Yagyu Munenori, who had long enjoyed a great reputation in the outside world and was called the number one swordsmanship master of the island country, felt very complicated inside at this moment.
Outside, he was praised by many swordsmanship masters as the only sword master, unmatched in strength. But when he came here, he was almost humbled to the dust. His strength had roughly become the bottom of the pack. Especially when he looked at the old acquaintances and romantic rivals from back then, Azure Dragon and Brahma, both of whom had already stepped into the innate level, while he was still only at the Dan level. This blow was too great, almost leaving him with a psychological shadow.
Back then, the three of them had all been comparable in strength. Even if they had not been exactly on the same level, he had still been in the middle. But now, he had suddenly become the weakest one, and the gap between him and the other two was enormous and difficult to make up for.
Yagyu Munenori’s heart was complicated, and Tsukahara Bokuden, the white-haired, youthful-faced old man who had already lived seventy or eighty years, was no less complicated inside than Yagyu Munenori.
At this moment, his heart was likewise full of mixed feelings!
Back then, the three people before him could only be considered his juniors. Even if all three joined forces to attack him, he had not feared them in the slightest, and in the end he had badly injured all three. But now, after so many years had passed, two of these three had already grown to his level, while he had basically still been standing in place.
He could not even deal with just one Brahma anymore.
Not to mention Azure Dragon, who had just arrived and sent Brahma staggering back with one stick.
For some reason, Tsukahara Bokuden could very clearly and confidently know Azure Dragon’s strength. Like him and Brahma, it was at the level of innate gang energy outer gang, and he had not yet begun tempering his own physical body to reach the inner gang realm.
But for some unknown reason, Azure Dragon was still able to give Tsukahara Bokuden a very strong sense of threat. This sense of threat was not something an enemy of the same level could give. Only an enemy stronger by a thread, one who could kill him, could give it!
Azure Dragon’s strength was enough to kill him?
When Tsukahara Bokuden thought of this possibility, he immediately shook his head, feeling it was too absurd.
Innate masters, even if all of them were at the outer gang level, still had differences in strength, and one side could suppress the other. But wanting absolute crushing, with one side suppressing the other so thoroughly that the other had no power to protect itself and could not even escape, was not very realistic.
Only ultimate powerhouses at the inner gang level could possibly do it!
Even Jiang Fei, who had just used a “demon art” that Tsukahara Bokuden had never heard of and could absorb or dissolve his cultivation, was someone Tsukahara Bokuden had no way to deal with, but protecting himself was still more than enough.
Had he not just broken free from Jiang Fei’s hands?
“Azure Dragon, when we parted back then, I silently swore in my heart that there would definitely be a battle between us. Originally, I wanted to kill the Lion King, one of your former Four Kings of China, and then go to China to find you. Now that I have run into you, let us see who is actually superior now!” Brahma finally placed both hands in front of him. They had already stopped trembling. With a gloomy face, he said with a smile.
But the gray-robed Azure Dragon was not affected by the other party at all. He shook his head and said, “Oh? You always wanted to see me. I thought you had always been afraid of me and hid from me, not daring to meet me. But since you invite me to battle so sincerely, then I do not mind either. Let us fight.”
“Then taste this strongest palm strike from my many years of secluded cultivation!” The ferocious expression on Brahma’s face instead disappeared at this moment, becoming incomparably solemn and dignified, as if he were doing something very sacred.
Boom!
As soon as the words landed, the aura of an innate master within him fully erupted. The gang energy inside his body even stirred up a storm out of thin air. Then Brahma moved…
Or rather, he did not move. Instead, he changed.
He was like Sun Wukong, able to use the divine power of seventy-two transformations. A perfectly normal person, in this instant, became a strange figure with three heads and six arms, extremely like the creator god in Indian religion.
The great divine power of three heads and six arms!
But as long as one was a true master, one could see that this was not actually Brahma turning into some Buddha or ghost in Indian religion. This so-called transformation was only because his speed was too fast. His line of sight could not react in time, and the time difference created a visual illusion. His head and arms all produced afterimages.
Afterimages. If an ordinary martial arts master was fast enough, they could barely achieve them, but this move was completely useless against Dan-level and innate masters. As long as one found the difference between the afterimage and the original body and could confirm that this was a true afterimage, then there was no need to block at all. One only needed to find the original body and attack it.
But for the afterimages of an innate master, it could not possibly be this simple.
Especially for Brahma’s strongest killing move, his afterimages clearly could not be used merely to confuse the enemy, but truly possessed killing power. These afterimages were all condensed from gang energy. In a certain sense, they were no longer true afterimages, because they already possessed attack power, and it was very powerful!
With these three heads and six arms, every arm could kill. They could not be left undefended.
They were like a heavenly net, covering Azure Dragon completely from every angle without any dead spots, forming an airtight space. Within the attack were dozens of variations, and each variation could strike Azure Dragon’s vital points.
