Bai Shan's eyes widened to the size of saucers.
His spear had stopped moving. It was completely halted in mid-air, a mere three inches away from Kuo's Dantian.
Trembling with shock, Bai Shan looked down.
His full-strength, lightning-infused strike was being held in place by a single, bare hand.
Standing over Kuo's kneeling form, his dark training robes barely fluttering in the displaced wind, was Yoriichi.
He hadn't drawn his weapon. He hadn't unleashed a massive, flashy Dou Skill. He had simply reached out and caught the razor-sharp, electrified blade of the Xuan-class spear with his left hand, his fingers clamping down on the silver steel with the crushing, immovable force of a hydraulic press.
"What...?" Bai Shan gasped, his brain completely failing to process the physics of what was happening.
The blue lightning violently rejected the foreign contact, surging viciously up Yoriichi's arm. The sheer voltage instantly scorched his palm and tore into his meridians, attempting to violently paralyze his heart. The pain was excruciating—a searing agony that would have instantly blown a normal two-star Dou Shi's arm to pieces. But Yoriichi's physical vessel had been brutally tempered, his muscles fiber clamped down, painfully enduring the devastating shock.
Bai Shan gritted his teeth, desperately trying to push the spear forward, or at least pull it back, but it was like trying to pull a weapon free from a solid mountain of iron. It wouldn't budge a single millimeter.
Then, Bai Shan made the mistake of looking up.
He met Yoriichi's crimson eyes.
They were completely emotionless. There was no anger, no hatred, no arrogance. They were as calm and still as a frozen ocean.
But in that absolute stillness, Bai Shan's martial instincts—the primal, animalistic part of his brain—violently screamed in sheer, unadulterated terror.
For a single, fleeting microsecond, the handsome, aristocratic arena vanished from Bai Shan's sight.
Instead, he saw a vision. He saw a man standing atop a literal mountain of mangled, demonic corpses. He saw rivers of blood soaking the earth. He felt the crushing, suffocating weight of a predator that didn't just defeat its enemies, but utterly, systematically eradicated their very existence from the world.
Bai Shan's heartbeat skyrocketed, hammering painfully against his ribs. His breathing hitched. A cold, paralyzing sweat instantly drenched his pristine white uniform.
His entire body went completely numb. The fight, the pride, the arrogance—it was all violently snuffed out by the sheer, existential dread radiating from the stoic youth standing before him.
His grip on the silver spear softened, his fingers going slack.
Yoriichi took the weapon from the trembling genius. With a slight pulse of his Dou Qi, Yoriichi extinguished the volatile blue lightning coating the blade.
With a smooth, fluid motion, Yoriichi flipped the spear and slammed the blunt end of the shaft heavily into the arena floor. It pierced straight through the solid stone, embedding itself a foot deep, standing perfectly upright like a metallic pole.
The arena fell into a state of absolute, pin-drop silence.
The Da Dou Shi Instructor, who had just arrived at the center of the ring, skidded to a halt. He stared at the red-haired youth, his jaw hanging slightly open. He hadn't even seen the boy move from the crowd. One millisecond he was standing at the bottom of the stairs, and the next, he had crossed fifty feet of space and caught a 9-Star strike bare-handed.
It defied every known law of physics for a lower-realm student.
Yoriichi slowly relaxed his left hand. He could still feel the residual, stinging pain of the high-voltage electricity dancing across his calloused palm, and a faint burn mark marred his skin, but it was absolutely nothing his body couldn't handle.
He turned his back entirely on the paralyzed, trembling Bai Shan, dismissing the 9-Star genius as if he were thin air.
Yoriichi reached down and extended his right hand to Kuo.
Kuo looked up, his swollen eye widening in profound respect. He grabbed Yoriichi's forearm, and with a firm, effortless pull, Yoriichi hauled the heavy youth back onto his feet.
"I cannot stand by and watch someone be crippled when they stood up to fight for me," Yoriichi stated, his deep, resonant voice carrying clearly across the dead-silent arena. "You fought well, Kuo. You have found your mountain."
Down at the base of the arena stairs, Gu Xun'er stood frozen.
Her golden, glowing eyes were wide, her long eyelashes vibrating slightly as she stared at the back of Yoriichi's dark robes.
She had been standing right beside him a second ago. When Bai Shan had initiated the lethal strike, her own Dantian had flared, preparing to use her high-tier movement technique to intervene.
But Yoriichi had moved first.
'What was that... speed?' Xun'er thought, her genius mind reeling in profound shock. 'He didn't use a Dou Skill. There was no spatial distortion. It was pure, unadulterated physical explosive force. Even I couldn't reach that far, that instantly, without relying on my sealed bloodline.'
But it wasn't just the speed that shocked her. Her acute senses had picked up on something else in that microsecond of movement.
'The heat...' she recalled, remembering the sudden, blistering wave of thermal pressure that had radiated from his body just before he launched himself. 'It was unimaginable. For a fraction of a second, it felt like standing next to a miniature sun. What exactly is his true strength now? How did his body survive such kinetic output without shattering?'
Slowly, the collective shock of the crowd began to break.
A low, buzzing murmur started at the edges of the audience, rapidly escalating into a chaotic wave of excited, bewildered whispers.
"Did you see that?! He caught Senior Bai Shan's spear with his bare hand!"
"He's not a coward... he's a monster! The rumors from the wilderness were true!"
"He didn't even draw his sword! He completely ignored the lightning!"
The whispers grew louder, washing over the arena. Bai Shan remained frozen near the center of the ring, staring at his empty hands, his pride completely and utterly shattered, humiliated before the entire academy without a single blow being struck against him.
Yoriichi ignored the noise of the crowd entirely. He supported Kuo's weight over his shoulder, offering a calm, respectful nod to the stunned Instructor.
"He requires immediate medical attention, Instructor," Yoriichi stated politely. "I will escort him to the healing pavilion."
Without waiting for a response, Yoriichi began to walk toward the stairs, leaving the arrogant spark standing alone in the shadow of his own absolute defeat.