Chapter 298

Bai Ning Bing genuinely does not know Tie Dao Ku. He trailed behind Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing after they left Qing Mao mountain without ever crossing their path directly, and only saw Fang Yuan in person for the first time when he and the Bai clan reached Shang clan city. Fang Yuan lured them afterward to Shi Zi restaurant, where the Bai clan paid five hundred thousand primeval stones and fled, leaving Tie Dao Ku behind, arrested and forced to guard the restaurant’s door. He, in turn, memorized her face from a Bai clan arrest warrant, and her question ignites a fury of hatred, humiliation, and grievance built from all of it. He screams and charges the moment the bell rings. ^{ch. 298}

Iron hand Gu and hand blade Gu turn his hands into blades; Bai Ning Bing’s ice edge Gu answers with a blade of pure ice, and after they trade five or six steps of clashing, she flicks three icicles at his back, which he smashes apart before charging again. Reading him as a genuinely dangerous opponent, she decides to use the match to test her own Gu set. His swift shadow Gu closes the distance in an instant, and he brings both arms down on her like an axe; she cannot risk taking it head on and is forced to retreat, guarding with her iceblade as his rotating arms hammer at her again and again. His hand blade Gu, the core of his set, cracks her iceblade and drives her back over a hundred steps. ^{ch. 298}

Badly cut and losing this exchange, Bai Ning Bing breathes out an icy wind from her frost breath Gu that frosts his arms and half his chest and slows him, then falls back and fires icicle Gu and snowball Gu together to break his momentum entirely. With room to breathe, she activates her vital Gu, ice crystal Gu, turning her flesh to living ice, her eyes frosting over, her height rising by two or three inches. She could not risk the distraction of activating it earlier, while all her attention was on his attacks. Now she closes in and the two trade blow for blow, over a hundred strikes in a few breaths, evenly matched enough that the few spectators watching are stunned. Bai Ning Bing stops defending and attacks only, and Tie Dao Ku, privately unsettled to realize she is sharpening her technique on him mid-fight, slows just enough for her to see an opening. ^{ch. 298}

She slashes at his head; he cannot dodge and braces to defend, but she detonates an ice explosion Gu hidden inside her blade, tearing through his guard. He realizes it is a trap and retreats with swift shadow Gu rather than panic, but she chases and keeps cutting, and he emerges with his left eye blind and his right eye heavily injured, his vision dyed red. He surrenders. The hosting Gu Master calls the match, but Bai Ning Bing laughs coldly and keeps attacking until an unseen force from the stage’s own defences pulls the two apart, to her visible displeasure. Tie Dao Ku heals what he can; his healing Gu cannot restore his blind eye, only stabilize the other. Shaking with leftover fear and rage, he calls her shameless for tricking him. ^{ch. 298}