Chapter 28: Duel Under the Moon: Spiritual Power Rampage Reveals True Feelings

As Shen Yan tucked the backup phone into his inner pocket, his fingertips still tingled with the faint vibration from when he had powered it on. He didn’t take the main path, instead skirting along the base of the mountain wall to reach the trail behind the hill. The dried leaves crushed under his feet made soft rustling sounds, like the error reporting tones when code fails to compile.

He knew Ye Zhao wouldn’t wait long.

Sure enough, as soon as he rounded the stone platform of the broken cliff, he saw her standing under the moonlight, the Frost Soul Sword held horizontally before her, its tassel cascading like a waterfall. She wasn’t wearing the Sect’s standard combat attire, having changed into a plain white training uniform with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, revealing a section of cool, pale forearm.

“You’re three minutes late,” she said.

“I ran into a cat on the way. It insisted I help debug a knot in its tail,” Shen Yan replied, taking off his glasses to wipe them before putting them back on. “The WiFi signal in the Cultivation Realm is too weak. I had to manually reconnect.”

Ye Zhao didn’t respond. With a flick of her wrist, the tip of her sword suddenly lifted.

In the next instant, Sword Qi like a silver dragon tore through the night sky, shooting straight toward his face—this was no posture for a friendly spar; it was clearly the opening move of a life-or-death battle!

Shen Yan’s pupils contracted. A warning window instantly popped up in his mind: 【High-risk Sword Intent Locked! Recommend Initiating Phase Shift Algorithm】.

He closed his eyes, sinking his consciousness into the deep recesses of his mind where the black-background, green-text Terminal Interface lay. His fingers tapped twice in his pants pocket as he silently recited: “if (Sword Qi intensity > critical value) → Activate Spatial Refraction Protocol.”

A faint glimmer of green light flickered at his fingertips, almost imperceptible.

Boom!

The Sword Qi brushed past the side of his ear, gouging a deep trench in the rock wall behind him and sending stone fragments flying. Yet his body leaned slightly to the side, as if he had precisely calculated its trajectory, emerging completely unscathed.

“Not bad reflexes,” Ye Zhao’s eyes flickered slightly. “Again.”

This time, she held nothing back. Sword techniques flowed out in rapid succession—Silver Dragon Slash, Cloud-Severing Thrust, Frost River Shadow… each move carried the chilling killing intent of the Sect’s secret arts. As Sword Qi crisscrossed the air, the entire hillside was sliced into fragments.

Yet Shen Yan grew steadier the more he fought. The program in his mind ran like an experienced driver on a highway, automatically recognizing the frequency of the Sword Qi and dynamically adjusting defense parameters. He even found time to quip, “Did your skill set forget to include any control moves? All burst damage—your mana pool won’t hold up.”

Ye Zhao didn’t answer. Her sword stance suddenly shifted.

An extremely thin line of Sword Qi silently sliced through the air, moving so fast it was nearly invisible to the naked eye—this was her trump card, “Extinction Needle,” which had once pierced through the heart meridians of three Evil Cultivators in a single strike.

But just as the sword tip was half an inch from his throat, Shen Yan abruptly opened his eyes and shouted, “Nesting Initiate!”

He threw his entire body backward, while his right hand traced a reverse sigil in the air. Spiritual Power instantly twisted, forcibly bending that lethal line of Sword Qi off course.

Yet at that very moment, an anomaly suddenly occurred.

The Source Code Spiritual Root in his Consciousness Sea violently trembled, and the Terminal Interface frantically scrolled with red text: 【Anomalous Emotional Variable Injection Detected! Source: Target Sword Intent Waveform】

It turned out that the previous sword strike had carried a faint trace of sorrow—a Memory Fragment from Ye Zhao’s subconscious regarding her mother’s death, usually sealed away by her Sword Heart, had unexpectedly leaked out along with her sword technique.

And this surge of emotion had precisely triggered the adaptive mechanism of the Source Code Spiritual Root.

The System began automatically parsing this “foreign data,” attempting to convert it into executable Commands. But how could human emotions be easily compiled like Code? The Program instantly fell into an Infinite Loop, causing Spiritual Power to surge backward and run wild.

“This is bad…”

Shen Yan’s face paled as he tried to forcibly terminate the process, only to find Ye Zhao closing in, her sword tip aimed directly at the vital point on his chest—her intention was to force him to yield by dissipating his power, unaware that his meridians were teetering on the brink of losing control.

At the critical moment, he abandoned disconnecting the program. Instead, he bit the tip of his tongue and sprayed a mouthful of vital blood onto the consciousness interface, swiftly writing a line of command: “Redirect all output, fully borne by the host.”

