Cultivation Nerd: Chapter 374

Chapter 374 - Sad Losses

After that brief meeting with the two youngsters, neither of whom seemed older than their mid to late twenties, fewer people began dying on the front lines. Scouts reported fewer attackers and a noticeable decline in traps hidden throughout the forests, fields, and swamps. Our border with the other great sects was vast, spanning multiple biomes, so the change was impossible to miss.

A few days later, fighting had almost ceased on both sides. When clashes did occur, they rarely ended in casualties, as both sides had been ordered to prioritize retreat.

The war front against the Azure Frost Sect had genuinely calmed down. It was surprising how quickly things had shifted, all stemming from a single brief conversation with the other side.

So little was happening there that Song Song ordered a significant portion of the stationed troops to redeploy against the Titanic Blade Sect. That sect had also volunteered to somewhat lessen the conflict, but Song Song interpreted it as a sign of weakness. It was more of a gut feeling than a decision grounded in evidence, but her instincts had proven right so often that I saw no real reason to argue.

When we arrived on the battlefield against the Titanic Blade Sect, a strange wave swept through this new front line. Because we advanced aggressively, the other side seemed to realize their mistake in softening their stance and overcorrected, launching far more vicious attacks in response.

The Titanic Blade Sect, after all, was far more confrontational by nature.

A blade swung down like an axe, aiming to chop me apart as if I were a log. The attacker was a gray-robed disciple whose group had attacked mine on sight.

The momentum behind his strike made the air ripple and sing, but despite its power, it wasn’t fast enough. I shifted my body aside.

Unable to redirect such a committed blow, he watched as his blade slammed into the stony ground, cutting through it like butter and sending cracks spidering across the earth.

He didn’t even glance at the devastation. Instead, he stared at me with naked fury, as if I had personally killed someone dear to him.

In war, it wasn’t uncommon for close friends or family to die. This world also granted people enough personal power to entertain thoughts of revenge on a battlefield. That power gave them confidence, just enough to stop them from fearing death the way ordinary soldiers would in the trenches of a warfront.

“Did someone close to you die?” I asked.

He tried to raise his sword again, but I imbued Qi into my foot, forming a translucent jade construct along its sole, and stepped down on the edge of his jian blade.

“Fighting so aggressively might allow someone to fight above their level if their attacks land. But you and I don't have the instincts needed to fight full of rage without our overall combat power dropping. We are average,” I told him, a jade sword mirroring his own forming in my hand as I leveled it at his neck. “Think about those people dear to you, even the dead ones. Would they want you to die like this?”

I didn’t mind if enemies retreated. I wasn’t desperate enough to chase them down simply to reap their lives.

My opponent was only a Qi Gathering Cultivator and no real threat to me.

Now, I was strong enough to afford mercy to those weaker than myself.

This was clearly a passionate guy, someone who still had much more to give to the world. It would be a shame for him to die on this battlefield.

His appearance was nothing special. He looked like an average kid in his late teens, with disheveled black hair and a bit of scruff on his chin that couldn’t even be called a beard.

He released his grip on his sword, letting my foot push the weapon down to the ground. But there wasn’t a flicker of hesitation in his eyes. He immediately pulled out another similar-looking weapon from his storage ring and swung it at the jade blade aimed at his throat, bashing it aside.

Afterward, he jumped back and glanced at his new sword, now chipped where it had clashed with my jade construct.

Unlike real weapons, which required skilled blacksmiths to make them sharp enough, I could conjure jade constructs that were impossibly sharp and sometimes even doing things that defied the laws of physics for normal weapons. Their only real weakness was their lack of weight, and if I handed them to someone else, the imbalance would throw off their skills since they were trained with real blades.

“Are you going to attack me?” I asked him.

Just like before, he charged straight at me, his feet digging into the rocky ground that had turned muddy from recent rain, leaving deep footprints behind.

What a shame. Now I was going to have to kill him. I wasn’t stupid enough to keep showing mercy to someone who attacked me repeatedly.

Having made that decision, I stopped paying much attention to him and turned my focus toward Tingfeng.

My disciple was fighting a cultivator at the peak of Qi Gathering. Their swords clashed in rapid succession, sharp whizzing sounds followed by sparks dancing through the air.

They were both fast, and Tingfeng’s opponent was talented. His swordsmanship resembled a raging tornado, creating the illusion that a blade always lurked at some unseen angle, striking at weaknesses no one else could perceive.

