# Chapter 175: One Against Five
No one dared turn their back on Li Longchuan's arrow. Not even Wang Yiwu, powerful as he was.
The moment he turned, his fist was already in motion.
And the instant he struck, the arrow arrived.
This was an arrow of qi.
The moment his aura surged, the arrow launched itself. The moment his aura moved, the opening appeared.
A streak of white radiance trailed by a long tail of flame—it collided directly with Wang Yiwu's fist.
Air exploded. Flame and wind screamed.
Wang Yiwu pressed forward. His fist met the arrow, and he drove forward, step by step.
"If you're so eager to die, then I'll grant your wish!"
On the battlefield, no one could afford to leave a member of the Shimen Li clan unchecked.
The longer the fight dragged on, the better they became at finding flaws in their opponent.
This had been common knowledge across the world ever since Li Longchuan's ancestor had shattered a mighty fortress with just ten arrows.
Since Li Longchuan had chosen to fight, Wang Yiwu's first priority was to kill him.
The qi arrow was being driven back by sheer force. Wang Yiwu closed the distance in strides that seemed to chase the wind, arriving in a heartbeat.
"An empty thought, yet mountains and rivers seem far!" Xu Xiangqian drew upon his literary qi, tracing characters in midair with his finger as though wielding a brush.
His scholarly energy surged skyward like a cloud, billowing before Wang Yiwu.
Though the two stood barely a hair apart, they might as well have been separated by mountain and river.
"A fine line!" Wang Yiwu let out a soft laugh. "A pity—it is not your own!"
His left hand swept wide and seized the literary energy—seizing the very mountain and river as though snatching a scroll. The painted landscape crumpled like fabric in his grip.
"Watch me embrace the one before me!"
His right fist closed tight, shattering the qi arrow completely as it hammered toward Li Longchuan's face once more.
Such overwhelming force.
But a dense thicket of vine-snakes erupted from the ground, intertwining before the incoming fist.
Xu Xiangqian had bought a single moment's delay, and that was all Jiang Wang needed. His Entangling Wall of Vine-Snakes was already complete.
Upon the wall, buds opened wide, revealing the blooming maw of the Devouring Flower.
During the long trek through the wilderness, Jiang Wang had not been idle. His Dao arts had grown sharper, more refined. And he had begun to develop his own understanding of them.
Building upon the Entangling Wall of Vine-Snakes, he had performed a Dao art grafting—fusing the Devouring Flower with the Vine-Snakes to create defense that concealed offense within.
It was his own independent enhancement to the technique.
And Chongxuan Sheng had risen to his feet once more.
"What are you waiting for? If we don't kill him, we all die!"
Even though he had ascended from the Zhou Heavenly Realm to the Heaven-Opening Realm, the pseudo-instantaneous state of his Secret Art Seal Release could not be sustained for long.
Even dragging an injured body, he had to unleash his maximum power within this window of peak combat readiness.
Earth spikes, wind blades, vine-snakes, golden arrows.
Four Dao arts, each enhanced by the Heavy Art, howled through the air and surged toward Wang Yiwu's back.
At the same moment, Zhang Yong shed his mask of timidity. He raised his head, and his eyes burned like twin blades of light.
One look at Wang Yiwu, and the gaze itself felt like a needle driving into the man's spine.
Wang Yiwu was too strong. He could no longer afford to hide.
Every person present had launched their attack. Li Longchuan, facing Wang Yiwu head-on, would be no exception.
He stood tall, his bearing magnificent and commanding.
Even as Wang Yiwu crashed toward him like a collapsing mountain, his expression did not change.
Mountains crumbling before him, yet his face remained a still lake.
At the lake's heart, an arrow lay hidden.
Water benefits all things without contention—the highest virtue is like water.
But when water chooses to contend, it sweeps across the world!
The arrow launched from between his brows, its force like a flood unleashed.
This was an arrow of momentum.
All fifty cultivators who had entered the Heavenly Treasury Secret Realm were elites below the Ascending Dragon Realm. And those present here had survived the crucible, selected from among the strongest of the strong.
They could fairly be called the pinnacle of the Heaven-Opening Realm.
Five of them striking in unison—even a casual strongman of the Ascending Dragon Realm would struggle to withstand it.
Yet Wang Yiwu showed not the slightest intent of evading. He maintained an almost eerily constant speed as he drew back his fist and struck.
