Just as Xie Fanghua's hair stood on end and her soul was about to leave her body, she felt the scene before her suddenly wrench apart, as though someone had used brute force to tear the entire world from her sight and instantly piece it back together.
A hard, icy sensation came from beneath her feet, along with the slight unevenness of fine cracks. She blinked before realizing that she was already standing at the edge of the city wall's battlements.
Below the city wall, the palace-dressed young girl, whose hand had been just an inch away from touching the oil lamp, had frozen with her five fingers suspended in midair. Her pause was incredibly subtle; if not for the pale blue cold mist around her fingertips suddenly stagnating for an instant, it would have been nearly impossible to notice.
The young girl slowly withdrew her hand and turned around, her gaze like two ice-tempered awls scraping inch by inch across the top of the city wall.
Spatial Shift techniques were nothing unusual to her, but one so utterly without warning, cast upon another person, without stirring even the slightest ripple of law... that was somewhat terrifying. Her divine sense had long spread out like mercury spilling across the ground, yet before that person appeared, she had not detected the slightest anomaly.
The deep-blue mysterious ice sealing Xie Fanghua and the oil lamp suddenly began to emit a layer of warm golden radiance from within.
The golden light was not dazzling, yet it carried an unquestionable, strange rhythm that seemed capable of smoothing out the creases of time.
Within that rhythm, the ice silently melted away. It did not shatter, nor did it evaporate; rather, as if time had flowed backward, it returned to the state before it had ever