For a moment, the blurred figure in the sea of fire above suddenly went quiet.
Within the blazing and blinding light of the flames, only the rushing sound of fire-heated air currents filled the silence with wave after wave of wind-like keening.
The Scarlet Fire Honored Elder, who had shown not the faintest ripple of feeling until now, finally began to move the pair of eyes blazing with brilliant golden fire. It seemed to be looking down and studying Li Musheng sitting on the ridgeline of the Hundred Fragrance Pavilion's roof.
Li Musheng, for his part, showed no change of expression throughout. He simply continued quietly observing the changes in the aura of heaven and earth around him, studying every detail of how the other party was deploying its innate divine gifts.
But at that moment, noticing that the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder had suddenly stopped and was no longer continuing its assault, Li Musheng immediately frowned, "Why have you stopped?"
He then beckoned toward the blurred flame figure above and said, "Continue."
At those words, the sea of fire engulfing the space above the Hundred Fragrance Pavilion surged and churned in an instant. Dozens of fire waves ten feet high erupted, and then the blurred flame figure let out a sound like rolling thunder, "This one underestimated you."
Li Musheng said nothing, only waiting quietly.
As expected, the moment the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's words faded, in the next instant, all the flames across several hundred yards of the sea of fire above suddenly condensed into flowing streams of magma-bright fire, and like a tide reversing, began pouring back.
In an instant, Hundred Refinements City, which had been blazing as brightly as daylight under the sky-filling fire, rapidly dimmed and was once more swallowed by the black of night.
Only above the Hundred Fragrance Pavilion remained a vast flame figure ten yards tall.
After absorbing all the flames from the sky above, the enormous fire figure was threaded through with currents of gold-red light compressed to their ultimate density, and at the center of its brow a dark fire core the size of an eyeball had formed, drawing in all the light around it, while silently emanating a terrifying temperature that seemed capable of burning through anything.
Seeing this, Li Musheng's eyes brightened.
It had to be said that this innate divine gift of controlling fire was enormously flashy, and the spectacular visual it produced was genuinely quite pleasing to behold.
Of course, this was not to say that the other party's innate divine gifts were mere show. Applied to this degree of power, this ability could easily crush peak martial artists like Hundred Refinements Peak's Peak Master without any difficulty.
And at that point, the flame figure standing in the air like a god of fire spread its arms in a grasping gesture and came crashing down toward Li Musheng below.
In an instant, the enormous flame figure, wrapped in rolling waves of fire, plunged from the sky.
The trail of flame it dragged behind it left scorch marks in the night sky like brands from red-hot iron, and the surrounding night air was seared by the extreme heat into rippling wave-like folds.
Then gold-red light currents gathered between the fists of the terrifying flame figure, and visibly to the naked eye, the space at the rooftop of the Hundred Fragrance Pavilion seemed to collapse and be annihilated within the blazing firelight.
Yet the enormous flame figure's punch, as large as a house, stopped just as all the previous attacks had, freezing three feet above Li Musheng's head without gaining a single inch further.
And the entire Hundred Fragrance Pavilion beneath Li Musheng, in the face of sky-filling flames pouring down upon it, was likewise entirely undamaged throughout.
The sky-spanning flame figure, seeing this, erupted with violently surging fire and released a deafening roar.
It immediately kept condensing rolling fire streams and driving them into another punch at Li Musheng.
One punch. Two. Three.
After more than a dozen punches, the area around Li Musheng and the enormous flame figure was already filled with what seemed like limitless fire.
Looking into it, there was nothing to be seen but blazing, eye-piercing light reaching into the sky. Everything within was invisible.
Several breaths later, all the firelight scattered and the body of the Hundred Fragrance Pavilion reappeared.
On the roof of the pavilion, the enormous figure with gold-red fire currents flowing around it had stopped driving its fists forward.
But Li Musheng was still sitting perfectly intact on the ridgeline of the roof, and the Hundred Fragrance Pavilion beneath him was also entirely undamaged.
For a moment, the air between the two of them seemed to freeze, and the silence was so complete a falling pin could have been heard.
After what was clearly quite a long silence, the flame figure suddenly demanded in a low voice, "Who exactly are you? This one has never heard of a Great Li court martial artist this young with such formidable strength."
Hearing this, Li Musheng shook his head and did not answer.
The other party was already as good as dead. Still asking this many questions. All he could say was that the other party talked rather a lot.
