## Chapter 148: Phantom's Wrath
The air didn't just grow cold. It crystallized.
The phantom of the Grandmaster, condensed from the talisman's light, was more than an image. It was a will, a sliver of supreme arrogance given form. Its eyes, twin pits of glacial fire, landed on Li Chang'an, and the world shrank to the space between them.
Pressure didn't begin to describe it. It was a mountain range settling on his soul. Li Chang'an's bones groaned. His blood felt like sludge in his veins. Behind him, he heard a choked gasp—Xiao Mei hitting the floor, her hands splayed against the stone as if holding the earth down. Old Wang let out a sound like a rusted hinge, his knees buckling. This wasn't an attack. It was an announcement: Kneel.
Yun Lei, bleeding and propped against the wall, bared his teeth in a bloody smile. "You see? This is true power! You're just an ant!"
The phantom raised a single, translucent hand. It didn't form a seal. It didn't chant. It simply gestured, a lord flicking dust from his sleeve.
The spiritual pressure moved.
It became a visible wave, a distortion in reality that roared forward. It wasn't aimed at flesh; it was aimed at the spirit, at the very core of their cultivation. Li Chang'an knew, with absolute certainty, that if it hit Xiao Mei or Old Wang directly, it wouldn't kill them. It would shatter their meridians, break their dantians, leave them as empty, twitching husks.
His mind, under the crushing weight, did not freeze. It ignited.
[Innate Talent: Heaven-Defying Comprehension - ACTIVATED.]
The wave of annihilating pressure wasn't just a threat. It was a textbook. A brutal, unforgiving lecture on spiritual defense. He saw the way it coiled, the frequency of its vibration, the arrogant, unyielding intent woven into its fabric. It was a technique of absolute suppression, meant to erase anything lesser.
Too rigid, a part of him whispered. All force, no yield. Like a cliff facing a tsunami. The cliff always breaks.
His eyes, burning with internal light, traced the wave's approach. In the span of a single, straining heartbeat, knowledge flooded him. Not just how to block it, but how to understand it. To dissect its pride and find the flaw in its arrogance.
"Get behind me!" His voice was a ragged strip of sound, torn from his constricted throat.
He didn't have time to form a proper stance. He planted his feet, the stone cracking under his heels. He didn't summon qi in a conventional pattern. Instead, he mirrored the phantom's own wave, but in reverse—not a wall, but a vortex.
His hands moved, not with the practiced grace of a learned technique, but with the desperate, instinctual genius of survival. He didn't push against the pressure. He guided it. He let the first edge of the wave touch his own spiritual energy and then spun it, weaving a funnel of his will around the annihilating force.
Comprehension Complete.
Low-Grade Spiritual Pressure Art [Mountain's Resolve] has been analyzed.
Evolved into Mythical-Grade Defensive Art [Void's Embrace].
A silvery, shimmering field, like heat haze over a desert, erupted from Li Chang'an. It didn't glow with blinding power. It absorbed. It hummed with a deep, hungry silence.
The Grandmaster' phantom's pressure-wave hit the shimmering field.
The sound was wrong. It wasn't a crash. It was a swallow. A deep, resonant gulp of energy. The violent distortion smoothed out, sucked into the humming vortex Li Chang'an had created. The edges of the silver field flared, straining, threatening to shatter. Li Chang'an felt it like a hot knife twisting in his gut. His nose bled. A fine network of cracks appeared on the skin of his forearms. He was holding back an ocean with a teacup, but the cup, for now, held.
Behind him, Xiao Mei and Old Wang gasped as the suffocating weight lifted from their chests. They were safe in the eye of the hurricane he'd created.
The phantom's glacial eyes showed the first flicker of something beyond disdain: a spark of cold curiosity.
"An interesting trick," its voice echoed, not in the hall, but directly inside their skulls. "A gnat that dodges the first swat. Let us see you dodge the hand."
