Chapter 261 |
As the room settled, Lin Hui continued. "The true foundation of the Nine Skies Gate's power doesn't lie in its martial art—the Nine Skies Divine Wind Art—but in its Law Seals. In fact, the sect's martial art was itself derived by the grandmaster through his comprehension of the first and most powerful of these seals."
Sifting through his memories, he chose the most iconic grandmaster as his example.
Over the course of its history, the Nine Skies Gate had produced thirteen terrifying experts capable of destroying worlds—and yet each of those thirteen had also made extraordinary contributions to the peace of their respective realms. They were accordingly revered as the Thirteen Ancestors of the Nine Skies.
"Since our Clear Wind Dao inherited its legacy from the Nine Skies Gate, we are counted as one of its branch sects. I have never personally met the Nine Skies grandmaster, but I have long held him in reverence. Allow me to introduce the most distinctive figure in our lineage."
Lin Hui understood that to persuade Mistborn to genuinely commit to the Clear Wind Dao, he needed to establish absolute prestige. Leveraging the Nine Skies Gate's fearsome reputation as borrowed authority was merely the first step.
He met the crowd's curious, skeptical gazes and continued.
"This grandmaster’s given name was Yan Xiao, his courtesy name Jinping, and his title was Perfected Lord Seven Extinctions. Because of his fiery temperament and zealous pursuit of justice, he often acted on misunderstandings, striking without hesitation. On seven separate occasions, he realized his mistake only after completely exterminating his targets’ clans—and so he later swore a solemn vow never to kill again."
"This grandmaster was far too hard on himself," the twin-tailed girl spoke up again. "Exterminating a clan seven times over is just accidentally killing a few dozen or a hundred people. Binding his own hands over something so minor seems rather unwise…"
"Ah… well, about that…" Lin Hui hesitated, then decided to be honest. "The ‘clans’ Perfected Lord Seven Extinctions wiped out weren’t households—they were entire races. The smallest numbered in the billions… and the larger ones…"
Billions?!
The room went dead silent.
Wasn't the boasting getting a little out of hand? Everyone had been treating this as storytelling from the start, but claiming that a single individual had exterminated billions of living beings destroyed any remaining pretense of credibility. The exaggeration was simply beyond all reason.
Undeterred by their silent skepticism, Lin Hui went on to recount Perfected Lord Seven Extinctions' appearance, life history, and anecdotes in vivid detail. As one of the Thirteen Ancestors, every disciple of the Nine Skies Gate had been required to memorize and recite his deeds.
But the real test of the crowd's credulity came when he described how Perfected Lord Seven Extinctions—maddened by the murder of his personal disciple—had launched a single strike across tens of thousands of li that instantly swallowed a mountain range spanning millions of square kilometers. At that, nearly everyone quietly wrote the whole thing off as fabrication.
"In any case, whether you believe it or not, Perfected Lord Seven Extinctions' deeds are recorded in history. The scars he left upon the world still exist. Perhaps one day we'll have occasion to see them. But for now—the assessment begins. Everyone, follow me to the courtyard."
Lin Hui smiled and rose, gesturing toward the door.
As the majority filed through the side door into the courtyard, he noticed that the golden-eyed girl in the red dress—the one who had spoken up earlier—was standing utterly still, her gaze fixed blankly on him.
"Something wrong?" he asked Song Feishi softly.
Song Feishi said nothing. Her eyes were locked on him—or rather, on the space directly behind him.
Lin Hui glanced over his shoulder and found nothing. He turned back, filed the reaction away, and didn't press.
Song Feishi pulled herself together, her expression smoothing back to normal. After tens of thousands of years, her mind-spirit didn't lose its footing easily. But what she had glimpsed behind Lin Hui had been so profoundly anomalous that even she could not probe its depth—that was the only reason she had faltered for even an instant.
Still, in less than half a day of contact, she had already encountered something without precedent. Song Feishi knew, with certainty, that she had come to the right place. For all her vast experience, she could neither explain nor determine what she had seen behind Lin Hui. Exactly as Xie Chang'an had said—he was different.
She steadied herself. "Nothing. My eyes were playing tricks on me."
"Are you sure? Sounds like you may be overdue for some rest after your cultivation," Lin Hui said gently.
"I'll keep that in mind," Song Feishi nodded.
But even as the words left her mouth, she couldn't stop herself from looking behind him once more.
Reflected in her golden pupils were countless densely packed blue threads drifting out from his back, each one carrying a destructive aura that made her heart lurch. Slowly but inexorably, the threads were weaving themselves into the shape of a four-meter-tall elder—white-haired, dressed in a green robe, bearing upon his back a narrow blade formed of seven-colored light. His figure shimmered and blurred, like an illusion on the edge of becoming real. Slowly and with great effort, the entity lowered its head and looked down at Lin Hui.
At that exact moment, Lin Hui finally felt that something was wrong.
The smile dropped from his face. He swept his mind-spirit over the surrounding space and found nothing. And yet the weight of imminent dread sat thick and unmistakable in his chest.
He summoned the Blood Seal immediately. Whatever the anomaly, if it fell within the Blood Seal's scope, it would be catalogued and flagged without exception—nothing had ever bypassed it before.
