ACSP: Chapter 189: Life and Death Pressure Points, this is the true terror of Crystal Release!
Jiang Chen's words drifted through the clearing like the icy whisper of a demon, instantly shattering Hato Yui's manic delusion and forcing her back to reality.
The adrenaline rush faded, leaving a cold dread in its wake. She mentally cataloged her internal reserves. The brutal, two-day war of attrition against the Lihuo Demon Flood Dragon had already drained a massive portion of her pool. Worse, in her desperate bid to break through Jiang Chen's lines just now, she had consecutively spammed multiple high-tier, catastrophic Crystal Release techniques. Her chakra pathways were practically screaming on empty.
Could she really execute this absolute freak of nature—a monster who had just systematically slaughtered her entire elite raid unit using nothing but expendable copies?
Wait. Shadow Clones...
A sudden, sharp realization flashed through Hato Yui's mind, and the desperate panic in her eyes instantly solidified back into a venomous, fanatical confidence.
"Heh... Jiang Chen, stop trying to bluff your way out of this," Hato Yui sneered, her voice trembling slightly but rising in conviction. "You manifested over three thousand high-density Shadow Clones in a single breath. The laws of chakra distribution are absolute. Even if you hide a monstrous Jinchūriki beast inside your soul, a multi-clone output of that scale would severely fracture and drain anyone's reserves!"
She took a slow, heavy step forward, her eyes locking onto his. "Don't think I don't see right through you. You chose that human-wave tactic to show off, dragging out the fight just to break my spirit and humiliate the Empire. But I have to thank you for your arrogance, Great Xia brat. Because if you hadn't wasted your energy trying to play with your food... you wouldn't have given me the perfect opening to kill you!"
Before the final word left her lips, Hato Yui's hands snapped together, locking into a forbidden, volatile sequence of seals.
"——Crystal Release Secret Technique: Life and Death Pressure Points!"
BOOM!
In the next fraction of a second, a terrifying, suffocating pressure exploded from her physical frame. The sudden eruption of raw chakra violently warped the surrounding atmospheric currents, generating a localized gale-force wind that ripped the turf from the earth and sent heavy pebbles flying like shrapnel.
Tactical Note: The [Life and Death Pressure Points] is a forbidden paradigm shift mechanically identical to the legendary [Eight Gates]. It is an ultimate, suicidal Taijutsu sequence that forces the user's biological cells to violently burn away their own life expectancy, converting their life force into a temporary, cataclysmic ocean of pure chakra.
Seeing the crimson-tinted aura erupting around her, the playful detachment finally vanished from Jiang Chen's face. His gaze turned incredibly serious.
In truth, Hato Yui's desperate deduction was half-correct—but she had completely missed the macro-picture.
Jiang Chen had indeed utilized the massive horde of Shadow Clones to deliver a crushing psychological blow to the invading force. However, his primary tactical reason for keeping his distance was rooted in a much more dangerous variable: Hato Yui's unique [Crystal Release Kekkei Genkai].
As a seasoned combatant, Jiang Chen understood the terrifying mechanics of her bloodline limit:
Absolute Material Conversion: Crystal Release is an exceptionally lethal anomaly. It possesses the terrifying property to instantaneously crystallize all physical matter it contacts—with the sole exception of pure, raw energy like Chakra.
The Close-Quarters Trap: The moisture in the air, the soil underfoot, and even the oxygen inside a target's lungs can be turned into solid crystal in a millisecond. If a physical combatant steps into a Master-level Crystal Release domain, the blood inside their very veins can be instantly converted into jagged, frozen shards.
This was the core reason Jiang Chen had handled the encounter with such calculated distance. He was entirely capable of crushing her in a direct attributes check, but the history of the New Era was written in the blood of arrogant powerhouses who had carelessly "fallen into the gutter" by underestimating a specialized, one-hit-kill gimmick. He had absolutely no intention of becoming a cautionary tale.
But now, facing a level 94 commander who had just set her own life force on fire to bridge the gap, the buffer zone was gone. It was time to end it.
The remaining [Shadow Clones] in the clearing, having put an end to their respective targets, instantly pivoted and converged on Hato Yui to eliminate the final threat.
But they never even touched her. Having burned her very life force to forcibly overcharge her chakra pathways, Hato Yui's output was at an absolute, apocalyptic peak. The moment the clones breached her immediate airspace, the sheer density of her radiating Crystal Release chakra seized them. Before their strikes could land, their physical forms were instantly petrified, solidifying into brittle, crimson crystal statues.
Ding, ding...
With the passing of a light breeze, the crystallized clones shattered inch by inch, dissolving into a glittering rain of red fragments that floated listlessly through the trees.
"I told you," Hato Yui whispered, her skin glowing with the volatile, self-destructive aura of the forbidden pressure points. She didn't even look at the dissolving shards, keeping her fanatical gaze locked entirely on Jiang Chen. "Those who underestimate me do not get a pleasant ending. I have staked my entire existence on this single microsecond. You cannot escape me..."
Before the final syllable could leave her lips, she vanished.
A blinding streak of red light cut through the battlefield. In less than a millisecond, she materialized dead in front of Jiang Chen. Instinctively, Jiang Chen attempted to execute a high-speed body flicker retreat—but the proximity trap was already sprung. The air around him snapped into a solid state, and the crystallization process climbed up his torso instantly, locking his joints and fixing him firmly to the coordinate.