The phantom's form solidified further. It drew back its hand, fingers curling. Spiritual energy from the entire surrounding area screamed as it was ripped away, forming a swirling, black-and-white sphere of destructive power above its palm—the true attack, one that would vaporize matter and spirit alike.
This was it. He couldn't just defend. He had to know. He had to see the source.
As the phantom gathered its world-ending power, Li Chang'an's left hand, hidden behind the shimmering veil of the [Void's Embrace], moved in a tiny, intricate pattern. His spiritual sense, refined to a razor's edge, extended not to attack, but to listen. To touch the edges of the phantom's constructed consciousness.
[Memory Extraction Art - ACTIVATED.]
He wasn't digging for deep secrets. He was looking for a signature, a resonance, a breadcrumb. The phantom was a message. Every message has a point of origin.
Fragments, sharp and cold as broken glass, sliced into his mind.
A dark, silent chamber, sealed for a hundred years.
The smell of ancient stone and fading incense.
A body seated in eternal meditation, dust on its robes, a single, pulsing jade slip on a pedestal before it—the master talisman connected to this one.
A location. Deep. Beneath the central peak. Sealed behind three layers of Void-Severing formations. A place called the "Eternal Repose Crypt."
The most critical fragment: a deep, rhythmic pulse from that meditating body. Not the pulse of active cultivation, but the slow, suspended beat of profound, death-like seclusion. The Grandmaster was not just away. He was under. Unreachable. Unaware. For at least several more days.
The phantom finished its preparation. The black-and-white sphere hummed with the promise of oblivion. "Perish."
Li Chang'an let the [Void's Embrace] drop.
The shimmering field vanished. He stood exposed, arms at his sides, facing the sphere of annihilation.
Yun Lei's eyes widened in triumph. "Fool! You've given up!"
Li Chang'an looked past the sphere, past the phantom, his gaze seeing the dark crypt miles away. A slow, deliberate smile touched his blood-streaked lips.
"You're just a echo," Li Chang'an said, his voice clear now, cutting through the hum of power. "And echoes… fade."
He didn't raise a hand to block. He pointed a single finger at the center of the phantom's forehead. Not with a beam of energy, but with a concept. He fed back the precise, inverted frequency of the phantom's own cohesive will, the flaw he'd comprehended in that first wave—its utter rigidity.
The phantom froze. The deadly sphere flickered.
A spider-web of light crackled across the phantom's form, starting from the point Li Chang'an had indicated. A sound like shattering porcelain filled the hall.
The Grandmaster's phantom looked down at its disintegrating hands, that cold curiosity finally shifting to something that might have been disbelief. Then, without a sound, it exploded into a million motes of lifeless light, which then winked out into nothing.
Silence, heavier than the pressure had been, slammed down.
Yun Lei's bloody smile was still etched on his face, frozen now in pure, incomprehensible horror. His talisman was a lifeless scrap of ash in his hand.
Li Chang'an lowered his hand. He was spent, every muscle trembling, his spiritual sea churned and low. But in his mind's eye, a map was now etched in fire.
He saw it. Not just a location, but the path. The three Void-Severing formations were complex puzzles, but to his eyes, they were already unraveling, their solutions unfolding like poisoned flowers.
He turned to his team. Xiao Mei was helping a pale Old Wang to his feet. Their faces were etched with relief and awe.
"We're done here," Li Chang'an said, wiping the blood from his nose. His voice was tired, but it carried a new, iron certainty. He glanced at the broken Yun Lei, who had shrunk into a corner, all arrogance gone.
But Li Chang'an had no more interest in him. The real prize was elsewhere, dormant and undefended.
"The Grandmaster is in seclusion," Li Chang'an said, the words hanging in the quiet air. He looked toward the distant central peak, his eyes seeing through rock and earth. "He's buried deep, thinking himself safe. Unreachable."
He paused, letting the implication sink in for his team, for the universe itself.
"I know exactly where he is."
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