Chapter 563: Star Pivot Dao Discussion

“The Master sent me here for the Dao discussion.”

Ling Shuang finally spoke. Her voice was even colder and harder than the obsidian of the Star Pivot Hall. Every word she uttered struck the stone floor like the tip of an invisible sword slamming down with force.

“I walk the path of the sword. My Dao is not found in those tedious runes.”

Without waiting for Xuanheng to respond, she simply raised her right hand.

She pressed her index and middle fingers together, then slashed them diagonally through the air with casual, yet absolute, finality.

“Sssshhh——”

A sharp tearing sound, like cloth being violently ripped apart, exploded in the air.

An icy-blue sword intent coalesced out of thin air. It wasn’t a circuit formed by spiritual energy following any established path, nor was it a rune of gathering or dispersing. It was pure, undiluted killing intent, compressed by terrifying divine sense into a solid, freezing blade of light.

Then, without any pause, her wrist flipped.

The second sword.

The third.

The fourth.

The sound of intersecting sword intents was like dense raindrops hammering a frozen lake. In less than a single breath, seven icy-blue sword intents crisscrossed the void.

The angle, length, and spacing of each sword intent relative to the next were as precise as if they had been meticulously measured with the strictest formation ruler.

Seven sword intents hung suspended in the air three feet in front of Ling Shuang, forming an extremely minimalist killing formation. It had no embellishments, no redundancy, only the pure aura of death.

No formation flags. No spirit stones. No formation plate.

She needed no external objects to bear her Dao. All she needed was the killing intent within her heart that could freeze the soul itself, along with these seven razor-sharp sword beams.

The cuff of Ling Shuang’s left sleeve trembled slightly.

A black iron ball, its surface covered in natural cloud-like patterns, slid from her sleeve and dropped down.

From his spot below the stage, Luo Feng gasped sharply, involuntarily taking half a step back and muttering under his breath, “Cold iron from the extreme north’s frozen lands… You could throw that thing into an earth fire furnace for three days and three nights, and it wouldn’t even deform. And the Eldest Senior Sister is using that as a test target?”

Ling Shuang didn’t even glance at the iron-black ball. She simply flicked her wrist casually.

The black iron ball shot forward like a dark shadow, crashing straight into the death trap woven by the seven sword intents.

“Shhh.”

There was no ringing clash of metal on stone, only a faint, soft sound.

The moment the black iron ball passed through the first sword intent, it was sliced cleanly in two without any resistance. The cut surfaces were as smooth as a bronze mirror polished for a hundred years, even reflecting the light from the hall’s ceiling above.

The ball’s forward momentum didn’t stop. When it passed through the second sword intent, the two halves became four quarters.

As those fragments collided with the third sword intent, a grating, fine grinding sound filled the air. The indestructible cold iron instantly turned into a fine cloud of black powder, which scattered and fell onto the obsidian platform.

The remaining four icy-blue sword intents hung motionless in the air, not even a flicker of light trembling within them. They hovered there quietly, like four venomous snakes coiled in the shadows, utterly disinterested in such an insignificant prey. They were waiting for the kind of massive beast that would truly allow them to feast on fresh blood.

Deathly silence filled the hall.

Ling Shuang slowly lowered her right hand, gently wiping her index and middle fingertips on the fabric of her sleeve.

With a soft hum, the seven sword intents suspended in the void dissolved like melting ice and snow, vanishing without leaving even a trace of spiritual energy fluctuation.

“Seven swords are the current limit of this disciple.”

Ling Shuang’s voice remained cold. She didn’t bother to look at the stunned expressions below the stage, fixing her gaze directly on Xuanheng in the seat of honor.

“But this sword formation has a fatal flaw.” She paused, her tone carrying no attempt at self-justification. “It can only attack. There is no room for defense. If my enemy is faster than me and strikes before my first sword is formed, my sword array will be shattered before it is even complete.”

With those words, she turned around briskly, wasting no motion, and walked straight back to her original position. Her back remained as straight as a ramrod, as if staying on the stage for even a single extra moment was a waste of time she could spend practicing the sword.