"Die!"
Hato Yui screamed, shoving her palm violently against the crimson crystal encasing Jiang Chen's chest.
——CRACK!
With the sharp, metallic screech of solid matter fracturing under immense pressure, Jiang Chen's crystallized silhouette shattered into a dozen jagged pieces.
But there was no blood. No bone.
Instead, the broken fragments instantly dissolved amidst a sudden, dense puff of white tactical smoke, transforming right before her eyes into a heavy, weathered timber log.
Worse yet, the surface of the log was completely plastered in an intricate, overlapping matrix of high-grade [Explosive Tags], their fuses already burned down to the absolute edge.
"Nani?! The [Substitution Jutsu]?!"
Hato Yui's expression twisted into absolute horror. Her instincts screamed at her to abort and leap backward, but Jiang Chen's execution threshold was mathematically perfect. The timing of the substitution was so precise that the exact millisecond the illusion broke, the entire payload reached critical mass.
——BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
A series of cataclysmic, overlapping detonations tore through the forest, the violent roar shooting straight into the clouds like rolling thunder and violently shaking the bedrock of the valley. A massive column of thick black smoke and pulverized earth erupted upward, driven by a series of high-velocity shockwaves that rapidly billowed into a giant, burning mushroom cloud above the treeline.
"Good heavens... how many explosive tags did he manage to slap onto that log in a fraction of a second? The kinetic output is insane!" Lin Ye shielded his face from the intense thermal backwash, his eyes wide with shock.
"No, look at the detonation pattern," Wang Shanshan analyzed, her voice tight with awe. "The volume of tags wasn't actually that high. It's that his synchronization was absolute. Every single tag ignited at the exact same microsecond, preventing any secondary energy bleed. Because the collective force peaked simultaneously, the destructive output multiplied exponentially!"
"Wait a minute..." Yuan Danqing blinked, staring at the blazing crater. "Why does this specific tactical sequence look so incredibly familiar?"
"How could it not be?" Li Yanran muttered, her eyes reflecting the orange glow of the fires. "During that ambush by the Chen family's assassin squad, the enemy tried to use this exact routine. But compared to that assassin... Jiang Chen's mastery over the mechanical execution is on an entirely different level. He's operating with divine proficiency."
Behind the front lines, the squad stood entirely dumbfounded.
The strategy Jiang Chen had just deployed wasn't inherently complex or secretive. In fact, ever since he had taken the initiative to publicly post the correct tactical applications of baseline E-rank academy skills online, the "Substitution + Explosive Tag" trap had become standard meta across the network. Thousands of Contractors used it daily.
But sometimes, the more ordinary a technique is, the more it demands absolute, flawless genius to weaponize it effectively at a high-tier level.
Jiang Chen had calculated the entire interaction down to the millisecond—the exact depth of her crystallization domain, the precise moment her palm would strike, and the microscopic window required to trigger the blast. He had completely read her movement path and let her walk straight into her own execution.
But what truly made their scalps tingle was a terrifying realization: Not a single person on the entire battlefield had noticed him casting the Substitution.
The foundational essence of the Substitution Jutsu is, at its core, a high-speed sleight of hand. To execute it successfully against a high-level opponent, you must completely deceive the visual and sensory perception of everyone watching. If the transition is tracked for even a fraction of a frame, the trap loses all tactical value.
Jiang Chen hadn't just used a basic skill; he had completely rewritten the limits of how an E-rank technique could perform against a Level 94 Commander.
It was the ultimate realization of the strategy: a trap is only a trap if the enemy remains completely blind to it. The moment it is seen through, it becomes nothing more than a useless display.
A moment later, as the suffocating dust and acrid smoke slowly drifted away, the devastating reality of the blast was laid bare. Lying quietly at the absolute epicenter of the scorched, cratered earth was a broken, mangled body. It was Hato Yui.
Her skin, previously glowing with the volatile, crimson aura of her forbidden life-burning technique, was now cold and gray. There wasn't a single spark of vitality left within her frame. She was dead as dead could be, her grand ambitions of eternal glory at the Nanga Shrine buried forever in the dirt of Great Xia.
Across the rest of the blood-soaked battlefield, the final metallic echoes of combat completely died out. Jiang Chen's relentless Shadow Clones had finished their grim work, systematically slaughtering every single subordinate Hato Yui had brought into the forest. Not a single invading Contractor was left standing. The entire division had been utterly eradicated.
With the area secured, Jiang Chen calmly raised a hand, dispelling the remaining legion of copies. In a massive, synchronized hiss of white tactical smoke, thousands of clones vanished into thin air.
It was only then, as the smoke cleared, that Li Yanran and the others gasped in realization. Jiang Chen's actual, physical body wasn't standing back where the explosion occurred—he was standing right there among the disappearing clones, entirely untouched. He had been hidden in plain sight within the crowd the entire time.
The revelation completely opened their eyes, shattering their previous understanding of combat mechanics.
Who would have thought that a massive deployment of Shadow Clones could be weaponized this way? It wasn't just about overwhelming the enemy with numbers; it was about creating a flawless, living cloak of misdirection. Reality within illusion, illusion within reality—it was an absolute masterclass in psychological warfare.
Good grief, they had just learned another terrifying trick!