snapped his fingers into a sword seal, ready to summon his flying sword on the spot.
"Hold on."
Huang Yun blinked.
Mo Fan was waving a hand, gesturing at the courtyard around them.
"Senior Brother, this yard is too small. We can't move properly in here, and I'd hate for anything to get broken. Can we find somewhere with more space?"
Huang Yun was already at the end of his patience, but with this many people watching, he couldn't afford to look petty.
He exhaled sharply through his nose.
"Fine, a dying struggle. Lead the way."
The whole procession moved out—Mo Fan at the front, the crowd trailing behind...
Until they reached a stretch of wasteland at the far edge of Hundred Forging Peak.
Flat, open, barren. Not a single decent rock in sight, just gravel and dead grass as far as the eye could see.
Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to maneuver.
To every observer present, this looked like the single worst possible choice of terrain Mo Fan could have made.
"Here's good."
Mo Fan stopped and dusted off his hands.
Huang Yun raised his fingers into a sword seal. Spiritual energy surged around him.
"WAIT—"
Mo Fan's voice cut across the clearing again.
That was the last straw. Huang Yun's temple vein looked ready to burst. He nearly roared.
"WHAT NOW?! Are we doing this or not?!"
Mo Fan looked at him with an expression of complete innocence, then raised his voice loud enough for the entire crowd to hear:
"Senior Brother—you're not actually planning to fight me at your full Mid-Stage Foundation Establishment cultivation, are you? Against a body cultivator with no spiritual energy? You'd kill me in one hit."
The Hundred Forging Peak crowd needed absolutely no encouragement.
"He's right! Yellow Dog, you're seriously going to bully someone half your level?!"
"A Main Peak Foundation Establishment cultivator picking on a body cultivator with no Spirit Root—have you no shame?!"
"I've got an Image-Capturing Stone right here! Keep it up and I'll make sure the whole Sect sees what 'winning without honor' looks like!"
Zhao Ziwei, meanwhile, had fully committed to the bit. He possessed the spirit of a drama queen...
Sprinting to one end of the clearing and shrieking, "Oh my, the Main Peak is bullying people!"
Then sprinting to the other end and shrieking, "Foundation Establishment beating a mortal, shameless!"—running back and forth until Huang Yun's face cycled through three different shades of purple.
Under the crushing weight of public opinion, Huang Yun ground his teeth and spat out his concession.
"Obviously I'll suppress my cultivation! I don't need you to tell me that!"
"And don't worry—striking to kill in a Sect duel is forbidden. Anyone who does gets expelled. We stop when one of us yields!"
"Perfect!"
Mo Fan let out a long, theatrical breath of relief, his face settling into the most guileless, silly smile imaginable.
"Alright, Senior Brother. I'm coming!"
The word coming had barely left his mouth.
He exploded forward.
Like a predator that had been still for so long the stillness itself had become a trap...
His legs drove into the ground with a sound like a thunderclap, and the solid rock beneath his feet cracked and cratered under the force.
Two deep impressions were left where he'd stood!
The burst of speed was almost impossible to track. One moment he was across the clearing. The next, he was in Huang Yun's face!
And in the same instant—invisible, soundless—Mo Fan's hand closed around nothing in the air.
[ Grave Chill ].
A thread of deathly cold, imperceptible to any watching eye, rode the wind of his fist and settled onto Huang Yun like a second skin.
Huang Yun felt it immediately.
Not the cold of wind or weather. Something deeper—a chill that reached directly into nerve and muscle and locked.
His spiritual energy stuttered. His body's response time dropped by a fatal fraction of a second.
What—
He didn't finish the thought.
Mo Fan's iron fist—the size of a small boulder, knuckles layered with callus upon callus—expanded in his vision until it was all he could see.
BOOM.
The impact detonated across the wasteland like a war drum.
Huang Yun had passive qi-shielding. It didn't matter.
The raw physical force behind that punch had nothing to do with spiritual energy—it simply transferred, all of it, directly into Huang Yun's body.
He left the ground. He traveled a considerable distance through the air. He landed in the dirt and kept going, gouging a trench through the gravel before finally coming to rest in a shallow crater, dust billowing up around him.
Complete silence.
Every person present—including Wu Mang, including Zhao Ziwei—stood with their mouths open...
Eyes wide at the unbelievable scene.
Then the clearing detonated in cheers that pierced the clouds.
"BEAUTIFUL! Junior Brother, that's what I'm talking about!"
"HAHAHA! Broken-backed dog! The name fits!"
Huang Yun dragged himself out of the crater.
His face was gray with dust. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
And from every direction, the laughter and jeering of Hundred Forging Peak's finest crashed over him in waves.
He had never—not once in his entire life—been humiliated like this.
His reason completely evaporated.
"YOU'RE DEAD——!!!"
His eyes went red. He stopped looking like a person and started looking like an enraged beast.
Shhhhk—!
A flying sword screamed out of its sheath, blazing with blinding light.
He was still suppressing his cultivation—technically—but the killing intent packed into that blade was no longer even pretending to be restrained.
Every strike drove straight for Mo Fan's vitals. The sword moved fast enough to leave a sonic crack in the air behind it.
Even Wu Mang shot to his feet, ready to intervene.
However. Mo Fan didn't retreat.
He went forward!
BOOM.
He launched himself off the ground—pure muscle, no spiritual energy—and hung in the air for several impossible seconds...
Body twisting at the absolute limit of what flesh and bone could manage.
The sword screamed past him, close enough to shred his sleeve and open a shallow line of red along his forearm.
But in the space carved out by that dodge, Mo Fan had closed the distance again.
The flying sword couldn't turn fast enough at this range.
Huang Yun found himself suddenly, catastrophically in close quarters with someone whose fists were the problem.
He threw his arms up in panic to block the storm.
It didn't help.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
The sound of impact was relentless—heavy, meaty, the sound of someone being systematically taken apart.
What unfolded in the middle of that open wasteland was, by any measure, deeply absurd:
An Inner Sect Foundation Establishment cultivator, being beaten senseless by a body cultivator.
Mo Fan's fists fell like rain. Huang Yun had no answer for any of it.
Under the sustained physical onslaught, he stopped trying to fight back and started trying to protect his head...
Stumbling backward across the gravel like a mutt being chased out of an alley.
This was exactly what Mo Fan had planned.
If Huang Yun kept his word and held his cultivation suppressed, Mo Fan's body alone was enough to beat him into the ground.
But that wasn't the real goal.
The real goal was to push Huang Yun to the edge in front of everyone. To corner him.
To make him so desperate, so humiliated, so completely unhinged that he "jumped the wall like a desperate dog" and broke his own promise...
And let the entire crowd watch him do it.
It worked.
The jeering from the sidelines. The pain radiating through every inch of his body. The taste of blood in his mouth. The mocking laughter.
Huang Yun's face had gone the color of a bruised liver.
And then his mind broke.
"You piece of—" "DIE!!!"
The hysterical scream tore out of him.
BOOM——!!!
The suppression shattered.
An extremely berserk Mid-Stage Foundation Establishment cultivation erupted outward in a shockwave that sent Mo Fan skidding back several steps.
The flying sword reversed course and snapped back into Huang Yun's hand.
His hair whipped loose around his face. His eyes were crimson.
Behind him, sword-light phantoms bloomed and screamed upward into the sky, sword-qi splitting the air in every direction.
Every promise he'd made—gone. Every rule—gone.
The pampered young master of the Main Peak had completely lost his rationality...
Leaving nothing but the singular, all-consuming need to cut the person in front of him into pieces!