Chapter 107: Shattering the Jade

Silence held the plaza for three full heartbeats.

Then the noise came back in a wave of gasps, shouts, the rustle of a thousand robes as disciples leaned forward.

Lin Tian stood with his sword point down, his breath a ragged scrape in his throat. Every muscle trembled from the backlash of the Vaporizing Strike. His dantian felt like a hollow gourd, scraped clean.

Across from him, Mu Chen stared at the hole in his vanished armor. He touched his chest, his fingers coming away dry.

The strike had been so precise it erased only the spiritual construct, leaving his physical body untouched. That was the true insult. It wasn’t a wound. It was a demonstration of absolute control.

“You…” Mu Chen’s voice was a broken thing. The translucent jade sheen was gone from his skin, leaving it pale and clammy. His seventh-level Core Spirit Realm aura, once a crushing pressure, now flickered like a guttering candle. “You dare…”

Lin Tian didn’t answer. He was busy counting the cost. His meridians ached from the forced fusion.

The System interface flickered at the edge of his vision, a warning in red characters: Spiritual Exhaustion. Vessel Integrity: 58%. He ignored it.

The fight wasn’t over. He could see it in Mu Chen’s eyes—the humiliation curdling into something far more dangerous.

Elder Boran’s voice boomed from the high platform. “Mu Chen! The contest is decided. The resonance—”

“The contest,” Mu Chen interrupted, his head lifting, “is decided when I say it is.”

He wasn’t looking at the elders. He was looking at the crowd. At the rows of Frozen Sword faction disciples standing closest to the arena, their faces a mix of shock and dawning fear.

Lin Tian’s instincts screamed a warning. Something’s wrong.

Mu Chen didn’t gather qi from the air. He didn’t assume a stance. He simply raised his hands, palms facing the crowd, and clenched.

It wasn’t a technique Lin Tian recognized. It was something older, darker. The air didn’t grow cold. It grew thin

. A low, sub-audible hum vibrated through the stone underfoot.

The first disciple to fall was a young man in Frozen Sword grey, standing barely twenty paces from the arena’s edge.

He choked, clutching his chest. His vibrant face, flush with youth and health, seemed to wither. Fine lines etched themselves around his eyes.

His black hair streaked with grey at the temples. He collapsed to his knees, gasping for air that wouldn’t come.

Then another. And another.

A ripple of decay passed through the front ranks. Disciples cried out, stumbling back, but an invisible force held them in place.

Thin, ghostly strands of silver light—their life force, their vital essence—were being torn from their bodies. The strands snaked through the air, coiling toward Mu Chen’s outstretched hands.

“The Forbidden Siphon!” Elder Shen Ruoyi’s voice was sharp with horror. “Stop him!”

But the other elders were frozen, either in shock or calculation. This was a technique lost to the sect’s darkest archives. It consumed the lifespans of others to fuel a temporary, catastrophic surge in the user’s power. It was a path of no return.

Mu Chen’s pale skin began to glow with a sickly, phosphorescent light. The flickering aura around him stabilized, then swelled, pushing past his previous limits. The air crackled with stolen vitality. He was growing stronger, but his eyes… his eyes were empty. Hollow.

He’ll kill them all, Lin Tian thought. The Frozen Sword disciples, his own faction, were just fuel to him.

Lin Tian’s body moved before his mind caught up. He couldn’t attack Mu Chen directly—not yet. The siphon field was a defensive maelstrom around him. He had to protect the crowd first.

He slammed the tip of his jian into the platform stone. Not to attack. To anchor.

“System,” he grunted, reaching inward. “Expand the Vessel. Now.”

The Vessel of Tranquil Mist wasn’t an attack skill. It was a domain, evolved from the Veil of Tranquil Mist he’d used to hide his room. A technique of containment, of calm. Of creating a space where external interference couldn’t penetrate.

He had never tried to expand it this far.

A silvery-grey mist erupted from Lin Tian’s body. It didn’t billow like smoke. It flowed like water, rapid and purposeful, spreading across the arena floor in a perfect, expanding circle. It washed over the stone, over the collapsed disciples, and hit the edge of the crowd.

Where the mist met the ghostly silver strands of the life siphon, it didn’t clash. It absorbed

. The mist acted like a spiritual sponge, drinking the invasive energy, neutralizing its pull. The viscous strands snapped, dissolving into harmless motes of light.

