The silence in the grand circular chamber stretched thin as drawn wire.
Shen Haoran watched the subtle shift in Shen Xun'er's posture, his golden eyes narrowing with razor-sharp interest.
The frantic tremble in her fingers had ceased, the shallow, ragged pants that had previously betrayed her racing pulse settled into a low, rhythmic cadence that barely stirred the collar of her red robes.
'Good,' Haoran thought, his lips twitching upward into a cold, expectant curve. 'The rust is finally peeling away.'
Without a word of warning, Shen Xun'er vanished.
BOOM!
The basalt floor beneath her back heel did not merely crack; it disintegrated into an implosive shockwave of pulverized stone.
She did not charge with wild, howling fury as she had done against her reflection, there was no theatrical roar, no wasted breath.
She crossed twenty paces of distance in a fraction of a millisecond, her silhouette blurring into a streak of pure, compressed crimson lightning.
