Chapter Thirty-Four: The Sword of Hidden Power

“You’re going to drive me mad! Why don’t you just hit him with your sword? Didn’t you say you were so capable?” Ruoxi snapped in exasperation.

“Where would I get a sword?” Moshan blinked, his thoughts in utter confusion. The question was so abrupt, so absurd, that he had not even reacted at once.

He fixed his gaze on Ruoxi, and suddenly a flash of insight struck him. Several images flickered through his mind—the strange scenes beneath the forest of Kilimanjaro, the very scenes in which he had held a long sword in his hand.

“Sword... sword!” Moshan groped over his own body, trying to find it.

“Where on earth is it?”

“It seems my pressure on you still isn’t enough. You still have the nerve to lose your temper at someone else?” The words came from the man in black. His voice was crisp and pleasant; if one were not listening carefully, one might even mistake it for a woman’s.

Clear and melodious, yet threaded with a faint masculine resonance, it had clearly been deliberately lowered, and still one could hear the mockery in it.

The sword in the man in black’s hand seemed to darken by another degree. As he moved it, even a trace of dust seemed to flake away from the blade.

“Damn it!” Ruoxi immediately felt the crushing force of the man in black’s unleashed power and grit her teeth.

“Give me everything you have. I want to see just how much power the famed Soul-Stirring Sword can display in your hands.”

The instant the words fell, the sword in the man in black’s hand seemed to turn even darker. With a twist of his right wrist, he changed a thrust into a slash. The moment it descended, it dragged the air with it, giving off a shrieking howl.

The force struck with a booming impact.

Ruoxi’s pupils contracted. Her right hand lifted at the last possible moment to meet the black blade head-on.

A resounding crash rang out as tremendous force converged in one place, producing a piercing, grating sound. Several wisps of dust immediately flaked away from the black sword. The air seemed to compress all at once, and the dark particles that had fallen to the ground were stirred up, bursting outward like a sudden whirlwind. Moshan could feel it most keenly; the wind howled past his ears, carrying the grasses and trees within the garden into a rustling, trembling chorus.

When the Soul-Stirring Sword met the black sword, the immense counterforce traveled through her wrist, making her arm tremble slightly. It was the sensation of an arm about to lose strength, on the verge of numbness.

At the same time, the two were immediately driven apart by the shockwave of the collision. Ruoxi’s feet scraped across the ground as she retreated nearly a meter, while the man in black merely stepped back a few paces.

“Damn it! If I’d reached the level of Transformation, I could unleash so many techniques. Now I can only infuse my true energy into the blade. I really don’t want to use that move, but the side effects are severe...” Ruoxi’s chest rose and fell faintly as she thought bitterly to herself, regretting all the more why she had not trained harder before, bringing about this situation.

She was now at the peak of Dark Force, only one step away from becoming a Transformation expert, one who could let true essence flow throughout the entire body. A tiny stream could become a vast lake, and many formidable techniques could be released instantly. Her swordsmanship was already of an extremely high level, but the techniques themselves required a long time to build up power.

And now, under the pressure of the man in black, she could not display any of it. Without techniques, her actual strength had fallen by more than half.

“This sword of mine is called Blackless Ink. Don’t you know it grows stronger with every battle?” The man in black stood where he was, gently stroking the sword’s surface.

It seemed like he was mocking Ruoxi for not going all out. A peak Dark Force practitioner had already opened the meridians and could unleash techniques; if that person also cultivated a high enough internal art, many techniques would already be able to display real power. Yet Ruoxi had not unleashed a single move.

Whether from friction or the passage of time, dust once again fell from the blade, scattering around the man in black.

A few seconds later, the man in black moved again. His hand left the blade, and the blackness of the sword actually faded a little. He drove off the ground with his ankles like a gust of wind, charging straight at Ruoxi.

The black sword was already raised, as if it could cleave into Ruoxi’s body the very next second. And Ruoxi was still deciding whether or not to use that move—the one that could cause her true energy to surge wildly.

In the next instant, the man in black was already right before her eyes, as though he might pierce through her chest at any moment.

Her sword was just about to be raised, when she discovered a solid back standing before her.

The moment he had been called infuriating by Ruoxi, a tremendous sense of humiliation surged straight to Moshan’s head. Something deep within his body seemed to tremble in unwilling resistance, and when Ruoxi’s sword met the man in black’s sword, that sensation grew even stronger.

Subconsciously, he wanted to find that sword. Then, the next instant, a sword hilt gradually grew from his right hand. It was a black hilt—yes, that had to be it. The feeling in his heart intensified all the more.

The blade slowly extended from the hilt. It was a gray sword, and more than that, a sword that had never been sharpened.

“My martial skills are not bad either. I can even withstand a master of the Force of True Strength for a time!” Moshan said as he spoke, and the tip of his sword was aimed straight at the black sword in the man in black’s hand. The black blade immediately shifted off course by several degrees. Seeing Moshan suddenly appear, the man in black instantly retreated several paces.

Moshan used the sword in his hand to prove that he was not only good at being infuriating—he was also capable of protecting someone.