Evolution - Chapter 85
Chapter 85
Ji Changqing leaned on her spear, standing quietly on the ring as she secretly regulated her breath.
Although she had only made two moves, it was a heavy burden in her current state.
A minute passed, and her opponent remained a crumpled heap on the floor, completely unable to fight back.
The referee declared Ji Changqing the winner!
She had a thirty-minute rest period. During this time, the arena staff would tally the gamblers’ votes. The person with the highest number of votes would be her next opponent.
On the StarNet, people who happened to be watching her live stream were going crazy.
“Is Ji Nine-Moves cheating? I’m going to report her!”
“I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it! With the strength-reducing buff in effect, how can someone take down an arena opponent in two moves!”
“This isn’t scientific!”
“So, the question is, is Ji Nine-Moves the bug, or is the StarNet program the bug?”
“Someone tried to follow her path before and got knocked out in the first match. Lighting a cigarette with a world-weary expression.jpg”
“Let me just weakly point out… have you guys noticed she’s a completely different person with a weapon in her hands compared to when she’s unarmed.”
“It’s like she’s two different people!”
“So she wasn’t even going all out during the qualifiers?”
“The more you think about it, the scarier it gets!”
“To the folks from the First and Second Military, don’t be scared! It’s your lucky day she drew a hell-difficulty mission! Most of her strength has been exposed! The god of luck is still looking out for you!”
“Hahaha, the person above is toxic. Why are you tagging the First and Second Military? They probably don’t want this kind of luck!”
“Exactly. What they want is Ji Nine-Moves’s—strength!”
“Am I the only one who wants to know what cultivation technique Ji Nine-Moves is practicing?”
“Nope.”
“Nope +1.”
“Nope + terminal number.”
“Only in your dreams.”
The benefit of a sufficiently long history was that there were enough tragedies to prove that forcibly seizing and cultivating a technique that made someone else powerful rarely ended well.
The dream of snatching a top-tier cultivation technique and making one’s family prosper was something people couldn’t even be bothered to dream about anymore.
“The idiot above, stop trying to start a fight and mislead people. Ji Nine-Moves’s technique was clearly tailor-made for her by an expert. Even if Student Ji were willing to teach you, you wouldn’t be able to learn it.”
“Whoa, it’s Big Boss Xingchen!”
“Student Ji is from Blue Star. Is Blue Star that amazing?”
“It’s probably just Student Ji who’s amazing, right?”
“Hahaha, the person above speaks the truth!”
“Big Boss Xingchen actually showed up? Is Student Ji that outstanding? Even Big Boss Xingchen is paying attention to her.”
The comments in the live stream quickly veered off-topic, with everyone calling for Big Boss Xingchen to love them again.
But the Big Boss they were all calling for had mercilessly abandoned them. He ignored the netizens’ creative attempts to spam the screen for his affection and instead focused his attention on Ji Changqing, who was meditating with her eyes closed.
After half an hour, Ji Changqing stood up, stretched her limbs, and walked through the passage onto the ring.
The viewers in the live stream held their breath. The spectators in the arena were in an uproar, wave after wave of sound roaring their support for her opponent.
None of them believed Ji Changqing could win this match.
But surely she could last a little longer, right?
This time, Ji Changqing’s opponent wielded a long whip.
His whip was a specially made three-section soft whip. At its shortest, it was 1.2 meters; at its longest, it could reach three meters. It could be long or short, and it even had a blade. When needed, he could press a trigger, and a 1.2-chi short blade would spring out.
Because of this disgustingly effective weapon, he feared neither close-quarters nor long-range combat.
This man was well-known in the arena. He wanted the same thing as Ji Changqing: a ten-match winning streak.
The only difference was that he cherished his life. If he wasn’t completely confident, he would decisively withdraw. As a result, despite fighting for nearly a month, he had yet to achieve his goal. His highest record was an eight-match streak.
He could have chosen not to accept this fight, but the arena’s offer was extremely tempting. If he won this match, it would count as three wins. He would then only need to win seven more to reach his goal.
Furthermore, his share of the betting pool would be doubled.
The moment the referee announced the start, her opponent attacked first. The long whip swept out, letting out a sharp whistle as it cut through the air at high speed.
Ji Changqing tried to get close. A flicker in her opponent’s eyes, a flick of his wrist, and the whip changed direction like a wave, rolling toward her. If she insisted on closing the distance, she would be walking right into a trap, about to be bound tightly by the whip.
She dodged in time, and the cracking whip didn’t strike her directly, but it still grazed her harshly a few times, the force imbued in it stinging her skin.
Unconsciously, she was forced further and further back, and the area covered by the whip’s shadow grew wider. Her opponent’s attacks were incredibly fast, at least twice as fast as her previous opponent. As Ji Changqing was forced to retreat, the three sections of the whip fully extended one by one. The spectators’ cheers grew louder, constantly shouting, “Kill her!”
A hint of triumph appeared on her opponent’s face.
The ring was only so large. With his three-section whip fully extended, plus the length of his arm and the hidden blade at the tip, he controlled a five-meter radius around himself.
His opponent was forced to constantly run around the perimeter, draining her stamina. It was only a matter of time before she was his for the taking.
In the eyes of the spectators, Ji Changqing was like a small boat in a stormy sea, appearing and disappearing amidst the dense shadows of the whip. Every move she made was a touch-and-go, only slightly altering the whip’s direction to facilitate her escape.
