ACSP: Chapter 232: Playing with Shadow Clones in front of me?
The jaws of the entire spectating crowd dropped, the sheer hypocrisy of Zhao Dingtian's statement exceeding everyone's expectations.
No one had truly anticipated that the dignified Great Elder of Magic City's undisputed number-one family would stoop to such shamelessly bankrupt logic just to deal with a teenage junior. It would have been one thing if he simply relied on overwhelming numbers to bully the few out of pure tactical desperation. But to actually spin that cowardice into a grand claim that he was honoring and acknowledging the opponent's strength? It was pathologically despicable.
However, facing this pathetic display of mental gymnastics, Jiang Chen didn't look angry. Instead, a deeply meaningful, razor-sharp smile carved across the corners of his mouth.
"To be able to frame a massive, desperate gang-up as a badge of honor so grandiosely... you are truly worthy of representing the peak of the Magic City's elite aristocracy," Jiang Chen murmured, his voice cutting through the localized storm with terrifying tranquility.
"Since you enjoy the physics of numerical suppression so much, old man, it's only fair that I let you personally taste what it feels like to be systematically outnumbered, outgunned, and utterly deleted..."
He looked at Zhao Dingtian with dead, unblinking eyes. At the exact same frame, he brought his hands to the center of his chest, unhurriedly locking his fingers into a precise, ancient hand seal.
—Whoosh!!!
The next microsecond, a catastrophic, ungodly reservoir of [Ice Release] Chakra detonated outward from his core. It surged into the arena like a whistling, absolute-zero frost blizzard, instantly crystallizing the moisture in the air and rapidly condensing into twenty distinct, hyper-detailed humanoid figures around his coordinates.
This was the advanced Kekkei Genkai (Bloodline Limit) anomaly he had thoroughly mastered—the [Ice Release Clone Technique]!
Mechanically speaking, this specialized technique belonged to the apex tier of solid clones, sharing the physical tangibility and performance metrics of a standard Shadow Clone. However, the game-breaking divergence lay in its elemental lineage. Because it was an advanced Bloodline Limit variant—sitting on the exact same tier as the legendary Wood Clone Technique—these frozen manifestations did not force a hard split on the caster's active Chakra pools.
They generated their own independent operational footprints, possessing the exact baseline strength and stat thresholds as Jiang Chen's primary body. Crucially, they carried their own independent ocular reserves, meaning they could freely manifest premier Dojutsu skills like the [Susanoo] without draining a single frame of the original body's energy or sight.
When Jiang Chen had deployed his regular Shadow Clones earlier, they had to actively share his central reservoir of Chakra and Ocular Power. But these twenty frozen phantoms were entirely self-sustaining batteries of lethal intent. The only technical limitation was that their quantity couldn't be spammed infinitely like standard smoke clones; given Jiang Chen's current level 52 parameters, his maximum output was hard-capped at twenty units.
But twenty was more than enough to rewrite the geography of the Magic City.
The exact millisecond the ice smoke cleared, a collective, agonizing gasp was ripped from the throats of every single class-holder present, their lungs freezing over in pure, unadulterated terror.
For no other reason than this: the moment those twenty Ice Clones initialized on the grid, every single one of them snapped their blood-red eyes open. And in perfect, terrifying synchronization, they all threw their arms wide—summoning twenty identical, towering, city-level Fourth-Form Susanoo giants into the sky.
"Holy crap... this Jiang Chen is a walking cheat code! How many hidden sub-classes does he have mapped to his soul?! To think he even commands the Ice Release Bloodline Limit?!"
"What the actual fuck... are my optic sensors glitching?! Are those... are those all fully stabilized, armored Fourth-Form Susanoos?!"
"Just a moment ago, he deployed standard Shadow Clones to manifest a handful of Fourth-Form avatars, which was already an absurd mechanical feat. I never imagined his kit held the capacity to split out twenty separate Ice Release Clones that can all freely scale into the armored Fourth Form! Is this kid even letting the rest of the server live?!"
"The database logs note that this specific tier of elemental clone carries an almost flawless realism rating. Even optimized tracking tools like the Sharingan or Byakugan would find it practically impossible to isolate the primary user from the phantoms. I wonder if the frame data actually backs that up?"
"Isn't that a completely rhetorical question at this point? We are talking about a top-tier Bloodline Limit attribute, not some basic academy trick..."
Although Jiang Chen had previously commanded his standard Shadow Clones to activate the advanced Fourth Stage to anchor Zhao Dingtian in place, he had only split his reserves into a few units to carefully preserve his baseline stamina. The localized shock value of that opening play was absolutely nothing compared to the apocalyptic sight of twenty identical purple behemoths simultaneously dropping their frames onto the grid right now.
BOOM!!!BOOM!!!BOOM!!!
The earth groaned and splintered under a series of rhythmic, cataclysmic footsteps.
Moving in absolute tactical harmony, the twenty Ice Release Clones drove their respective titans forward, systematically sealing off every single escape vector until Zhao Dingtian was completely hemmed into a tight, inescapable perimeter.
"Damn it all... how does this brat even possess the internal mana pools to sustain physical clones of this caliber?!"
Zhao Dingtian instinctively took two heavy steps back within his own cockpit, his ancient eyes completely filled with an icy, creeping terror.
His veteran perception could easily read the ambient pressure—the twenty elemental phantoms Jiang Chen had initialized were structurally far more dense than the fragile smoke clones from the previous trade. If those opening constructs had only inherited roughly 10% of the caster's baseline combat metrics just to act as temporary aggro sponges... then the functional combat output inherited by these twenty frozen anomalies was verified to be well over 30%. Perhaps even higher!
