Chapter 77: Taking Action

“As I hear it, you almost sound grateful that I nearly killed you back then,” Li Miao said.

“Yes. I am grateful from the bottom of my heart,” Yun Zelin replied with perfect sincerity.

“That sword of yours woke me.”

Yun Zelin sprang to his feet, waving both hands in agitation, his face flushed, half-mad with fervor.

“All day long I knew only how to obey the rules. I had already strayed from every canon, yet still I wasted my days among mediocrities!”

“The true masters of the martial world all made their names in their twenties! I was already twenty-eight, and I was actually pleased with myself just because I might earn the label of ‘second-rate’!”

“Second-rate, second-rate! I searched bitterly for more than ten years, slew my father, betrayed my sect, all for a single verdict of ‘second-rate’!?”

“I fancied myself gifted beyond ordinary men, yet I still squandered my days, keeping company with a pack of fools. Is that not laughable!?”

He suddenly bent in a deep salute before Li Miao, almost to the ground.

“It was because of that sword of yours that, standing between life and death, I finally came to my senses.”

“It was only after meeting you that I learned there was truly someone in this world worth chasing.”

He lifted his head and said, “Those fools in the Bright Cult do not understand you. In all the world, I alone do.”

“For these past ten-odd years, I have sought news of you every day. Only when I heard you had left Shuntian Prefecture did I set in motion the plan I had prepared for more than a decade.”

“That I must kill you today is something I do with no choice.”

“Once you die, I fear there will no longer be anyone in this world who can sit with me and discuss the Way.”

As he spoke, Yun Zelin truly shed two streams of tears.

During this whole exchange, his features had been changing without cease. By now he had wholly returned to the appearance of a youth barely past twenty.

His limbs were slender, his face soft and feminine, almost like that of a quiet, graceful woman.

Li Miao let out a scoffing laugh. “After listening to all that nonsense, it still comes down to drawing blood in the end.”

“If my own hands weren’t itching to see just how far you’ve managed to reach, I wouldn’t even have bothered listening.”

“But there’s one thing you left out.”

He raised a hand and pointed at Yun Zelin. “Your so-called ‘inborn defect of the bones’ was more than merely having a few fewer meridians than other people.”

“You were born with both sexes. That’s why you could practice neither the arts of men nor the methods of women.”

His father’s sect had likely hidden him away for precisely that reason. They could not accept that someone neither man nor woman had been raised all along as the next sect master. They feared the disgrace if word ever got out.

Yun Zelin could see Li Miao’s level; naturally, Li Miao could discern what was abnormal about Yun Zelin as well.

Li Miao spoke lightly, but his words were brutally direct, striking at the matter Yun Zelin least wished to mention.

The ever-courteous Yun Zelin finally could not keep a flicker of anger from showing on his face.

That was exactly it. This was the reason he had deliberately avoided, the truth he had passed over between the moment his father discovered his defective constitution and the moment he killed him and fled.

The softness of his features came from the fact that he had been born intersex, neither male nor female.

Most martial arts could be practiced by either sex; they merely varied in suitability according to one’s natural constitution.

But there was not a single discipline in the world suited to someone born with both sexes.

And in that age, once his father’s sect discovered the truth, one could easily imagine what sort of attitude they would take toward him.

Yun Zelin cared nothing for human life, nothing for rules, nothing for morality... but this one matter, he cared about deeply.

Grinding his teeth, he said, “Lord Li... I sincerely wished to discuss the Way with you. Why humiliate me?”

Li Miao rose to his feet and said to him, “Humiliate you? Was anything I said untrue?”

“You never treated other people’s lives as worth a thing, and even took pride in it. Now that I don’t treat you as worth a thing, you fly into shame and rage?”

“You’re over forty years old, yet you stand here mouthing the sort of nonsense only a teenager would say, putting on this affected performance. Don’t you find it ridiculous?”

Li Miao lifted a hand and beckoned. “I’ve endured my disgust and waited for you long enough. You should be ready now.”

“Didn’t you want to kill me? Come, then.”

Yun Zelin stared at Li Miao, fixing his gaze on his eyes, the corners of his own twitching.

Plainly, what Li Miao had said and done was utterly different from what he had imagined.

And what had he imagined?

At the summit of Mount Tai, foremost of the Five Great Peaks, two peerless prodigies who had traveled farther than anyone in the centuries since Perfected Master Sanfeng’s passing would finally meet.

One decisive battle would settle superiority and decide life and death alike.

Then he, the victor, would ascend to the pinnacle of the martial world bearing his defeated rival’s admiration and acknowledgment, and from that day forth become a living legend.

That was why he had maintained such refined courtesy toward Li Miao all along. In his vision, this meeting ought to have been one of mutual recognition between kindred spirits, followed by the inevitable truth that those who walked different paths could not scheme together, and so must fight to the death.

He had betrayed the Bright Cult, driven himself into a dead end, and at last united the three paths within himself, waiting for Li Miao—the fated opponent he had anticipated for fifteen years.

And what he received in return was only Li Miao’s disdain and mockery.

How could he not be disappointed? How could he not be enraged?

To those of the martial world, Yun Zelin’s nature would seem rebellious, bizarre, a thing outside the norm.

And he truly was extraordinary. He had personally manipulated half the Bright Cult and, through it, climbed to a realm even Ji Tianrui had failed to reach in his day.

But in Li Miao’s eyes, he was nothing more than a lunatic driven into obsession by the defect of his own body. Apart from having somewhat higher martial skill, there was nothing remarkable about him.

In this world, misfortune did not make one right. Whatever reasons had brought Yun Zelin to this point, they could not alter the fact that he was now a beast who regarded human life as less than grass.

The reason Li Miao had waited until now was that he did not want him to die too easily. He had wanted to wait until his scheme was complete, then smash it apart piece by piece. That would be the finest punishment for Yun Zelin.

Of course, there was another reason—

Li Miao’s hands were itching a little too.

There was nothing more useless in this world than the art of slaying dragons.

He had shut himself away in Shuntian Prefecture, training in martial arts with his head down. Yet when he had finished, he looked up and found there was nowhere to use them.

Even the five hundred parasite soldiers under Mao Yingxia tonight had posed no great threat to him.

As for Yun Zelin, this enemy who cultivated all three paths together—after today, one like him would likely never appear again.

In any case, from what Li Miao had seen, those infected with parasite poison in the Mount Tai Sect were all but dead already. With no lingering concerns, he had the time to wait until Yun Zelin was ready.

Yun Zelin looked at Li Miao for a long while, yet still failed to find the acknowledgment and respect he wanted.

At last he clenched his teeth. “Very well.”

“Lord Li, do not assume victory is certain.”

“I may not have long to live, but your realm is not as complete as mine.”

“Who lives and who dies today remains to be seen.”

Before the last word had fully fallen, Yun Zelin flashed forward and closed in before Li Miao in an instant.

His hand swept out like a blade—it was the very same One Slash Li Miao had used several times that night.

With the three paths fused into one, what kind of realm had he reached?

As Yun Zelin’s oblique slash fell, the aftershock alone blasted apart dozens of yards of wall in the main hall of the Mount Tai Sect.