Chapter 378: Hu Tao: Are you really being balanced?
The parasitized elite Ethereals grew restless. Their eerie, worshipping postures broke as a sudden, suffocating pressure descended upon the plaza.
"Then..." Venti exhaled a long, measured breath. He had been channeling his energy for nearly a full minute. The usual carefree, playful grin vanished from the bard's face, replaced by a razor-sharp focus that belonged solely to the Anemo Archon. His glowing teal eyes locked onto the dead center of the plaza—the exact spot where the monstrous horde swarmed the thickest, guarding their pulsating core.
"...It's decided. You're the one!"
"Watch closely! This move is very cool!" Venti called out, his voice cutting through the tense atmosphere.
He pulled his arm back, gathering the terrifying, hyper-compressed Anemo energy into his palm. It took the shape of a cyan-white wheel—a miniature 'Sun of Wind' that hummed with the promise of ultimate destruction. With a vigorous swing, he hurled the glowing sphere directly at the parasitized Spine King Hound, Hati, and its cluster of elite guards.
The cyan-white wheel of destruction tore across the battlefield. It unleashed an ear-piercing shriek, carrying the sheer aura of death as it cleaved through the thick, corruptive purple mist permeating the plaza. Wherever the sphere passed, stray blades of Anemo energy bled off its edges, plowing deep, jagged gullies into the concrete. Heavy, abandoned shipping containers lining the plaza were sliced open like wet paper and sent tumbling through the air.
Screech—!
The projectile's speed skyrocketed the moment it left his fingertips. It dragged a blinding, fleeting afterimage in its wake, resembling a cyan meteor streaking horizontally across the earth. It slammed dead-center into the horde of Ethereals.
Yet, the expected fiery explosion never came.
Instead, a heart-stopping, agonizing screech echoed across the ruins—the horrific sound of thousands of glass panes being ground to dust by razor-sharp blades. The Anemo wheel halted abruptly in the middle of the swarm. In the next fraction of a second, the hyper-compressed elemental energy ruptured. It didn't explode; it bloomed into a terrifying, beautiful lotus of absolute death.
A colossal cyan wind domain, stretching over twenty meters in diameter, materialized instantly. It swallowed the towering Hati Hound and the vast majority of the high-level Ethereals whole.
Inside this glowing sphere, the air ceased to flow naturally. It transformed into a churning ocean of microscopic Anemo blades. Visible to the naked eye, these threads of wind were as fine as silk but possessed an incomparable, terrifying sharpness. They didn't just thrash about randomly. Every single blade vibrated, rotated, and slashed at a synchronized, destructive frequency, establishing a flawless domain of execution.
Hu Tao blinked, her plum-blossom pupils contracting. She only caught a flash of brilliant teal light before the scalp-numbing storm of blades took over.
Wherever the chaotic wind field expanded, the slower-reacting Dullahans, Thanatos, and Farbauti Ethereals bore the absolute brunt of the devastation. Their notoriously hard Aether-crystallized carapaces and resilient energy bodies offered zero resistance. Against the high-frequency Anemo shredder, they were nothing more than warm butter meeting a white-hot knife.
A Dullahan raised its heavy crystallized shield in a desperate bid for survival. The moment the wind touched it, the thick barrier was shaved down layer by agonizing layer, rapidly thinning until it shattered into useless glowing dust.
Nearby, a Thanatos phantom attempted to draw its ethereal bow. Before the string could even pull taut, several intersecting wind blades silently severed its entire arm.
The hulking, heavy-set Farbauti brutes became the perfect, stationary targets. The storm mercilessly peeled away their thick, armored plating, exposing the pulsating, purple-black corrupted tissue underneath. In seconds, denser clusters of wind blades rushed in, shredding their exposed flesh into nothingness.
"ROAR—!!!"
An agonizing, furious howl erupted from the epicenter of the storm. The parasitized Hati Hound thrashed blindly against the tempest.
Sensing their alpha's peril, the surviving Ethereals stationed near the outer edges of the domain displayed a horrifying level of hive-mind loyalty. Instead of scattering to save themselves from the shredding winds, they lunged fearlessly toward the center.
