"Oops… slippery stairs," Athlaea muttered, flicking a speck of blood off her toes. "They really should clean better."
"…"
The entire chamber fell into suffocating silence.
Even the ghostly wind circling the staircase seemed to stop.
Then, her eyes gently shifted.
Two figures had just entered, the moment Athlaea recognized Wang Xiao, her back straightened instantly. The lazy arrogance vanished.
She forced a smile, the kind a child makes after breaking an ancestral vase.
"Ah…" she said carefully, voice far softer than before. "That one slipped on his own."
She was genuinely terrified of this man.
Wang Xiao was unpredictable.
Athlaea had faced Immortals, Kings, and even beings rumored to have brushed the fate, but this man? He didn't operate within logic.
If he decided to punish her on a whim, she wouldn't even know when to start crying.
Fortunately for her, he wasn't looking at the stairs.
He wasn't even looking at the corpse-mist.
His gaze was elsewhere.
