Recoil Blast

Recoil Blast is a destructive qi technique used by Yuan Guang, and a measure of how his combat skill and physical strength develop. Its power is not simply the force of an explosion: Yuan learns to shape where that force goes and to survive the backlash. Against a trashemoth, that control lets him break through its skull and destroy its core; later, on the History Road, he can fire at a ghost boat with far less need for support behind him.

Technique and Control

Recoil Blast is presented as a forceful attack with a dangerous counterforce. Yuan’s solution is to use a Barrier to direct and disperse the blowback while concentrating the attack on a single point. The technique’s effect therefore depends not only on its raw power, but on how carefully he manages the force it releases. His improved Barrier design makes it possible to focus damage without letting the recoil harm him.

The sequence before the trashemoth attack shows that this control is part of a wider combat method. Yuan uses repeated Recoil Kicks to rise above the creature, then weaves a Barrier around his right arm and uses his left to form another behind him. Even amid smoke and chaos, his aim remains steady. The preparation makes the attack look deliberate rather than indiscriminate: he has found the creature’s vulnerable point and is arranging his technique to strike it.

The Trashemoth’s Core

The trashemoth’s hide has already been softened by Yuan’s flames when he launches the attack. He has analyzed its qi and located its core deep inside its immense skull, concluding that a powerful enough blow could reach it. His first Recoil Blast tears away half the skull. Burnt plastic and metal fall into the desert, exposing a black core of coalesced sludge, orange sinews, and fossilized plastic. The revelation makes the target visible, but its foul qi is nauseating even to look at.

Yuan does not pause after exposing the core. A second Recoil Blast shatters it and exits through the other side of the skull, leaving a gaping hole. The trashemoth’s qi pours from the fatal wound like poison as its many heads die. Its fall crushes the Plastic Men herders and comes within a few meters of the spirit-train. The outcome demonstrates the technique’s precision as well as its destructive force: Yuan has not merely damaged a huge creature, but struck the core that sustains it.

The ease of the victory surprises him. He recognizes that size alone is a poor measure of a spirit-beast’s power and that a trashemoth would once have seemed an opponent for someone like Gayak. The comparison also gives the attack a history: Recoil Blast is the technique that slew Gayak, and Yuan now uses it to kill another formidable foe. His conclusion that he can fly, breathe fire, and kill a large spirit-beast alone registers the distance he has traveled in a month.

Growth and Later Use

Yuan’s later use of Recoil Blast on the History Road shows a change in what the technique demands of him. When the Metallists’ plane and the Deathsong Sect’s ghost boat pass above the spirit-train, cannons emerge from the boat and bombs begin falling toward the road. Yuan orders his crew to shoot both machines, prepares a Recoil Blast, and chooses the phantom ship as his immediate target because he doubts ordinary weapons can hit it.

Orient raises a Barrier behind Yuan to support him, but Yuan senses that he no longer truly needs it. Compared with his performance at the Third Coil, his body can now endure most of the blast’s backlash unaided. His Gun-aligned body also processes qi more easily, strengthening the attack and helping him fuel adaptive techniques. The change is not that recoil has ceased to matter; rather, Yuan has become more capable of bearing it himself.

Effects and Limits

The blast crosses the sky quickly and strikes the ghost boat before it can open fire. Its impact destroys a fifth of the bones in the vessel’s bulk and shatters cannons into steel shrapnel. Hungry ghosts shriek in rage, but the damage does not stop the assault: the boat continues climbing, fires spectral cannonballs, and the Metallists’ plane drops explosives. Bucket’s group shoots down some of the bombs, but not all.

These encounters distinguish a decisive single-target kill from damage that can only weaken a larger attack. Against the trashemoth, Yuan’s successive blasts reach and break the core, bringing the creature down. Against the airborne threat, his strike cripples part of the ghost boat but cannot prevent its remaining weapons or the plane’s bombs from endangering the History Road. Recoil Blast is consequently a powerful, increasingly controlled technique—not a guarantee that one successful hit will settle every battle.