One glance at the interface, and Lin Hui's heart lurched violently. His expression nearly cracked.
[Warning: Speaking his true name and detailing his history has drawn the attention of Perfected Lord Seven Extinctions. The experts of the Nine Skies Gate have not entirely perished. A portion of these beings possess the ability to launch cross-world attacks. Please act and speak cautiously to avoid unforeseeable consequences.]
Iwas just goddamn bragging. Lin Hui hadn't cursed in a long time. But right now, every instinct screamed at him to. To think that a simple pitch to a room of recruits could trigger a crisis of this magnitude—he had thought he was already overestimating the Nine Skies Gate's grandmasters to the furthest degree possible. He had been wrong.
He closed the Blood Seal quickly, a snarl of emotions tightening in his chest.
Turning it over now, he realized that at some point during a breakthrough, the Blood Seal had connected to the Nine Skies Gate in a distant world. And naturally, that also meant the Nine Skies Gate's surviving experts could trace that connection straight back to him.
That in itself was alarming—but worse was another thought that surfaced immediately: was his set of Clear Source Law Seals actually deduced and evolved by the Blood Seal from scratch? Or had the system simply stolen them from the Nine Skies Gate?
His scalp prickled. If it was theft, then when the Nine Skies Gate's experts finally tracked him down, annihilating the Clear Wind Dao to cover their tracks would be the natural first move.
What an absolute, unprovoked disaster.
Any interest he'd had in overseeing the recruits' assessment evaporated on the spot. Compared to the existential threat now looming over the Clear Wind Dao, this recruitment drive was a footnote.
Lin Hui passed the organizational duties off to Wang Hongshi and turned his attention inward, methodically examining the details of his own condition.
…
The assessment proceeded without him.
One by one, the newcomers stepped forward to receive Lin Hui's Bestowal Seal. Three failed in succession. The fourth—the twin-tails girl—became the first to earn the Law Seal's acknowledgement.
Riiiiip.
A sharp, tearing sound split the air.
Before the crowd's astonished eyes, the girl's body erupted with bulging muscle, her frame shooting upward until a towering, twin-tailed behemoth over two meters tall stood in her place.
"Ahhhh!"
The hulking twin-tailed musclewoman shrieked in alarm and frantically clutched at her shredded clothing.
Lin Hui had already flicked his wrist, sending a large robe sailing over to cover her. He had clearly been prepared for exactly this.
"This strength—it's incredible!" The twin-tails behemoth snatched the robe in shock, her expression wild as she felt the raw power surging through her new body.
"Now you see," Wang Hongshi stepped forward calmly. "This is our sect's most extraordinary force—the Law Seal. An inheritance drawn directly from the Nine Skies Gate. As long as you genuinely commit to the Clear Wind Dao, you can receive this same enhancement."
He stripped off his outer robe with a clear shout, his body ballooning into the same towering muscular form.
"This state raises baseline physical constitution by fifty percent. In practical combat testing, however, the effective increase to overall combat power runs three to four times—because speed, strength, endurance, and reaction time all fall under the scope of constitutional enhancement. Compounded together, the results become quite extreme."
The newcomers stared in blank silence.
What kind of Law Seal was this? Simply identifying with the sect multiplied a person's combat power by three or four times. Even the Fourth Princess, Song Feishi, felt a genuine tremor run through her.
She had come into this expecting arrogance and hollow claims. What she had found instead was a sect with extraordinary depth—and the phantom she had witnessed earlier, already dissipated, had nonetheless left an impression on her that would not be so easily erased.
The specific effects of the Law Seal also reminded her of the highest-tier secret arts and Treasure Relics stored in Federation vaults. Certainly, some items could boost combat power by three or four times—but all of them exacted a steep cost. None were dispensed like this, freely and without condition.
…
Slowly, in the shell-shocked quiet, the newcomers who inwardly belonged to the Clear Wind Dao stepped forward and received their Law Seals one by one.
Eventually, it was Song Feishi's turn as the third-to-last.
She walked forward unhurriedly. Her striking figure and golden eyes had not gone unnoticed—a silent collective hope had formed around her that she would pass without trouble. Having a martial sister like this to cultivate alongside would not be unpleasant.
Song Feishi stopped before Lin Hui. The aura-masking concealing her true identity was a high-tier Treasure Relic set, the finest the Federation had to offer. Logically, she had no reason to fear detection. But after the twin shocks of the phantom and the Law Seal, she was suddenly less certain whether Lin Hui might see straight through it.
Fortunately, his expression didn't shift, and his gaze remained soft. He simply raised one hand and pressed his index finger gently to the center of her brow.
"Upon entering our sect, regardless of your past or your present identity, you are forever a disciple of the Clear Wind Dao. After joining, you must abide by our core tenets. First: respect your master and honor the Dao. Second: fellow disciples must never kill one another. Third: do not bully the weak. Fourth: do not slaughter the innocent indiscriminately. Fifth: do not leak our sect's cultivation techniques..."
As she listened, Song Feishi noticed something.
These rules contained no clause requiring members to jointly defend against external enemies—a foundational article shared by virtually every other sect and faction in existence. She voiced the discrepancy before she could stop herself.