Huang Su frowned as she perceived Li Wusu defending against her attacks. She had imagined plenty of ways in which her foe might endure their offensive, and yet what she saw was beyond her expectations.

  For one, the ship captain had managed to conjure up a foreign nd around them, somehow utilising her memory powers to manifest something outrageous. It made some degree of sense, but it was still beyond her expectations for the archetype that Li Wusu used. This ndscape wasn’t offering her a great advantage at this moment, either, so it was trivial to ignore for the moment and simply focus on the fight.

  What she couldn’t ignore was the fact that every single time Li Wusu used a skill to ward off her fming feathers, it was a different skill, from a different archetype. From crystalline barriers to spears of bone and strokes of paint in the air to masses of humanoid bodies appearing in a tightly compressed wall, she seemed to possess anything and everything.

  ‘She could not have learnt all of those, no mortal mind would be able to comprehend all of those skills and no body would be able to handle cultivating all of them… it must be her archetype. It seems like she can duplicate the skills and techniques alongside memories, and use them as her own,’ Huang Su concluded, gritting her teeth, ‘They are not quite at the strength they should be, but that does not stop her from nearing my own strength with sheer versatility…’

  With the ndscape surrounding them, the countless memory entities fighting below, and her near-endless skillset, Li Wusu had enough power to rival a sect, not to mention their small group.

  Thus, as her endless barrage of fming feathers, shrouded in darkness in a pointless attempt to make her identity less obvious, failed to produce results, Huang Su had to switch up her strategy. She manifested a few st fming feathers and then charged forward, conjuring fming nces that flew alongside her.

  The ship captain didn’t seem perturbed in the slightest, simply waving her hands once more to create a golden figure in front of her. It was rough and simple, barely resembling any specific person, but it moved in a way that was awfully familiar, producing nces of fme in the same manner that Huang Su did.

  ‘Did she… did she create this from my memories? It would expin why the figure barely looks like me, but… heavens, she must not be allowed to survive!’ the Sect Master narrowed her eyes and went all out, immense heat building up around her.

  Without bothering to shroud her fmes in darkness, she built up the image of a phoenix behind her, an enormous winged entity that lit up the entire area like a small sun. It spanned dozens of metres from the end of one wing to another, and that was before Huang Su activated all of her marks that were yet to be joined as part of her Linked Channels realm. Fourteen marks went off at once, and all of their energy was devoted to the phoenix construct, causing it to triple in size and become almost lifelike.

  For a moment, it was as though her Phoenix Wrath skill created a true phoenix from days long past, when the ancient beasts still roamed the world.

  “Burn, monster!” Huang Su excimed as she let the construct fly forth, the mass of fme passing through her and soaring at her foe in the blink of an eye.

  Phoenix Wrath was a sure killing move of the Phoenix Sect, usable only from the sixth realm. It was an incredible skill that was able to have a huge area of effect but also incredible power against a single target, the former allowing all routes of escape to be cut off while the tter ensured an enemy’s death. Although she’d only had cause to use this move a few times prior, she knew just how devastating it would be.

  ‘It’s over.’

  Her Phoenix Wrath crashed into Li Wusu’s figure, the entire construct exploding and reaching numerous memory entities down below, annihiting them in an instant. However, despite this eruption, Huang Su didn’t see the entities disappearing, as regur pnar constructs might if their creator was killed.

  ‘Impossible, did she-’

  Down below, she felt the ship captain’s energy once more, and her spiritual perception spotted Li Wusu standing down below, awfully close to Bianca and the others.

  ‘How… she can swap pces with her memory entities? Unless I can wipe them all out, I would not be able to test…’ the Sect Master sighed, checking her current pnar energy pool, ‘That wasted around half of my energy, and all of my searing marks, so I am not able to perform that kind of attack again. I should focus on the memory entities for now and keep the others safe, and let Bianca make her attempt.’

  To say that Li Wusu’s sudden appearance in front of them was a shock would be an understatement. Xue Yaling had been fighting off the memory entities using Spearing Pieces, conjuring fragments of the Butcher’s Cleaver and Aureate Sword to pierce her foes and, if any of them were able to block her attacks, to confuse them with the two effects of the shards.

  The Butcher’s Cleaver’s shards were filled with killing intent, inevitably drawing the attention of those memory entities, while the Aureate Sword’s shards had the property of being easily overlooked.

  When shot together, one would distract from the other and allow at least one shard to strike her foes, and thus she would eventually take them out, whether she needed one shard of a hundred. She could’ve been more efficient if she had more strength, but the memory entities demonstrated strength between the third and fifth realm, so she could only do so much with any single hit.

