Shatter

The following morning, Hao Nhien left Cat Loi City.

Cat Thanh and several elders accompanied him only as far as the eastern gate. There was no grand farewell ceremony. After everything they had been through together, the relationship between them no longer needed to be expressed through elaborate formalities.

Before they parted, Cat Thanh gave Hao Nhien's arm a heavy pat.

“Grand Elder, if anything happens to Cat Loi, I'll send word.”

Hao Nhien cupped his hands.

“All right.”

Cat Thanh looked at him for another moment before adding:

“And if Hoa Van needs people, you send word as well.”

Hao Nhien laughed.

“I won't be polite about it.”

“Good.”

Neither of them said anything more.

The Tieu Dao Sword appeared beneath Hao Nhien's feet. Spiritual power flowed into the blade, silver light flashed faintly, and the flying sword carried him away from Cat Loi City toward Hoa Van.

He had already been away far longer than expected.

Originally, Hao Nhien had only intended to handle a few matters before returning, yet the final round of cultivation alone had kept him in Cat Loi for forty full days.

This time, he had no intention of stopping anywhere else.

He wanted to return to Hoa Van first. Everything else could wait.

About half a day later, the sky ahead began to change.

At first, only several clusters of gray clouds appeared in the west. The Western Wastes were dry, but regions close to the mountains still occasionally experienced violent thunderstorms, so Hao Nhien paid little attention to them.

Less than half an hour later, those clouds had already joined into a thick black layer.

The wind rose rapidly.

Hot and cold air collided, sweeping dust from the ground into long ribbons that rolled across the mountain slopes below.

Hao Nhien deliberately slowed down.

The Tieu Dao Sword remained stable beneath his feet, but just as he was about to continue observing the route ahead, a deafening thunderclap suddenly exploded within the clouds.

Purple light flashed.

Hao Nhien immediately remembered what had happened once inside the Lightning Sacrifice Mountain Cave, when a bolt of Lightning disrupted the spiritual connection between him and the Tieu Dao Sword.

He had fallen straight through the air.

Had the Spirit Wings not erupted in time, the consequences would not have been light.

There was no reason for him to fly directly through a thunderstorm that was clearly becoming more violent.

Hao Nhien changed direction, lowered his altitude, and searched for a low mountain ridge below where he could avoid the worst of the wind.

After finding a relatively level rocky slope, he landed and took out the Cosmic Ark, intending to wait out the storm before continuing his journey.

At that moment, however, his attention was drawn to an ancient tree ahead.

Its trunk was so massive that three grown men joining hands would still barely be able to encircle it. Thick roots rose above the ground like giant serpents, penetrating deep into cracks in the stone and anchoring the entire tree to the mountainside.

The violent wind bent the trunk again and again, yet it continued to stand.

Hao Nhien was just about to look away when the entire sky suddenly turned white.

A bolt of heavenly lightning struck directly into the crown of the tree.

The explosion seemed to arrive at the same instant as the flash.

The ancient tree shuddered violently before suddenly bursting apart from within.

A huge section of bark and countless wooden fragments were blasted outward. White vapor erupted through the cracks, while white-purple electricity raced down the trunk all the way into the roots.

Immediately afterward, the upper section of the tree caught fire.

The gale swept past, dragging the flames sharply to one side.

The ancient tree had endured strong winds for many years, but the lightning strike had severely damaged its internal structure. The massive trunk held for only a few breaths before folding over and crashing onto the ground, sending shards of stone flying across the slope.

Hao Nhien stood still and watched.

The heavenly lightning had existed for only an instant, yet its destructive power far exceeded anything his current body could directly endure.

Within the Lightning Domain, he had come into contact with countless strands of Lightning, but most had been much smaller branches that he could deliberately choose when and where to receive.

The heavenly lightning before him was entirely different.

Its power had converged into a single point, entered the target within an extremely short span of time, then destroyed the structure from the inside.

Judging purely by instantaneous destructive force, that strike had already surpassed Hao Nhien's current offensive power by a wide margin.

He could not accurately determine its exact level, but he knew that even after tempering himself in the Lightning Domain, directly taking such a blow could still leave him severely injured.

His gaze remained on the burning trunk.

Then he remembered the Fire Spirit Sword.

Inside the Lightning Domain, Hao Nhien had once experimented with allowing Fire and Lightning to appear within the same sword strike.

The two forces had retained their individual characteristics, but when they acted on the same target together, the destructive effect had clearly been greater than when either was used alone.

The phenomenon before him gradually gave rise to an idea.

When a very large amount of energy entered matter within an extremely short period, the moisture inside could be heated and violently expanded, creating destructive pressure from within the target's own structure.

Heavenly lightning was powerful enough to accomplish that on its own.

The Lightning Hao Nhien could currently borrow was still far too weak to produce comparable energy.

But he had Fire.

If Lightning entered the target first, creating disruption and an initial burst of heat, Fire could immediately follow and supply what the Lightning lacked.