Her opponent, and the spectators, all thought the same thing: what good is being skilled in close combat? If you can’t get close during a fight, you’re helpless against your opponent.
When fighting someone with a long whip, a rash attack was risky. First, you feared the whip would dissipate the force of your attack, rendering it useless. Second, you feared your own weapon would get entangled, which would be a complete disaster.
Among everyone present, besides Du Zhong, perhaps only those who had placed heavy bets on Ji Changqing to win were hoping she could reverse the situation of being chased and beaten.
The two were locked in combat for nearly ten minutes before someone finally sensed something was wrong.
Ji Changqing wasn’t being whipped to a bloody pulp like those before her. Ten minutes had passed, and aside from her current inability to counterattack, she didn’t look disheveled in the slightest.
Her figure flickered in and out of view. At first, they thought she was at a disadvantage, forced to dodge. But now, thinking back, if she were truly at a disadvantage, how could she have avoided being struck squarely even once?
She was clearly handling it with ease.
Her opponent probably figured it out too. His face darkened. After a moment of hesitation, he chose to change his move.
At the same time, Ji Changqing fought back.
Unlike the stormy assault of her first match, this time she was unhurried. Everyone could clearly see the trajectory of her spear.
Compared to her opponent’s tempestuous attacks, her move was as slow as an old man faking a fall, calm and gentle.
The tip of her spear tapped the air three times.
The crowd’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets!
First, the tip of her spear struck the joint connecting the hidden blade to the whip.
The short blade flew off, out of control.
Second, sparks flew as her spear tip grazed the joint of the third section.
Third, the joint of the second section met her spear tip head-on.
The long whip shattered, section by section.
And along with it, her opponent’s pride.
“Impossible!” Her opponent was left with only a 1.2-meter broken section of the whip. He swung it frantically, making the soft whip feel like a hard rod. “How could it be shattered by vibrations? Urk…”
The short blade that Ji Changqing had knocked away spun, changed direction, and pierced him through the chest from behind. He opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. His right hand clutched the tip of the blade protruding from his left chest as he slowly collapsed to the ground.
The gamblers erupted in curses. “Some expert he was, dying so pathetically?! Damn it, made me lose my money!”
Du Zhong’s mouth hung wide open, completely stunned.
She won that easily? Why did it feel so unreal?
The audience in the Alliance was more direct.
“Was that… a fluke?”
“Student Ji makes a move, and her opponent dies by his own blade?”
“So, was that good luck or great strength?”
“Good luck, right? Who knew it would be such a coincidence.”
…
There were no commentators for the preliminary rounds. The crowd frantically spammed the live stream chat, calling for a master to come and explain.
“Student Ji Nine-Moves used a brute-force method. During that game of cat and mouse, with every contact between her spear and the whip, she was using a hidden force to send vibrations through it. But her control was so good that her opponent didn’t notice.”
The audience gasped! Forgetting to worship Big Boss Xingchen, they were all questioning their own existence.
If what Ji Nine-Moves did was a brute-force method, then what did that make them?!
They just wanted to kneel!
“At the end, when her opponent realized she was just toying with him and tried to switch tactics for a big move, the internal energy he channeled, combined with the force of her strikes on the key joints, and the accumulated vibrations from before, caused the whip to suddenly shatter.”
Finally, Big Boss Xingchen concluded like a particularly strict dean: “I feel like she still hasn’t used her full strength. I hope she has an even better performance later.”
Ji Changqing lowered her eyes, directing the internal energy from her dantian to repair the damage to the meridians in her hands. At the same time, she slowly infused internal energy into her depleted acupoints, storing it away.
That last move had seemed simple, but the high-intensity, high-rhythm, and continuous output of internal energy had slightly damaged the meridians in her hands. They needed to be slowly repaired to soothe the soreness.
Her physique level had, of course, been reduced, and even her own body tempering technique felt weakened.
The specific manifestation was that her internal energy was always present, but its output was not allowed to exceed a certain threshold.
She dared to fight in the arena, and with at least seventy percent confidence, because while the output of internal energy from her dantian was limited by a threshold, the internal energy stored in her acupoints was not.
She had calculated carefully. Through her relentless cultivation day and night, she had opened 108 acupoints throughout her body to store yuan energy. She had used the reserves of six acupoints to defeat the first opponent, but it had taken the internal energy from fifteen acupoints to defeat the second.
She knew the first opponent was the weakest and the second was likely the strongest. She wondered if her subsequent opponents would be a middle ground between the two.
If so, and each match consumed the energy of twelve acupoints, she might be in danger by the final match.
The half-hour rest between matches wasn’t enough time to channel the internal energy from her dantian into her acupoints.
Beneath her calm expression, Ji Changqing was frantically calculating the cost of each match, resolving to be more frugal in the coming fights. If she reached the final match only to find her energy reserves depleted, wouldn’t their mission be a failure?!
On another planet in the Alliance, a man closed the comment page for the user ID “Xingchen.”
He opened a specially encrypted terminal, entered his authorization command, and requested Ji Changqing’s file.
At the same time, he entered the first name on a candidate evaluation list: Ji Changqing.
After a moment’s thought, he carefully lit up a star next to her name and clicked send.
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