The Semifinal

Chapter 17: "The Semifinal"

The Hall of Tested Valor felt different on the second day.

The casual spectators had thinned out. What remained were cultivators who actually understood what they were watching. The upper tiers—yesterday they'd held a scattering of Golden Core elders and sect scouts, maybe a dozen serious observers total. Now those same seats were packed with senior practitioners, their combined spiritual pressure settling over the arena like fog you couldn't see but could feel in your bones. Yun Fei counted at least forty Golden Core signatures. And in the highest seats—three stone platforms reserved for the city's most distinguished guests—the deep, oceanic presence of the Three Arbiters themselves. All three Nascent Soul cultivators had come to watch the semifinals.

The attention was a physical weight.

It pressed against Yun Fei's concealment array from every direction. Dozens of assessment probes touched his false aura with varying degrees of subtlety—some gentle, some aggressive, some so faint he almost missed them. The orb handled the deception with that precise, tireless efficiency it had, the kind born from being designed to operate under far greater scrutiny. But the strain was real. Maintaining a false cultivation signature under this level of observation consumed energy and attention Yun Fei would rather have saved for combat.

Li Wei was quieter this morning. The cheerful nervousness from yesterday had condensed into something focused and still. Yun Fei recognized it—the calm before commitment. His Azure Flame opponent had shown techniques in the quarterfinals that pushed the boundary of what Foundation Establishment fire cultivation could do. Intense. Volatile. Delivered with a reckless aggression that was either fearless or stupid. Li Wei's water-element techniques were a natural counter, but natural advantage meant nothing if the execution fell short.

They sat together in the competitors' section. Reduced now to four cultivators where thirty-two had gathered yesterday. The Azure Flame woman—Song Yiren—sat across the aisle, her crimson robes seeming to radiate heat even at rest. Her spiritual signature flickered like a contained bonfire. Restless. Hungry. Barely leashed. The black-robed man, whose name Yun Fei had learned from tournament records was Wei Heng, occupied his usual isolated position at the section's far end. His suppressed signature remained an enigma. The orb had spent the night analyzing every scrap of data from his previous matches. It still couldn't reach a definitive conclusion about his technique or his true cultivation level.

The first semifinal was called: Li Wei versus Song Yiren.

Li Wei rose. He met Yun Fei's eyes and offered a small, tight smile. "If I win, I'll see you in the final. If I lose, save me a bowl of noodles."

"Win," Yun Fei said.

Li Wei's smile widened fractionally. Then he walked to the ring. His stride steady. His spiritual signature settling into that focused clarity of a cultivator who'd accepted whatever came next.

The match was brutal.

Song Yiren fought like her element—explosive, consuming, relentless. Her opening technique was a cascade of fire that filled the ring with sheets of crimson flame. The heat was so intense the containment barrier shimmered as it absorbed the radiated energy. The Cloudstone floor glowed orange. The air itself seemed to ignite, creating thermals that distorted vision and disrupted spiritual sense.

Li Wei responded with the fluid adaptability that defined his Clear Stream training. His water-element Qi didn't try to extinguish the flames—that would've been a contest of raw energy favoring the aggressor. Instead, he created channels. Corridors of cooled air and moisture that carved through the fire like rivers through a burning forest. He moved through these corridors with the graceful precision of a fish navigating rapids, always one step ahead of the flames, always finding the gaps in Song Yiren's assault.

But Song Yiren adapted too. She compressed her fire techniques, abandoning wide-area coverage for concentrated lances of flame that tracked Li Wei's movements with predatory accuracy. One lance caught his shoulder—the water-element defense absorbed most of the impact, but Li Wei hissed in pain as residual heat scorched through to skin. Another lance nearly caught his hip as he dodged. The ring was shrinking around him. Song Yiren's flames closing the corridors faster than he could create them.

Li Wei counterattacked with a technique Yun Fei hadn't seen before—a wave of water Qi that didn't move horizontally but vertically, rising from the arena floor in a wall that cut the ring in half. Song Yiren's fire lances struck the wall and exploded into steam. A deliberate trade. Exchanging visibility for the moment of disruption the steam cloud provided. Li Wei burst through the cloud, his water-element strikes finding Song Yiren's flanks before she could reorient her fire techniques.