  This strategy worked well against the retively simple entities, but the instant that Li Wusu suddenly showed up, repcing one of the memory entities that Xue Yaling had been targeting, it fell apart. The ship captain was able to effortlessly block the conjured shards, and replied with an attack of her own, some kind of whip made up of hundreds of small metallic fragments appearing in her hand as she swung it.

  That whip flew right towards her with terrifying speed, forcing her to throw out the Nocturnal Aegis, letting the shield block the strike as all the pieces of it came together. In the next moment, the Aegis exploded, emanating all of the power it had absorbed outwards, devastating several of the weaker memory entities in the process.

  However, Li Wusu merely smirked and raised her hand, fmes gathering around her shoulder and rising up over the course of a second, a vast amount of energy soaring towards the skies as the fmes reached her fingertips and seemingly vanished.

  The energy up above suddenly lit up, an enormous pnar construct manifesting in the skies. It was a huge ball of fme, easily three or four metres across, and after a moment of hovering in the air, it started to plummet down onto their group. Having used Nocturnal Aegis a moment ago, she couldn’t re-use it right away, and so she let the meteor fall while she focused on the ship captain.

  ‘This bitch is clearly more capable than we would’ve wished, but that’s still fine. I just need a single moment at the right time, and then I could provide an opening for… whoever takes it, although it’s most likely to be Bianca. As long as she understood my suggestion, she should be able to act on it in that moment,’ the kitsune thought as she released the ability of the Butcher’s Cleaver, manifesting the enormous figure above her.

  It didn’t dey before performing a sweeping cleave with the weapon in its spectral hand, cutting across the battlefield as though it was merely cutting air.

  At least a dozen memory entities were ruined, and twenty more blocked or leapt away from the attack, but Li Wusu was able to simply manifest a yer of energy to shield herself. It formed into hexagonal panels of varying widths that blocked the strike while ringing in a peculiar manner, vanishing after a short while.

  “Ancients, do you have the abilities of every single memory you’ve stored?”

  “I contain and am the Nexus of Thoughts!” the captain replied indirectly, and produced another mysterious attack, a helix of energy condensing in the air and shooting out directly at Xue Yaling, flying at a speed beyond her imagination.

  She couldn’t respond in time, but a wave of energy rushed in front of her and struck the helix, disrupting the delicate structure and shattering the energy to naught.

  Song Ming had thrown out her Energy Wave by instinct, feeling that the kitsune would be unable to stop the strike, and was astounded to find out that she was able to do anything against it.

  ‘That worked? Oh… that’s good. But I must focus, my current skills aren’t good enough to handle my opponents on their own, and I can see that the memory entities aren’t affected in the same way, so…’ she took a breath and focused, gathering all of the energy of her physique.

  In a breath, she was able to unleash dozens of smaller runes on the ground, some beneath the enemies directly and others in random spots, to try and catch any memory entities that dodge out of the way. It barely consumed any of her pnar energy, and very little mental energy, so she was able to throw out numerous runes without issue, but she wasn’t going to dispy all of that right away.

  Li Wusu might be able to handle countless memories and execute their skills, but Song Ming didn’t believe that she could remember every single one at the same time. Therefore, as long as she could be lured into thinking a certain way about Song Ming’s skillset, there might be a moment where she could gain an edge.

  ‘I don’t have much else I could do… especially about that enormous ball of fme above us,’ she didn’t need to look up to feel the heat from above, to see the overwhelming light slowly brightening the area.

  Bianca saw the meteor falling from above, and knew that out of everyone present, she had perhaps the best chance to handle it. Her defensive skill wasn’t optimal for covering a rge area, but she didn’t need to defend anyone if she could just break it apart in the skies.

  She steadied her footing and channelled her energy to her weapon, flooding the bde with crimson lightning that sparked out all the way to the ship floor. Looking up at that enormous ball of fme above her, she narrowed her eyes and focused on the very middle of the orb, the light practically blinding her. Nevertheless, she knew the spot to target, and she had plenty of intent to kill. Therefore, her power was practically overflowing.

  As it was unleashed, for a brief moment, it was able to overshadow the light from the meteor, at least until her crimson light reached close enough to it that it could no longer compete. Nevertheless, as it struck, crimson erupted out, countless arcs exploding into the air, and the fmes exploded with them.

  ‘Great, the meteor might even explode on contact, or maybe not – either way, it just got split!’ Bianca excimed in her mind as she witnessed the enormous orb shatter, fmes going all over the pce, aside from the ground where they were standing.

  Her strike managed to divert the meteor from them and onto all of the memory entities, so she naturally took advantage of this moment to look out for the ship captain’s position. The moment she found her, Bianca focused all of her attention on her and unleashed swing after swing, crimson waves crashing towards the captain.

