Morning didn't arrive slowly.When the sun first appeared on the eastern horizon of the Eternal Night Sect, sound was already everywhere—the footsteps of thousands of people moving in one direction, conversations held back to whispers because the place they were heading didn't feel like somewhere to speak too loudly.The main arena stood at the heart of the Eternal Night Sect's complex.From outside, it looked large. From inside, the scale was something else entirely—a circle with a diameter of a thousand meters, its floor made of stone polished until the morning light reflected in it like an imperfect mirror. Along the arena's edge, every few dozen meters, stood pillars emitting thin blue light—not decorative, but part of a protective array encasing the entire arena in a layer invisible to the eye but perceptible to anyone with enough spiritual energy sensitivity.The array was strong.Strong enough to hold against an Immortal Realm attack without cracking, strong enough to ensure th

In the center of the arena, an old man walked to the precise position at the heart of that thousand-meter circle.His robe was grey—not a faded grey, but a grey that had chosen its color very deliberately, dark enough to look serious but not dark enough to look excessive. On his chest, the Eternal Night Sect's emblem in gold embroidery that had faded slightly at the edges, showing this robe had been around longer than most of the participants in the arena.He stood.Produced nothing. Didn't raise his hand. Just stood—at the center of that large circle, beneath a morning sky already fully bright, among the hundred and eight participants each standing differently but all sharing one thing: waiting.Then his voice came out.Not loud in the ordinary way. Loud in a different way—spiritual energy channeled through the vocal cords, extending the reach of the words without changing the quality of his voice, so that someone standing at the farthest edge of the arena heard with the same clarity

Caelan stood on the cold stone floor, among the hundred and six other participants still fighting around him.At his feet, Su Ming wasn't moving.He didn't look at Su Ming any longer than necessary. His head came up—toward the largest pavilion, toward the five chairs that had been there since before the first gong sounded.From this distance, the faces of each of those five people couldn't be read clearly. But their auras—those were different.Caelan could feel them even from the center of the arena, like pressure that didn't come from one direction but from all directions at once—not pressing in a way that hurt, but in a way that very clearly conveyed that what was there belonged to a different category from anyone standing on this arena floor.Extraordinarily powerful.Far more powerful than anyone he had encountered in this world.Caelan filed that observation away.In those five people—among them—there was a possibility. Not a certain one, but one substantial enough to account for

Caelan moved.Not in one direction. This was movement with no straight line in it—reading the space, finding gaps between fights already underway, and moving through them.Three seconds after Su Ming went down. First casualty.A large man with an axe, mid-swing at the opponent in front of him, never noticed something approaching from his side. Caelan entered the axe's swing radius at the exact moment the swing passed him, and one light strike landed at the Yanglingquan point outside his left knee—the same point used before, the one that severed the connection between the brain's command and the leg's ability to bear weight.His left leg folded.The axe embedded itself in the stone floor as its owner lost his balance.Caelan was no longer there when the axe hit the stone.The opponent who had been facing the axe man stared in confusion toward a direction completely different from where he should have been looking, and Caelan wasn't there either.Five seconds. Two people.The third—a wo

In the Five Great Sects' pavilion, no one spoke for a few seconds after that cough.Not because no one wanted to speak, but because each of them was processing something in their own way—and the first to finish was the first to speak.Lei Qinghe."That man is holding back."Her voice came out the way it always did—measured, every word in its right place. Her eyes didn't move from the arena below, from the two people still standing at their respective positions after that kick."Li Mingzhi has already pushed his full capacity. But the one across from him—" A brief pause. "He hasn't even used half."Dao Tianyue gave a slow nod—a small head movement for a neck that was anything but small."Their power levels are on par. I can feel the spiritual energy of each of them." His large hands rested on his knees. "But that man—he has a thorough understanding of how to maximize every part of his potential. Nothing wasted. No movement just for show." His eyes narrowed slightly. "He is extraordinar