The exchange lasted twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of fire and water, steam and flame, two cultivators pushing their elemental affinities to the limits of Foundation Establishment capability. The audience watched in silence so intense the hiss and roar of clashing techniques was the only sound in the amphitheater.

Li Wei won. Barely. His final technique—a concentrated water drill that punched through Song Yiren's fire barrier and struck her square in the chest—sent her stumbling backward. Her Qi circulation disrupted enough that her flames guttered and died. She tried to recover. Tried to reignite her attacks. But Li Wei was already there—three rapid strikes that sealed the meridian points controlling her fire-element output. Song Yiren stood in the ring, panting, her robes smoking, her crimson Qi flickering like a candle in a wind she couldn't stop.

She raised her hand. Submission.

The audience's roar was thunderous. Li Wei stood in the center of the ring, his own condition barely better than his opponent's—robes soaked with sweat and condensed steam, water-element reserves visibly depleted, burns marking his shoulder and forearm where Song Yiren's attacks had penetrated. He looked exhausted. Triumphant. Slightly surprised to still be standing.

Yun Fei allowed himself a moment of genuine satisfaction. His friend had won. The feeling was warm, unfamiliar, and entirely welcome.

Then the second semifinal was called.

"Position seventeen, Yun Fei, independent. Position twenty-three, Wei Heng, independent."

Yun Fei rose. The competitors' section felt very empty with only two occupants remaining—Li Wei, who'd settled onto the bench with the controlled collapse of a man whose body had just remembered what pain was, and the space where Song Yiren had sat, now vacant.

Wei Heng was already walking to the ring. His movements were economical, unhurried—the stride of a man who conserved energy the way a desert conserved water, wasting nothing, spending nothing that wasn't absolutely necessary. Up close, Yun Fei could study him more carefully. The black robes were high quality—spirit silk, subtly reinforced with formation work the orb identified as defensive. The man's face was angular and pale, with sharp cheekbones and eyes the dark grey of storm clouds. He looked perhaps twenty-five, though cultivation made age estimation unreliable. His expression was neutral to the point of blankness. No anticipation. No concern. No readable emotion of any kind.

His spiritual signature remained suppressed. Even this close, Yun Fei could detect nothing beyond the Foundation Establishment facade. Whatever Wei Heng was concealing, he concealed it with a skill that rivaled the orb's own deception protocols.

They faced each other across the Cloudstone ring. The containment barrier hummed to life, its blue shimmer brighter than yesterday—the referees had increased its power for the semifinals, anticipating higher-intensity combat. The audience fell silent. Ten thousand spectators. Dozens of Golden Core elders. Three Nascent Soul Arbiters. All focused on the sixty-pace circle where two cultivators stood in mutual assessment.

The referee raised his hand. "Cultivators, salute."

The exchange of bows. Fist to palm. The gesture held a fraction longer than protocol required—each of them studying the other through the brief proximity, searching for any information their senses could provide.

Up close, the orb detected something. Faint. Almost subliminal. A trace of energy in Wei Heng's suppressed signature that didn't belong to any conventional cultivation method. It was dark without being evil. Dense without being solid. And it carried a resonance that made the orb's dimensional sensors twitch with recognition.

Blood cultivation. Not the harmless body-tempering techniques some sects practiced, but the deeper, darker art of drawing power from the vital essence of living beings. The Continental Cultivation Accord classified advanced blood cultivation as forbidden—not because it was inherently corrupt, but because its most effective applications required consuming others' life force. A technique that transformed the practitioner's own blood into a reservoir of stolen vitality. Granting power that exceeded normal cultivation limits at a cost the accord's founders had deemed unacceptable.

The orb's assessment upgraded from *potential threat* to *confirmed danger*. Wei Heng wasn't merely concealing a higher cultivation level. He was concealing a forbidden technique—one that explained both his suppressed signature and the 'unusual' damage inflicted on his quarterfinal opponent.

This changed the calculus entirely.

"Begin."

Wei Heng attacked first.

The technique was immediate, overwhelming, and unlike anything the previous tournament matches had produced. Dark energy erupted from Wei Heng's body—not Qi in any conventional sense, but something denser, thicker, carrying the copper-iron taste of blood on Yun Fei's spiritual palate. It manifested as tendrils. Dozens of them. Black-red and glistening, extending from Wei Heng's outstretched hands like the reaching fingers of a predator. The tendrils moved with independent intelligence, each one seeking Yun Fei's body with the focused hunger of a parasite searching for a host.

