The makeshift battleground was still horrifyingly fresh with the immediate aftermath of the slaughter. Broken boulders laid shattered everywhere, massive tree barks were scattered like mere toothpicks, and the scent of fresh blood was too heavy to ignore.
Aunt Hua smiled a terrifying smile, immensely pleased to know she didn’t even have to go out looking for her next target. The target had delivered herself.
Every survival driven part of Mei’s brain screamed at her to turn and run as fast as her legs could carry her. But her heart, heavy with grief and desperate hope, completely overriding her nervous system, kept her legs firmly anchored to the spot.
Even if there was only an impossibly tiny chance at using her abilities to heal either Liangyu or Jian, she utterly refused to let go of that opportunity.
Trembling, she tightly clenched her small fists, let out a war cry, and ran right towards the floating executioner.
"Well, well. This one’s actually got some real courage," Aunt Hua remarked, muttering the observation to herself with mild amusement.
Mei forcefully pushed her arms forward, channeling every ounce of her anger and fear. Instantly, a blindingly white, ethereal light erupted from her palms, shooting directly toward the older woman.
Aunt Hua, moving with that same speed, simply vanished from where she was hovering. However, she miscalculated by a fraction of an inch. The edge of Mei’s blinding light managed to briefly grease the side of her palm before she fully disappeared.
Aunt Hua immediately materialized a bit off to the side, letting out a sharp hiss of genuine pain. She looked down at her palm. The flesh there had been instantly drained of its vitality. It had aged a thousand years in a single second, turning wrinkly and frighteningly old.
"Now that," Aunt Hua said, her tone dropping its playful edge, genuinely impressed by the sheer destructive potential of the magic, "is quite the powerful attack you have there, little girl."
Fueled by that microscopic victory, Mei started to aggressively attack again and again, throwing wave after wave of white light. But the element of surprise was gone. Aunt Hua simply kept vanishing into thin air, dodging the beams as they scorched the earth behind her.
Aunt Hua patiently waited, dodging and weaving, until Mei’s frantic attacks naturally began to slow down. As Mei began visibly losing strength in her projections, her breathing growing heavy, Aunt Hua took this golden opportunity to strike back.
She closed the distance and delivered multiple punches and brutal kicks to Mei’s fragile frame. The onslaught didn’t stop until Mei finally collapsed to the dirt ground, groaning weakly in terrible pain.
Aunt Hua paused, hovering above her, seemingly opting to let Mei catch her breath just to prolong the suffering.
Even through the blinding haze of her physical agony, Mei’s peripheral vision caught something. She noticed Liangyu’s blood soaked finger weakly twitching in the dirt a few yards away.
"I can still do this," she muttered to herself, spitting out blood. She closed her eyes, digging deep into the very core of her soul, aggressively focusing her internal qi, attempting to muster enough raw energy to deliver one final attack.
When she opened her eyes, they had completely lost their pupils, glowing terrifyingly bright white. She was preparing to put every single ounce of her life force into this final strike.
Seeing the massive buildup of energy, Aunt Hua decided to stop playing fair. She instantly split herself into a dozen multiple copies. They hovered rapidly all around Mei in a dizzying circle, overlapping and shifting to disorient and confuse her.
Mei didn’t care which one was real anymore. She raised both her glowing palms and released the massive shockwave of light anyway.
With a flick of her wrist, the real Aunt Hua manifested a thick and highly polished layer of magical glass completely encasing Mei in a dome. The aging light hit the glass and instantly refracted. The attack bounced directly off the surface and hit Mei in her own chest.
The backlash was immediate. Mei’s youth was stripped away from her. Her skin sagged, her hair turned white, and her remaining strength completely evaporated as she rapidly aged into a frail old woman. She fell to the ground, motionless.
With that, Aunt Hua was done with Mei.
As for me, I was still wandering the woods like a lost fool. I kept calling out for my friends, shouting their names until my throat felt sore, but I heard nothing in return. Nothing, that is, until a sudden shift in the wind carried a terribly distinct scent directly to my nose.
The faint smell of blood.
I sprinted, aggressively following the horrific scent, pushing through the thick underbush. That’s when the tree line finally cleared, and the nightmare truly began.
I saw Qinyue’s body. She was lying entirely motionless on the forest floor, her clothes completely soaked in a dark puddle of her own blood.
The visual felt so incredibly unreal that my brain simply refused to process it.
"Qinyue?" I whispered, foolishly acting as if she was just taking a nap and would happily answer me. My eyes were already starting to sting and water. I rushed towards her, dropping to my knees in the dirt, consumed by the hope of checking to see if she was somehow still alive.
My hands were shaking so much I was genuinely too scared to even touch her, terrified that if she was hanging by a thread, moving her would accidentally hurt her further.
So, with a trembling hand, I simply extended my index finger and placed it gently under her nose to check if she was still breathing.
She wasn’t.
Before I could react, a scream echoed from somewhere much deeper into the woods.
I abandoned Qinyue’s side and immediately decided to run towards the source of the sound. As my feet pounded against the dirt, I kept praying and begging the universe that whomever’s scream it was, that it wouldn’t be their last.
I stumbled into a wide clearing. And there they were.
The first thing my eyes locked onto was a single hand. It was Jian’s hand, clenching the mud in a death grip. The entire rest of his body was horrifically crushed flat underneath a massive boulder.
I forced myself to look slightly to the left.
Then, I saw Mei. But it wasn’t the Mei I knew. It was a frail, incredibly old corpse wearing her clothes, her wrinkled face frozen with her mouth hanging half open, staring blankly up at the sky.
Even with hot tears actively rolling down my dirty face, I forced my gaze further across the blood-soaked clearing and finally noticed Liangyu. He was pinned to the earth by a tree root.
That was it. That was the last straw that completely broke me.