Meanwhile, Dong Ling and Chun Xu’s battle reached a crescendo. Chased across the ice pit’s walls, Chun Xu split into two sword doppelgangers, deftly avoiding any contact with Dong Ling’s Frigid Sword Dance. With each salvo, the ice-cold crescent moons seemed to get closer to their target, yet each assault ended in a miss, some narrower than others, but misses all the same. In that double flying sword form, Chun Xu could not only space out Dong Ling’s strikes but also use the tiniest gaps to escape the brunt of her sword dance.

As far as Qi Refinement or Foundation Builders were concerned, both ladies possessed tremendous quantities of qi, but the Frigid Sword Dance was no run-off the mill technique, and even Dong Ling had to admit that, should the battle follow the current trend, she’d exhaust her qi before she could deal Chun Xu serious harm. On the other side of the spectrum, Chun Xu’s Sword Obsession drained Soul Force, a more sensitive resource than qi that, once exhausted, would lead to unsavory backlashes.

Unaware of the depth of their opponent’s reserve, neither side could afford to delay things for much longer. Dong Ling whipped her sword at the ice wall, dislodging droves of fragments and blocks that stayed in suspension, held by her awe-inspiring control of the Ice Element. Fragments and blocks broke down into a swirl of ice particles, rotating Dong Ling whose form blurred in their midst.

The Frigid Sword Dance ground to a halt, and Dong Ling turned into an alarming mass of snow—threatening to drown both soul swords under the crushing weight of an avalanche. As the avalanche defied gravity to chase down Chun Xu at breakneck speed, the Sword Fairy did the unthinkable, stopped her run, and rushed right back at Dong Ling’s move.

Dong Ling had no time to make sense of Chun Xu’s charge. The Sword Fairy spread her Spiritual Sense towards the avalanche, and in her eyes, Dong Ling’s mass of snow became a flight of icy-blue particles, many of which teetered unceasingly. Moving at lightning speed, Chun Xu stabbed into the unsteady particles, causing Dong Ling’s avalanche to burst into an eruption of snow and ice debris.

Propelled by the impact, Dong Ling flew into the air, her eyes trembling as she failed to understand this turn of events.

As far as Chun Xu was concerned, Dong Ling’s last two moves both carried a self-harming flaw: an unstable structure. With high talent but little battle experience, although Dong Ling quickly mastered the principles of the Extreme Yin Transformation, she still had a long way to go before she could execute its moves flawlessly. When these moves came in unending salvos, like with the Frigid Sword Dance, Chun Xu couldn’t afford to break them down individually. This last one, however, was like an invitation to ruin: colossal in size, but easy to collapse.

The double swords turned into racing bolts of light, sandwiching Dong Ling, who now only stood an inch away from certain defeat. Here, Dong Ling’s lips curled up, and she clenched her fists. By the time Chun Xu’s double soul swords stood an inch from her chest and back, the temperature surrounding Dong Ling shrank to absolute zero. All particles stopped moving, but while Chun Xu’s soul swords should have been exempt from this physical phenomenon, just like the Frigid Sword Dance beforehand, this move not only punished the flesh but ignored dimensional barriers to freeze Chun Xu’s soul as well.

Too close to retreat, the Sword Fairy reverted to her human form, and alongside her doppelganger, stared dumbfounded at Dong Ling’s counter-strike. “A...domain?” Within a nine-meter radius, Dong Ling’s Extreme Yin Qi ruled supreme—suppressing all that attempted to encroach on the snakegirl with an overwhelming dominance. It therefore became evident that the Extreme Yin Transformation also provided Dong Ling with a domain—a minuscule domain, but a domain all the same. Considering that domains were abilities typically reserved to Dao Revelation level experts or above, Chun Xu had every right to feel cheated and lose hope. However...

“Interesting but...I have several of those,” Chun Xu said through a mental message, and the Heaven’s Wrath attribute engraved in her Void Spirit Root kicked into gear—twisting the atmosphere to turn all things within a 12-meter radius into a world of drought and stifling heat. The extreme temperature shift caught Dong Ling by surprise, and unable to contend with Chun Xu’s domain, the snakegirl fell into a passive stance, channeling her Extreme Yin Qi to resist the drought and heat. A pity that her best efforts wrought no result, barely enabling her to struggle underneath Chun Xu’s domain.

Like an envoy of the Celestial Court, the Sword Fairy glowed in a resplendent halo. Blue lightning coiled in her brown eyes, and as her hair fluttered alongside her dress, she raised her hand at the sky.

“Due to my impaired meridians and current cultivation base, I typically avoid tapping into the Heaven’s Wrath attribute I cultivated through the Wisp of Heaven’s Breath. But that should not make you forget that by default, I hold sway over the tribulations Heaven tests men and cultivators with. True, I cannot release the full splendor of that force with my trifling Qi Refinement cultivation base, but what I have is more than enough...to deal with the likes of you. Junior sister, congratulations for pushing me to this stage but...you lost.” As Chun Xu’s voice pealed within Dong Ling’s mind, a dark cloud formed above the Sword Fairy—sparkling with crackling lightning.

In that instant, Dong Ling didn’t need Chun Xu’s words to realize that...unless she unleashed her true form, she had no hope of turning this around. Alas, no matter how desperate she was for victory, and how willful she could be, even Dong Ling knew that the consequences would be too much to bear for the Dong and Zi clans. Still, she refused to lose. Her eyes went bloodshot, madness took over, and she bit her lower lip to blood—about to ignite her bloodline for a ruinous power-up.

Chun Xu’s senses went on maximum alert. But before the Sword Fairy could probe her foe and consider her options, massive tremors swept through the Yin Platform, and the formation holding this virtual world together...malfunctioned.

“What?” Chun Xu and Dong Ling both asked in confusion. At first, they blamed one another for this abrupt change, but soon realized that neither had the strength or skills needed to affect the formation in the slightest.

Indistinguishable shadows leaped from crumbling ice walls, racing towards the two weather girls with glaring murderous intent! Back to the Yang Platform, Xinzi had barely deactivated the formation that 16 shadows surrounded him, aiming for his neck, heart and crotch with razor-sharp knives.

When Xinzi removed the spectators’ abilities to see what went on his platform, a riot followed, but was soon quelled by the White Immortal sect elders who smoothly redirected the public’s attention to the Dong-Chun weather girls’ fast-paced and colorful battle.

But as the fight reached its climactic point, the spectators were startled to see some of the folks that previously laughed, raged and bet on potential outcomes with them, unleash their knives and leap toward the two platforms. At the same time, a plethora of talismans flew from various corners of the confused crowd, not only hurtling at the formations but also targeting the leaders up above.

By the time they’d reacted to this change, Zi Yao, Lord Hanxing and Lady Ziyue had fallen prey to arrays of Displacement Talismans. All three found themselves forcefully teleported into murderous battle arrays led by men in dark-gray monastic robes. Only Guang Fanghu, who’d left to speed up the transfer of his Chamber of Commerce to Xinzi, escaped this furtive strike.

Instantly, chaos broke out, the crowd scattered to avoid stray bolts. Disordered screams and flying treasures took off as the assassins appeared in ordered sets—targeting the White Immortal sect’s elites.