Chapter 5181 — A Thousand Blades in Flight
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
Wei Zhao had only made a cursory study of the Thousand Blades Sect's foundational cultivation method, but he knew well enough where its difficulty lay — and the greatest difficulty of all was dividing the mind. Every weapon under one's control demanded a thread of attention devoted solely to it. For an ordinary person, even splitting the mind in two was no easy feat; to command a hundred weapons at once, one would have to split the mind a hundred ways. Anyone with half a brain could see that such a thing was beyond the human capacity altogether.
Yet the Ling Tianyou before him was a puzzle. Unlike the other disciples of the Thousand Blades Sect, he had not opened with a great array of weapons. Instead he produced only a single ribbon, which looked utterly harmless. What was the meaning of this?
Was he concealing his strength? Or was this wholly unremarkable ribbon in fact his trump card?
Wei Zhao did not stir rashly. He simply stood where he was and quietly waited for Ling Tianyou's next move. At his level, he could not possibly regard the other as a genuine threat, but neither would he underestimate him. He watched Ling Tianyou, holding fast to stillness while awaiting whatever change might come.
And as Wei Zhao observed Ling Tianyou, so too did Ling Tianyou observe his reaction. As he had said himself, he was genuinely curious about this man Wei Zhao.
A primal-spirit expert of formidable power, an uncle-master of the Cangwu Sect of the Northern Isle — to all the disciples of Taigu, this Wei Zhao was an existence wrapped in mystery. Though Ling Tianyou had made no move throughout the previous ten months, in both the short and the long view he felt it necessary to ascertain just who and what Wei Zhao was. Otherwise, if nothing else, the coming Taigu Trial would have one more unpredictable factor to reckon with.
Suddenly, the ribbon fluttering in midair snapped taut with a sharp crack. Then came a shrill shriek of air being split, as it hurtled straight at Wei Zhao like a loosed arrow.
The onlookers' expressions shifted at the sight. To carry such force — this ribbon was plainly no ordinary thing.
Faced with the ribbon rushing at him, Wei Zhao's expression remained unmoved. Only when it was less than half a foot from his face did he extend two fingers and calmly catch it.
Xin Yi'an nodded to himself. The scene looked wholly unremarkable, but to achieve such composure and fearlessness as Wei Zhao's was no easy matter. Among those present, at least, few could have managed it — even he, a cultivator of early Golden Core, would not dare to stake his word on it.
Yet once caught, the ribbon did not stop. Instead it thrashed wildly like a serpent. To the onlookers, however, it seemed merely futile struggling — what harm, after all, could a limp scrap of cloth do?
But Wei Zhao's expression flickered slightly, and without hesitation he let go. In almost the same instant that his fingers opened, a dense swarm of flying needles burst from the ribbon!
The move came so abruptly that the whole crowd drew a collective sharp breath, every face stricken with alarm. Nearly all of them had been deceived by the ribbon's innocuous appearance — who could have imagined that such a multitude of flying needles lay hidden within?
Had it been any of them in his place, they would by now have been punctured into a pincushion; that single move would have been the end of them.
But Ling Tianyou's opponent was Wei Zhao. Even though the needles were concealed with extraordinary cunning, virtually fused with the ribbon so that under normal circumstances not even a spiritual sense could detect them, Wei Zhao possessed not only a spiritual sense far keener than ordinary men but also the feral instinct for danger honed since childhood. Had he not sensed it beforehand, why would he have suddenly let go?