Chapter 1468: Crouching Tiger Wakes

“Go?”

Yuan Se smiled as he watched Yuan Gang charge toward him to cover the others’ retreat.

He almost wanted to ask: could any of them still leave?

Yuan Se continued walking at an unhurried pace, calm and composed, completely ignoring the man charging toward him.

In his eyes, these people were nothing more than insignificant creatures he could kill with a casual wave of his hand.

Their final struggles were futile.

This fellow clearly did not fear death.

Yuan Se merely intended to tear off his false face and see whether he truly was the Holy Son of the Demonic Sect.

If he was, Yuan Se would certainly question him about what he and Wu Chang were plotting, what had happened to his severed arm, and why Lü Wushuang had supposedly rescued him.

“Yaah!”

Yuan Gang’s furious roar seemed to be squeezed from every corner of his lungs before exploding from his throat.

“Awooo!”

He arrived.

The saber came out.

It tore through the air.

A thunderous tiger roar ripped through the passage.

Yuan Se flicked one broad sleeve.

Dense, overwhelming spiritual power crashed forward with an effortless wave of his hand.

“Awooo...”

A second tiger roar followed.

Its force was nowhere near the first, yet it resembled muffled thunder gathering inside storm clouds high in the nine heavens, as though a heaven-shaking bolt might split the sky at any moment.

The sound tightened the heart.

Yuan Se’s gaze flickered slightly.

He had to admit that this man’s saber was fast.

What surprised him was that during the strike, the man’s movements seemed to become smoother and smoother as the saber’s momentum developed.

It was like dragging something across a rough surface. At first, heavy friction made the motion stiff and awkward. Once the arm had swung open, the resistance remained, but the movement itself became smooth.

As Yuan Gang’s saber stroke opened up, it could actually accelerate a second time.

In other words, once the saber’s momentum fully developed and the coordination of his body came into play, his body possessed the ability to produce a second burst of power in the briefest instant.

Such a thing was rare.

But to Yuan Se, it still changed nothing.

The tremendous spiritual power he had released had already collided with Yuan Gang.

At the instant the crushing force struck, Yuan Gang’s body seemed to freeze.

The descending saber seemed to stall as well.

Yet for no reason Yuan Se could explain, his pupils suddenly contracted.

The frozen figure seemed to flicker forward with the faintest phantom image.

The stalled saber seemed to do the same.

It did not spring backward.

It did not bounce upward.

It was the strange sensation of something flashing forward while still trapped inside complete stagnation.

No physical object visibly broke free.

There was only that flicker—as though something had emerged from a cocoon inside the frozen body.

Yuan Se’s heart and mind suddenly trembled.

A thought flashed through his head.

The roughness in that saber stroke had now been worn completely smooth.

Its flow had entered an entirely different realm.

Hidden inside this man’s body was an unimaginable reserve of continuous explosive power.

His body could actually accelerate a third time.

It was as though the saber stroke, fully extended at last, had completely opened every tendon and bone in his body and released all the potential hidden inside him.

Man and saber fused into one.

Nothing could withstand them.

Yuan Se could not see it.

Neither could anyone else.

But he could feel it.

The man was the saber.

The saber was the man.

Man and saber as one!

The blade was the cutting edge.

The man himself was the body of the saber.

The immense spiritual power Yuan Se had released was split apart along that edge.

When it struck Yuan Gang’s body, it was like force sliding past the flat of a blade.

Whoosh!

It swept past him.

A trap!

The thought flashed through Yuan Se’s mind like lightning.

In that instant, terror nearly ripped his soul away.

His body shot backward.

At the same time, his other hand drove out a palm strike with every scrap of cultivation he possessed.

The palm force, powerful enough to crush everything before it, split.

At least, that was how it felt to Yuan Se.

It was exactly like the dense spiritual power he had released before colliding with the saber’s edge.

Something seemed to shoot through the opening.

He could not see it clearly.

It was too fast.

There was no other way to describe it.

Its speed was like a false impression flashing through a single thought.

The frozen figure and saber stroke seemed to be destroyed by Yuan Se’s desperate palm strike, dissolving into nothingness.

Yuan Se landed as he retreated at full speed.

Whoosh!

The thing following him finally appeared.

