Chapter 80

Chapter 80: The Real Killing Move

The mantis attacked like a mad thing, never staying in one place for more than a heartbeat. Beasts understood their own weaknesses better than people ever did—it refused to give Wang Jie a clean opening.

With a thunderous crack, his blade shattered too.

No matter how good the material, it couldn’t survive that relentless barrage.

The twin scythes lifted. The mantis vanished.

Wang Jie didn’t budge. He slammed his fists together, detonating fiftyfold power. The shockwave rippled through the air in visible rings. He snapped his head to the side—found it.

He jabbed with two fingers.

He had long since mastered the Heaven-and-Earth Luo Xuan Finger. The strike caught the mantis mid-sprint and made its body stutter. In that same instant, a scythe chopped down, forcing him to pull back.

By any reasonable measure, he should have withdrawn.

Otherwise, even if he landed the hit, he would lose his hand.

But he’d used his left arm.

The scythe—One Blade—bit into his wrist guard. It cut deeper, angling for his arm, but at the instant the follow-up slash fell, Wang Jie snapped out another finger and knocked it sideways. Power that would have stunned even a Star-Breaking expert erupted in full.

The ground caved in with a roar. Dust and shattered rock blasted in every direction.

Wang Jie sprang out of the cloud and landed in a half-crouch. A long gash ran along his arm, flesh torn away, blood soaking into his clothes.

Inside the dust, the mantis had it worse.

Its body had been pierced clean through.

Wang Jie tore cloth from his sleeve and bound the wound tight, eyes locked on the creature. The pain hadn’t caught up yet—his body was still numb from the exchange. The mantis stared back with long, narrow eyes. Pale yellow fluid dripped from the hole in its torso—its blood.

One of its scythes had a dent along the edge from Wang Jie’s strike, with bits of his flesh still clinging to it.

The mantis glanced at the scythe, opened its mouth, and swallowed the meat.

Wang Jie’s eyes widened.

The imprint power of his ten seals exploded outward. A pillar of force punched through the clouds, howling as it bore down on the mantis like a mountain.

The mantis lunged for him, flickering again and again.

Wang Jie had never fully unleashed his imprint power before. Now nine of his seals had turned a pale, smoky black. When he released everything at once, even he was startled by the pressure.

But with imprint power like this, the fight changed.

If his qi ran thin, imprint power could make up the difference.

He pressed a palm to the ground. Imprint power spun around him, turning silver as it spread—Silver Radiance Art.

As the mantis closed in, he still couldn’t catch its body clearly, but within Silver Radiance Art its traces showed—stutters in the flow, faint distortions in the silver light.

He stabbed out a finger again.

This time the mantis was ready and dodged at top speed. Wang Jie stepped through Jia Eight Steps, shifting forward and back, sliding sideways—and then his hand snapped up and seized.

Something icy, hard, and rough met his grip.

A wing.

The mantis twisted, staring at him from inches away.

Wang Jie surged, pouring all his strength into the grab. If he could seize it, he could smash it into pulp.

The blade edge flashed.

The mantis cut off its own wing without hesitation.

Another One Blade swept at Wang Jie. He hadn’t expected that kind of ruthlessness, and at the critical moment his wrist guard caught the strike again.

The mantis stared at the guard, fixated.

Without it, it wouldn’t have struggled this long.

One Blade blasted Wang Jie backward. He countered with a punch. The force alone blew a mountain peak apart—yet the mantis slipped away as if the air itself carried it.

Brute strength couldn’t catch it.

The mantis flickered and rose into the sky. Its scythes crossed, forming a spiraling blade edge. It locked onto Wang Jie and charged.

Cold ran through him.

A star-breaking battle skill.

To reach the Star-Breaking realm, the most common path was to drive a single battle skill to its absolute limit—gathering everything you were into one strike. When it shattered the “mountain” of the Ten Seals, it would also break a star. That kind of technique was called a star-breaking battle skill.

What the mantis was using now was almost certainly one of those.

Its true killing move.

And it meant this single strike could destroy the planet beneath them.

He couldn’t run. Even if he dodged, if the planet broke apart, his ship would never survive the blast. He would die for sure.

So he had to stop it.

Even if it killed him, he had to stop it.

The mantis understood that too. That was why the attack came slowly. As it rushed toward him, it halted again and again, each pause compressing more power into the spiraling edge.

Cruelty glinted in its long, narrow eyes. It didn’t want to beat Wang Jie.

It wanted to shatter the planet.

It was the perfect way to deal with humans below the Roaming-Star realm.

No matter how strong you were, if you had nowhere left to stand in the universe, you would still die.

Wang Jie forced the thoughts down and stared at the mantis dropping from the sky. He bent his knees. His eyes snapped open.

The imprint power of his ten seals surged upward, tearing through the clouds again. Visible ripples ran across heaven and earth as he released the Heaven-and-Earth Luo Xuan Finger.

A gigantic finger formed, pointing diagonally toward the sky.

The mantis’s cruelty only deepened as it continued to close in, straight into the path of that finger.

Wang Jie kept his gaze on the falling shadow and followed behind the Heaven-and-Earth Luo Xuan Finger.

At ten thousand meters, he clenched his right fist and compressed tenfold power.

At one thousand meters, he compressed fiftyfold power. Veins bulged along his entire right arm as qi flooded into his fist.

At one hundred meters, he compressed ninetyfold power.

The Heaven-and-Earth Luo Xuan Finger was a feint.

His real killing move was the punch.

He couldn’t express his power perfectly through the Heaven-and-Earth Luo Xuan Finger, so what was power, truly?

Strip everything away until only the strike remained. No self. No other. Only the blow.

That was power.

