Strands of utterly pitch-black hair that devoured light quietly seeped out from beneath the edge of the Time Ghost's lowered Red Wedding Veil.
They did not resemble hair, but black living creatures with minds of their own, or filth flowing from a rift in time. Soundless, yet terrifying enough to freeze one's thoughts, they twisted toward Ji Li's lowered head.
Their speed exceeded imagination, yet visually they appeared exceptionally slow, creating an oppressive sensation that made them impossible to predict or evade. They were vastly different from ordinary, low-level strangling hair.
Ji Li's mind was intensely focused, taut as a string stretched to its limit. Inwardly, he calculated the black hair's trajectory, his own posture, and the hand lying over his shoulder and reaching past the back of his head.
The first strand of black hair moved as slowly as a venomous snake, yet carried the sound of piercing air as it touched Ji Li's long hair first.
Ji Li suddenly pressed his body downward. This was the pressure brought by the black hair, but the back of his head felt only coldness and oppression, not any obvious stabbing pain.
It worked!
That sensation proved Ji Li's hypothesis was entirely viable. Because the ritual was underway, the Time Ghost had touched not him first, but the ghost hand representing the ritual itself.
From the corner of his eye, Ji Li could see his long shadow on the ground. Beside it, dense black hair, like slender little snakes, began to coil around it.
The ghost hand draped over him began to tremble and struggle, until its projection was swiftly submerged by that long hair.
At the instant it was about to be swallowed up, yet had not been completely swallowed, the pressure on Ji Li's back suddenly lessened by three parts.