Unfortunately for him, he had met someone like Tingfeng on the battlefield.

My sword-loving disciple moved like a bird, flowing through incoming slashes as if his body were made of water. His blade traced strange, sinuous paths, like a serpent with a will of its own.

They clashed in a blur of movement. Until today, I had never thought swordsmanship could be particularly beautiful, but my eyes were being opened to new possibilities.

As his teacher, even though I had never taught him much directly, I understood Tingfeng’s fighting style better than most. He was adapting mid-fight, copying his opponent’s techniques and stripping away what he deemed unnecessary before reflecting them back in refined form.

On the other side, Jiang Yeming winced as a small cut appeared on her cheek from some kind of wind technique. She was fighting three opponents, one Qi Gathering Cultivator and two at Foundation Establishment. One wielded the wind element, the other the sword element.

Tingfeng hadn’t finished his battle yet, clearly learning a great deal from the exchange.

Jiang Yeming, on the other hand, was in genuine danger fighting while still refusing to reveal her trump cards.

The wind cultivator swung his sword, releasing a flying slash of condensed wind that was almost invisible to the naked eye, its presence betrayed only by the twisting area around it and the shrill, tearing sound it made as it cut through the air.

Jiang Yeming reacted instantly. She leaned backward in a fluid motion, her athleticism on full display as the back of her head came within a breath of the ground. The slash screamed past her face and continued on, cleaving through trees and ripping open the earth behind her, sending rocks, roots, and dirt exploding into the air.

If it had struck her directly, there would have been nothing left to save.

The sword cultivator, meanwhile, raised his blade to his lips and whispered to it, as though confiding in a living thing. Strange, dark markings began to crawl along the length of the sword like a swarm of ants.

Oh? An array of some kind? It leaned closer to curses than traditional arrays, something I’d never seen before.

Jiang Yeming noticed it as well. Her eyes narrowed, and instead of retreating, she straightened and charged straight at the sword cultivator. She crossed the distance in an instant, very fast for her stage, but the moment she brought her blade down, her eyes widened. She aborted the strike and leapt back just as a tornado of razor-sharp wind erupted around the sword cultivator, forming almost instantly.

The Qi in that wind didn’t feel like his own.

As expected, the wind cultivator had extended his palm toward his teammate, shielding him from a killing blow.

When cultivators truly knew how to fight together, the pressure they exerted wasn’t one plus one equals two. It was far more than that, more like a multiplicative force.

Seeing his chance, the Qi Gathering cultivator in their group acted. He activated a sword technique that spawned multiple illusionary blades around him, identical in appearance, and only one of them was real.

Silvery Qi flared around Jiang Yeming like blazing fire. From above a massive chain, thick as a tree trunk, materialized and plunged downward like a colossal serpent.

Another tornado of sharp wind surged up around the Qi Gathering cultivator, but the titanic chain didn’t care. It punched straight through the gale and wrapped around him.

A sickening crunch echoed through the battlefield. As the chain tightened, the sound grew worse making wet, grinding, nightmare-inducing noises. The wind and sword cultivators stared in horror as their teammate’s body was crushed into something unrecognizable before dropping to the ground in a bloody splatter.

Broken bones jutted out at impossible angles of elbows, ribs, and joints. Turning him into a grotesque mass of flesh, bone, and scraps of gray robe.

“Ten Sword Array!”

The sword cultivator screamed, pulling nine swords from his storage ring while leveling the blade in his hand at Jiang Yeming. A small sword-shaped tattoo appeared between his eyebrows.

The swords floated into the air, surrounded by azure Qi, orbiting him as though each possessed its own will.

This was the Titanic Blade Sect’s famous Sword Array. It came in tiers: One Sword Array for beginners who barely qualified as array practitioners, followed by the Ten Sword Array, then Hundred, Thousand, and finally the legendary Ten Thousand Sword Array.

It was a renowned array created by their eighth sect leader, with each sword acting as if it were independently thinking.

…That really was a nice technique.

The swords scattered at once. Some carved strange arcs through the air, zig-zagging around trees, while others slipped low and vanished into the grass, lying in wait.

Huh. Tracking all of their positions consciously was difficult. Still, the array had a glaring weakness; if one focused, the Qi within each sword could be sensed. This formation would have benefited greatly from a Qi-Suppressing Array layered on top. At higher tiers, that flaw vanished naturally; with hundreds or thousands of swords in motion, they created their own sword domain, the overlapping Qi masking individual signatures entirely. But at this level? The gaps were obvious.

