77 Whims of The Fairy Empress

The Fairy Empress picked up Yeon's unconscious body and moved into her room in a blink of an eye.

The Fairy Empress dropped Yeon's limp and bleeding body onto the floor.

His head thumped against the hard marble surface of the VIP room, making a painful sound.

"Sect Master Reina, you're going to hurt him," she commented, shaking her head at the Fairy Empress' rough treatment of Yeon.

"Kaka! If he dies from that, then that was all he was worth," she said while laughing to herself.

Elder Blanche sighed as she watched the Fairy Empress scan his body using divine sense. The Fairy Empress prodded one of Yeon's wounds causing it to reopen and spurt out some blood.

It travelled through the air like a splash from a puddle, only to be stopped inches from her face by an invisible barrier.

She scrutinized it for a while, humming and hawing before she stuck her index finger into the floating blood globule.

She licked the blood like a detective, rolling the taste around her tongue.

"…" Elder Blanche watched her silently. She wanted to make offhand comments about how she was behaving like a crude animal, but somehow, the Fairy Empress would always manage to discern some information using this primitive method.

If it works, don't fix it.

"It's surprisingly normal…" she murmured disappointedly as if she had expected some great secret to be hidden in his blood.

She could sense that Yeon's heart was still beating despite his immense blood loss.

"How is he not dead?" Elder Blanche asked. She was more knowledgeable than the battle-oriented Fairy Empress but nothing she knew could explain why.

"…I think he has a special physique," The Fairy Empress replied after thinking for a short while.

"What physique is it? The Immortal Phoenix physique? The River Root Life physique? The-" Elder Blanche began listing off all the physiques she knew that gave the cultivator immense vitality.

"None of those. It's special because it's normal," she said while summoning a luxurious black dagger from her spatial ring.

She pushed the tip of the blade into his Yeon's arm, and the sharp edge cut effortlessly cut into him.

She inspected the healing reaction of Yeon's body, carefully observing the flow of qi within his meridians and qi channels.

"Normal, it's absolutely normal…" she said, completely fascinated by Yeon's body.

An idea flashed in her mind - Suddenly, her golden eyes glowed like the sun, her face warping into a twisted, intense smile. But it disappeared as quickly as it came, replaced by an unnaturally cold-blooded and demeaning stare.

She stabbed her dagger through Yeon's wrist where his arteries lay and watched as he bled out onto the floor.

Yeon's body flinched due to the pain and just before he could open his eyes, the Fairy Empress had hit him across the head, knocking him out before he could even realize that he had woken up.

"… He's about to die," Elder Blanche said with a frown.

The Fairy Empress had intervened in the duel since she had an interest in his martial arts, and as the duel prolonged itself, she realized that Yeon must have some sort of special physique.

She knew that the Fairy Empress had brought him here to heal him and ask about his martial arts, but as if her attention had been swept away by a new toy, she was now too busy experimenting on Yeon's body.

"He's lost a fatal amount of blood for his cultivation level," she said as she examined the expanding pool of blood around Yeon's wrist:

"Yet he's still alive. Therefore, he must have a special physique. But there's nothing indicating to it..."

"Is there really nothing else?" Elder Blanche asked. She didn't like the way the Fairy Empress was going about it, but she was also incredibly curious.

"He claims to be a farmer's son, but his body is about as clean of impurities as you can possibly get at his realm. His qi channels are abnormally large but that doesn't justify his vitality,"

She used her fingers to open Yeon's eyelids but apart from his eyes being a rare colour, they weren't anything special. She thought about stabbing them too, but she knew that nothing would be gained from doing so and refrained herself.

"…" then the Fairy Empress waited in silence.

She wanted to see how much blood loss his body could endure before he died.

His body continued to pale, and the stench of iron and flesh filled the room.

She monitored his heart and overall vitality. His heartbeat began to slow and lose strength.

Nothing indicated that she felt remorseful over what she was doing.

Just before his body became a corpse, she slipped a powerful healing pill into his mouth.

Yeon's heavily wounded body began to miraculously heal itself, the hole in his cheek filling out.