Once cracks appeared inside the structure, Fire would penetrate more easily.

And Wind, which naturally supported Fire, could help that destructive process spread more quickly along those newly formed fractures.

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Hao Nhien continued staring at the fallen tree.

The three forces did not need to fuse into some new form of energy.

They only needed to arrive at the correct place and time, allowing the characteristic of one force to create the conditions for the next.

That realization gradually brightened his eyes.

Hao Nhien moved away from the Cosmic Ark and followed the slope until he found a better place for experimentation.

Before long, he spotted another tree.

It was far smaller than the ancient tree struck by lightning, but still large enough to test the idea.

He stopped only a few steps away.

The thunderstorm had made the Lightning-element spiritual energy in the surrounding air far denser than usual.

Hao Nhien calmed himself, sensed the extremely fine strands of Lightning around him, and simultaneously circulated Fire-element spiritual power within his body.

The first test was cautious.

Only when his hand was about to touch the trunk did he open the meridian pathways he had tempered.

A small amount of external Lightning immediately traveled through those routes, passed along his arm, and entered the point of contact.

Almost at the same moment, Fire-element spiritual power erupted from his palm.

The two forces did not merge.

Lightning entered slightly earlier.

Fire followed immediately after.

A small explosion sounded.

The bark in front of Hao Nhien split apart, white smoke and the smell of burning wood bursting from the opening.

A region of wood inside had already turned black, while the accumulated heat caused several cracks to continue spreading deeper.

Hao Nhien studied the result before circulating Wind-element spiritual power.

This time, he guided the airflow along the fractures that had already formed, helping the Fire penetrate farther into the damaged wood.

The flames that had initially remained around the point of contact quickly traveled along the narrow cracks inside.

Crisp splitting sounds followed one after another.

Hao Nhien stepped back several paces.

The effect was real.

Heavenly lightning could rely on overwhelming force to destroy a tree from the inside.

His own borrowed Lightning was nowhere near strong enough to reproduce that scene.

But when Fire supplemented the heat immediately after the initial disruption, while Wind helped the Fire spread along the cracks already formed, the overall destructive effect clearly increased.

He tried several more times.

On the second attempt, Fire arrived too early and most of the heat erupted across the outer bark.

On the third, Lightning penetrated deeper, but Wind dragged the Fire away from the structure that had just been damaged.

With each adjustment, Hao Nhien gradually understood what he was truly looking for.

The key was not to push every force to its individual limit.

What mattered was making them follow one another closely enough that the effect of the previous force became the condition for the next.

He tried again.

Lightning traveled through the pathway in his arm and entered the trunk.

Fire followed almost immediately, adding heat to the area that had just been disrupted.

Wind did not compress or merge the forces together. It simply guided the Fire along the cracks opening within the wood.

A low muffled pop sounded.

Only a modest section of the outer trunk cracked, but a series of brittle sounds came from within.

When Hao Nhien followed with another palm strike, the entire section of wood in front collapsed, revealing a blackened, fractured core beneath.

He stared at the result for a long time.

Compared to the heavenly lightning from before, this level of power was still far too weak.

But the principle had been proven.

The three forces remained separate, yet when coordinated correctly, their combined destructive effect exceeded what any of them could achieve independently.

A name suddenly appeared in Hao Nhien's mind.

“Shatter.”

He spoke it quietly.

The name suited the technique.

It was not meant to cut or smash a target apart from the outside through overwhelming force.

What Hao Nhien wanted was to use Lightning to create the initial point of disruption inside the target, allow Fire to push heat deeper into the weakened structure, and ultimately cause the interior to lose stability and break apart.

Wind would support that process and help it spread more quickly.

Hao Nhien did not continue experimenting.

The current form was still extremely crude, and the timing between the three forces remained unstable.

If the distance changed or the opponent moved, maintaining the correct sequence would be far more difficult than testing against a motionless tree.

But for Hao Nhien, this was already enough.

For the first time, he had created a killing technique based entirely on what he himself had learned and experienced.

Shatter was not yet complete.

But it had taken shape.

Hao Nhien returned to where he had left the Cosmic Ark and stepped inside.

The interior immediately became far quieter.

The rain, wind, and thunder outside faded into distant echoes.

He returned to one of the rooms, sat down, and took out a jade slip to record what he had just comprehended.

After thinking for a moment, Hao Nhien wrote only one short sentence:

Lightning creates the break. Fire follows within. Wind helps the destruction spread.

He stored the jade slip back in his storage ring.

At that moment, Hao Nhien's gaze suddenly stopped on an object buried deeper inside.

A piece of advice he had nearly forgotten resurfaced in his memory.

“When you reach late-stage Foundation Establishment, break the seal. There'll be a small surprise waiting for you.”

Hao Nhien paused.

He had not yet reached the seventh layer of Foundation Establishment.

But his current cultivation was already at the peak of the sixth layer, only one step away from the late stage.

He had deliberately stopped before the bottleneck because he wanted his foundation to remain stable, not because that realm was still far beyond reach.