Yuan Gang.

Yuan Gang had not managed to keep pace with the distance Yuan Se had retreated. He stamped one foot forward.

Sand and stones exploded outward as he forcibly stopped his momentum.

Both hands gripped the Three-Roars Saber in the posture of a forward cleave.

His body bowed forward.

The saber point angled down toward the ground ahead.

His entire body heaved with violent breaths.

With every breath, a faint golden mist streamed from his mouth and nose.

The veins on both hands gripping the saber bulged sharply.

So did the veins along his neck.

His eyes remained fixed on the saber tip.

Even Yuan Gang himself did not know what this life-or-death strike had accomplished.

When he charged out to meet the enemy, when he swung that saber, he had known only that no matter how powerful the enemy was, he felt no fear whatsoever.

He had never thought of retreat.

He had no regrets.

Every shred of vitality, spirit, and will in him had pressed forward without return.

The saber moved forward, straight and unerring.

The man moved forward, unwavering even unto death.

All his vitality, spirit, and will had condensed into a single thought.

Fight!

Kill!

“Awooo...”

A third tiger roar arrived late.

It seemed to come from the motionless saber.

In truth, the sound rang out from behind Yuan Gang—from the place where he had swung his saber.

The tunnel thundered and shook.

Yuan Se’s first strike had controlled the direction of its force, yet the attack still went awry and had already caused the tunnel to collapse.

From where Zhuge Chi and the others stood behind, they saw Yuan Se swiftly launch a second attack.

This strike had the power to collapse mountains and split the earth.

Yet it too veered off.

It did not strike the group behind Yuan Gang, but instead destroyed the entire tunnel.

Through fleeting gaps in the falling earth and stone, they vaguely saw the previously unhurried Yuan Se retreating.

They could see nothing after that.

The collapse filled their vision and blocked everything.

Those who caught that single instant almost thought they had seen wrong.

The calm, unhurried Yuan Se had been forced back?

In the next moment, the tunnel was filled not only with collapse, but with a roaring storm of dust and sand.

The power of Yuan Se’s attacks was simply too great.

Zhuge Chi was no decoration.

He too was a Nascent Soul expert who had cultivated for many years.

He thrust out both arms and stopped the storm from sweeping over them.

The others all used spiritual power as well, bracing the earth collapsing from above.

But both the road ahead and the road behind were buried in an instant.

Escaping was no longer so simple.

Amid the thunder of the collapse, another “awooo” came through.

The roar of falling stone and earth could not drown it out.

Within all that crashing noise, this tiger roar remained perfectly clear, as though no other sound could interfere with it.

It was different from the first two.

This tiger roar was not loud.

It even carried the lazy feeling of something slowly waking from sleep.

Yet the sound had a strange quality that seemed to bite at the eardrums.

It created an indescribable discomfort, as though gnawing at the mind, flesh, and bone.

That languid sound seemed impossible to shake from the ears, lingering and coiling there without end.

It possessed an extraordinary penetrating power, as though seeping into every crack throughout the mountain and spreading through them.

The sound came from deep inside the mountain.

Outside, it could be heard only faintly.

Yet throughout the mountain, it was as though a catastrophe of Heaven and Earth were about to descend.

Birds and flying creatures roosting for the night fled in terror, crying chaotically as they scattered beneath the dark sky.

Wild beasts reacted as though struck by lightning, rushing from their dens and fleeing in every direction.

Crawling things swarmed from their nests and scuttled aimlessly through the night.

The mountain seemed to have transformed into an enormous tomb.

It was as though some demon buried deep beneath the earth in the Netherworld was slowly awakening.

Every living creature in the mountain fled in blind panic.

Inside the collapsed passage, the group had forcibly stabilized a small space with spiritual power.

They too were startled.

Every head turned toward the collapsed direction from which the tiger roar had come.

Uncertainty filled their faces.

They all seemed to be asking the same question.

What sound was that?

Yin’er, who had been looking back, was the first to recover.

She turned toward Niu Youdao as something occurred to her, her expression full of grievance. “Dao-Dao, you hit me.”

Her words brought the others back to themselves.

“A tiger roar?” Guan Fangyi asked.

