Chapter 15: The Master Does Not Speak of Strange Powers and Chaotic Spirits!

“Bang!”

The slap struck his face, and Zhao Tiande felt a burst of agonizing pain in his cheek.

It was as though he had been rammed head-on by a heavily armored cavalryman.

“Pffft!”

He spat out a mouthful of blood toward the sky.

His entire body flew backward like a kite with its string cut, moving even faster than when he had come!

He smashed straight through the gates of the Zhao Residence, carving a trench several inches deep into the marble ground.

“Cough, cough, cough…”

When the dust settled, Zhao Tiande lay in the ruins, his face covered in blood, his chest heaving violently.

He raised his head and looked at the illusory stone stele hanging in the air, his eyes filled with misery.

“Good, good, good… As expected, the Prince of Qin’s writing is truly overbearing…”

Zhao Tiande struggled to his feet and wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth.

A sinister grin that sent chills down the spine spread across his face.

“Since Great Xia will not tolerate my Zhao Family…”

He suddenly pulled out a purple-black jade disk from his robes and crushed it viciously.

“Then let the people of this entire city be buried with my Zhao Family!”

“Raise the formation!!”

Rumble…

With that roar, the earth began to tremble violently.

The ground throughout the entire Zhao Residence exploded apart with a crash, and countless purple-black pillars of light shot into the sky!

Within those pillars of light, it seemed as though countless resentful souls were howling like evil ghosts.

Yin wind swept in gusts, blotting out the sky and the sun.

A horrifying pressure that made it difficult to breathe instantly enveloped the entire Eastern District.

The aura of the formation kept rising, already breaking past the peak of the Third Rank!

It continued climbing, all the way to the peak of the Second Rank, surging ever upward.

It even faintly showed signs of breaking into the First Rank.

“Xu Yong!”

The injuries on Zhao Tiande’s body had already healed completely. As his aura surged, his hair whipped wildly in the wind.

Pointing at the distant commoners, he roared sharply:

“I know this grand formation cannot stop you, but if I unleash my full strength, it will definitely drag the surrounding common people into it!”

“Now, as long as you let the core members of my Zhao Family leave the city, I guarantee they will conceal their names and identities from this day forward and never again set foot in Great Xia!”

“And as for me, I will submit to your disposal and tell you every secret I know.”

Xu Yong gripped his blade and looked at the formation before him without saying a word.

He was not afraid that he could not break it, nor was he afraid of implicating the common people.

He was afraid that if he acted rashly, it would affect his elder brother’s plans and also affect his second brother far away at the frontier.

As for sparing trouble for the future by letting the tiger return to the mountain, that thought had never even crossed his mind.

Just as he was about to give the order, a clear and calm voice rang distinctly in everyone’s ears.

“You are not worthy to bargain with Great Xia.”

The voice was not loud, yet it carried incomparable confidence.

Xu Yong abruptly turned his head, and joy instantly surged into his eyes, which had been full of violent fury just moments before.

“Big Brother!”

At the far end of the long street,

Xu Tian was walking steadily forward, his figure straight and upright.

Behind him followed Li Hongru and the other Great Confucians of the academy, along with several hundred young students clad in Confucian robes.

And behind them still came countless citizens of the capital.

Everyone knew that Confucian cultivators valued the heart and mind above all else. Self-cultivation and the nurturing of one’s nature were their daily pursuits.

These students cultivated only Vast Righteous Qi and had not yet had time to practice Confucian arts.

If a real fight broke out, they would not even compare to a street thug.

That was why they usually kept to themselves and seldom showed their faces.

Now, a sight like this—hundreds of Confucian cultivators appearing at the same time—was not something one could see whenever one pleased.

As the Embroidered Uniform Guard parted to open a path, Xu Tian led the Confucian scholars to the front of the formation.

He lifted his head.

His gaze passed through the rolling black mist and settled on Zhao Tiande at the center of the formation, who looked like a madman, and on that monstrous blood formation that had consumed endless resources.