The audience gasped. Several Golden Core elders in the upper tiers rose from their seats. The referees exchanged sharp glances—the technique was recognizable to anyone with knowledge of forbidden methods, and its use in a public tournament was either an act of supreme arrogance or deliberate provocation.

But the match had begun. Tournament rules were clear: once combat started, only the referees could stop it, and stopping a match required unanimous agreement among the three assigned judges. A process that took precious seconds while the tendrils raced toward Yun Fei with lethal intent.

Yun Fei moved.

The concealment array was already straining—the blood cultivation tendrils carried a corrosive quality that ate at spiritual disguises the way acid ate at cloth. Maintaining his false aura while defending against an attack of this nature was rapidly becoming impossible. The orb calculated the trade-offs in microseconds: maintain concealment and die, or reveal more than planned and survive.

Survival won.

Yun Fei's Qi output jumped. Not to his full capability—not even close—but enough that the false early Foundation Establishment aura cracked and fell away, revealing a cultivation density unmistakably at peak stage. The watching elders would notice the discrepancy. They'd have questions. But questions were a problem for after the fight. The tendrils were a problem for now.

He channeled Qi into his palms—pure spiritual energy, dense and focused, enhanced by the force modulation training that let him calibrate his output with surgical precision. The first tendril reached him and he met it with a palm strike that sheared through its substance with a crack of dispersing energy. The blood cultivation material dissolved on contact with his concentrated Qi, the stolen vitality that sustained it unable to maintain coherence against the ordered structure of properly cultivated spiritual force.

But there were dozens of tendrils. For every one he severed, two more took its place, Wei Heng feeding the technique with the seemingly bottomless reservoir of blood energy his forbidden cultivation provided. The courtyard filled with the grasping, seeking appendages, creating a forest of dark-red tendrils that closed around Yun Fei like a cage.

He needed to reach the source. The tendrils were extensions—powerful, numerous, but dependent on their creator's concentration and energy. Sever the connection between Wei Heng and his technique, and the tendrils would collapse.

Yun Fei dropped into the Flowing Mountain stance. His combat awareness expanded—the orb's tactical overlay mapping the tendril pattern in real time, identifying the gaps, the rhythms, the moments where the forest of grasping darkness thinned enough to allow passage. He began to move. Not charging blindly, but flowing. Weaving through the tendrils with minimum-distance efficiency, severing those that came too close with precise palm strikes, deflecting others with Qi-augmented forearm blocks that sent them curling away.

A tendril caught his left calf. The contact was brief—less than a second—but the effect was immediate and horrifying. Cold. The same invasive, draining cold the demon's void-energy had produced, but different in character—this cold didn't negate existence, it consumed it. Yun Fei felt his Qi being pulled through the contact point, siphoned into the tendril and fed back to Wei Heng. A fraction of his reserves, stolen in the space of a heartbeat.

He tore free with a burst of concentrated Qi that severed the tendril and cauterized the contact point. The cold lingered in his calf—a numbness the orb immediately identified and began to counteract. Blood cultivation parasitism. The technique didn't just attack—it fed. Every contact strengthened the user while weakening the opponent. A vampire's art, designed to make the practitioner stronger as the fight progressed.

The realization crystallized Yun Fei's strategy. He couldn't afford a prolonged engagement. Every second of contact, every tendril that touched him, transferred his strength to Wei Heng. The blood cultivator fought by attrition—draining his opponents until they were too weak to resist, then finishing them with accumulated stolen power. A technique nearly impossible to defeat through conventional means, because the harder you fought, the more energy you expended, and the more energy you expended, the more the blood cultivation had to harvest.

But Yun Fei wasn't limited to conventional means.

The orb pulsed in his dantian—a question, a request for permission. The seal-resonance. The same frequency that had banished the demon in the sanctuary. Blood cultivation wasn't demon energy—it was a mortal technique, however forbidden. But the seal-resonance carried the authority of dimensional law, a vibration that asserted the fundamental order of reality against anything that violated it. Blood cultivation, which consumed the vital essence of other beings to fuel its practitioner's power, was a violation—a smaller one than demon manifestation, but a violation nonetheless.

