Chapter 3749 — A Contest of Minds
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
But now that he had seen through Wei Zhao's intentions, none of that existed any longer. The initiative was wholly in his hands, and Wei Zhao was no more than fish on his chopping block, to be put to death at his pleasure.
"Clever enough in your small way, but unlucky enough to run into me—you're not living past today!" Yu Jiang grinned savagely at Wei Zhao's fleeing back, having already calculated the direction of his flight. Sword qi burst from his fingertips with a shriek, and wherever it passed, stone and jade alike split asunder and none could stand against it: the Life-Reaping Chain Sword, Twenty-Third Stance!
BOOM! The earth shook and the mountains swayed. That mighty sword qi swept aside all before it like rotten wood, cleaving the forested hill ahead clean in half, its force towering to the heavens.
Yet at this moment, no trace of satisfaction showed on Yu Jiang's face. Instead it was ashen, and beneath it lurked something very like panic.
For no other reason than this: the strike he had been so certain of had missed.
At the instant of the strike, the distance between him and Wei Zhao had been less than a zhang, and because he had anticipated Wei Zhao's gambit in advance, he had been fully prepared—in theory there had been no possibility whatever of missing.
But the fact was that he had missed, cleanly and completely. That fearsome sword qi had destroyed half the mountain forest and yet had not so much as brushed the hem of Wei Zhao's garment. Faced with such a result, even a man of Yu Jiang's deep cunning could not help but be stung into furious humiliation.
The reason he had missed was in truth quite simple: Wei Zhao's feint, that frontal lunge with an eye to escape, had been deliberately revealed to him. In Wei Zhao's own words—sorry, I lied.
From first to last it had been a deception, a classic contest of minds.
Though Wei Zhao, relying on his many formidable hidden cards, felt no fear of his opponent, he was not foolish enough to pit himself head-on against him. He was, after all, only at the peak of the early Foundation Establishment stage, a full grade below his opponent, and in a straight clash the odds of coming off worse were plainly greater.
In a challenge across stages, however capable and confident the apparent weakling might be, to choose a direct confrontation is always the poorest strategy. The true highest strategy is always to attack the mind—to lure the opponent into exposing a flaw by every means possible, then in an instant unleash one's hidden strength and kill him with a single blow.
In his days in the mortal world, Wei Zhao had often crushed opponents of higher rank head-on, but those had been paper tigers—empty of stage, hollow of true strength. Against a formidable enemy of genuinely high rank such as the one before him now, there could plainly be no such simple and direct course.
Among the disciples of the Threefold Pavilion of the Northern Island of the Heaven Rank, how many were mediocrities? Those of the Soaring Heaven Pavilion in particular were all powers to be reckoned with.
The contest of minds was only the opening greeting; the battle had barely begun.
In that instant just now, Wei Zhao had merely made a feint. Against something slow-witted like Meng Zhou, such a feint would have fooled no one—not because it was clever, but because Meng Zhou simply could not react in time, still less perceive the intention Wei Zhao had deliberately let slip.
But facing Yu Jiang, it was precisely because his reactions were too quick and his mind too sharp, because he had early on convinced himself he had grasped Wei Zhao's intention, that he had fallen into Wei Zhao's trap.
Put plainly, this contest of minds was a psychological snare Wei Zhao had tailored for clever men like Yu Jiang. Against ordinary folk it might not work at all, but against clever men so sure they could grasp everything, it never failed.
The moment Yu Jiang grasped this, his face turned unspeakably ugly.