She pulled out the dagger before his flesh fused around the blade as Yeon's fully healed body lay on the floor in a puddle of red.

The Fairy Empress seated herself on the sofa and had a moment of realization that she could no longer ask Yeon about his martial arts.

He had been at death's door and back: He wouldn't wake up until a few hours later.

She didn't want to wait that long. She had prolonged the duel on a whim to observe his fighting, but she wasn't the type to wait on someone for answers.

Instead, she asked Elder Blanche about it since they had watched it together.

"Eira, what do you think of this boy?"

"…" Elder Blanche collected her thoughts before answering, "he's exceptionally talented at fighting. He is inexperienced in swordplay, but he makes up for it with his animalistic intuition and understanding of the dynamics of the human body."

The Fairy Empress nodded in agreement, "And his Sword Style?"

"It's unrefined," Elder Blanche's voice chilled in displeasure.

"Kaka! But is that all?" she laughed to herself, amused by her friend's reaction.

"…" Elder Blanche was silent before replying, "admittedly, even though it is crude, it's also fascinating. It's something I never expected to see over here, so far from Central."

"I wonder how many people will even recognize him for it?" The Fairy Empress asked.

There was a minuscule chance that Elder Michael, the Unending Bloodwater, from the Heaven Flowing River Sword sect might see the same 'glimpses' that Elder Blanche and the Fairy Empress could see in Yeon's martial art.

She doubted Elder Elijah from the Jade Soul Palace would realize since he was much more accustomed to Soul Arts than Sword Arts.

Although the 'glimpses' they saw weren't because of his swordsmanship exclusively, it was more difficult to notice them unless you were also gifted in swordsmanship. Otherwise, you might dismiss those 'glimpses' as something unique to his swordsmanship alone.

But those 'glimpses' extended beyond swordsmanship, it was what he was trying to do with his swordsmanship that was important.

"To the untrained eye, it will simply look elegant and beautiful. It has a unique and rather endearing charm to it. I think the girls back at the Fairy Palace might enjoy watching it as entertainment, a sword dance of sorts," the Fairy Empress analyzed.

"However," Elder Blanche continued off from where the Fairy Empress ended:

"To the trained eye or to anyone in the Martial realms, it will look horribly incomplete. Too much creativity and not enough practice. He's trying all styles of swordsmanship at once and failing miserably because of his greed."

She looked down at the figure of the sleeping Yeon.

"It's as if an artist with no knowledge of martial arts created something in its image, a rude mirage, a facade."

"I agree. It's impressive that he created his own Sword Style, but it's dirty. It feels murky, and grey. Like a newborn crying out an ugly, loud cry," The Fairy Empress added on with a cold and callous look.

Elder Blanche's brows furrowed as she thought back to his Sword Style.

"It is an insult to what martial artists pursue. Rather than actual martial arts, it's like he's taken an ideal and forcibly brought it into existence using his talent. He hasn't read enough manuals… It's rough, boorish, clumsy and cheap," said Elder Blanche.

She put on a distasteful look as if she were looking at something she didn't want to see:

"His Sword Style was born as a bastard son to his arrogant raping of what martial arts is. Its only value lies in its aesthetic beauty and its idea."

"Kakaka!" The Fairy Empress laughed:

"You're right. It's like the bastard son of martial arts. What wonderful imagery," the Fairy Empress said, her eyes curving up playfully.

"And yet…" Elder Blanche's words dragged on without finishing, as she couldn't find the words to describe it.

Honestly, she wasn't sure why, but very rarely she would feel like she had seen a 'glimpse' of something in his martial arts, almost like a ghost.

If not for the Fairy Empress saying that she had seen them as well, she would have dismissed it.

That 'yet' was the entire reason that Sect Master Reina was fascinated by Yeon's Sword Style.

"And yet here we are, discussing this boy's crude display of martial arts…" the Fairy Empress said as she poked Yeon's head with her foot.

"I… I don't really understand why those short glimpses are special. I only feel that they are, but don't know why," Elder Blanche admitted.