“Your Highness the Prince of Qin…”

Zhao Tiande’s breathing hitched. Looking at Xu Tian’s unchanged expression, a trace of fear flashed through his heart.

He had ties to the Shan Kingdom, so he naturally understood more about the battles of those years.

But precisely because he understood more, he feared the Prince of Qin even more deeply.

He drew a deep breath, yet could not suppress the tremor in his voice.

“Even if Your Highness has brought so many Confucian cultivators, once the formation fully unfolds, even if we are defeated, you will still suffer losses as well. Rather than that…”

“So it really was… just as I thought!”

“What?”

Zhao Tiande’s head went blank for a moment, and he instinctively asked, “What did Your Highness say…?”

“I said that in Great Xia, there can be no evil fiends.”

At the instant those words fell, the Vast Righteous Qi within Xu Tian’s body, which had long been surging like great rivers, finally ceased holding back and burst forth completely!

Bzz!

A clear, resonant hum echoed between Heaven and Earth.

An incomparably pure Vast Righteous Qi surged into the heavens and spread across the sky.

Xu Tian drew in a deep breath. His gaze became solemn and august as he slowly spoke:

“The Master does not speak of strange powers and chaotic spirits!”

【Confucian Dao Talent: One Call, a Hundred Responses!】

It activated with a thunderous force!

Boom!

As those seven words left his lips, the Vast Righteous Qi in the sky suddenly trembled.

A towering, ancient stone stele phantom slowly manifested high above the heavens.

Upon that stele appeared a single character:

“Suppress.”

An incomparable and surging suppressive force descended from the sky in an instant!

It forcibly suppressed the evil fiend formation whose aura had been rising without end.

“Hm?”

Li Chuan, standing behind Xu Tian, suddenly felt a heat rise in his chest.

And it was not only him.

Every Confucian scholar present—whether the highly respected Great Confucian Li Hongru, or the newly enrolled students who still understood little, or even the licentiates among the watching commoners who had only studied at a private school for a few years—all felt, at that very moment, a tremor rising from the depths of their souls.

It was a summons.

It was a resonance.

“The Master does not speak of strange powers and chaotic spirits…”

Li Chuan found himself repeating the words without any conscious thought.

His eyes grew fervent.

The Vast Righteous Qi within his body circulated once in accordance with that guidance, then turned into a streak of white light and shot into the sky, merging into that stone stele.

“The Master does not speak of strange powers and chaotic spirits!”

Then came the second person, the third…

“The Master does not speak of strange powers and chaotic spirits!!!”

At last,

hundreds of Confucian scholars, including the Great Confucian Li Hongru, cried out in unison.

Their voices merged into a flood, carrying an incomparable conviction as they surged forth mightily!

Countless white streaks of Vast Righteous Qi flew out from the crowd and poured into that enormous stone stele phantom like a hundred rivers returning to the sea.

The somewhat illusory stele instantly solidified at that moment!

It swelled to a height of a hundred zhang!

Its entire body seemed to be cast from white jade, radiating a blazing white brilliance that made Heaven and Earth change color.

“Suppress!”

Xu Tian slammed his palm downward.

Boom!

The giant stone stele came crashing down!

That arrogant, towering blood formation was like prey encountering its natural bane.

“Hiss! Hiss!”

It shattered apart at astonishing speed, turning into black smoke that was then devoured by the blazing white Vast Righteous Qi.

Crack! Crack!

The earth shook violently.

Those purple-black pillars of light that had shot into the heavens shattered and went out one after another.

The blood formation that the Zhao Family had spent decades of effort building vanished like smoke and clouds in this single instant!

“Pffft!”

The formation rebounded.

Zhao Tiande and the dozens of Zhao Family elders behind him who had been maintaining the formation all spat blood at the same time and collapsed to the ground.

“N-no… impossible…”

Zhao Tiande’s hair hung loose and wild, his face smeared with blood and filth, his eyes full of disbelief.