And most importantly, the mechanical vulnerabilities were entirely different.
Standard Shadow Clones carried atrocious durability scaling; the moment they sustained a high-damage critical hit, their internal matrix would destabilize and force an instant collapse. But a premium, bloodline-derived elemental vessel operated under entirely different physics. Their damage-soaking parameters were aggressively optimized. They could take a full, high-tier rotation directly to the chest without shattering, functioning as independent, high-health raid bosses in their own right.
"Don't blame me for using overwhelming numbers to bully the few, old man. After all, you represent the absolute apex of Magic City's dominant aristocracy, possessing decades of deep faction legacies and a character sheet locked at a towering Level 98. A junior like me simply has to play it safe..."
Jiang Chen stood at the heart of his primary Susanoo core with his arms loosely crossed over his chest. He looked down at the pale, sweating Great Elder, his eyes overflowing with unadulterated, toxic mockery.
Hearing his own hypocritical logic hurled back at him word-for-word, Zhao Dingtian felt his chest tighten so violently he nearly spat out a mouthful of old blood right then and there.
To ensure this boy's permanent deletion from the grid today, he had already dragged his own prestigious reputation through the absolute dirt of the Magic City. He had mentally budgeted for every trick, every sacrifice—yet he had never calculated that the target could casually manifest an entire personal army of high-tier avatars to flip the numbers game on its head.
"Do you truly believe a pack of frozen physical duplicates gives you the leverage to dictate my termination?!" the elder roared, his voice cracking with desperate rage. "If you think you're the only contractor on this platform who can play with numbers, you are sorely mistaken! Disruptive duplicates are not a mechanic exclusive to your kit!"
Watching the twenty towering purple walls close in step-by-step, compressing his available coordinate space, Zhao Dingtian gritted his teeth until they bled. Forcing his remaining chakra reserves to their absolute limit, he violently split out five personal Shadow Clones.
The five newly materialized duplicates immediately went through their hand seals, forcing out their own dark spiritual shrouds.
However, because his internal energy pools were heavily depleted from the ongoing deadlock, his clones were mathematically incapable of matching Jiang Chen's scaling. Their avatars were rigidly stuck in the Third Form. In terms of raw environmental momentum and sheer structural density, they were noticeably a full notch weaker than the glowing purple wall of ice closing in on them.
Yet, even while standing down in the frame data, Zhao Dingtian's face contorted back into the expression of a gambler holding the winning ticket.
He knew the numbers didn't favor his squad in a direct clash. But the fundamental objective behind splitting out his five duplicates wasn't to achieve a decisive victory over Jiang Chen—it was pure, systematic stall tactics. As long as he could pin down Jiang Chen's primary coordinates and prevent him from rotating over to support Ronan and Li Dala, the macro-strategy remained completely viable.
The moment his 2,000-man vassal legion successfully captured or liquidated Jiang Chen's inner circle, the leverage would shift back to him entirely. He could still parade their broken characters right in front of the boy, forcing him to accept a total mechanical submission or watch his teammates get deleted from the server!
"Five standard Shadow Clones?"
Jiang Chen looked down at the five dark, Third-Stage avatars with unadulterated disdain, then slowly shook his head. His passive observation parsed Zhao Dingtian's tactical blueprint at a single glance.
"Is this pathetic line of code seriously your ultimate reliance?"
"Hmph! Mock my parameters all you want, brat! Though my five clones lack the structural density of your ice anomalies, they possess more than enough baseline health to stall your rotations!" Zhao Dingtian's mouth curled into a dark smile, his voice booming across the plaza as he deliberately tried to inflict psychological pressure and disrupt the boy's mechanical focus. "Look at the mini-map! Your companions are rapidly approaching their absolute threshold! Let's see how much longer that arrogant face lasts once their health bars hit zero!"
Unexpectedly, after hearing the elder's triumphant reminder, the smile on Jiang Chen's face didn't falter. Instead, it grew remarkably calm, expanding into a cold, serene grin.
"You know... if you hadn't brought it up so grandiosely, I almost forgot to execute this part of my kit..."
Jiang Chen subtly adjusted his stance, his arms remaining casually crossed over his chest. "The truth is... I also happen to know a little bit about the standard Shadow Clone Technique."
Before the final syllable could even echo through the ruins, a bizarre, overlapping distortion rippled across the local space.
—Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!
Without a single hand sign, without a microsecond of wind-up animation, identical humanoid figures began manifesting out of thin air, spawning directly from the vacuum.
Using Jiang Chen's central coordinates as the origin point, the purple-shrouded duplicates materialized in geometric progression, spreading rapidly in all directions at an astonishing, frame-breaking velocity that completely overwhelmed the spectators' visual processing.
Ten! One hundred! One thousand! Two thousand! Four thousand! Five thousand!
In the span of a single localized heartbeat, the total registry of active Shadow Clones deploying onto the battlefield violently surged past the 5,000-unit threshold.
This massive, endless sea of purple-eyed phantoms didn't just deploy defensively to form an absolute, multi-layered shield around the exhausted Ronan and Li Dala. They aggressively fanned outward, systematically wrapping around the flanks of the thousands of operatives belonging to the Meng, Wang, Mo, Ye, and Southern Pavilion forces.
The sky-high walls of the Magic City plaza were completely drowned in a tidal wave of identical, cold smiles.
At this exact microsecond, the entire instance server seemed to grind to a halt. The positions of prey and hunter were completely, flawlessly reversed.
----
📚 Want to read the last chapter (380+) RIGHT NOW?
✨ Patreon members get instant access!
👉 Join on -
🌟 pat reon .com/Rogue_Reader