Chapter 78
Chapter 78
Old Cao had to be talking nonsense.
Was he joking?
I was only a middle-school student who had studied magic for three months.
He wanted me to engage in a contest of magic with a coffin bearer and funerary-paper artisan who had practiced the esoteric arts for decades?
To put it politely, I would be displaying my meager skill before a master and asking to embarrass myself.
To put it bluntly, I would be courting death.
Well, it would not be my fault. Old Cao had proposed the contest himself.
I shook my head, refused, and threw in a free roll of my eyes.
“Now, Xiao Wu, don’t be so hasty. I didn’t ask you to fight me head-on. I hadn’t finished speaking. We can hold a formal contest instead.”
A formal contest?
I stared blankly.
I had never heard the term, so Old Cao gave me a general explanation.
Within the esoteric world, not every magical duel was a fight to the death between enemies. Friendly contests between friends or fellow disciples took two forms.
One was called an open fight.
This was an ordinary magical battle in which each side freely used its methods. Since the purpose was friendly competition, neither participant normally tried to kill the other.
Even so, some rough contact and minor injuries were probably unavoidable.
The other form was a formal contest.
Two people stood some distance apart. One cast a technique, and the other defended.
Only after one exchange ended could the next begin.
Throughout the process, both attacker and defender could watch out for the other person to prevent an accident.
When a senior tested a junior, they generally used this form of formal contest.
Several years later, something called an online game became wildly popular among young people. Only then did I discover that games offered roughly similar systems.
An open fight resembled a real-time combat game.
A formal contest was simply a turn-based online game, like Fantasy Westward Journey or Westward Journey Online.
I even wondered whether esoteric practitioners hid among the game designers.
Perhaps they had renamed the open fight and formal contest of the esoteric world as real-time and turn-based combat.
But that came much later.
Back to the matter at hand.
Once Old Cao finished explaining, I relaxed.
I smiled at him. “So you want to test me. Fine, let’s try it. I won’t hold back, but you’ll have to go easy on me.”
“You rotten boy! You attack me with everything you have, while I’m supposed to restrain myself when attacking you?”
I laughed and cursed back. “Nonsense! If you use your full strength on me, what would be the point? The moment you unleash your divine paper and flame blade, I’ll die just like Miss Duan.”
Old Cao was almost as old as my grandfather, yet I felt none of the reserve one normally showed an elder when we were together. I could relax completely around him.
Perhaps that was what people meant by friends despite the difference in age.
We went to the rear courtyard of the coffin shop.
Old Cao’s shop stood at the far eastern edge of town. Vast fields stretched behind the building, and beyond them flowed one of the rivers surrounding Lianghe Town.
An open concrete courtyard connected the coffin shop to the farmland.
In the Sichuan-Chongqing dialect, one could also call it a drying yard, a place used to spread grain and other crops in the sun.
Naturally, Old Cao did not use it for that.
Instead, the courtyard was where he practiced whenever he had free time at night.
It was afternoon now, and no one worked in the surrounding fields. Our contest would not disturb anyone.
I surveyed the area, then casually took two small stones from my pocket and dropped them at separate points in the concrete courtyard.
Just a tiny bit of maneuvering.
Old Cao immediately laughed.
“Xiao Wu, I’m not blind yet. You’re playing tricks! We agreed on a formal contest, and you’re secretly laying down a Qimen formation before it even starts.”
Uh…
Embarrassed at being exposed on the spot, I scratched my head and gave him a foolish grin.
“Well, Old Cao, you understand Qimen Dunjia too? Master said very few people know it.”
Old Cao shook his head. “I don’t understand it. But even if I’ve never eaten pork, I’ve seen a pig run. I don’t know how to drive either, but if I see you holding a steering wheel, can’t I tell that you’re driving?”
He did not make me pick up the stones.
This was only a formal contest, after all. He would naturally give me every advantage.
There was no shame in using a few tricks against a coffin bearer and funerary-paper artisan with decades of experience.
We took our places at opposite ends of the courtyard, about six meters apart.
“Xiao Wu, you attack first.”
“All right!”
I was already prepared.
Honestly, the great increase in my strength had left me eager to test myself.
I simply had not found a suitable opponent.
Now Old Cao had offered a turn-based contest in which I would not be hurt. It was a perfect opportunity to measure my improvement.
I held my breath and focused, sensing the qi flowing within my dantian.
I drew it outward through my meridians into my palms, then invisibly infused the yellow talisman paper in both hands.
I cast with left and right simultaneously.
My right hand released a Headache Talisman.
My left released a Blinding Talisman.
Both were basic talisman arts. As their names suggested, one inflicted a violent headache, while the other caused temporary blindness.
How long the headache or blindness lasted depended on the caster’s own magical power.
Before my recent improvement, striking an ordinary person would have made the effect last about two minutes.
Whoosh!
The two yellow papers cut through the air and flew rapidly toward Old Cao.
They were light, flimsy sheets, yet they moved swiftly as though they possessed weight.
This was the technique called talisman casting.
One infused a talisman with qi and hurled it through the air.
Naturally, a practitioner’s cultivation determined how far he could cast one.
Previously, my limit had been three or four meters. Now six meters felt easy.
Facing the two incoming talismans, Old Cao chuckled.
“Well, Xiao Wu! You attack ruthlessly from the start–a Headache Talisman and a Blinding Talisman. Either one would cause plenty of trouble. Bullying an old man like me? You have no martial virtue.”
If I observed martial virtue, I thought, he would defeat me in an instant.
Deep in my heart, I even held a tiny, unrealistic hope.
Perhaps I could defeat Old Cao in this formal contest.
Still laughing, he extended his calloused hands.
To the naked eye, his movements seemed slow, like an old farmer feeling for fish in a rice paddy.
Yet they stirred a loud rush of wind.
His true speed was clearly astonishing.
His hands reached separately for the Headache Talisman and Blinding Talisman.
He intended to catch them barehanded.
Thump!
Old Cao’s hands closed around both pieces of paper.
To his surprise, his left hand easily crushed the Headache Talisman into fragments.
But the Blinding Talisman vanished the instant his right hand grasped it, as if he had caught only a phantom or empty air.
What?
Old Cao paused, surprise flashing in his eyes.
At the next instant, the air beside his left shoulder rippled like the surface of water.
A yellow talisman appeared from nothing and flew toward his shoulder, less than an instant from making contact.
The corner of my mouth rose in a smile.
“Ha! Old Cao, the glamour spell from my miniature Qimen formation fooled you after all. Both talismans came from your left from the very beginning.”
I could not hide my pride.
That was the effect of the Qimen formation I had created with the two small stones.
Qimen Dunjia was one of the most mysterious and profound disciplines of magic.
But after absorbing the corpse core’s power, I could already produce a few simple effects.
For example, I could place stones at different Qimen positions and trap a fixed target in a mild glamour spell.
In scientific terms, it created an error in visual perception.
By cheating and laying down the formation in advance, I gave Old Cao’s vision a mirror-fold error.
The Blinding Talisman he saw on his right had actually been a projection of the true paper.
The Headache Talisman, however, had carried no such visual distortion, so Old Cao crushed it directly in one hand.
One true and one false.
If the talisman struck him, wouldn’t I win immediately? How could he continue fighting if he could not see?
Excitement surged through me.
But Old Cao chuckled, turned his head, and looked directly at the talisman less than two inches from his shoulder.