Hum—

The world fell silent.

A violent vortex of Spiritual Energy erupted from him as the center, cracking the ground and snapping all vegetation. Ye Zhao’s Sword Qi collided with this chaotic flow and instantly shattered.

Immediately after, the rock beneath their feet crumbled and collapsed.

The ground where they stood gave way, plunging them ten meters down a cliff!

Amid the howling wind, Ye Zhao reacted swiftly, twisting her body to retreat. But just as she leaped into the air, the corner of her eye caught sight of Shen Yan—blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, his gaze unfocused—having shouldered all the backlash alone to suppress the turmoil.

Her heart tightened, and she abruptly changed direction, lunging toward him.

“Are you insane?!” she roared.

Shen Yan only felt a lightness in his arms before she crashed into his embrace the next instant. The two tumbled down to the bottom of the cliff, dust billowing around them.

Before the dust settled at the pit’s bottom, Shen Yan’s back slammed against hard stone, eliciting a muffled groan. His first instinct was to raise a hand to shield her head. Ye Zhao lay atop him, her hair cascading down and brushing against his neck, her warm breath grazing his collarbone.

Silence.

Too silent.

They could both feel the strange fusion of Spiritual Power within their bodies amidst the chaos, like two pieces of code in different languages suddenly finding a common interface and beginning to synchronize automatically.

In Shen Yan’s mind, the unspoken words—”Don’t be afraid, I’m here”—flowed clearly into Ye Zhao’s Consciousness Sea through the Spiritual Power link.

She shuddered.

What did she see in that moment?

Not an image, not a memory, but a pure sense of “presence”—as if someone had long stood silently behind her during countless nights of solitary sword practice, shielding her from all storms unseen.

Her hand, tightly clutching the corner of his clothes, trembled slightly.

After a long while, she struggled to rise, her movements stiff as she fumbled a bottle of pills from her Medicine Pouch and handed it over.

Shen Yan grinned. “Thanks, special user exclusive edition?”

She froze.

“Your Sword Intent waveform just now was marked by my System as a special permission user,” he coughed twice, still trying to joke. “Next time, could you apply for an API interface in advance? You nearly crashed my server.”

Ye Zhao said nothing, merely stuffing the medicine bottle into his hand before turning to leave.

But after two steps, she paused.

Moonlight slanted, illuminating a faint red tinge on the rim of her ear.

“…Don’t write code with blood again.”

With that, she strode away, her figure soon disappearing into the woods.

Shen Yan sat where he was, panting, and looked down at his palm—where a strand of broken silver thread, a remnant of her sword tassel, lay tangled.

He didn’t discard it.

Gently lifting his phone case, he tucked the strand inside.

From afar, the clock tower tolled three muffled chimes—it was already the hour of Yin.

Leaning against the pile of rubble, grass blades clinging to his hair, his clothes torn in several places, his back burning with pain, his Mental Power nearly drained, and his mind buzzing as if thousands of lines of code were stuck in an infinite loop—

Yet the corner of his mouth lifted slightly.

He knew that tonight’s sparring session, on the surface, nearly saw him sliced into a sieve by Sword Qi, but in truth, he had stumbled upon an enormous stroke of luck—

Not only did it verify that emotional energy could affect the operation of the source code, but it also managed to pry open a crack in the Chief of Sword Sect’s emotional defenses.

Even better, the offline cache automatically recorded the entire process, and a new notice popped up in the System background: 【Unknown resonance pattern detected. Suggested naming: “Dual Cultivation Protocol · Test Version”】

“Who wants to dual cultivate with you!” he muttered softly, then couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

The laughter startled a few night birds.

He collected his emotions, leaned against the rock wall, slowly stood up, and stretched his shoulders. The Silver-Thread Soft Armor shimmered faintly in the darkness, and the backup device hidden close to his body was still vibrating—the tracking program was still running, and that same-source signal had not disappeared; instead, it had penetrated deeper into the Sword Sect’s internal network.

He narrowed his eyes.

“Looks like someone is more eager to stir things up than I am.”

He dusted off his clothes, straightened his Grid Shirt, and headed toward the direction of the Servant Peak.

The mountain path before dawn was silent and still.

As he passed a fork in the road, he suddenly paused.

In a crevice among the roadside stones lay a copper coin hair tie, its yellow cord faded, with a fine crack on the coin.

He bent down to pick it up, rubbing the crack with the tip of his finger.

The next moment, a crisp shout came from afar:

“Hey! The one wearing the grid shirt ahead! You stepped on my Talisman Paper Formation Eye!”

(End of Chapter)