The seal-resonance would be effective. But using it meant revealing capabilities that went far beyond what any Foundation Establishment cultivator—even a peak-stage one—should possess. Every Nascent Soul cultivator in the arena would feel it. Every Golden Core elder would recognize that the energy Yun Fei was channeling bore no relationship to anything in their experience. The questions would multiply. The scrutiny would intensify. The careful anonymity he'd maintained since arriving at Azure Sky City would shatter like glass.

But the alternative was losing to a blood cultivator whose technique grew stronger with every passing second.

Yun Fei made the choice.

He stopped retreating. Planted his feet. Let the tendrils close around him—a deliberate invitation Wei Heng interpreted as exhaustion or desperation. The blood cultivator pressed his advantage, the tendrils surging forward with redoubled hunger, dozens of dark-red appendages reaching for Yun Fei's body with the eager greed of a predator that tasted victory.

Yun Fei reached inward. Past his Qi. Past his cultivation base. Down to the core of his dantian where the orb resided—the ancient artifact, the seal component, the repository of a dead lord's knowledge and power. He touched the seal-resonance and felt it respond—the blue-gold vibration that hummed at a frequency beyond normal perception, the song of the dimensional barrier that held reality together.

He let it rise.

The effect was visible. Yun Fei's Qi shifted from the neutral white of conventional cultivation to a blue-gold luminescence that suffused his body, his hands, the air around him. The light was warm—not hot, not aggressive, but warm in the way sunlight was warm, carrying a quality of rightness that was almost tangible. The blue-gold energy expanded outward in a sphere, pushing through the space around Yun Fei with the steady, irresistible force of a tide.

The tendrils recoiled.

The blood cultivation technique met the seal-resonance and screamed—a thin, high keening every cultivator in the amphitheater heard not with their ears but with their spiritual sense. The dark-red tendrils writhed in the blue-gold light, their substance corroding, the stolen vitality that sustained them being purified and dispersed by a force that recognized parasitic energy and rejected it with the authority of natural law.

Wei Heng's expression changed for the first time. The blank neutrality cracked, replaced by something Yun Fei recognized from the demon's cold eyes: a predator discovering its prey was not what it seemed. Fear flickered across the blood cultivator's angular features—brief, quickly suppressed, but real.

The tendrils burned. One by one, then in clusters, the blood cultivation constructs dissolved in the seal-resonance field. The dark-red energy that had filled the ring retreated, pulled back toward Wei Heng's body as the practitioner tried to salvage his technique. The blue-gold light pursued it—not aggressively, not with the focused intent of an attack, but with the inexorable inevitability of water filling a low place.

Wei Heng snarled. The sound was barely human—a guttural eruption of frustration and fury that came from somewhere deeper than his throat. His suppressed signature exploded outward as he abandoned concealment entirely, and the audience felt the true weight of what he'd been hiding.

Not Foundation Establishment. Not even close. Wei Heng's released signature was Golden Core—early stage, but unmistakably across the qualitative boundary that separated Foundation Establishment from the next realm. He'd entered a Foundation Establishment tournament with a Golden Core cultivation base, concealing his true strength to dominate opponents who couldn't match him.

The audience erupted in outrage. The referees surged to their feet—disqualification was automatic for cultivation misrepresentation, the tournament's most fundamental rule. But Wei Heng wasn't interested in the tournament anymore. His attention was fixed on Yun Fei—on the blue-gold light that had unraveled his blood cultivation technique with the casual authority of a hand brushing away cobwebs.

"What are you?" Wei Heng's voice was raw, stripped of the polished neutrality he'd maintained throughout the tournament. His eyes burned with the dark-red tint of activated blood cultivation—the technique suffusing his entire being now, no longer concealed, no longer restrained. "That energy—I've felt it before. In the old places. The sealed places. You carry a fragment of the prison."

The words hit Yun Fei like a physical blow. Wei Heng recognized the seal-resonance. Not as a theoretical concept but as something he'd encountered—in the old places, the sealed places, the locations where the barrier between dimensions was thinnest and the demons' influence seeped through in whispers and corruptions.

Blood cultivation. The consumption of others' vital essence. A technique the Dao Lord's archive listed among the methods that weakened the barrier—not directly, not with the scale of demon manifestation, but insidiously, one corrupted practitioner at a time. Wei Heng wasn't just a forbidden cultivator. He was a symptom—a sign of the seal's degradation expressed through the corruption of mortal cultivation practices.

