But without a doubt, he was the fastest-advancing and most prodigious Demon in the entire history of Qiming First High School.
-----------------
The preliminary rounds progressed like a massive, intricate funnel, mercilessly weeding out the weak.
Qin Feng’s winning streak continued.
Among the tens of millions of contestants, his name was like a star rising against the tide, climbing steadily and swiftly through the ranks.
Top 50,000...
Top 30,000...
Top 10,000!
When his rank officially broke into the top ten thousand, the very nature of the competition changed.
The easy, overwhelming victories vanished completely.
Not a single person who fought their way into the top ten thousand—surviving the bloody gauntlet against tens of millions of Ninth-level Martial Artists from across hundreds of millions of Star Zones—was weak.
Every single one of them had cultivated at least one Level 6 Killing Technique to the Control Realm. They all possessed a wealth of combat experience, honed amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
Anyone who made it into the top ten thousand was, without a doubt, a chosen prodigy of their respective star system and civilization.
At this level, the contest was no longer about simple metrics like life force index or the realm of one’s Killing Technique.
The true key to victory lay in the information gap—in understanding and cracking the operational model at the core of each other’s Killing Techniques: the Mental Power-driven Spiritual Energy Module aggregation.
The essence of a Level 6 Killing Technique was to use Mental Power to harness hundreds of Spiritual Energy Modules, arranging them into complex combinations to unleash terrifying power on a physical level.
For every Killing Technique, the modules’ operational trajectories, energy frequencies, and methods of aggregation were all completely different, like an intricate combination lock.
If you understood an opponent’s Killing Technique and knew its "password," you could predict their attack trajectories, find the weakest nodes in their energy flow, and seize the upper hand to defeat them at minimal cost.
Conversely, if you knew nothing about an opponent’s Killing Technique, or if its properties countered your own, you could easily be forced onto the defensive by an unexpected attack and suffer a bitter defeat—even if your Hard Power was superior.
From this point on, Qin Feng’s battles became incredibly grueling.
He could no longer take down opponents with a single spear strike.
Each match turned into a difficult war of attrition, lasting half an hour or even longer.
His opponents, like a kaleidoscope, revealed to him both the brilliance and the brutality of the human Empire’s Martial Dao civilization.
He encountered a Martial Artist who practiced the Thousand Threads Guide. The man’s weapons were ten Spiritual Energy Threads, each thinner than a strand of hair and incredibly sharp. Controlled by Mental Power, they could silently form a Heaven and Earth Net capable of slicing through anything.
Qin Feng was forced to transform his spear technique into an impenetrable whirlwind, fighting a battle of millimeters against the invisible killing intent within a confined space.
In the end, he relied on his experience from thousands of bouts against similar styles in the Imperial Arena. He keenly perceived the 0.01-second-long pause as his opponent retracted the threads with their Mental Power, shattered the net with a single spear thrust, and secured a narrow victory by half a move.
All the sweat he’d poured into the Imperial Arena over the past five years paid off handsomely in that moment.
Those nearly one million high-intensity duels had exposed him to over ninety-five percent of the commonly known Level 6 Killing Techniques.
Even if he hadn’t personally practiced most of his opponents’ Killing Techniques, he had fought against them hundreds, if not thousands, of times, and knew their strengths, weaknesses, and operational models like the back of his hand.
Drawing upon this downright terrifying repository of combat experience, Qin Feng could always calmly analyze the state of a battle and find the key to victory.
Several more brutal elimination rounds passed.
When the victory notification chimed on his personal terminal once more, Qin Feng glanced at his rank.
Nine hundred and eightieth.
He had successfully broken into the top one thousand!
This meant he now held a ticket to the Cosmic Genius Battle.
However, the competition was still ongoing.
Qin Feng didn’t let his guard down in the slightest. He quickly recalibrated and prepared for his next match.
When he stood on the stage and saw his opponent’s information, his pupils couldn’t help but contract, despite his iron will.
[Opponent: Jinmu (from the Central Star System)]
He had seen this name before on the list of championship favorites provided by Qian Duoduo.
But what truly made him wary was his opponent’s weapon.
—A long spear, crimson-gold from end to end.
Jinmu’s frame wasn’t burly; he was even somewhat lean. But just by standing there, he seemed like a Divine Spear poised to pierce the heavens, his sharp edge fully revealed, his aura overwhelming.
[Match Start!]
No probing. No feints.
The instant the match began, they both moved!
BOOM!
The two long spears, like a pair of furious dragons lunging from different voids, collided violently in the center of the stage.
A terrifying Energy Shock Wave instantly erupted, blasting a layer of metallic dust from the solid alloy surface of the stage.
Qin Feng felt an irresistible, immense force travel up the shaft of his spear. The webbing of his thumb went numb, and he was sent stumbling back more than a dozen steps, completely out of control.
Across from him, Jinmu merely swayed.
The disparity in their power was instantly obvious.
"Your foundation is solid."
Jinmu spoke, his voice even but laced with undeniable confidence. "But your Killing Technique... is far too inferior."
Before his words had faded, his figure vanished.
The next instant, hundreds of golden spear phantoms materialized all around Qin Feng. Each one pulsed with enough terrifying power to pierce a star, sealing off every possible escape route.