The mantis crashed into the Heaven-and-Earth Luo Xuan Finger and tore it apart with contemptuous ease. In the instant after shredding it, it saw Wang Jie.

An indescribable chill crawled through its body, as if something deep inside screamed at it to dodge. For a heartbeat, it hesitated—like prey glimpsing a monster.

That single heartbeat slowed the attack.

Wang Jie threw his punch.

Ninety-ninefold power detonated in full. Qi and strength fused into a peak strike.

His fist met the spiraling blade edge.

Heaven and earth froze for an instant.

Then the impact exploded across the sky, twisting the dim daylight in a blink. Vast power and razor-sharp blade qi crushed everything in their path—mountains, rivers, forests—sweeping across the land. The seas rose into towering tsunamis.

The entire planet shuddered once.

Countless volcanoes erupted. Red magma speared into the sky and burst like fireworks.

Wang Jie drove his fist forward. The blade edge stabbed into his knuckles. Bone shattered. His blood sizzled in the heat.

The mantis wasn’t faring any better. It couldn’t withstand that hammering force. Its outer shell cracked, then burst apart, its huge body caving in under the pressure.

It was running out of strength.

Wang Jie snarled and stabbed out a finger with his left hand—Heaven-and-Earth Luo Xuan Finger.

The mantis tried to dodge, but Wang Jie’s fist had its scythes pinned tight. It couldn’t fully escape. The finger strike landed, and its head shattered.

Its body twitched once and went limp.

It fell from the sky and smashed into the ruined mountainside.

Wang Jie exhaled—and fell after it, crashing into a river.

He floated on the surface, drifting with the current. He had spent far too much strength.

Ever since he had trained to ninety-ninefold power on Blue Star, he had never unleashed it completely.

This time he had burned everything—imprint power, strength, qi. Only then had he managed to kill a mantis in the Star-Breaking realm.

The gap between the Ten Seals and the Star-Breaking realm was monstrous.

No wonder the Silver Radiance Empire had countless Ten Seals cultivators, yet only a handful in the Star-Breaking realm.

It wasn’t a matter of quantity. It was quality.

He climbed onto the bank, changed out of his damp clothes, and walked to the corpse. A faintly yellow liquid coated its body. If he smeared it on his ship, maybe he could avoid being tracked by a starry sky behemoth.

Right now, the priority was recovery.

Fortunately, he had harvested plenty of disaster materials. It was enough.

He immediately began absorbing imprint power, restoring himself little by little.

His worst injury was his right fist. That would have to heal during his exercise routine.

If he’d had ninety-ninefold power during his third duel with Shu Mu Ye… maybe he really could have tried to punch him to death in a single blow.

The thought lingered. After absorbing imprint power for several hours, Wang Jie returned to the ship, exhausted, and fell asleep.

Sunlight streamed through the cabin and stabbed into his eyes. Seeing clear skies outside, he stepped out and continued absorbing imprint power.

Several days later, it was time for his exercises.

He took out healing medicine, spread it over his fist, then ran through the routine while drawing in imprint power.

When it ended, his fist had mostly recovered.

The effect was almost absurd.

His imprint power had fully recovered as well.

With Silver Radiance Art layered on top of his exercises, the speed at which he absorbed imprint power was beyond imagination.

Wang Jie smeared the mantis’s blood over the hull and set off into the universe. He still had to keep moving. Staying here too long was asking for trouble.

Maybe the blood worked. Or maybe the starry sky behemoth had simply given up.

Either way, the journey went smoothly all the way to the Qing Fang Star Cluster.

The Qing Fang Star Cluster was a knot of more than ten planets pressed close together. Tunnels connected them, and the passages shifted along with the planets’ rotation.

In other words, you could walk from one planet to another.

Wang Jie hid his ship first, then headed toward a location based on Deputy Domain Lord Yan’s instructions.

It wasn’t far from where he’d landed. He’d calculated his entry angle—at least he’d arrived on the correct planet.

[This is it?]

Wang Jie stared at the barren mining mountain ahead. It felt strangely familiar. The first place he’d reached after leaving Blue Star had been a mine, too.

It didn’t take long to find what he was looking for.

Beneath the ground lay a massive iron chest. Inside were a puppet and a strange set of clothes.

Puppeteer.

That was the identity Deputy Domain Lord Yan had told him to use to move through the ninth star chain.

The ninth star chain connected to both the eighth and the seventh. The eighth was the Shuang Hua Star Chain—an enemy for ages, locked in endless war. The friendly one was the seventh star chain.

The seventh star chain was also called the Puppeteer Star Chain. The people there worshiped one kind of power above all others—controlling puppets, becoming a puppeteer.

A puppeteer could come and go freely within the ninth star chain.

Of course, only if the identity was real.

In the past, many from the Shuang Hua Star Chain had disguised themselves as puppeteers. They were exposed, and they died horribly.

Wang Jie’s equipment, though, came from an actual puppeteer. Unless his luck was truly terrible, he would almost never be found out.

Beside the puppet were the most basic control methods.

Simple.

He didn’t need to fight or cultivate through the puppet. To him, it was a vehicle.

He put on the clothes, used a few basic controls to make the puppet stand, then hid himself inside it. The puppet was three meters tall—more than enough to conceal him.

After a short time getting used to it, he guided the puppet out of the mine and headed in one direction.

The sensation was strange, like sitting inside a car. It could move fast or slow depending on the operator.

The more he used it, the more natural it became.

It could run and jump, climb mountains, cross rivers, even leap through the air.

As it walked, small bells chimed softly—the sign of a puppeteer traveling outside, warning others that a puppeteer had arrived.

Puppeteers usually avoided interacting with others. Since their greatest advantage in battle came from controlling puppets, they were all experts at hiding.

That suited Wang Jie just fine.