The two people in front of her had never planned to let her leave alive from the very beginning. Their every posture and cold, calculating gaze spoke of a hunt that would only end with her blood on the frozen ground of the swamp.
"You… what do you actually want?!" Granny Hua's voice finally carried a faint, uncontrollable tremor that betrayed her rising panic. "If you kill me, the Hehuan Sect won't let this go! Can your Northern Ice Palace really bear our sect's fury?!"
"The Hehuan Sect's fury?" Ling Chuan lightly rubbed the ice crystal in his hand, his gaze never leaving the elder. "Elder Hua, don't you think… if the Hehuan Sect finds out that their Elder Hua and Elder Xue Shouren died killing each other over a star core origin essence fragment, ending in mutual destruction… what do you think they will believe?"
Her face went deathly pale in an instant as the implications sank into her mind. A frame up. What a vicious and calculated scheme it was.
He was not just planning to kill and steal. He was also going to dump all the blame on their internal conflict, weaving a lie that would satisfy the sect's investigators and leave his own hands clean.
That way, even if the Hehuan Sect investigated the site of the battle, their rage would fall on Xue Shouren the Butcher, or they would suspect other rival forces competing for the fragment in the chaos. It would be extremely hard to directly link anything to the Northern Ice Palace, especially given the thick, concealing mist of the swamp.
After all, the Northern Ice Palace itself wasn't exactly in a good situation right now, struggling to hold its own against multiple threats and lacking the surplus strength to start an open war.
"Then… explode!"
Madness and pain flashed through her eyes. She fiercely emptied her storage pouch, throwing out every usable offensive and defensive artifact she had, even treasured single-use talismans, as if they were worthless baubles. She hurled them all at the duo in a desperate, glittering storm of wood, metal, and jade.
She wasn't trying to injure them with this barrage, only to create enough chaos to buy herself a few precious seconds of time to breathe and think.
At the same time, light flashed in her hand as several pills rich with medicinal fragrance were stuffed into her mouth. She swallowed them greedily, the bitter liquid burning her throat as she tried to forcibly suppress her injuries and recover even a small portion of her spiritual power.
"Trying to stall and recover? Keep dreaming." His eyes were icy as he watched her struggle. He slapped his own storage pouch, and several artifacts flashing with different colors flew out to meet the self-detonating ones. He answered explosion with explosion, his own treasures clashing against hers in mid-air.
Boom—! Boom—! Boom—!
A series of violent detonations roared out, the sound trapped within the shimmering blue walls of the array.
The power of artifact self-destruction was no joke, the shockwaves tearing through the air. In an instant, violent energy turbulence swept through the ice-sealed barrier. However, it was firmly locked inside by the Mystic Ice Sealing Annihilation Array, which held steady against the pressure. Not a trace of the battle leaked outside to the rest of the swamp. It temporarily blocked their assault and obscured their vision with thick smoke and dust.
The elder seized the chance to retreat rapidly, her boots splashing through the dark muck as she frantically searched for a weak point in the array's structure.
She refused to die here like a trapped animal in this gods-forsaken place.
"Struggling at death's door." Ling Chuan snorted coldly, his expression showing no mercy. The ice crystal in his hand glowed with a steady, haunting light as he maintained the array's stability. "She won't get out." He glanced at Xie Zhaolin, his jaw set in a hard line.
"End it fast," the girl replied concisely, her voice like a cold blade.
They weren't in a rush, since the array was already complete and the elder was trapped like a turtle in a jar. Her artifacts would run out sooner or later, leaving her defenseless against their combined might. Still, they weren't going to stand by and watch her swallow pills to recover her strength and prolong the fight.
Neither of them held back. They each took out several relatively ordinary artifacts, poured their spiritual power into them, and hurled them fiercely toward the center of the ongoing explosions where the old woman stood.
"Go!"
At the same time, the two of them unleashed sharp attacks once more, passing through the aftermath of the clashing artifacts. They struck at her from every tricky angle, their movements fluid and relentless, forcing her into a state of total chaos.
The An Jin Martial Guard fearlessly blocked most of the frontal attacks, its metallic body clanging as it constantly shrank her room to dodge.
Three people and one puppet waged a brutal war of attrition inside the ice-blue barrier, the air thick with the scent of ozone, blood, and the freezing cold of the sword qi.
"Damn it!" She was so furious she nearly spat blood again, her vision swimming with exhaustion.
