Shen Yu didn’t counter-attack. He simply drifted.

Whenever a fist came too close, a subtle tilt of his torso or a microscopic step to the side left Junjie hitting nothing but residual afterimages.

And whenever Junjie tried to lock him down with wide, sweeping swings, Shen Yu’s hands would flash like pale jade under the lantern light, gentle, circular palm deflections that tapped the sides of the heavy iron gauntlets, sending the young lord stumbling past him time and time again.

From the sidelines, the silence was suffocating.

The minor clan leaders were staring with their mouths wide open. Wu Shan’s proud smile had completely vanished, replaced by a dark, rigid expression as his Nascent Soul perception realized a terrifying truth, Shen Yu wasn’t just winning, he was actively playing with his son.

He was exerting the bare minimum amount of energy required to make a 3rd-Stage Foundation Establishment genius look like a flailing toddler.

Beside the Tang table, Meng Yan let out a soft, breathy sigh, her fingers curling tightly around the edge of her seat.

Watching Shen Yu effortlessly dominate another man with such absolute, cold elegance was doing wicked things to her restraint. Her core throbbed violently.

’Look at him,’ she thought, her hazel eyes completely dark with lust. ’He doesn’t even need to try. Ah, I want him to look at me with that same cold, conquering indifference while he breaks me.’

"Stand still and fight me, you cowardly bastard!" Junjie screamed, his breathing already becoming ragged. The dense golden aura around him was flickering chaotically, pushed out of alignment by Shen Yu’s constant, disruptive palm deflections.

"Is this what your ’eccentric master’ taught you? To run like a dog? To hide behind women’s skirts and dance around the ring?"

’Got you,’ Shen Yu thought, his internal voice echoing with the cold, predatory malice of a trap snapping shut.

In an instant, the gentle aura of the Golden Paragon underwent a terrifying shift.

Shen Yu’s eyes narrowed into slits of righteous indignation, his facial expression hardening into a mask of pure, wounded honor.

He let out a sharp, resonant sigh that cut through Junjie’s frantic roaring.

"It was entirely acceptable when your insults were directed at my own lack of talent, Young Master Wu," Shen Yu declared, his voice carrying a sudden, thunderous weight that vibrated through the pavilion.

"As a junior, I can bear your arrogance. But the moment you drag my esteemed Master’s name into the mud, you cross a line that no righteous cultivator can overlook!"

With those words, Shen Yu’s defensive stance shattered into raw, aggressive movement.

He didn’t just step, he lunged, his white robes snapping like a whip as he closed the distance in a microsecond.

The crowd gasped. To the onlookers, the minor patriarchs, and even City Lord Wu Shan, it looked like a classic display of a loyal disciple defending his master’s honor, fueled by righteous fury.

They assumed the Golden Paragon was finally unleashing his hidden strength to punish an insolent challenger.

But beneath that flawless, holy theater, Shen Yu was channeling a completely different kind of rage.

His mind was burning with a cold, merciless fury over the sheer audacity of this imperial pup demanding Lixue’s hand in a wager.

’You dare covet what is mine?’ he thought, his gaze pinning Junjie down like a corpse on an altar. ’Then I will dismantle you piece by piece.’

What the cheering crowd and the proud City Lord didn’t know, what they couldn’t possibly fathom, was that the man standing before them was not some lucky, kind-hearted young prodigy.

No.

The soul manipulating this body belonged to Grandmaster Xu, the feared, ruthless demonic cultivator from a different world.

A man who had slaughtered thousands, who had systematically dissected and experimented on countless bodies to unravel the deep secrets of meridians and break the mortal limits of cultivation.

He knew the structural map of human flesh and Qi pathways better than a physician knows his needles.

Shen Yu’s open hand blurred into a cascade of strikes. To the audience, it was a masterful display of restraint. They watched as his pale jade palms repeatedly slammed into Junjie’s shoulders, chest, and flanks, driving the 3rd-Stage Foundation Establishment genius backward with overwhelming force.

Yet, strangely, Junjie’s armor didn’t shatter, and no bloody wounds tore open. To the untrained eye, the Golden Paragon was true to his saintly name, mercifully dominating the fight without inflicting lethal trauma on the City Lord’s son.

In reality, it was a slow, agonizing execution.

Every single tap of Shen Yu’s fingers, every seemingly gentle press of his palm, was delivered with microscopic precision to a specific network of acupoints.

He struck the Tianfu point, then immediately followed it with a microscopic injection of Qi into the Jianjing shoulder well and the Qimen pathways.

Individually, the strikes felt non-lethal, barely leaving a bruise. But delivered in that exact, rapid-fire sequence, the strikes acted as a flawless, slow-acting poison.

Shen Yu had no intention of provoking an immediate, catastrophic conflict with a Nascent Soul expert like Wu Shan right now.

He needed the City Lord’s political backing for the Tang Clan’s ascension. So, instead of a vulgar display of immediate violence, his demonic refinement ensured that the injected Qi would lay dormant, quietly festering within Junjie’s meridians.

Over the coming months, it would slowly devour the boy’s foundation from the inside out, progressively blocking his energy flow until the imperial scion was permanently crippled and disabled, a useless husk unable to ever hold a blade again.

"The final stance," Shen Yu shouted righteously, his palm gathering a vibrant, beautiful glow of pure spiritual energy. "Verdant Flow — Ascending Crest!"

BOOM!

The strike connected squarely with Junjie’s chest. The young lord’s golden mountain shield shattered entirely.

With his meridians completely chaotic and his body screaming from the invisible, subterranean damage, Junjie utterly lost his balance.

He crashed heavily onto the fractured marble, his iron gauntlets clattering uselessly against the stone as he fell flat on his back, gasping for air like a dying fish.

Before he could even attempt to roll over, a shadow loomed over him.

Shen Yu stood perfectly poised, his right hand shaped into a rigid, lethal palm strike hovering barely an inch away from Junjie’s nose.

The sheer, condensed wind from the sudden stop ruffled Junjie’s ash-blonde hair, forcing the terrified young lord to blink in absolute horror.

"You lost, Young Master Wu," Shen Yu said softly, his golden eyes completely tranquil, his breathing as steady as if he had merely been reciting poetry.