"That's because you subconsciously dismiss what he's trying to do," the Fairy Empress said.

She looked at the sleeping figure who was far too young to be considered a 'man' in her eyes.

"I am?" Elder Blanche asked, one of her eyebrows rising in doubt.

"The only difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. Stupidity does not, and what he's trying to do is impossibly foolish," her words were insulting, but her tone was endearing as if she found him cute.

"The principle of Yin and Yang is that all things exist as inseparable and contradictory opposites, they exist in flux and encompass the entire universe itself," she explained.

This was already common knowledge to all cultivators, but Elder Blanche remained quiet since she believed that the Fairy Empress wouldn't be explaining this without a reason.

"Normally, when you forcibly mix positive and negative, you get a neutral. A fusion of opposites will bring about a null," the Fairy Empress said while twirling her hair around her finger.

"But he," she said, prodding his head with her feet for emphasis, "he is trying to fuse the negative and positive, not as a push and pull between the two, but as one new homogenous power: forcibly mixing positive and negative to give a new charge. It goes against everything you take as obvious, it's understandable that you don't get it,"

Elder Blanche's eyes widen in surprise, her mouth gaping open.

"Then… has he managed to do it?" she asked in disbelief.

"Kaka! By the heavens, no. He's completely failed since it's impossible to do," the Fairy Empress chuckled condescendingly.

"Then what were those 'glimpses' we spoke of where we saw something worth noticing?" Elder Blanche asked with a light blush, embarrassed that she had momentarily lost her composure.

But it was reasonable for her to do so. What they were discussing was so outlandish that if it weren't the Fairy Empress saying these things, they would immediately be deemed a lunatic.

"Those 'glimpses' are when he takes that first step in attempting to achieve the impossible. It's his first step yet he's already fallen and practically broken both his legs, but still… he's trying to move in the direction of absurdity," she said while smiling to herself.

It was like watching a dog trying to carry a stick indoors, but the stick was too long, and it caught on the door frame no matter the orientation.

The outcome was obvious: failure. But it was enjoyable and cute to watch the dog nonetheless.

"Such a talent…" the Fairy Empress sighed, "yet he's decided to join a sect full of veritable morons."

She poked Yeon's forehead and began instilling a portion of the Immortal Yin Flower manual into him.

"Sect Master Reina!" Elder Blanche warned.

She didn't know what knowledge her Sect Master was giving Yeon, but any knowledge that came directly from her was bound to be priceless.

"Calm down, Eira. I'm just giving him a taster of the outside world, so he doesn't rot inside the Divine Sword Sect."

"Sect Master Reina, what exactly are you giving him?" she asked, her tone raised threateningly. She had taken it upon herself to limit the capricious and volatile nature of her friend.

She was the only individual within the Venerable Yin Flower Palace that the Fairy Empress vaguely listened to.

"I'm giving him an incomplete portion of the 27 Petals of the Winter Rose manual," she lied. She knew that Eira would have an absolute field day if she found out the truth.

"That's an Earth grade manual, Reina!" in her anger, she had forgotten to use the correct honourifics.

"Hush. As a man, he won't even be able to cultivate it, and he'll forget it soon anyways. I've also made it impossible for him to tell anyone this information. Stop being so pedantic, Eira. You'll get wrinkles," she teased.

Unless Yeon magically became a Martial within the span of a week, no one would be able to extract the information from him and he wouldn't be able to share it either.

"It'll act as a guiding light to help him in his futile struggle. I don't trust the 'Divine Swordsmen' to guide this child sufficiently," she scowled, her golden eyes gleaming dangerously.

As a male-dominated sect full of those obsessing over power and face, she hated them with a passion.

She had received hundreds if not thousands of marriage proposals from them, and she made a point of burning them alive if they ever asked in person.

Once the Fairy Empress finished offloading the information, she returned him to Mia and Emily who were anxiously waiting in the stadium as the other duels continued.

She quickly came to regret helping Yeon due to Elder Blanche's incessant nagging for the rest of the day.

But in the future, she would consider it the greatest decision she had ever made.