The Kaiyang Envoy... was dead?
The sight plunged everyone into a dreadful silence.
"This is bad..." Chi suddenly bit her lip and lowered her voice. "This thing can absorb other people's qi."
Xia Fan noticed it too. When the Evil Spirit rose again, it was slightly taller than before, as though it had grown from a ten-year-old to someone seventeen or eighteen. It now stood taller than Princess Guangping and was roughly as tall as Luo Qingqing.
"Or rather, it had been absorbing the dead's qi ever since it was in statue form." Li's expression turned even graver. She had practically witnessed it absorb the qi of hundreds aboard the Tree Boat, shedding its old form step by step until it became what it was now. "But the Kaiyang Envoy's qi was vast enough to cause a change visible to the naked eye..."
Chi sucked in a sharp breath. "Doesn't that mean... every one of us who dies will become its... food?"
"Should we retreat first?" Yu Linglong was beginning to lose heart as well. "Even the Seven-Star Envoy is dead. At the very least, Moonshadow Temple won't fall into the Bureau of Military Affairs' hands. We've achieved our original objective, haven't we?"
"Let it devour everything on Yama Island?" Li clenched her fists. "Then what we might face will be a monster we have no way of fighting at all!"
"Then do you have a better idea?" Yu Linglong retorted. "It's already a monster now!"
Xia Fan watched the Evil Spirit from midair, and it looked back up at him—it did not attack immediately, and there was not a trace of human emotion in its eyes, yet Xia Fan seemed to read its thoughts.
It did not care whether these people kept fighting or fled.
It had descended for