Xuanheng did not speak immediately.

His deep, penetrating gaze lingered on the spot in the void where Ling Shuang had just shattered the black iron ball. His fingers tapped slowly, twice, on the obsidian armrest of his chair.

“Thump. Thump.”

The dull knocking sound echoed through the vast hall.

“Sword cultivators have always pursued an unyielding path, charging forward without looking back.” Xuanheng finally spoke. The cadence of his voice today seemed a beat slower than when he lectured on formation principles. “Unafraid of death, unafraid of failure, and even unafraid of their own sword breaking.”

Xuanheng’s gaze shifted slowly toward Ling Shuang. It was impossible to tell from his eyes whether it was approval or disappointment.

“But what a sword cultivator fears most is not that their sword isn’t fast enough. It’s that the moment the sword is broken, they won’t even know where they were too slow.”

Xuanheng’s fingers stopped tapping. With a light wave of his sleeve, he said, “You can see your own slowness. These seven swords were not practiced in vain. Next.”

Qin Yi, standing to the side, gently grabbed the spirit marten that was still sniffing the remnants of sword intent in the air and stuffed it into the wide pocket of his sleeve.

He patted down the wrinkles on his clothes, turned to Su Ming and Luo Feng with a gentle smile, and then walked toward the center of the platform.

Unlike Ling Shuang’s ice-cold, distant demeanor, Qin Yi’s steps were steady. Each footfall on the stone slab carried a reassuring sense of weight.

He stopped where Ling Shuang had just stood and took a deep breath.

As he inhaled, the air in the Star Pivot Hall, which had been made sharp and even murderous by Ling Shuang’s sword intent, underwent a miraculous reversal.

A faint, emerald-green light slowly spread from under Qin Yi’s feet. The light was like a tender sprout breaking through the soil in early spring, carrying an irresistible, abundant vitality.

“The Eldest Senior Sister’s Dao lies in the word ‘kill’.”

Qin Yi’s voice was warm and thick, his pace neither hurried nor slow. “But this disciple’s Dao lies in ‘life’.”

He slowly raised his hands, palms facing upward, and spread his ten fingers open gently in front of him.

Without needing any deliberate spiritual energy guidance, specks of green light drifted from his fingertips. In the air, these lights did not coalesce into sharp lines but instead transformed into circles of soft halos, rippling like water waves.

“This disciple spends his days at the Beast Peak, dealing with birds and beasts,” Qin Yi said as his hands continued to move. The green halos wove together and merged in the air, gradually outlining the rough shape of a massive, intricate formation radiating endless warmth.

“Those spirit beasts don’t understand formation principles or the laws of heaven and earth. They only know how to seek benefit and avoid harm. They know to go wherever there is life.”

Qin Yi’s wrists suddenly turned downward, and his palms pressed toward the obsidian platform from a distance.

“Humm——”

An emerald-green circular formation, a full ten feet in diameter, instantly spread across the platform.

Su Ming narrowed his eyes slightly from below the stage.

Under the probing of his Golden Core divine sense, he could clearly see that the formation contained no killing or defensive runes. It was densely packed with only the three gentle, basic runes: ‘Gathering,’ ‘Life,’ and ‘Absorb.’

But Qin Yi’s arrangement of these runes defied common sense. Instead of forming a closed loop for the spiritual energy, he deliberately left tiny outlets at forty-eight key nodes of the formation.

The abundant life-attribute spiritual energy slowly seeped out through these forty-eight outlets, like a massive, warm nest patiently waiting for the arrival of some life form.

The spirit marten hidden in Qin Yi’s sleeve suddenly let out a cheerful cry. It shot out of the cuff like a white bolt of lightning, diving headfirst into the center of the emerald-green formation.

The marten rolled around happily inside the formation. Under the nourishment of the life-attuned spiritual energy, its pure white fur began to grow noticeably thicker at a visible rate. Even its faint aura, which had been that of a mere Second-Rank spirit beast, slowly began to rise under this nurturing.

“The formation this disciple has set up is called ‘Returning Nourishment to All Beings’.”