Yun Fei didn't answer the question. There was no answer to give—not here, not in front of ten thousand spectators and a hundred Golden Core witnesses. Instead, he closed the distance.

Wei Heng's Golden Core cultivation gave him a significant power advantage—but the seal-resonance negated the blood cultivation boost that was his primary offensive tool. Stripped of stolen vitality, his actual Golden Core base was early stage—powerful, but not insurmountable, especially against an opponent whose own concealed abilities exceeded what any observer could guess.

The blood cultivator fought with desperate ferocity. Without his tendrils, he resorted to direct combat—physical strikes augmented by blood-energy the seal-resonance stripped away on contact, leaving only the conventional Qi-enhanced blows beneath. He was fast. Strong. His Golden Core cultivation gave him speed and power Foundation Establishment bodies couldn't match. But his technique was built on the blood cultivation foundation—take that away, and his combat skills, while competent, lacked the refined precision of a practitioner who'd trained honestly.

Yun Fei fought with the controlled fury of someone who understood, for the first time, what the seal's enemies looked like in human form. Not demons. Not cosmic horrors. People. Cultivators who'd found the cracks in the world's defenses and chosen to exploit them for personal power. The blood cultivation was a mirror—a dark reflection of what the seal was meant to prevent, a mortal echo of the consumption the demons beyond the barrier embodied.

The seal-resonance burned through Wei Heng's defenses with the patient inevitability that characterized its nature. Each of Yun Fei's strikes carried the blue-gold frequency—not overwhelming, not devastating, but persistent. The blood-energy in Wei Heng's meridians fought the resonance and lost, purified and dispersed with each contact. The Golden Core cultivator weakened as his parasitic reserves were stripped away, his movements losing speed and precision as the foundation of stolen power beneath his cultivation crumbled.

Wei Heng tried one final gambit. He drew his blood cultivation to its deepest reservoir—the core of consumed vitality the technique stored in the practitioner's own blood, the concentrated essence of every life the method had touched. The energy erupted from his body in a sphere of dark-red force that pushed against Yun Fei's seal-resonance with the intensity of a last stand.

Yun Fei met it head-on.

The collision was the most intense energy exchange the tournament had produced—blue-gold light clashing with dark-red force in a spectacle that lit the entire amphitheater like a second sunrise. The containment barrier strained, cracks of overloaded formation energy racing along its perimeter. The Cloudstone floor beneath them fractured in a web of hairline cracks that spread from the impact point like a frozen lightning strike.

Yun Fei's meridians screamed. The orb poured energy into the seal-resonance, drawing from reserves that went deeper than his personal cultivation—tapping the artifact's own dimensional authority, the power of the seal itself channeled through the body of a mortal practitioner never designed to contain this level of energy. The pain was exquisite. His vision narrowed to a tunnel of blue-gold light. His arms shook with the effort of maintaining the resonance output while his body tried to tell him it was breaking, failing, crumbling under a load it couldn't bear.

But the blood cultivation broke first.

Wei Heng's final reservoir shattered. The dark-red energy dispersed in a cascade of purified vitality the amphitheater's ambient field absorbed like rain into dry earth. The blood cultivator staggered—his signature collapsing from Golden Core back to Foundation Establishment, then further, to something thin and fragile, the remnant of a cultivation base built on a foundation of stolen power now stripped clean.

He fell to his knees. His eyes—no longer dark-red, now a simple, human grey—stared up at Yun Fei with an expression that held no more defiance. Just exhaustion, and beneath it, something that might have been relief.

The referees descended. Golden Core cultivators, three of them, surrounding Wei Heng with containment techniques that sealed what remained of his cultivation and prevented movement. The disqualification was immediate—blood cultivation violated both tournament rules and the Continental Cultivation Accord. Wei Heng would face investigation, judgment, and likely imprisonment by the city's authorities.

Yun Fei stood in the ring as the containment team removed his opponent. His seal-resonance faded—the blue-gold light dimming, retreating, the orb pulling the dimensional energy back into its depths with the careful control of someone closing a door that shouldn't have been opened so wide. His body trembled with the aftershock of channeling forces that exceeded his physical capacity. His Qi reserves were dangerously low—less than twenty percent. His meridians felt raw, scraped, the spiritual pathways swollen with the residual heat of energy they'd never been asked to carry.