It would have been better to simply keep throwing out more moves. That way even if the person was gone, at least their performance record would have looked more impressive.
After all, before this occasion, no one had ever managed to make more than two moves against him before being finished. This was quite a personal best.
The Scarlet Fire Honored Elder, however, clearly did not grasp Li Musheng's goodwill and only saw his contempt.
In an instant, fury overtook the figure entirely, and it erupted in an enraged roar.
"This one does not believe your defense is impenetrable!"
The Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's voice was like rolling thunder, and in the next instant the enormous ten-yard flame body suddenly contracted. The surging fire waves wrapping around it were continuously compressed, and the gold-red flames became incredibly dark and concentrated.
Visibly to the naked eye, the enormous flame figure condensed to normal human proportions in an instant, revealing the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's true appearance.
Though the body had shrunk, the aura it gave off had become even deeper and more unfathomable.
The Scarlet Fire Honored Elder, while appearing to have the face of an ordinary middle-aged man, was clearly no normal human being.
No clothing covered the body, and the exposed skin was semi-translucent, with magma surging through the blood vessels to illuminate the outlines of the chest bones.
Within the deep eye sockets blazed a scorching fire as brilliant as two collapsing miniature suns, the pupils transformed into incandescent vortexes, and wherever the gaze fell the air itself ignited, sending fire waves dozens of feet high surging upward.
At the same time, a black fire core the size of an eyeball appeared in the center of the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's brow, and the space it was hovering in had become something resembling a flame black hole that seemed to devour everything, with seemingly undying fire writhing endlessly around its edges.
"Now let us see whether you can still hold up."
The Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's pair of blazing fire-red eyes locked rigidly onto Li Musheng below. The hair, red as fire, was like three thousand dragons of flame, and when sent aloft by the fire waves, it danced and scattered sparks of blazing light.
Then the black fire core at the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's brow drifted a dark flame into a fingertip.
A single finger was pointed at Li Musheng, instantly producing a ring-shaped fire storm of scorching wind that contained currents of what seemed like fire hurricanes compressed to their ultimate density.
In an instant, the surrounding space seemed unable to bear such extreme heat and began cracking in every direction, and from those cracks rose pillar after pillar of fire like reverse thorns.
Without a sound, the dark sky was torn open in a web of cracks. The space at the roof of the Hundred Fragrance Pavilion seemed to collapse in an instant, and all the heat and light across Hundred Refinements City converged in that point, then in a single instant erupted in a spray of gold-white light spots like a solar corona.
In that moment all of heaven and earth was still. Li Musheng and the Hundred Fragrance Pavilion below were both engulfed by those terrifying light spots, as though a burning sun had fallen directly onto the roof of the Hundred Fragrance Pavilion.
Several breaths later, all the light faded away, and everything returned to as it had been.
The Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's black fire core at the brow dimmed slightly. It looked down from above, and then its brow immediately furrowed.
Li Musheng, who had been sitting on the ridgeline of the Hundred Fragrance Pavilion's roof, was now gone. But the Hundred Fragrance Pavilion itself was exactly as it had been before, entirely undamaged.
In an instant, a bad feeling rose in the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's heart, and the blazing eyes swept immediately in every direction.
Wherever the gaze fell, firelight blazed and the air warped, but there was no trace of Li Musheng to be found.
"Stop looking. I am here."
At that moment, Li Musheng's voice drifted lightly to the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's ear.
The flames burning in the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's eyes erupted violently, and then it saw with shock that Li Musheng's figure was materializing from the empty air several feet directly ahead of it.
"How is this possible? How can any defense in this world be so formidable? Even the Earth Core Fire Nucleus that this one spent countless decades of effort to condense cannot break through it."
"How... are you doing this?"
The Scarlet Fire Honored Elder was clearly having some difficulty accepting this.
Over decades of cultivation, it had used the innate divine gift of fire control to absorb the essence of the earth's core fire from deep underground magma day after day, and had barely managed to condense that much of a fire nucleus that could burn through metal and stone.
And yet even so, it could not break Li Musheng's defense. It had not even singed the edge of his clothing.
Faced with the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's question, Li Musheng said nothing.
His gaze was fixed on the black fire core at the other party's brow, the eyeball-sized dark nucleus.
Li Musheng narrowed his eyes slightly with a thoughtful expression, then looked at the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder before him, saying, "Your innate divine gift is genuinely not bad. But without reaching my level of cultivation, you do not understand where true Heaven-Man unity and the limits of the martial path actually lie. Being able to control powerful forces without understanding why they work the way they do is useless."