She was a mighty Nascent Soul cultivator, yet she was being driven into such misery by two Golden Core juniors using low-handed tactics like this.
What made it worse was that they clearly didn't care about artifact losses at all, treating their treasures as expendable resources. They only wanted to drain her strength as fast as possible.
She, on the other hand, had to conserve every shred of spiritual power just to stay alive, her dantian feeling as though it were being scraped hollow by a dull knife.
"Despicable! Despicable!" She dodged wildly while desperately urging the pills' medicinal power to spread through her veins. Her injuries were simply too severe, and their coordination was terrifyingly smooth. The attacks came nonstop, one after another, giving her no chance to breathe or focus her mind.
The effects of the pills she had just swallowed hadn't even fully unfolded before she was forced to keep dodging and blocking. Her injuries only worsened with the constant, frantic exertion.
Puff—!
At last, after another precious defensive artifact exploded and she took a solid punch from the An Jin Martial Guard that cracked her ribs, she spat out a huge mouthful of blood. Her aura withered abruptly, her body staggered, and she nearly collapsed into the mud. The pill energy inside her was almost completely exhausted.
"Now!" Xie Zhaolin's eyes flashed with cold light. She seized this fleeting opening, instantly breaking through the elder's disordered defense and stabbing straight at her back.
This strike had been building for a long time, the baleful qi condensed into a lethal, invisible point. It was fast, precise, and ruthless.
"This is bad!"
Alarms blared in the elder's mind. Her severe injuries dulled her reactions, and the girl's timing was too perfect to be anything but lethal. She wanted to dodge, but her wounded body was half a beat too slow to respond to the command. She wanted to block, but her spiritual power was drained and her treasures were all gone. She could only watch as the attack rapidly filled her vision, the tip of the weapon gleaming with an unholy light.
"So this is how I die," despair surged through her, cold and heavy as lead.
Yet at that very instant, the air itself seemed to vibrate with a strange energy. A strange hum suddenly rang in their ears, as if an invisible barrier had been forcibly pierced, or space itself had been torn apart by some overwhelming power that defied explanation.
In the next moment, a slender figure appeared out of nowhere right in front of the elder. It was as if she had always been standing there, only now becoming visible as the concealment faded away into the mist.
Clang—!
An extremely crisp clash of metal rang out, the sound sharp and clear against the dull roar of the battle.
Xie Zhaolin's attack slammed hard into a suddenly appearing pink jade plaque that radiated a soft, warm light. Blinding pink light erupted from it, pushing back the shadows of the swamp. Cracks spread all over its surface from the impact, yet it forcibly blocked the killing blow. The massive rebound even made the black-robed girl step back half a step, her boots digging into the soft earth.
"Who is there?!" The two attackers shouted at the same time, both shocked by the sudden and impossible intervention.
Ling Chuan in particular felt his heart churn violently, his control over the freezing array wavering.
The Mystic Ice Sealing Annihilation Array he had set up had been silently pierced without any warning or ripple in the energy. That was a secret technique of the Northern Ice Palace, designed to be impenetrable to those outside. How could someone break in so easily without alerting the one holding the core?
Unless the newcomer's cultivation far surpassed theirs, or she possessed some secret art or supreme treasure that ignored arrays altogether. Yet judging by her aura, she was clearly only at the Foundation Establishment stage, her energy ripples weak compared to the monsters fighting here.
How was that possible? It defied all established logic of the cultivation world.
Granny Hua had already closed her eyes, waiting for the final blow to land. Hearing the noise and the sharp shouts, she snapped them open, her heart racing with a sudden spark of hope.
When she saw the familiar figure standing in front of her, her eyes instantly burst with disbelief, joy, and the overwhelming emotion of surviving a disaster.
"Young Sect Master!"
She cried out, her voice trembling with excitement and weakness as she looked at the back of the girl. It was the Young Sect Master. It really was her. She had arrived at the most critical moment, appearing like a savior from the thickest part of the mist.
And she had actually blocked that black-robed woman's fatal strike with a single, fragile-looking jade plaque. How was this possible? Wasn't she only at the Foundation Establishment stage?
"Young Sect Master, be careful! They're strange! That black robed woman…"
The newcomer was Yu Xiaotang, her expression calm and unruffled despite the surrounding chaos.
At the final moment, she had finally arrived.
Relying on the system's highest level concealment aura and a special restriction breaking method, she had forcibly slipped through a weak point of the Mystic Ice Sealing Annihilation Array and arrived just in time, saving Granny Hua.