novelraw Chapter 35 : Chapter 35
Chapter 35 : Chapter 35
Chapter 35: Another Challenge
They chatted as they walked until they arrived at the Testing Palace. Lin Bai and Wang Yu were not the first to come.
The doors to the eight testing entrances were all shut tight, faint light flowing across their surfaces to show that students were already challenging the trials inside. A few people were scattered outside, waiting.
Lin Bai and Wang Yu exchanged a glance and wordlessly each chose an entrance with no one queued in front of it.
Their luck was not bad. There happened to be exactly two left.
They did not have to wait long. In less than a quarter of an hour, the faint light on the door before Lin Bai quietly dimmed, and it slowly opened.
A woman in white who had already finished her test stepped out from within. Lin Bai did not hesitate. After signaling to Wang Yu, he strode straight into the tunnel.
It was the same familiar tunnel, the same familiar turn of space.
When Lin Bai came back to his senses, he was already standing within the familiar white space.
The Spirit of the Space appeared once more.
“Challenger Lin Bai, which of the three trials do you intend to challenge? You have three chances each day.”
Lin Bai raised an eyebrow. No wonder things had moved so quickly this time. So the number of attempts was limited during the assessments.
“The Martial Skill Trial. This time, I will use the bow.”
Since he had three chances, Lin Bai decided to test archery first, then try blade arts, and finally attempt a combination of blade and bow to see how it worked.
The moment he chose his weapon, the pure white space around him rapidly rendered and reshaped itself, transforming into a vibrant forest thick with towering ancient trees.
The air was filled with the fresh scent of earth and vegetation. Light filtered down through the layered branches above, and everything looked incomparably real.
Ahead of him, that familiar tall woman in white began to condense once more. Unlike last time, she now held a bow in her hand, with a quiver slung across her body.
The instant her figure became fully solid, Lin Bai moved.
His bow curved like a full moon, and his arrow flew like a shooting star as he sent a shaft hurtling toward her.
Strike first and seize the initiative. Perhaps he could catch her off guard.
But even though the woman’s strength had likewise been suppressed to an ordinary mortal level, her movement technique was astonishingly nimble.
With only a light tap of her toes, she drifted backward like a wildcat, using the momentum to spring up into a large tree. After several quick bounds, she disappeared into the dense canopy.
The situation reversed in an instant.
Now it was Lin Bai who broke into a cold sweat, because he realized that it was extremely difficult for him to catch sight of her.
The dense forest, the crisscrossing light and shadow, all served as perfect cover for her.
He was like a reckless intruder who had blundered into a hunter’s territory, while the woman in white was the true master of this forest.
“I can’t just sit here and wait to die.”
Gritting his teeth, Lin Bai relied on his instincts and fired three arrows in quick succession toward several positions where he thought she might be hiding, hoping to force her out.
The woman still did not appear. He only managed to shoot down a few branches.
Two soft sounds of air being pierced rang out, and two arrows came at him. Their force was not that great, which meant they were not especially fast either. Lin Bai easily twisted aside to avoid them and immediately returned fire toward the source.
Unfortunately, he accomplished nothing.
What followed was an exchange of arrows back and forth.
No, that was not quite right.
Because Lin Bai’s movement technique and footwork were poor, he was basically a living target for the woman.
Her arrows grew faster and heavier with every shot. Lin Bai’s expression turned grave as he looked at the arrow shafts before him, nearly half-buried in the hard wood.
“This is the thirtieth arrow.”
The woman’s movements had become even quieter, as though a hunter had already seized control over her prey’s life and death, and all that remained was to reap the kill.
The sound of Lin Bai’s own heartbeat thundered in his ears, thump, thump, reminding him of the tension he used to feel as a child when his elder sister Lin Su was about to find him during a game of hide-and-seek.
The forest, filled with birdsong and floral fragrance, had grown almost soundless in Lin Bai’s ears.
Three arrows came from three different directions, and Lin Bai sensed the ripple of the wind.
WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!
Lin Bai wanted to evade them. He forcibly twisted his body and dodged two of the arrows. The third only grazed the sleeve over his left arm.
Before the joy of escape could rise within him, however, a silent hidden arrow had already slipped in behind the direction he had turned toward, aimed straight for his heart.
