How could that be?
Li Xun stared at the beauty lying on the ground, unable to react for a moment.
Shui Die Lan’s eyes were shut tight, her face deathly pale, her breathing faint. She showed every sign of having lost consciousness.
Under normal circumstances, a woman collapsing from shock after what just happened would make sense. But this woman? She was the most formidable assassin the Tongxuan Realm had seen in centuries, a brazen traitor, and one of the rare few who had reached the pinnacle of the True Person stage .
And she fainted from fright?
Li Xun could only feel both exasperated and amused. He wasn’t the kind of man who lived for lust. Shui Die Lan’s beauty was undeniable, but not enough to drive him mad with desire.
The ugly way he had acted toward her was meant purely to humiliate her, not because he was burning with passion. Yet this was the result. The fire in his chest sputtered and died before it could even take hold.
He shrugged, gave Shui Die Lan’s cheek a light pat, and sank into thought.
At least his five days of careful preparation had finally paid off. This strange and dangerous woman had been captured in one stroke. His plan had worked, every layer of restriction painstakingly laid down under the guise of intimacy.
Now that Shui Die Lan was out of the way, a heavy shackle had been lifted. The methods he had once kept hidden could now be put to use without restraint.
He understood it well enough: the lure of Mist-Hidden Pavilion was simply too great. Forget the so-called “treasure arts and pill manuals” for the moment. Just the chance to carve out a sanctuary within that Forbidden Land meant not only faster progress in cultivation, but also an unbreakable refuge no one else could breach.
With Zhong Yin gone, who in the world could move through one of the Six Forbidden Lands as freely as he had?
Which meant Mist-Hidden Pavilion was his for the taking.
His plan was about to be set into motion. Having Nether One impersonate Xiao Zhongzi might have been a bit of a waste, but no one would ever see through the disguise. At least not from the way the techniques looked. With Nether Two as his guard, and drawing on experience from last time, breaking the restrictive formations would be as easy as turning his hand.
But when his thoughts returned to Shui Die Lan, Li Xun felt puzzled all over again.
What was with this woman? Her cultivation seemed bottomless. Without laying trap after trap, he might never have been able to hold her.
Even if her Reverse Shadow Escape technique was unmatched in the world, it still shouldn’t be this overpowering. She was clearly concealing her true strength. But looking at her, she didn’t seem the type willing to hide away in silence…
The more he thought about it, the more wrong it felt. He had lived in the Tongxuan Realm for sixty or seventy years. He might not know every master under heaven, but he had at least a general map in his head. Who belonged where, and what they were capable of.
But in the past few days, this female cultivator had kept shattering the limits Li Xun thought he knew. Judging from how she had been performing just now, he felt she could even hold her own against both of his puppets at once. In other words, she might be on the level of the “Three Wanderers” or the Demon Phoenix herself.
Wait... Demon Phoenix!
A sudden thought jolted him, and the hand he had been running across Shui Die Lan’s face froze in place.
His attention returned to her. His lust had faded, but seeing those long, flawless legs wrapped in gauzy silk trousers, gleaming under the pearls’ soft light, he still found himself swallowing hard.
At the same time, though, his gaze fell on the torn scraps of her skirt lying nearby. The lifelike butterfly patterns embroidered there sparked another train of thought.
Demon Phoenix… Shui Die Lan… butterflies…
The truth was right there, as thin as a paper screen between him and it. Just as he was about to pierce through, a violent warning slammed into him. One part from his own instincts, another from both puppets.
The sudden shift left Li Xun momentarily stunned. An alien sensation forced him to look down. And in the very next instant, blood and flesh exploded before his eyes.
No one could possibly stay calm while watching their intact arm, in a single heartbeat, turn into a mangled heap of meat.
The moment sight and searing pain struck his mind together, Li Xun let out a scream, lurched upright, then stumbled back and crashed heavily to the ground.
Even as the shock hit, Nether One and Nether Two attacked at once. The small cavern was suddenly like the heart of a massive whirlpool. Violent primordial qi squeezing toward the center, yet not a shred of it spilled out.
And at that center stood Shui Die Lan, suddenly awake.