With that, he paid no further attention to the expression of shock and confusion that immediately crossed the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's face, and raised a hand to reach toward the black fire core at the other party's brow.
In the next instant, the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's expression changed sharply. It could feel clearly that the fire core at its brow had suddenly slipped beyond its control.
The fire in its bloodstream, in its eyes, and the gold-red fire currents flowing all around its body were all being drawn by an irresistible pull, all separating from its body and converging toward the fire core that was moving away from it.
In an instant, the flames around the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder went out all at once, and the entire figure dimmed, returning to the appearance of an ordinary person.
It could now only rely on its own martial Dao True Qi to maintain its suspension in the air and keep from falling.
With the black fire core that had taken decades to accumulate taken away, the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's innate divine gifts immediately lost the majority of their power.
"No. This one still has martial cultivation."
Suddenly, the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder looked at its own hands, and a trace of returning confidence appeared in its eyes.
At that point Li Musheng across from it held the black fire core suspended half an inch above his palm, and glanced at the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder.
Even innate divine gifts could do nothing to him. And yet the other party wanted to compete with him in martial cultivation? He could not imagine what they were thinking.
He paid no further attention to the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder, however, and instead studied the black fire core before him that contained an extraordinarily terrifying temperature.
A moment ago, he had been able to withstand the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's flames entirely through his level of martial cultivation and his command of the True Qi of heaven and earth across the entirety of the surrounding space.
In truth, at Li Musheng's current level of Heaven-Man unity, as long as he was unwilling to allow it, no force whatsoever could come within half a foot of him.
Through his earlier observation he had also found that while the power those of divine nature's innate gifts drew upon was different from the True Qi of heaven and earth, the way both of them drove and applied force was essentially the same at a fundamental level, both following the same underlying rules of operation.
And so, having reached a certain level that was difficult to surpass, even innate divine gifts could do nothing to him.
As for his interest in the black fire core, it was because a curious thought had suddenly arisen in him.
He had previously created and mastered a martial cultivation art of his own called the Immortal Golden Body. In his view, this was without question the finest body-tempering and body-protecting divine art in the world, immune to blades and spears, immune to all poisons.
Li Musheng wanted to test whether the black fire core, with its extreme temperature, could break through his Immortal Golden Body.
With that thought, Li Musheng's intent moved, and immediately gold-colored lines appeared across his skin, suffused with a faint golden radiance.
He then released his hold on the black fire core and let it fall on its own toward his palm.
Throughout this process, his gaze stayed fixed on what was happening.
After all, as the saying goes, curiosity killed the cat. If the black fire core accidentally burned a hole through his hand, that would be...
But right at that moment, a palm condensing terrifying burning fire and vast martial Dao True Qi pressed silently against Li Musheng's chest.
The Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's voice followed, furious and cold, "You dare let your attention wander while facing this one..."
But before those words could finish, in the next instant a faint clear radiance shimmered across Li Musheng's skin, and the hand was sent flying back faster than it had arrived.
Li Musheng glanced at the Scarlet Fire Honored Elder tumbling backward, then in the same motion sent a formless thread of True Qi directly through the center of its brow.
The Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's body, from which every last trace of life had drained in an instant, lost all its strength as though its strings had been cut, and fell like a kite with a broken line into the street furrow below.
That furrow already held the bodies of a whole collection of Falling God Peak martial artists, including the Hundred Refinements Peak Master and the grandmaster's head disciple.
The Scarlet Fire Honored Elder's body fell in among them, seeming neither one too many nor one too few.
Li Musheng then withdrew his gaze and returned his attention to his experiment.
The black fire core fell into his palm, and the dense golden lines across his skin lit up, blocking the fire core's terrifying heat from reaching any further.
Li Musheng then felt a thread of warmth reach the center of his palm.
Yet his hand was completely unharmed.
Only the ink-black fire lines had merged with the golden radiance at his skin's surface, giving off a black-gold luster.
Seeing this, Li Musheng raised an eyebrow slightly.
The Immortal Golden Body was genuinely extraordinary. That an ordinary mortal body could withstand such extreme heat had already entered the realm of the non-human.
Yet in Li Musheng's view, it still was not enough.
After all, he was a person in pursuit of martial transcendence, and at that moment a thought had suddenly occurred to him. If there were something similar to the Qilin Blood or the Azure Dragon True Qi that could further enhance his physical defense, that would be ideal.