The pressure holding the front-row disciples released. They stumbled back, coughing, their aging process halted mid-way. They were weakened, their lifespans shortened, but they were alive.

Lin Tian felt the strain instantly. Expanding the domain to cover a quarter of the plaza was like holding up a collapsing mountain. His vision blurred. Vessel Integrity: 49%. Every inch of the mist’s expansion drained his already crippled foundation.

But it worked. The siphon was contained. Mu Chen could only draw from what he’d already stolen.

Mu Chen’s hollow gaze turned toward him. “You… always in the way.” His voice was a chorus of stolen whispers. He lunged, not with a weapon, but with a clawed hand trailing tendrils of stolen life.

Lin Tian yanked his sword from the stone and met the charge.

The clash was pure concussive force. His blade met Mu Chen’s palm like a cracking bell. He was thrown back ten feet, arms numb. Mu Chen’s power was bloated and unstable, but immense.

Can’t match strength. Have to outlast. That power is finite—it’s burning him up.

He could see it. Fine cracks were appearing in Mu Chen’s glowing skin, leaking wisps of silver light. The Forbidden Siphon was a poison, consuming the user’s own spiritual matrix to contain it. Mu Chen was a kettle about to explode.

Lin Tian switched tactics. He stopped blocking and let the Moonfrost Sword Dance guide his feet into evasion instead. He became a ghost in the mist, sliding around heavy blows, conserving energy, letting borrowed time run out.

“Stand and fight, you coward!” Mu Chen’s voice distorted as he unleashed a wild blast of glacial energy, corrosive with silver light, pitting the stone where it landed.

Lin Tian didn’t answer. He breathed. Each cycle pulled from his dense Fifth Level core, from faint echoes of Xueya’s ice and Su Lan’s fire—distant now, the bond stretched thin, but still a bedrock.

Mu Chen’s attacks slowed. The glow pulsed erratically. The cracks widened.

Now.

Lin Tian planted his feet and lowered his sword toward the ground between them. Mu Chen saw the opening. With a final, grating scream, he gathered all the chaotic stolen power into his right fist and drove it forward to obliterate Lin Tian’s torso.

Lin Tian sidestepped, just enough. The fist tore past, deathly cold shredding his robes.

He reversed his grip. Not a sword anymore—a needle. A surgeon’s tool. His target wasn’t heart or throat. It was the root.

The dantian.

As Mu Chen’s momentum carried him over-extended, Lin Tian struck. Not a slash. A tap. He channelled the last coherent thought in his mind—not destruction, but reset—and imprinted the minuscule spark of Ice Flame Qi on his blade with a single command: Return to Zero.

There was no explosion. The sickly glow winked out. The cracks sealed. The stolen aura vanished.

Mu Chen stumbled, staring down at the unmarked skin where the blade had touched. Then he felt it—a hollow absence where his core should have been. His cultivation from the seventh level of Core Spirit Realm down collapsed in on itself. It didn’t shatter. It deflated.

He tried to summon his qi. Nothing answered. He tried to feel the familiar cold of his glacial energy. Only void.

A low, broken sound escaped his lips—not a scream. The sound of a world ending. He sank to his knees.

Lin Tian pulled his sword back, swaying as the mist dissipated around him. The plaza was utterly silent.

Elder Boran descended and landed between them, face ashen. “What did you do to him?”

“I didn’t break his dantian,” Lin Tian said, each word an effort. “I reset it. His Frozen Jade Body is intact. His cultivation has returned to its base state. He’s a mortal.”

The genius of the Azure Snow Sect. The chosen partner for the Ice Phoenix bloodline. Reduced to the very thing he had spent his life scorning.

Mu Chen lifted his head. His eyes were clear of the hollow glow, filled only with vast, uncomprehending emptiness.

“Cripple,” he whispered—the word meant for himself.

Lin Tian turned away. He scanned the high platforms until he found silver hair and worried eyes.

Across the plaza he found Su Lan, hand pressed to her mouth. Through the frayed threads of their bonds came a surge of relief so profound it felt like warmth.

Then the darkness rushed in. Vessel Integrity: 41% flickered and faded.

His knees buckled.

As Lin Tian’s consciousness wavered, the last thing he heard was Elder Shen Ruoyi’s voice, ringing with final authority across the silent plaza.

“The Contest of Resonance is concluded. The victor, and the true resonant bond, is Lin Tian.”

Then there was only quiet, and the distant, broken weeping of a man who had lost everything.

End of Chapter 107

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