But the strike that carried the combined power of two Grandmasters landed on nothing at all. It only tore loose the glowing pearls embedded in the rock wall, smashing them into powder.
The cave fell instantly into choking darkness.
Yet the darkness lasted no more than a blink. In the next instant, before Li Xun’s eyes appeared a pair of delicate, ethereal wings, lightly stirring.
A soft blue glow spread out, peeling away the blackness as though thinning it to nothing. Waves of light rippled outward along the mottled patterns on the wings, flowing and returning, dazzling beyond measure.
At the same time, a fragrance drifted into Li Xun’s nose and mouth, sweet and piercing, as if it reached straight to his heart. For a moment, it almost made him forget he was in a foul, chaotic cavern instead of standing in the middle of a field bursting with flowers.
Half lying, half sitting, Li Xun stared dumbstruck at the vision unfolding before him until a low, ringing voice pierced his ears: “Butterfly Dream Technique…”
Before Nether Two’s cry had even faded, a sudden burst of light blinded Li Xun. The blue radiance surged in an instant to an impossible intensity. For a heartbeat, he thought ten million suns had exploded before his eyes, searing his fragile pupils with their glare.
He screamed and rolled backward.
In the split second his mind reeled in chaos, something icy brushed past his neck. If not for Nether Two intercepting at the last moment and diverting the strike with a skillful maneuver, Li Xun’s head would already be rolling on the ground.
Barely regaining his wits, he didn’t even have time to check the damage to his eyes. He just let out a hoarse roar: “Kill her!”
What answered him was another storm.
Unlike the power his puppets had summoned before, this gale was pure wind made manifest, driving its essence to the extreme. It slipped through every gap, sparing no corner.
Blind now, Li Xun could only feel his whole body go numb as countless blows rained down on him. His head spun, and he was hurled away again.
As he tumbled across the ground, instinct made him press a hand against the floor. But the instant his fingers touched the earth, he froze.
This hand. This hand…
A muffled groan from one of the puppets reached his ears, chilling him to the core. Could it be that even with both of them attacking together, they still couldn’t hold the situation under control?
Still reeling from the impact, Li Xun tumbled twice more across the ground. Pain wracked his body, and a bitter taste filled his mouth.
He couldn’t understand it. If it were simply a matter of making one careless move and letting someone overturn him, that would be one thing. But Shui Die Lan had clearly suffered crippling injuries. More than ten meridians destroyed, both arms broken. How could she possibly have recovered?
And what about his own arm? His eyes? What was happening to him?
The cave roared with the clash of forces. Li Xun couldn’t see, but he sensed that under such conditions, his two puppets seemed unable to fully exert their strength, wary of hitting him by mistake.
Gritting his teeth, he forced himself upright, bracing against the rock wall, trying to retreat out of the cave. But as soon as he shifted his weight to his feet, they twisted strangely beneath him, and he crashed back to the ground.
What was this now?
Struggling to rise again, he suddenly realized his hands and feet no longer felt like his own. The most ordinary movement, just pressing himself up from the floor, was beyond him. All he felt was a twitch of his limbs. The power he had built up within his body, where had it gone?
In that moment, Li Xun felt as though he had fallen into a nightmare he could never wake from. His mind was perfectly clear, yet he couldn’t control his own body. It was absurd. It was bewildering.
Then he remembered Nether Two’s shout!
Butterfly Dream?
Shui Die Lan? Butterfly? Demon Phoenix?
His thoughts retraced themselves step by step: from those delicate wings fluttering in the blue light, to the lifelike butterfly embroidery on her torn skirt, to what Flayer of Yin had mentioned days ago; that only someone skilled in art of gu could command the “Ten Thousand Living Fires.”
Piece by piece, everything aligned under Shui Die Lan’s unfathomable strength, pointing toward an answer so outrageous it seemed impossible!
“Damn it, you’re the Hundred—”
Before he could finish, both puppets let out muffled groans. A gust swept across his body, and in the blur of shifting light, a smooth, supple arm snaked around his neck, hauling him upright in a choking grip.
At the same time, several key meridians in his body went numb. This time, his strength was stripped away completely.
The two puppets whirled forward like a storm, not to save him, but to block the cave’s entrance together.