The swords didn’t attack Jiang Yeming. Instead, they all turned on me.

Several streaked through the air in feints while others attempted ambushes, one of them even burrowed underground, hiding its course.

Even so… something was off.

One sword was missing. I couldn’t sense it at all.

Had the caster used a concealment technique? No. That would have been unnecessarily taxing, and the sword cultivator’s Qi wasn’t shifting in a way that suggested a secondary technique. The more likely answer was simpler and smarter. One of the swords was an artifact capable of suppressing its own Qi.

Clever.

One blade led the charge, lunging straight for my face. It stopped an inch away, frozen in midair as a jade-colored lock snapped shut around its hilt.

The rest followed instantly. Eight more blades screamed toward me in chaotic patterns, each halted just shy of my skin, locked in place one after another.

Nine swords in total.

Some novices would mistakenly count the blade in the caster’s hand as the tenth, assuming it completed the array, but that wasn’t how it worked. Even without knowing the precise structure of this formation, basic array theory made it obvious. Even numbers weakened rituals. Symmetry, parity, and shape: these things mattered. Arrays followed their own internal logic, not unlike code.

I crouched.

The suspended swords adjusted immediately, maintaining that precise inch of distance from my body.

I placed two fingers against the ground and released a pulse of Qi.

Even if the hidden sword suppressed its Qi, it couldn’t erase its physical presence. Unlike Song Song, it couldn’t simply vanish from reality.

The response was instant.

A tree to my left exploded apart as the concealed blade burst free, shooting straight for my neck.

Jade strings lashed out in a blink, coiling around the sword’s shaft and hilt. Their other ends wrapped tightly around nearby trees, forming a web-like lattice that arrested the blade mid-flight.

I rubbed my chin, studying it.

“Huh. So it wasn’t a Qi-suppressing artifact after all,” I said thoughtfully. “You cast an array on the blade beforehand and prepared it from the very start.”

If our gap in array mastery hadn’t been so vast, he would have been a genuinely dangerous opponent. Even uncovering the trick wouldn’t have guaranteed safety.

…A shame, really.

“At higher levels, it is just a cheap misdirection trick that wouldn’t work most times,” I told him. “Let me show you a bit about array techniques that don’t require a barrier to set up.”

I raised two fingers toward him. The surrounding Qi grew stale, heavy, as lightning crackled in the space before my hand, as though something invisible was charging.

The sword cultivator’s eyes widened, but instead of retreating, he reached into his storage ring and drew out another ten swords.

“Ten Swords Array: Phase Two!” he shouted.

I had never read of this before. It seemed the Titanic Blade Sect had refined its iconic array after all these years.

Another ten swords surged forward, wrapped in that same azure Qi, attacking in erratic rhythms once more. Some drifted lazily, others darted like eager fighters, while several moved in chaotic, unpredictable patterns.

“Heh, this really is an interesting array,” I smiled.

A thin beam of crackling blue Qi shot from my fingers. It traveled in a perfectly straight line, passing cleanly through the chaos of blades.

The technique was simple and predictable in movement, but it compensated with sheer speed. Fast enough that, for someone encountering it for the first time, even a Foundation Establishment Cultivator would struggle to react without understanding its mechanics.

As expected, a tornado of sharp, invisible wind erupted around the sword cultivator, his teammate once again defending him with impeccable timing.

I saw relief flood the sword cultivator’s eyes. Instincts forged through countless battles told him he was safe. That familiar technique had saved him before. It would save him again.

But that relief was a lie.

My blue beam pierced through the wind barrier with barely any loss of momentum. Had the sword cultivator attempted to defend himself directly, he might have lessened the damage, but everything was happening too fast. His ally acted on instinct. He felt relief on instinct.

And instinct betrayed him.

The beam punched straight through the sword tattoo between his brows with a sickening, crunching sound. Blood spilled from his eyes as the Qi bored through his skull, leaving a clean, smoldering hole straight through his head.

The attack ended in an instant.

On the far side, I could see straight through where the beam had burned its path.

The flying swords dropped lifelessly to the ground. This was only a Level One Array; it could not function independently of its caster.

“You know,” I said quietly, “this is kind of inefficient to use as an array. At this level, pure Qi control would be easier, faster, and far more flexible.”

He couldn’t hear me. He was already dead.

What a shame. Another rather talented cultivator gone from this world.