Chapter 199: Rivalries Ignite: Dawn of the Anomaly
"Would you be my disciple?"
Everyone turned to Duan Fei.
The Silverblade Peak Lord hovered in the sky with a seriousness that hadn't been there all morning. Her emerald hanfu fluttered around her despite the absence of wind, giving her a serene yet undeniably dignified presence.
Huo Changfeng and Bai Tianhu exchanged a glance but neither moved to intervene. Her gaze was already set on Wang Bing.
"So. What do you say?"
Wang Bing became the center of everything in an instant. The waiting ground went so quiet a dropped pin would have been an event.
The silence stretched.
Wang Bing blinked. Frozen with disbelief.
Before the quiet could stretch any further, Elder Xuan drifted forward, his voice cutting through with barely concealed urgency. "What are you doing, Bing'er? Accept her offer quickly—don't keep the Peak Lord waiting!"
Although his own strength sat at a similar level to Duan Fei's—perhaps even a hair beyond—the same could not be said of their futures. He was already past two hundred years old. His potential had reach a ceiling. Duan Fei's had not. In a few years she could easily become an Inner Court Elder, a genuinely invaluable connection for the Wang Mansion.
Wang Bing glanced at him. Then at Duan Fei.
She drew a slow breath, steadying herself. Her eyes closed. When they opened again, they held a luminous conviction that hadn't been there before.
Her lips parted. And what came out was not what anyone had expected.
"Why do you want me to become your disciple?"
The crowd drew a sharp breath. They had been prepared for acceptance. For gratitude. Not a question—not this.
Duan Fei's lips curved, the kind of smile that could have made most men lose their footing entirely—but the quality in her eyes undercut it entirely.
"Why?" She let the word sit for a moment. "Because I see your potential." The look in her eyes deepened and sharpened.
Wang Bing shook her head slowly. Then she raised a hand and pointed.
At Su Tianhao.
"If it's about potential," she said, "why not ask him?"
Every head turned.
The solitary figure stood in the waiting ground like he belonged somewhere else entirely—golden eyes calm as a deep mountain lake that had never known a rival, presence unhurried, completely detached from the weight of ten thousand expectations pressing down on him from all sides.
"You're perceptive enough to see it," Wang Bing pressed, "so you already know he has more potential than me."
"Bing'er—" Elder Xuan's voice came out with the particular desperation of a man watching something very good slip away.
Wang Bing simply raised a hand—a gesture that said, quietly but firmly, that she knew what she was doing.
But her words carried implications that refused to settle.
"More potential than her?" The murmur spread like a current through standing water. "Impossible."
"Not necessarily impossible," a voice said, cutting through the noise with deliberate weight.
Jin Yulong.
The earlier smugness had left his face entirely. What remained was something heavier.
"It's said that Lu Ruyi—the Lotus Sword Fairy of the Lianhua Sect—awakened a talent that surpassed nine stars." He paused, brows drawing together. "It's said that the Aptitude Rating Stele used to test her shattered. It couldn't contain the result."
Hiss.
The crowd drew a collective breath.
Su Tianhao's ears sharpened. "Ruyi?"
High above, Lu Ruyi caught his surprise and frowned.
"That bastard ruined my surprise."
Qiongqi shook her emerald head and raised her beak in proud agreement, as if the subject under discussion were her own achievement.
The murmurs in the crowd swelled, voices overlapping, speculation building on speculation, growing louder with each passing second.
"Enough."
Duan Fei's voice was low. Just loud enough. Her hand rose.
The crowd went silent.
She turned back to Wang Bing, her expression fully relaxed again. "You want to know why I didn't ask him?"
Wang Bing nodded.
Duan Fei's smile widened.
"Then ask yourself why neither of them did." She gestured lightly toward Huo Changfeng and Bai Tianhu.
"..."
Duan Fei let the silence hold for a moment, then let out a soft, amused sound.
"Simple. He's an unknown variable. The kind you would call an anomaly."
The way the crowd looked at Su Tianhao shifted—visibly, immediately, like a lens snapping into focus.
Anomaly.
A term reserved for genuine monsters. The ones that defied common logic so thoroughly that trying to categorise them was its own mistake. From the very beginning of this examination, Su Tianhao had been accumulating evidence for exactly that label. He had stood unfazed through Elder Gu Lie's pressuring aura when thousands of others had fallen. His cultivation base had bounced back every spiritual sense that tried to read it—including the Grandmasters'. He carried himself with an aura that neither sought nor required anyone's acknowledgement. And his eyes—those golden eyes held a depth and quietness that no youth should be able to possess.
"So~" Duan Fei's voice drifted through the air like a note from a zither string. "Let me ask you one last time. Will you become my disciple?"
Bam.
Wang Bing's knee met the ground. Her head lowered.
"This disciple greets Master."
Duan Fei's lips curved with warmth and something that looked very much like genuine satisfaction.
"Your name?"
"Wang Bing," she replied, with a courteous bow. "Young Mistress of the Wang Mansion."