  Li Wusu didn’t seem to even react before the killing light was beside her, at which point she merely disappeared from her position, repced by a golden entity that had been somewhere else on the battlefield earlier.

  Thus, those destructive arcs cut into it, cleaving the thing in half, and continued on to hit and be blocked by the memory entities behind it.

  ‘She can easily swap pces with a memory entity at any time, so taking her down is practically impossible without wiping out all of them first…’ Bianca frowned and looked around, trying to estimate the difficulty of such a feat.

  All around the deck of the ship, there was a vast range of grassy hills that seemed endless, blocking off any route of escape, and she was able to see memory entities wherever she looked. Most of them weren’t anywhere near as effective as Bianca had expected, but the sheer quantity meant that she couldn’t just casually sit around and look for a way out.

  ‘Crap… Then I’ll have to try out a few of my pns… well, single pn. One and a half at best,’ she shut her eyes for a moment and focused, allowing the Demonic Tyrant to use the Weave of the Senses and guide her spiritual perception outwards, trying to explore the area and figure out where the ship was retive to the coast.

  If she was able to determine their position, then at the very least they’d have a direction to try and escape into.

  However, her search proved fruitless. To her spiritual perception, everything around her was, for all intents and purposes, seemingly entirely real and devoid of falsity. The hills and mountains were no different from an actual chunk of nd that simply manifested around them.

  ‘Fuck… It looks like these memories of nd aren’t going away easily. Either she’s the one keeping them up, or…’ she gnced down at the ship’s deck, one of the few things remaining amidst the changed terrain, ‘The ship might also be involved. I hope it’s the tter.’

  Han Rushu never wanted to get into all these fights, but when the enemies were right before her, she did have a few skills to use to ward them off.

  Some were picked up for the sake of bcksmithing – blunt strikes with her fists or a hammer, if she had one on her. Against metallic foes like the memory entities, such attacks were retively effective, though some were far more lifelike. With those, she unleashed the Bestial range of skills, performing various strikes with her sword that felt like the fierce swings of a lion’s paws, the fearsome jaws of a wolf, or the like.

  Technically, she didn’t have any of those specific skills, as she had never bothered to cultivate them. Still, with her draconic blood, she had decent affinity with the Bestial archetype, and emuting its skills with her energy proved sufficient.

  Of course, she was incomparable to a true fighter, but she couldn’t help but notice something.

  ‘The ship is btantly the anchor for all of this. There’s no chance that anyone could just stabilise thousands of memory entities and the ndscape, even at the fifth realm…’ Han Rushu concluded, looking around while smacking away anything that got too close, ‘Somewhere in that huge thing, there should be some kind of array to assist with all this. It would also expin why Li Wusu doesn’t tend to go on nd – with such an army, she should have no problems conquering a town, maybe even confronting a sect.’

  She hoped that she would be able to perceive some kind of energy flow towards the ndscape surrounding them, but it was proving unfortunately challenging.

  ‘Why does this ship have to be so well made… not a single fw anywhere. It’s almost like the person making it wasn’t spending all day thinking about who they’d dick down next…’ the bcksmith almost couldn’t help but regret her attitude towards her work… almost.

  No matter what, being able to fuck gorgeous women was the best, so no matter how much she did care about her great art, it wasn’t worth giving up on her main pleasure for it.

  ‘And… I hate to admit it, but there’s no chance I’m keeping up with Bianca. Since she gets her dick from a technique, and mine is just… natural, so she’ll outgrow that, and her cultivation will inevitably leap ahead of mine… and she has been very permissive of my bullshit despite having a literal Sect Master at her side that already dislikes me…’ Han Rushu paused for a moment, and sighed, ‘Shit. I might need to compromise with her eventually, or else I won’t get any privileges in her sect.’

  She was so deep in thought that she nearly missed an attack by a weakened memory entity that got past the others, so she could only dodge in time before the golden bde cut her in half. The second strike was coming with little dey, but luckily, she saw the crystalline glow of a dark jian soaring her way, blocking the attack with ease.

  “Jia Bo Xun, was it? Nice!”

  “What are you doing? Dodge!” her greeting was met with yelling as Jia Bo Xun dashed past and blocked another strike, managing to ssh forward and damage one of the memory entities.

  “Why aren’t you using that lightning your Master loves using? Haven’t learnt it yet?”

  “S-Shut up!” the former bandit replied hurriedly, swinging her sword with little precision or grace.

  Despite that, for just a moment, a fsh of crimson appeared amidst the crystalline energy as it erupted out in a wave that crashed into the midst of the golden figures. Her energy exploded into shards, but both of them had noticed that minor change.

  “… Huh.”

  “I… I felt like I had it for a moment! That… that emotion, that anger…”