Chapter 416: Float like a petal, recoil like bamboo
Once Zhen Jin started to think in terms of reactivity instead of proactivity, he quickly took on a fighting stance that would allow him to move more instantaneously and used a bit of aether to recall some of the seeds he scattered about.
Evidently he was so focused on his bestial opponent that he failed to notice how his own aether was acting funny, namely turning into surprisingly efficient threads of energized silk that precisely clung to each seed, instead of being a shapeless energy that would grab stuff like clay.
The moment the seeds reached Zhen Jin’s palms, was the exact moment the Rust Rodent decided to strike out.
“Skrrr-ump!”
With a very strange battlecry, the Rust Rodent slammed its tail against the cargo hold’s floor and launched himself upward into an arc towards Zhen Jin. As it soared through the air, the beast began to rapidly circulate it’s aether towards it’s claws.
[R-rust Claw!]
Rust colored aether began to manifest around the rodent’s claw, giving off a weird sense of corrosion normally exclusive to metal.
Granted, Zhen Jin knew firsthand that this wasn’t the case.
As the rust coated claws came barreling towards his head, Zhen Jin didn’t panic nor did he try to dodge immediately. Instead, he stood there as a single thought came to his mind.
‘Huh…I never thought my opponents could be so…easy to read.’
Zhen Jin would normally pay attention to the environment moreso than his opponents in a fight, so that he could force them into situations that were always more advantageous for himself. As such, he tended to not notice the things his opponents would do when they learned they were getting corralled or even notice that they were about to counter his moves.
This didn’t happen all the time, but it happened enough times that it caused Zhen Jin to double down on the idea of forcing predictable events onto others even harder. However, now that he wasn’t focusing on forcing a predictable event, he realized that it was far easier to just…go with the flow.
‘I can’t control how the wind blows or how the sun shines…but I can at least control myself,’ he thought to himself once more, as he prepared his next course of action.
There was no need to adjust the environment, only himself.
“SKREEEE!”
WHAM!
The rodent’s claw came slamming down and smashed into the floor below, missing Zhen Jin altogether.
The rodent was stunned at missing, for it was sure that Zhen Jin was doing nothing but standing still.
How the hell does one miss a motionless target?!
“Skree?”
“Miss something?”
“Skree?!”
Only a couple feet further from the rodent’s point of impact, Zhen Jin was standing there in the exact same posture as he was just moments ago.
A part of the rodent wanted to question as to how and why this man managed to avoid his attacks, the more feral part of it however just wanted the man dead.
[Rrrust Claw!]
The Rust Rodent’s claws flared back up with rust colored aether as it struck forward in an attempt to slash the man before him into pieces. However, it didn’t manage to land even a single attack.
Everytime the rodent tried to lash out with it’s claws, Zhen Jin would simply dodge as if he was using the momentum of the attacks to float backwards and every which way like a floating petal in the breeze.
Eventually, the rodent got sick of this and attempted to go for a more wide sweeping method of attack, its tail.
[Iii-iron Lash!]
The rodent’s tail glowed with aether as the skin rapidly darkened and hardened to the point it looked like iron.
In a rapid, sweeping motion, the rodent swung it’s tail like a heavy flail and smashed to pieces several crates and barrels in an attempt to crush Zhen Jin.
‘And up!’
Instead of stepping back, Zhen Jin proceeded to leap forward instead, landing at a spot directly behind the Rust Rodent after it had finished it’s rotation.
This turned out to be a great idea, as the Rust Rodent immediately followed it’s tail attack by lunging forward.
“SKREEEE!…skree?”
Rage gave way to confusion as the Rust Rodent soon realized that it had lost it’s opponent somehow.
It had initially thought that perhaps they had crushed the opponent into mush, but gave up that idea when he realized he couldn’t smell any blood.
“Hey! Over here!”
“Skr-what?”
The Rust Rodent quickly turned it’s head in an attempt to see how and why Zhen Jin’s voice had suddenly appeared at its left flank like some kind of ghost, but that turned out to be a very very bad idea.
[Wild Growth!]
“SKREEEE!”
The moment the beast turned his head, Zhen Jin had taken one of the seeds he picked back up and aimed it at the turning head like a handheld crossbow.