Five fists!
Five fists appeared to strike simultaneously.
In truth, it was the afterimage left by punches thrown too fast for the eye to follow.
But it was precisely those afterimages that made the trajectory appear deliberate—almost leisurely.
Wang Yiwu had thrown five punches in sequence, nearly at the same instant. And visually, all five burst forth at once.
No self. No victory.
Invincibility. No self.
The force split mountains and rivers. Killing intent swirled like a cyclone.
The No-Self Killing Fist!
Wang Yiwu had designated Li Longchuan as his primary target. In turn, Li Longchuan became the one everyone else had to protect.
Military strategy was combat strategy.
Strike where the enemy must defend. Control the battlefield. Decide the outcome.
In this moment, Wang Yiwu held nothing back. He unleashed the most devastating version of the No-Self Killing Fist, determined to end this in a single exchange.
*BOOM!*
The sound was deafening.
In truth, five explosions had occurred nearly simultaneously, overlapping into a single thunderclap.
Li Longchuan stumbled back three steps, a sweet taste rising in his throat.
Chongxuan Sheng collapsed onto the ground, blood pouring from his mouth as though it would never stop.
A line of blood seeped from Zhang Yong's eye socket.
Xu Xiangqian's right index finger was bent at a sickening angle—broken clean through.
Jiang Wang was sent hurtling through the air. He caught the edge of the stone platform with one hand and hauled himself up, narrowly avoiding a plunge into the abyss.
This was Wang Yiwu's true strength.
In a single exchange, all five were wounded.
No wonder he had demanded Chongxuan Sheng's surrender outside the Full Moon Pool.
No wonder he had shattered mountains and arrived at the platform demanding their horns.
No wonder he was so arrogant—he had the power to back it up.
But what surprised Wang Yiwu most in that exchange was not Li Longchuan, nor Chongxuan Sheng. It was the timid young man he hadn't even noticed at first.
His hawk-like eyes shifted, locking onto Zhang Yong.
"You are not Zhang Yong. The Fengxian Zhang clan has no such eye technique!"
Even in the heat of battle, this revelation was enough to shock Xu Xiangqian.
The wretched youth from a fallen clan had been an imposter all along?
His own teacher had once written poetry defending the Fengxian Zhang clan's honor. At the Full Moon Pool, he had spoken righteous words.
And the person who appeared here was a fraud?
"Does it matter?" The timidity was gone from Zhang Yong's face.
He traced a single finger across the blood at the corner of his eye.
With a faint smile, every trace of youthful innocence vanished without a trace.
"I just wanted to quietly slip in, claim a divine power, and gradually recover what I lost. We're at the final moment, and you have to go mad on me here."
"Wang Yiwu—know this: those who kill... shall be killed!"
His words fell. His eyes blazed wide. His hair whipped in an unseen wind.
What happened next was impossible to see.
*Roar!*
A single tiger's roar.
Above Wang Yiwu's head.
A phantom image of a tiger token flashed and vanished.
Wang Yiwu stood unmoved. Zhang Yong closed his eyes and toppled backward.
"He even sacrificed the life-saving tiger talisman the War God gave you." Chongxuan Sheng was inwardly shocked, though his voice dripped with cold mockery. "Your devotion to Chongxuan Zun is truly touching!"
What shocked him was that Zhang Yong had forced Wang Yiwu to this point.
What shocked him even more was that Wang Yiwu had been willing to go this far.
Zhang Yong's eye technique might not have been something Wang Yiwu couldn't endure—but enduring it would have cost him. Even he could not be so reckless as to fight five such opponents in a diminished state.
And so he had ruthlessly deployed the life-saving talisman from the Great Qi War God Jiang Mengxiong—just to ensure absolute certainty. It spoke to the depth of his killing intent.
For Chongxuan Zun, what would Wang Yiwu not do?
Xu Xiangqian and Jiang Wang were foreigners to this land—they could be somewhat detached. But Li Longchuan's sword-like brows twitched violently, betraying the turmoil within.
"A man must first respect himself, before the world respects him!"
Wang Yiwu abandoned any thought of finishing off Zhang Yong. Instead, he spun around and hurled his fist at Chongxuan Sheng. "Let me see what right you have—to compete with Chongxuan Zun?"
The fury was no longer contained.