148: Chapter 148 Teleportation Array Malfunction? Qin Ye Is Unreachable!

"She hasn't even activated her Limit Overload yet. At this level, it's probably enough to get her Furnace Engine running at eighty percent. In terms of absolute energy output, I can't beat her for now."

He paused for a moment.

"But that's about it."

Zhao Dahai's eye twitched twice. Lin Xiao and Lin Weiwei exchanged a look.

Both of their expressions conveyed the exact same thought—where on earth do you get your confidence from?

But they didn't ask it out loud. Su Bai's tone was too calm when he said that. It didn't sound like he was bragging. It sounded like he was stating a fact he had confirmed long ago.

Kyubey jumped down from Su Bai's lap.

[Su Bai. Wei Xiaoyu's Mental Power conduction density is thirty percent higher than the last round. She has become stronger.]

"Normal. Everyone who has been slapped becomes stronger."

[...]

Lin Weiwei's mouth twitched. How absurd of a person must one be to equate being slapped with becoming stronger as a matter of course.

On the arena.

Wei Xiaoyu tossed the sun upward.

Not pushed away, but tossed. Her two hands changed the direction of the force acting on the sun, and dark golden furnace energy exploded between her palms and the golden plasma, creating an extremely blinding shockwave. Then, that golden sun, which had originally been slamming towards her, was forcibly tossed by her directly above the arena.

BOOM!!!

The sun hovered in the air once again.

Golden light spilled down. It shone on Wei Xiaoyu's short hair and reflected in her dark golden pupils.

Her breathing quickened slightly. The rotational speed of the Furnace Engine inside her slowly dropped from eighty thousand back to forty thousand. Surging heat waves steamed up a circle of distorted air around her.

She pulled the battle axe she had stuck into the sandy ground back out. She shouldered it with one hand and nodded in the Empress's direction.

There was no arrogance in that nod. No showing off, no provocation. It was just one warrior nodding to another.

The Empress locked eyes with her for a second.

The curve of her mouth deepened just a little.

"...It has been a long time since We have seen such an interesting young person. First Master Mage Chen Taixu, and then you. The Empire has worthy successors."

She turned her head, her gaze falling back onto the ball of golden light in her hand, the golden law patterns flowing twice around her palm.

"You three, all not bad."

Then she lifted her eyes.

Her dark golden pupils, through the rising heat waves on the arena, locked onto that figure who had remained motionless from the very beginning once again.

Qin Ye.

"It's your turn."

The Empress flicked her finger lightly.

The golden sun moved for the third time.

This time it was faster than the previous two times. Fast to an extremely absurd degree—it vanished the moment it left the Empress's fingertip. The air on the arena was torn by its trajectory into a visible vacuum channel. The sand on both sides of the channel was sucked in, then melted into extremely fine glass filaments in mid-air.

Not a single high-speed camera in the entire venue captured its movement.

That sun had only one target—Qin Ye.

Qin Ye stood in place. The dark golden gear patterns on the back of her hand had spun into a blurred halo. She lifted her chin slightly, her eyes reflecting the sun that was slamming toward her at Ninth-Tier speed.

No fear. No tension. Nothing that could be called an "emotion."

Then she smiled.

The corners of her mouth curved. The arc was very small, so small that probably only the Empress facing her and Su Bai, who was watching her profile from the side, could notice.

BOOM—!!!

The golden sun pierced through the location where Qin Ye had been. High-temperature plasma exploded on the sandy ground beneath her, creating a giant crater over thirty meters in diameter. The sand was instantly vaporized, and the rock layer at the bottom of the pit was burned into a dark red lava lake.

The shockwave caused the barrier around the arena to crack with dense fissures.

The entire venue was dead silent.

Zhao Dahai's complexion instantly turned from light gray to a complete ashen gray, and he muttered: "She—she—she was hit? That's impossible—"

Someone in the audience let out a very brief exclamation, but that exclamation lasted only half a second before being suppressed. The barrage of comments exploded into a mess of garbled text in that instant, with completely contradictory comments like "Eliminated," "Impossible," "The Stand is finished," "Wait," and "Look again" filling the screen all at once.

Because everyone felt something was wrong.

That sun had indeed hit Qin Ye. The trajectory was correct, the landing point was accurate, and the plasma ripples excited by the high temperature at the point of contact were also captured frame by frame by the high-speed camera. But Qin Ye's figure was still there.

It wasn't an afterimage.

Her silhouette had not dissipated. Her stance had not collapsed. Her shadow remained steadily on the ground amidst the firelight.

"How is that possible—she didn't trigger a forced teleportation under an attack like that?! Did the Empress's teleportation array malfunction?!"

"No!! The teleportation array didn't malfunction!! Just a moment ago, a few people were instantly eliminated just by being grazed by the flames!!"

"Then why is she—"

No one finished that sentence. Because everyone saw the next scene at the same time.

The golden sun, which had already pierced through Qin Ye's position, pulled up again in the lava lake behind her, turned at an extremely sharp angle, and slammed toward her again. The speed was even faster than before.

Qin Ye didn't move.

The sun pierced through again. Pulled up again. Slammed again.

The trajectory of the third attack drew a spiral in the air. The tail flames of the golden plasma spread out layer upon layer of dazzling light curtains above the arena. Within a few seconds, that sun repeatedly slammed into Qin Ye from no less than seven different angles, passing through her body accurately every single time.

But Qin Ye was still there.

Her position had never shifted. Even the indentations of her toes in the sand had not changed.

Every time the golden sun slammed into her—passed through her—the ground behind her was blasted into a new crater. The lava lake had expanded from one to seven. The temperature on the arena was so high that even the air was trembling. But there were no traces of burning on Qin Ye. Her clothes were not on fire, her hair was not curled, and even the rotation rhythm of the dark golden gear pattern on the back of her hand had not changed.

"...She wasn't hit."

Chief Commentator Lu Ming's fingers holding the microphone were trembling. After his voice was amplified by the loudspeaker array, every single person in the crowd of over one hundred thousand could hear every word clearly.

"Your High—the Empress's golden sun—those countless impacts just now—one after another—it didn't touch her!!"

"This is not defense!! Not a shield!! She stood in that pit and didn't even change her stance from beginning to end!! But Sun and Moon in Palm cannot touch her!!"

The barrage of comments froze.

The entire live stream server fell into a brief state of silence in this instant. Then the comment section poured out as if it had been blown open—not with text, but with nothing but question marks.