Zhuge Chi said, “Is the saber in his hand Xi Wuxian’s Three-Roars Saber?”

Lü Wushuang looked uncertain, as though she did not dare believe it. “Crouching Tiger woke?”

Yun Ji hesitated. “When Crouching Tiger wakes, none beneath Heaven can stand against it?”

No one dared be certain that the sound had come from Yuan Gang.

Even Niu Youdao, whose eyes had been nearly splitting with fury a moment before, had his attention seized by that languid, almost demonic tiger roar.

The collapse had spread mainly in the direction from which Yuan Se attacked.

The other side of the clash had collapsed for a short stretch as well, but the place to which Yuan Se retreated had not been affected.

He had moved too far in a single flash.

The tiger roar caused a thin layer of sand and gravel to trickle down from the top of the passage.

Fortunately, the tunnel had not been dug long ago. Most of the earth was still damp, so little dust rose.

The rumbling collapse stopped half a zhang behind Yuan Gang’s bowed body.

A few clods of earth rolled to his feet.

Yuan Gang remained almost frozen, eyes fixed on the saber edge.

It was the first time he had ever unleashed the power of a single strike to such an extent.

He was not even accustomed to the feeling.

It was as though his soul itself had nearly followed the saber out of his body.

All his vitality, spirit, and will had gathered into the blade and seemed difficult to call back.

As the faint golden mist from his breathing returned into his chest and lungs, Yuan Gang slowly lifted his eyes.

Two points of light shone ahead.

They came from night pearls on Yuan Se’s clothing.

The pearls had been arranged with unusual cleverness.

Two small pockets had been sewn into the left and right sides of his robe. Each had a little flap above it, while the two night pearls looked like buttons sewn beneath the flaps.

Ordinarily the pearls were tucked into the pockets and could not be seen.

In darkness, the flaps could be opened to let them provide light.

Clearly, they had been designed for a lazy man.

Yuan Se stood there silently as though nothing had happened.

Yuan Gang’s eyes narrowed.

His body began gathering force again.

The currents created by the collapsing tunnel and the force of the attack swept back toward them, whipping Yuan Gang’s clothes.

The air surged forward and stirred Yuan Se’s robes as well.

Only then did Yuan Gang notice that across the chest of Yuan Se’s upper robe ran a diagonal split.

More precisely, the clothing had been cut open.

When the wind lifted the torn fabric, a thin line of blood could be seen across the flesh beneath.

The air current curled back.

Yuan Se took one step backward, almost as though he needed that step simply to remain steady.

The tiger roar gradually faded away.

The sand and gravel trembling down from the tunnel roof stopped.

Even the returning wind finally grew still.

A smile appeared on Yuan Se’s face once more.

But this smile looked rather ugly.

His gaze fixed on the saber in Yuan Gang’s hands.

He seemed to be asking Yuan Gang, yet also muttering to himself.

“One saber stroke actually broke through my flesh... Three-Roars Saber?”

“Angry Tiger roars with ease; Running Tiger makes no sound; Crouching Tiger is hard to wake.”

“When Crouching Tiger wakes, none beneath Heaven can stand against it...”

“It’s true?”

His gaze sharpened.

“A trap. You laid a trap here waiting for me, didn’t you?”

Yuan Gang stared at him coldly.

The enemy was still standing.

The battle intent within him had not faded.

On the other side of the collapse, Niu Youdao and the others waited, but no further sounds of battle came.

Something was wrong.

If Yuan Se had won, there was no reason he would take so long to pursue them.

Niu Youdao could no longer care about anything else.

Nor could he worry about how dangerous facing Yuan Se might be.

So long as Yuan Gang could be saved, Niu Youdao believed he himself still had value Yuan Se could exploit.

He charged forward first and began using spiritual power to excavate the collapsed passage at high speed.

The collapsed stretch on this side was not long.

Before long, he broke through into an intact section.

Niu Youdao emerged and saw Yuan Gang crouched forward with both hands gripping the saber, like a starving tiger about to spring upon its prey.

Farther ahead stood Yuan Se, one leg forward and one behind.

The two men facing one another were motionless as stone statues.

Yuan Gang watched like a tiger eyeing prey.

Yuan Se wore a smile.

[End of Chapter 1468]