Wang Zongquan lay motionless on the marble floor, utterly still, as if time itself had frozen in the grand hall — an eerie, suffocating silence blanketing the room.
"No way!"
"This can't be real! Wang Zongquan actually lost — just like that?"
"What the hell is this Shi Feng — human or ghost?"
……
Everyone stared at Wang Zongquan's crumpled, unconscious form on the floor, unable to believe what they were seeing. This was a Dark Force Grandmaster — someone who stood at the absolute pinnacle of Fenglin City. And he had been effortlessly defeated by a man who looked completely ordinary, someone who didn't even radiate the faintest trace of presence or authority.
It could barely even be called a fight. It was a one-sided humiliation.
"Wang Zongquan had so many top fighters wary of him before — he should've been strong, right? How did he lose so easily?"
"Don't tell me Wang Zongquan was hired by the Tiandou Training Center to throw the match!"
"That's probably it. A Dark Force Grandmaster is incredibly powerful. Shi Feng is so young — how strong could he possibly be? And the fact that someone like Wang Zongquan suddenly showed up out of nowhere is suspicious to begin with. The Tiandou Training Center must have brought him in to stage a fake fight, just to boost their reputation."
The combat enthusiasts in the hall, watching how easily Wang Zongquan had been taken down, suddenly got the feeling that the whole thing was staged — that they were witnessing nothing more than a rigged match.
After all, Wang Zongquan had traded blows with Huo Wu earlier and put up a genuine fight — they could tell there was real skill involved in that exchange.
But the battle between Shi Feng and Wang Zongquan? From start to finish, there wasn't a single moment where they could see anything impressive. It looked as though Wang Zongquan had deliberately cooperated with Shi Feng — the instant Shi Feng grabbed his wrist, he practically leapt into the air on his own, then got slammed to the ground. It couldn't have looked more fake if it tried.
Now it wasn't just the combat enthusiasts in the hall who felt the fight was suspicious. Even the students from the various training centers and martial arts academies watching from the sidelines thought it looked staged. A peak Dark Force expert's mastery of power was on an entirely different level from ordinary people — grabbing someone's wrist and flinging them aside like that was simply impossible.
"A rigged match?" Xiao Yu was also dumbfounded.
But instinctively, he knew that couldn't be the case, because Shi Feng had never mentioned anything to him about it. Besides, the Tiandou Training Center had been under constant surveillance by the Star Navigation Conglomerate — only they would have the means to bring in someone of Wang Zongquan's caliber. More importantly, a peak Dark Force Grandmaster would never risk destroying his own reputation just to help the Tiandou Training Center gain fame.
Just as Xiao Yu was wondering why Wang Zongquan would do such a thing, Chen Tianhe, standing right beside him, wore an expression of undisguised terror on his face.
"Trans… formed Force… He's… a Transformed Force Grandmaster!" Chen Tianhe stared fixedly at Shi Feng in the center of the hall, muttering under his breath as though he had seen a ghost.
"Transformed Force… Grandmaster?" Xiao Yu was stunned, unable to help seeking confirmation from Chen Tianhe. "Master Chen, you're saying Shi Feng is a Transformed Force Grandmaster?"
In the world of combat, mastering Dark Force already made one an absolute powerhouse — the number of fighters who could achieve it was fewer than one in a thousand. Their understanding and application of the body and power was beyond anything ordinary people could comprehend. No matter where they went, they had the qualifications to open their own schools and take on disciples, which was why everyone called them Grandmasters.
But above Dark Force lay Transformed Force. For ordinary people, merely encountering a Dark Force expert was already remarkable. Meeting a Transformed Force practitioner was something most people would never experience in their entire lifetime. These individuals were titans of the combat world — they could compete for the title of world's strongest. Their fame and status were incomparable to the likes of Chen Tianhe or Wang Zongquan.
If one were to describe the gap between the two levels, it would be like comparing a firefly to the full moon.