From the seed rapidly grew a bamboo tree that surged forward in an attempt to skewer the rodent’s eyes, but at the last moment, the rodent jerked it’s head upward to avoid the attack…or so it thought.
Once the bamboo tree stopped growing, Zhen Jin quickly grabbed hold of it with both hands and reinforced it with aether as he swung it like a staff directly into the rodent’s exposed neck.
The sound of crunching, corroded metal could be heard as the makeshift staff made impact with the exposed rodent’s throat.
“Skree…”
The Rust Rodent let out a pained hiss as it clutched at it’s neck and took several steps back.
Zhen Jin was feeling pretty good about himself in this moment, but even he knew that he had to this quickly.
‘This thing is just wantonly destroying everything, at this rate, it’ll break the ship. I need to figure out how to put down this rat without breaking the ship, or at least buy time for my more…focused brothers to show up, but how?’
Usually, Zhen Jin would end his opponents by ensnaring them in rapidly growing thick vines covered in thorns and then smash his opponent upside with a heavy fist.
That particular move, though required open space, solid ground and sunlight to use properly, and Zhen Jin had neither at the moment.
As he racked his brain for an idea on how to end this, eyes soon settled on the handful of seeds he had scooped up.
‘Huh…maybe I could…’
A devious plan began to form in Zhen Jin’s mind, one he would have never thought of up until his recent “epiphany”.
‘Now that I think about it though, where the hell are my brothers?’
________________________________________________
[You’re being surprisingly quiet about this fight,] Nepherage noted, [the other guys would normally provide advice or insight.]
[Their hosts at the time were surprisingly compliant for such exchanges,] Archanidame answered, [Elder Zhen Jin on the other hand, happens to be that breed of warrior that tend to believe that they’re usually correct, especially when challenged. Hence why when I was in his head, I focused more on “showing” instead of “telling”. Growth can be more conducive if self-discovery can be applied.]
[Huh…]
________________________________________________
“So…is this thing edible?”
“I…think so?”
“Why did that statement sound like a question?”
“Well…normally they’re poisonous, but if I’m reading this book correctly, there’s a way to make it edible.”
“If?”
After catching a big ass fish with the ship’s fishing gear, Zhen Long, Zhen Lao and Zhen Yan decided to bring it to the ship’s galley to see if the ship’s cook could make use of it. The reception to this question had been mixed.
The reason being that, as soon as the three elders of the branch clan brought the fish, the cook immediately identified it as a highly toxic Scarlet Scaled Tuna. The fish looked pretty, but the meat was so poisonous that it could outright kill Aether Masters and below, while giving Aether Grandmasters a horrible case of the runs. Aether Lord’s and above were okay, to them it was “mildly” spicy.
However, the aforementioned cook was also, coincidentally, in the middle of reading up on how to make such a fish edible for low ranking aether warriors as soon as it was brought in.
It should be noted that this book wasn’t in the cook’s normal repertoire of recipes, but it was something that he had acquired around the same time the ship suddenly upgraded into a steamship.
The cook looked over the book a few times before finally sighing and showing the elders.
“Alright, I can’t understand a word of this book, but the pictures seem to depict that the tuna is edible if I cut it a certain way…I think.”
The three elders looked at the book for a brief moment, curious to see if they could understand, only to be shocked that they could.
Namely due to it being written in a really old dialect of Tide Script.
“Shit, no wonder you couldn’t read this. It’s written in like a super old dialect of our language,” Zhen Long pointed out.
“Seriously? Any of guys understand this stuff then?”
“Not really…,” Zhen Lao chimed in, “but on the plus side, it does mention that the recipe you’re looking at can make this fish edible.”
“Only guy we know who can read this stuff is Zhen Jin,” Zhen Yan followed up, “but we have no idea where he is right-.”
WHAM!
“First Uncle! Third Uncle! Seventh Uncle!”
“Huh? Xiao Xing? What’s the matter?”
At that exact, Zhen Xing flung open the door to the galley with a panicked look on his face. Before they could ask what was wrong, Zhen Xing already spilled the answer.
“Father’s in trouble! Something got loose in the cargo!”
“What? What are you talking-”
At that exact moment, a sudden spike in aether could be felt reverberating across the ship.
“Oh…oh shit.”
“We gotta go, now!”