The audience was silent. Not the silence of anticipation that had preceded the match, but the silence of shock—ten thousand people processing what they'd witnessed without the framework to understand it. They'd seen a Foundation Establishment cultivator produce energy that didn't belong to any known cultivation tradition. They'd seen that energy dismantle a forbidden technique with a purity that bordered on divine. They'd seen a young, unknown independent do something the Golden Core elders in the upper tiers couldn't have replicated.

Then the silence broke. The sound started low—a murmur, building to a rumble, building to a roar. Not just applause but acclamation, the visceral response of a crowd that had watched something unprecedented and needed to express the emotion it provoked. The sound washed over the arena like a physical wave, rattling the containment barriers and shaking the Cloudstone beneath Yun Fei's feet.

He bowed—the formal gesture, right fist to left palm—and walked to the competitors' section on legs that wanted very badly to stop functioning.

Li Wei caught him before he could collapse onto the bench. The taller man's hands were strong and steady, guiding Yun Fei down with the careful attention of someone who recognized just how close to his limits his friend was.

"Breathe," Li Wei said. "Just breathe. I've got you."

Yun Fei breathed. The air tasted of copper and ozone—the familiar aftermath of dimensional energy discharge. His left arm ached with the phantom cold of the void-contamination scar. His right hand was numb from the sustained seal-resonance output. His dantian throbbed with the deep, bruised sensation of an overworked muscle.

But he was alive. He'd won. And the blood cultivator's technique—the parasitic corruption that weakened the seal one consumed life at a time—had been purified and dispersed.

Li Wei's expression was complicated. Friendship, concern, and the unmistakable awareness that the person sitting next to him was not who he'd appeared to be. "That light," he said quietly. "That blue-gold light. I've never seen anything like it. I don't think anyone in this city has ever seen anything like it. What was that, Yun Fei?"

"Something my master left me," Yun Fei said. Which was true, in every way that mattered.

Li Wei studied him for a long moment. Then he nodded—a single, decisive gesture that said he'd chosen to trust his friend's silence rather than demand answers the friend wasn't ready to give.

"The final is in four hours," Li Wei said. "You and me. I'd say I hope you've got enough left to give me a real fight, but honestly? After what I just watched? I'm starting to think I should've stuck with noodle-eating competitions."

The tension broke. Yun Fei felt something he'd been holding release—a knot of anxiety and isolation he hadn't realized he'd been carrying until it loosened. Li Wei knew. Not the specifics, not the details, but the fundamental truth: Yun Fei was more than he seemed, carrying burdens that went beyond a normal cultivator's concerns. And Li Wei's response was not suspicion or demand but friendship—the simple, human decision to stand beside someone regardless of the secrets they kept.

The orb hummed warm approval. It had calculated that Yun Fei would need allies—people who could be trusted without requiring full disclosure. Li Wei was the first such person. Not because of his cultivation level or his political connections, but because of his character. The quality Chen Wuji had valued above all others: the willingness to choose loyalty when doubt would have been easier.

Four hours. Time enough to meditate. To recover what Qi he could from the amphitheater's ambient field. To allow his strained meridians to settle from their inflamed state to something approaching functional. The final match would test everything he had left—and Li Wei, despite his self-deprecating humor, was a formidable opponent whose water-element techniques would probe Yun Fei's depleted defenses with ruthless efficiency.

But that was the final. Four hours away. A lifetime, in combat terms.

Yun Fei closed his eyes and began to cultivate. The crowd's roar faded to a background hum. The spiritual signatures of the watching elders retreated to the periphery of his awareness. The orb managed his recovery with the systematic efficiency of an intelligence that understood damage, limitation, and the precise rate at which mortal bodies healed when given the right conditions.

The semifinals were over. The blood cultivator was in custody. The seal-resonance had been witnessed by the entire cultivation elite of Azure Sky City.

The consequences of that revelation would unfold in their own time. For now, there was only recovery, preparation, and the steady, patient work of a cultivator who understood that the path forward was walked one step at a time—even when the ground beneath those steps was cracking.

The city murmured around the arena. Thousands of conversations, spinning theories, sharing awe and speculation about the young independent whose golden light had filled the Hall of Tested Valor like dawn breaking over mountains.

Yun Fei cultivated. The orb hummed. And the four hours between now and the final ticked away with the measured patience of a world that had just glimpsed something it didn't yet understand.