"Oh—" Something shifted in Duan Fei's expression, light with recognition. "So you're Wang Yuehua's treasured daughter. No wonder~"
"You know my mother?" Wang Bing looked up with surprise.
Duan Fei only nodded. No spoken answer. Whatever she had to say about that, she said it through telepathy—words that passed between them in silence, meant for no other ears.
"Congratulations on accepting a talented disciple, Duan Fei."
Huo Changfeng and Bai Tianhu were the first to offer their words—one with genuine warmth, the other with the particular graciousness of a man performing a courtesy he has long since mastered.
"Congratulations, Peak Master!"
"Congratulations, Lord Duan!"
The two Silverblade Elders and the two Jadeclaw Elders followed in turn. After them, a wave of congratulations rose from the gathered representatives of the various forces watching from the sky—praises and flattery layered over each other in careful, practised voices.
Many of them turned to Elder Xuan next. Smiles that didn't quite reach their eyes. Warmth that smelled faintly of calculation.
Elder Xuan smiled back and accepted it all with humble graciousness.
He was no fool. These were parasites testing which surface might hold their weight. The same people offering congratulations now were the same ones who would sharpen knives the moment the wind changed.
'In your dreams,' he thought pleasantly.
---
"Congratulations on acquiring a powerful backer," Su Tianhao said as he approached Wang Bing, who still stood before the steles.
"Brother Tianhao!" Wang Bing's face lit up.
He smiled. "Looks like you won't be needing my help after all."
The smile faded from her face.
His words brought back something she had been letting herself not think about. Their first encounter had been pure chance—their paths converging on the road to Cloudrise City. She had been fortunate he was there when the Phantoms appeared. Fortunate that he had killed one of them. Fortunate that their shared danger had given her reason to offer him the protection of her carriage—and from that, a favour. And from that favour, an alliance.
She remembered the words she had spoken that day: 'I don't know anyone there. It would be nice to have someone I could trust. Someone to talk to.'
Their friendship had been built on a deal. And realising it now, clearly, left a bitter taste in her mouth she didn't have a name for.
She raised her head and met his gaze—her autumn eyes finding his golden ones directly.
"Brother Tianhao." Her voice was low and steady. "Forget the deal we made. Forget the alliance."
A breath.
"I just want to be your friend."
There were emotions underneath those words that even Su Tianhao, with all his inherited memories and accumulated insight couldn't immediately discern. He held her gaze for a moment, then raised an eyebrow and gave a simple nod.
Shrugging it off completely.
Just then, Huo Changfeng's voice filled the air like a war drum struck at dawn—commanding every ear without asking permission.
"Hey. You're not going to keep us all waiting, are you?"
He didn't specify. He didn't need to.
The crowd remembered, all at once, that the anomaly hadn't been tested yet.
---
"Finally!" Lu Ruyi exhaled, the word coming out almost as a sigh of relief. Her fists had clenched at her sides without her noticing. She couldn't wait anymore. The Little Rogue. The lost boy who had broken into her room seven years ago and walked out of it as something she still hadn't found the right word for. The one face she had never been able to set aside. The only peer she had ever truly acknowledged.
"Time to unravel your mysteries," she said quietly. "Mister anomaly."
Qiongqi's eyes sharpened to bright, focused points—as if trying to pierce through the veil surrounding Su Tianhao by sheer will. She still remembered the day they had first met. That Su Tianhao and this one shared a name. Beyond that, almost nothing else was the same.
---
From their positions above, Su Huiqing, Su Minghe, Su Yuan, and the others who had known Su Tianhao the longest watched him approach the steles with unhurried steps.
Su Mei's fingers tightened around each other.
She had followed his story through letters and secondhand accounts—the wager with Su Jian, the rise, the expulsion from the family. But knowing things from a distance and watching them unfold in front of you were not the same. Right now all she could think was that the expectations pressing down on him were enormous, and that she was afraid for him.
Her concern was not without reason. Surpassing nine-star talent? She had heard it said—but it was a thing that happened in old stories, not in examinations she was standing twenty metres away from.
She still remembered the pain of hearing he had awakened with zero measurable talent a year ago. She had wanted to go to him. Circumstances had kept her here.
What neither she nor anyone else in the crowd knew—including the three Martial Grandmasters—was that there were other eyes watching from further away than any of them had thought to look.
Hidden well beyond the Ashenveil Peak, concealed within cloud and distance, a towering figure stood on air as casually as most men stand on solid ground. Dishevelled hair. Unkempt beard stirring in the wind. An aura that was wild and feral and ancient—the presence of something that had survived too many battles to be anything other than what it had become. His eyes, sharp as driven arrows, passed through kilometres of mountain air and cloud with effortless precision, finding Su Tianhao through pure spiritual sense alone.
Zhan Kuang.
"Show them, Su Tianhao," he said, his rough voice carrying to no one but the sky.
"This is the time for the dragon to announce its name to the world."