Chapter 4478 — Spare Your Life
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 3
Others might toil at it for decades and still achieve only a minor success, and you want to master it in less than a stick of incense's time—how could that be possible? That was not just a brain addled by water; someone had dropped a brain into the water!
Yet while this was unrealistic for anyone else, on Wei Zhao—with his five elements and seven attributes, all of them true spirit-root attributes—it was another matter entirely.
With a deep, prodigious foundation like his set firmly beneath him, no matter what move his opponent used, Wei Zhao could take the martial techniques he already knew, combine them with the opponent's unique method of activation, and reconstruct and assemble it bit by bit; once he had gradually grasped and grown familiar with it, he could truly make it his own.
He had done this many times before—the Furious Fire Eight Trigrams Palm was a ready example. To advance one's strength swiftly, one had to walk on two legs: raising one's cultivation was one side of it, but on the other, one's martial techniques had to keep evolving as well. Neither could be dispensed with, and Wei Zhao clearly understood this principle well.
Of course, reconstructing and assembling any martial technique was an extremely complex and difficult undertaking, and the more exquisite, profound, and powerful the technique, the harder it was to reconstruct—so much so that even with Wei Zhao's wealth of experience, facing Wu Baoliang's Wild Sand Thousand Explosions Fist at this moment, he was lost in a thousand threads and ten thousand strands.
Over and over, like a film reel playing in Wei Zhao's mind, the scene on the ring replayed without cease. He disassembled the opponent's Wild Sand Thousand Explosions Fist piece by piece, and after combining it with his own understanding and insights, reassembled it bit by bit once more.
If conditions allowed, the best method would be to reconstruct it in his mind for a time and then try it out with his own body on the spot, for only thus could he truly know whether his reconstruction had succeeded, and where the problems lay.
But with so many people watching, Wei Zhao plainly had no means to do so. He could only silently rehearse it within his mind, relying on his rich past experience to judge whether the reconstruction had succeeded—a truly high-difficulty technical feat that ordinary people could not manage at all.
In the end, after the Wild Sand Thousand Explosions Fist had been disassembled and rehearsed countless times, it was finally reassembled successfully in Wei Zhao's mind—yet it had, remarkably, taken on an entirely different form. Once actually executed, it would likely be vastly different from Wu Baoliang's original Wild Sand Thousand Explosions Fist.
There was no helping it. To this moment, Wei Zhao still could not fully confirm whether that wisp of black qi about Wu Baoliang was a trait of demonic cultivators or some exceedingly rare variant spirit-root attribute. So even with his five elements and seven attributes, he had no way to fully replicate the black qi.
A stick of incense's time was not long. As the last bit of ash fell, the spectators perked up at once. Though nine out of ten of them were certain Wei Zhao was a dead man, watching such a sensational life-and-death duel still stirred an inexplicable, exhilarating thrill that left them unable to tear themselves away.
Wu Baoliang glanced sidelong at Wei Zhao below the ring and was about to offer a few taunts, but before he could open his mouth, Wei Zhao had already risen to his feet of his own accord and walked straight up onto the platform.