No sooner had Liu Haotian finished speaking than a dark staff appeared in Yunxi's hand. She did not even need to channel spiritual power into it—the Seven-Star Deadly Staff already crackled with purple lightning, radiating a formidable menace. The Yin Family members, who had been ganging up on them, instinctively retreated.
With one hand, Yunxi slammed the Deadly Staff heavily into the ground. Its power swiftly spread in every direction, destroying everything around it. The once warm and tranquil Taoyuan Village instantly revealed its ruined true face.
Yu Qingcheng sneered at the village chief.
"Do you see it? This is the real Taoyuan Village. This place has long become a dead village. Your stubborn obsession allowed it to fall under the control of an Evil Artifact. No one could discover its true state. Every person who accidentally entered this place was likely sacrificed by you and made into a part of Taoyuan Village!"
Looking at the shattered walls and ruins before him, as well as the uncollected white bones scattered across the ground, the village chief finally seemed to wake up. Clutching his head, he said,
"I tried to stop them, but they went mad. They all made wishes to that Bronze Mirror, and then the villagers began dying one after another. In the end, no one could even leave Taoyuan Village.
"As the village chief, this was my failure. I sacrificed myself, and only then did the village return to how it had once been. But it was all fake! All fake!!"
The village chief's hysterics had exposed Taoyuan Village's true condition. The villagers who had been wailing moments ago all turned into soul bodies and drifted through the skies above the village, as though they had remembered their past lives.
Sword in hand, Liu Haotian sent a streak