Not collapsed. Not flickered out.

  Detonated — the feathers shattering outward in a spray of dissolving energy constructs as three resonance frequencies hit three structural weak points at the same instant.

  The involute geometry, which had been the technique's beautiful strength, became its fatal weakness: the curves that made the feathers flow so gracefully also transmitted the resonance with devastating efficiency, each feather passing the destructive vibration to the next in a chain reaction that consumed the entire wing structure in under a second.

  Liu Fang staggered. Without her wings, she was a Foundation-stage cultivator with excellent reflexes and no active technique.

  Chen Xi was already moving — not the casual palm strike he'd used on Gao Shan, but a Qi construct: a compressed wedge of energy shaped like an arrowhead, formed in real time from vortex output, launched at her centre mass.

  She dodged. Barely. The quill-launching instincts saved her — she twisted the way her technique had trained her to twist, and the construct grazed her shoulder instead of hitting her sternum.

  Her eyes were wide. Not afraid. Calculating. She was trying to rebuild her wings.

  He didn't give her time. Three more constructs, fired in a pattern that exploited the dodge trajectory his geometric analysis predicted — left, high, centre.

  She blocked two with raw Qi reinforcement, an ugly but effective emergency defence. The third hit her thigh and she dropped to one knee.

  The crowd was screaming.

  Not the confused silence of his first match. Screaming.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  They had seen lightning. They had seen wings explode. They had seen a fight.

  "I yield," Liu Fang said, from one knee, with the calm dignity of a woman who recognised a superior technique and did not intend to be injured proving a point she had already conceded.

  Chen Xi lowered his hand.

  The vortex, which had been running at roughly eighty percent capacity for the first time since its creation, hummed in his chest like an engine that had finally been given proper road.

  Elapsed time: fourteen seconds.

  From the spectator section: "THREE HUNDRED AND TWELVE MATCHES AND THAT IS THE BEST ONE I HAVE EVER SEEN!" Little Abacus was standing on his seat.

  His notebook had fallen. He did not care. The people around him were staring.

  In the referee's section, the head judge marked his tablet and announced the result. There was no mention of "technical anomaly."

  ---

  Wu Zheng found him afterward, as Chen Xi sat in the competitors' staging area drinking water that tasted wrong (everything in Jianzhou tasted wrong; he missed the metallic mineral flatness of Stanford tap water, which was itself an absurd thing to miss) and reviewing his energy expenditure.

  "The lightning was a good idea," Chen Xi said.

  "I've been watching fights for four hundred years. I know what works."

  "The efficiency cost was 8.3 percent. But the information return was—" He stopped. Wu Zheng was holding a bowl of something.

  "Eat," Wu Zheng said.

  "I'm not hungry."

  "You burned through thirty percent of your Qi reserves in fourteen seconds. You're hungry. You just don't know it because you're running on adrenaline and mathematical satisfaction. Eat."

  The bowl contained noodles.

  Not the gelatinous, overcooked noodles served at the inn down the street, which Chen Xi had been tolerating with the grim acceptance of a man who understood that caloric intake was a thermodynamic necessity.

  These were Wu Zheng's noodles — hand-pulled from flour he'd traded for that morning, in a broth made from bones he'd bought from the butcher's waste pile and simmered for six hours with ginger, star anise, and a single crushed spirit stone that added a faint luminous quality to the liquid that made it look like someone had dissolved a small star in the pot.

  Chen Xi ate. The noodles were transcendent.

  "When I get out of this life," he said between mouthfuls, "and assuming the afterlife has some sort of economy, I'm hiring you as my personal chef."

  "In this life or the next, you couldn't afford me."

  "You cooked with moss for seventy-three years."

  "And I was excellent at it.

  Excellence commands a premium."