This arrow carried the same weak force as the earliest ones, so it produced almost no sound of wind at all. Yet it was precisely this seemingly feeble arrow that ended the trial.
A sharp pain burst through Lin Bai’s chest, and the tremendous impact caused his body to falter.
Before he could even react, there was a soft thud, and the second arrow buried itself with perfect precision into his throat.
“Damn it... there was even a finishing blow.”
Those were Lin Bai’s final words.
He had seen that arrow to the throat clearly enough, but it was useless. His body could no longer keep up with his reactions.
Then he returned once again to the white space, his injuries fully restored.
The Spirit of the Space did not waste words. It directly projected the battle from an all-seeing perspective, allowing Lin Bai to watch the recording of his fight with the woman.
Within the image, one could see that after the thirtieth arrow, the woman moved with light, graceful steps. She first fired those three arrows to lure Lin Bai into exposing a weakness.
Then, at astonishing speed, she shifted into his blind spot. At the moment when his old force was spent and his new force had yet to arise, she fired that decisive killing arrow.
After Lin Bai was struck in the heart, another arrow entered his throat and completed the kill.
“What a beautifully executed hunt. She first used the force behind the arrows to make her opponent believe that all the coming shots would be fast and heavy, yet the true killing blow was a hidden arrow.”
“And then there was that final finishing shot. A perfect hunt. A true work of art. It would have been even better if the unlucky prey being hunted up there were not me.”
Lin Bai even mocked himself a little at the end, but that did not stop his eyes from shining.
This sort of review was of enormous help to him.
“Spirit of the Space, can you transmit these battle records to me?”
The moment the words left his mouth, the token on Lin Bai’s body gave a chime.
“As expected. I knew I would have to ask for it myself.”
Lin Bai had only intended to test the idea, but he had not expected it to actually work. What surprised him even more was that the token even had a function for transmitting and viewing such records.
Next came blade arts.
Because he had absorbed the lessons from his previous trial, he was no longer impatient and managed to endure until the fortieth strike.
After that came the combination of blade arts and archery.
This time, Lin Bai “died” the fastest of all.
Compared with the woman’s seamless switching between weapons, Lin Bai moved as though his motions were catching and sticking. He only lasted until the fifteenth move before he was defeated.
At this point, he had understood it clearly.
The Martial Skill Trial was purely a test of experience. Once all cultivation was stripped away and two people fought as mortals, what they competed in was nothing more than battle instinct and technique refined through long accumulation.
There was no rushing it.
And if one were to explain it in game terms, Lin Bai already possessed enough raw numbers, with the Shared Journey talent and his 129,600-point Star Chart, as well as supreme mechanics, with the Metamorphosis talent and the late-stage traits of the Beast-Taming Martial Artist.
If Lin Bai’s execution, his Martial Skill, could improve further, then in the future he truly would become invincible under heaven.
That was why Lin Bai felt no discouragement at all in the face of defeat. Instead, he delighted in repeatedly examining why he had been “killed.”
Where had he made a mistake? Where had his reactions been too slow? All of those flaws needed to be identified.
Lin Bai was not some masochist. It was simply that visible progress was too delightful to resist.
“Ah, at the end I should have abandoned the bow altogether and rushed in with fierce blade attacks. Hesitation leads to defeat. It truly is an eternal truth.”
He was still savoring the battle in his mind when he was teleported out of the testing space.
The moment Lin Bai emerged, the next person hurriedly entered through the door.
“Everyone is working hard. Good thing I came early, or I would have had to stand in a long line.”
Lin Bai sighed inwardly.
Because he had entered before Wang Yu, she had not yet come out, so he had to wait for her a while longer.
Fortunately, it was not very long. About a dozen minutes later, the door Wang Yu had entered also opened.
Wang Yu stepped out, saw the long queue outside the door, and quickly slipped away from it.
She looked left and right, searching for Lin Bai.
Lin Bai had originally planned to quietly sneak up behind Wang Yu and give her a surprise.
He had not expected that the moment he drew near, Wang Yu would turn around sharply as though she had eyes on the back of her head, catching Lin Bai with perfect accuracy in the act.
Looking at Lin Bai, whom she had caught red-handed, Wang Yu pursed her lips and said, “Come on. It’s time to go back and cultivate.”