They threw themselves into the meat grinder. The remaining Dullahans with their half-broken shields, the severed bodies of the Thanatos, the hulking, bleeding remains of the Farbauti—they piled atop one another. Using everything they had left, the monsters formed a grotesque, towering barricade of corrupted flesh and Aether carapace to shield the Hati Hound.
The morbid tactic actually worked, if only slightly. The relentless Anemo blades automatically focused on the closest targets, violently cutting, crushing, and annihilating the suicidal meat shields into ultra-fine Aether dust.
Hiding behind this crumbling mountain of its own kin, the Hati Hound endured the storm. Countless wind blades still managed to penetrate the gaps in the corpse pile, striking the beast directly. Yet, the creature's exceptionally thick layer of Aether-crystallized armor displayed an astonishing level of defense.
Ssss, ssss, ssss—Click! Crack!
The dense, rapid-fire sound of blades striking armor echoed like a torrential downpour hammering against a tin roof. Blinding sparks erupted continuously across the Hati's purple-red carapace. Jagged slashes of varying depths appeared, intersecting violently across its massive frame. Large chunks of the corrupted crystal were forcibly shattered and peeled away, falling to the ground like thick, crumbling plaster.
However, this armor was forged from massive quantities of high-purity Aether absorbed during its parasitization. Its sheer density far exceeded that of any ordinary high-level Ethereal. The Anemo blades were devastatingly sharp, but after spending most of their kinetic energy chewing through the meat shields, they lacked the final push to completely pierce the Hati's core in a single volley. They only managed to inflict severe surface trauma, leaving the beast's armor riddled with glowing, spider-web cracks.
This brutal clash between ultimate sharpness and absolute solidity lasted for exactly five seconds.
Then, as abruptly as it had manifested, the violent cyan-white tempest dissipated into thin air.
The aftermath in the plaza could only be described as absolute devastation.
The ground where the core of the wind field had raged looked as if an invisible, colossal plow had violently churned the earth. Deep, crisscrossing trenches scarred the concrete. The scattered shipping containers and concrete ruins that previously littered the area had been entirely erased, leaving behind a sunken crater of bedrock polished as smooth as a mirror.
Along the outer edges of this blast zone, a fine, purple-black mist slowly drifted away on the breeze—the absolute last trace of the annihilated Ethereals.
Within the epicenter, an eerie silence fell. Aside from the macabre hill of shattered crystals, severed limbs, and carapace fragments, only one entity remained. Behind the mound of corpses, a massive, heavily scarred figure weakly wriggled, struggling to push itself up from the ruined earth. Every other enemy had been wiped from existence.
Hu Tao stood frozen, her plum-blossom pupils blown wide. Her mouth hung slightly agape as she surveyed the apocalyptic clearance of the plaza. For a long moment, the usually talkative Director of the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor couldn't find a single word.
She knew Venti was strong—he was an Archon, after all. But she never expected him to unleash such catastrophic, wide-area devastation while actively suppressed by the world's balancing mechanism. The sheer scale of the destruction completely shattered her conventional understanding of what an Elemental Burst should look like.
Snapping out of her daze, she whipped her head around to stare at the bard.
Venti's complexion was noticeably paler than usual. A thin layer of sweat coated his forehead, which he casually wiped away with the back of his hand, letting out a soft, breathless exhale.
"You..." Hu Tao started, her voice dripping with absolute disbelief. "Are you really being affected by that balancing mechanism? This level of power... isn't this way too outrageous?!"
"Hehe~" Venti flashed his iconic, breezy smile, though the edges of his grin carried a hint of obvious fatigue and sly amusement. He took a moment to steady his breathing before answering.
"Of course there's an effect! Otherwise, why would I have needed to stand there and prepare so painstakingly?" He stretched his arms, rolling his shoulders. "This is mainly... well, let's call it my instinctive talent. I am a Wind Spirit at my core, after all. I have absolute, microscopic control over the finer details of Anemo energy. So, instead of wasting my stamina on flashy momentum or giant tornados, I condensed every single drop of it into the pure concept of 'cutting'."
He paused, his teal eyes shifting sideways. He cast a highly meaningful, teasing glance at Zhongli, who stood completely unbothered with his arms crossed.
"Besides," Venti added with a cheeky wink, "Zhongli could easily do the same. If the old blockhead actually got serious, the resulting scene would be far more 'spectacular' than my little breeze."
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