Azure Dragon had nowhere to escape.
Boom!
Perhaps only zero point one seconds passed, or even shorter, so short that people did not even have time to blink, did not even have time for a heartbeat. Brahma’s attack had already arrived in front of Azure Dragon.
This strike was like a god’s wrath, wanting to destroy heaven and earth, annihilate space, and seal and kill all living things beneath the three-headed, six-armed palm.
Just then, Azure Dragon finally moved too.
He still had not thrown away the long wooden stick in his hand. It seemed to become a true long spear in his hand. Holding the spear shaft, he fiercely thrust forward.
This thrust still appeared plain and ordinary, with nothing especially profound about it. It did not look at all like spearmanship displayed by a spear master. His movements were like someone who did not know how to use a long spear at all thrusting randomly, like a child using a stick to poke a bird’s nest in a tree. Because his grip was unstable and his hand trembled a little, the spear tip trembled along with it.
“Good spearmanship!”
Beside him, Jiang Fei looked at this plain and ordinary spear strike, but his heart was strongly shaken, and his eyes began to shine. In his eyes, this spear strike looked so dazzling and magnificent. Simply incomparable!
All martial arts in the world reach the same destination by different paths. Although swordsmanship and spearmanship were very different, in the origin of attacking the enemy and killing the enemy, they were certainly common.
No matter what method you used, in the end it was all to defeat the enemy. Any martial art in the world was like this.
And now Jiang Fei saw the mystery of Azure Dragon’s spear strike. It actually had some common ground with the original sword intent of his Dugu Nine Swords. That was, it did not seek fancy beauty, but only the most direct, purest, and closest-to-original killing move, able to grasp the enemy’s weakest link and kill with one strike!
However, Jiang Fei felt that Azure Dragon’s spear strike was displayed even more purely than his Dugu Nine Swords, reaching a deeper realm, which greatly shook him inside.
Azure Dragon’s long spear trembled without stopping. It was not because his grip was unstable and trembling. Rather, the long spear was trembling on its own, because the spearmanship displayed by this long spear had already reached a very high realm when Azure Dragon launched the attack. The spearmanship seemed to have gained “life.”
It could spontaneously and calmly seek out the enemy’s flaws.
“When speed cannot be faster, and strength cannot be stronger, and one is locked down by shackles, is this the ‘life’ of seeking the origin of swordsmanship?”
Jiang Fei murmured to himself in his heart. He seemed to understand what he should do now that his Dugu Nine Swords had been raised to the realm of great perfection, the system had reached its limit, and improvement now depended on himself.
The truly strongest power of Dugu Nine Swords was far more than simply the third-level great perfection defined by the system.
The system called it third-level great perfection, but that only meant the system could no longer use experience to forcibly raise Jiang Fei’s understanding of Dugu Nine Swords. The power of Dugu Nine Swords could actually continue to increase and reach an even stronger level, but this required Jiang Fei himself to slowly ponder and seek his own way to break through.
This was like the Compassionate Boat Sword Classic, which could ultimately shatter the void with a single sword technique.
Jiang Fei’s eyes were full of brilliant light. Instead, he no longer cared much about the result of this exchange between Azure Dragon and Brahma.
Because he had already guessed in his heart what the result would be.
This time seemed to pass even faster. Still before one could even blink, Azure Dragon, holding the wooden stick like a long spear, brushed past Brahma.
The two bodies had actually both turned into illusions in that instant, so the two seemed to pass through each other’s shadows, passing through each other completely.
Whoosh, whoosh!
After crossing, when the two were about three meters apart, their bodies completely steadied and solidified, and all illusions completely disappeared. It seemed as if everything had frozen. Neither had moved. It looked like they were evenly matched, with neither having lost and neither having won.
But when everyone focused their eyes and attention, they quickly discovered that something was wrong.
First, the wooden branch spear in Azure Dragon’s hand was gone. It was not held in his hand. When everyone looked for it, they discovered that the long spear was nailed into the trunk of a tree ahead.
The long spear had been inserted a full twenty or thirty centimeters deep, and the part of the spear shaft exposed outside the tree trunk was dripping bright red liquid bit by bit.
That was… blood!
Blood?
Wait.
When everyone thought of this word, they were suddenly stunned, and then their eyes quickly shifted back to between Azure Dragon and Brahma. After waiting for a while, they finally discovered what was going on.
First, Azure Dragon was also injured. Near his neck on his left shoulder, the gray robe had been torn open, and along with it a piece of flesh and blood had disappeared. It was unknown whether the bone had been injured. And if this wound were just a little farther to the right, then Azure Dragon’s neck would definitely have been torn off, and he would certainly have died.
As for Brahma, his legs went weak, and his body slowly knelt on the ground.
His abdomen had been pierced through, leaving a bloody hole about two or three centimeters in diameter!