Hao Nhien remained silent for a while before reaching into his storage ring.

“One more layer…”

He smiled faintly.

“Probably doesn't make much difference.”

A jade token roughly half the size of his palm appeared in his hand.

Its surface was gray-green and dull, covered in small scratches.

If it had been tossed into a pile of low-level artifacts, very few people would have spared it a second glance.

But Hao Nhien still clearly remembered the man who had given it to him.

Co Lang.

The burly man who had spent years living among mountains and forests, tempering his body against demonic beasts and sharpening his instincts through repeated encounters with life and death.

Hao Nhien studied the token for several breaths, then tightened his grip.

The gray-green outer shell began to crack.

Piece by piece, it dissolved into motes of light and disappeared.

A smaller token gradually emerged from within.

Golden.

Simple in design.

Only two characters were engraved on the front.

Doc Hanh.

Hao Nhien stared at the name for a long time.

It felt vaguely familiar, yet he could not remember where he might have heard it.

“Doc Hanh…”

He frowned slightly.

This was clearly the token Co Lang had given him, yet another name had been hidden inside.

A real name?

An alias?

Or simply a title Co Lang had once used elsewhere?

While Hao Nhien was still thinking, the two characters on the token gradually lit up.

A faint trace of aura emerged from within.

Hao Nhien recognized it immediately.

Co Lang.

The imprint was already extremely weak, but Hao Nhien had both fought and spoken directly with the burly man.

There was no mistaking that familiar aura.

At the very least, it proved that the token had indeed once belonged to Co Lang.

Whether Doc Hanh was a name, an alias, or represented something else entirely remained unknown.

Hao Nhien sent a thread of spiritual power into the token.

It trembled faintly.

The residual aura inside began fading, while the two characters Doc Hanh slowly dimmed before disappearing completely.

A blank space appeared.

Immediately afterward, a very simple message entered his sea of consciousness.

Engrave the name of the new owner.

Hao Nhien raised an eyebrow.

After thinking briefly, he used spiritual power to write across the token.

Quan Hao Nhien.

The golden characters gradually took shape.

When the final stroke was completed, the token trembled again.

An invisible force swept across his body as though confirming his aura.

Another message followed.

New owner recorded: Quan Hao Nhien.

Hao Nhien stared at the words, his curiosity only deepening.

What exactly was this thing used for?

Why had Co Lang given it to him?

Before he could think further, another message appeared.

Current challenge condition: one exceptional-grade spirit stone.

Keep or Change?

Hao Nhien fell silent.

“Challenge?”

He looked down at the token.

What exactly was being challenged?

Who could issue the challenge?

And why could the owner set a condition?

At the moment, he knew none of it.

But one exceptional-grade spirit stone was obviously no small amount.

If Co Lang had previously chosen this condition, Hao Nhien saw no reason to change it before understanding how the token worked.

After several breaths of thought, he sent his intent into the token.

“Keep it.”

The golden light immediately brightened.

A narrow slot opened across the surface.

Another message entered his mind.

Please place the corresponding item to verify the condition.

Only then did Hao Nhien begin to understand.

He took an exceptional-grade spirit stone from his storage ring.

The moment the crystal appeared, pure spiritual energy spread throughout the room.

Hao Nhien placed it against the token.

Golden light quickly enveloped the crystal and pulled it inside.

Several breaths later, the token trembled gently.

Challenge condition verified.

A slit of light opened.

The exceptional-grade spirit stone immediately reappeared in Hao Nhien's hand.

He looked at it for a moment before returning it to his storage ring.

So the stone was only required to prove that the owner genuinely possessed something corresponding to the condition they had set.

Once the verification was complete, the token gradually became quiet again.

The name Quan Hao Nhien remained engraved across its surface.

Below it was a smaller line.

Challenge condition: one exceptional-grade spirit stone.

Hao Nhien stared for a long time.

There was still no further explanation.

“Co Lang…”

“What exactly did you leave me?”

The token remained silent.

Just as Hao Nhien was about to put it away, a streak of golden light suddenly escaped from its surface.

It passed straight through the wall of the Cosmic Ark and vanished into the thunderstorm outside.

Hao Nhien immediately stood.

But by the time his spiritual sense reached outward, the golden light had already disappeared completely.

He stared in the direction it had gone for a while before slowly sitting again.

What the token represented, what the challenge condition meant, and why a golden signal had left after the ownership changed were all things he did not yet understand.

Perhaps after returning to Hoa Van, he could ask Luu Van or send a message to Lanh Tuyet.

With their knowledge and networks, they should at least be able to uncover some clues.

Hao Nhien stored the golden token inside his storage ring.

Outside the Cosmic Ark, rain continued pouring down.

He had no idea that somewhere unimaginably far from the Western Wastes, a name that had remained unchanged for many years had just quietly disappeared.

And in its place, three completely unfamiliar characters slowly appeared.

Quan Hao Nhien.