Before Han Yuchen could look further into where the pool of black water in the holographic projection had ultimately gone, the gentle night wind outside Star Gazing Pavilion suddenly stilled without warning.
It was a suffocating dead silence.
It was as if the air above all of Heaven Dou City had been forcibly drained dry in that instant by some invisible behemoth.
Immediately after, a gale ten times more intense than before, carrying an overwhelming stench of rot and an icy aura that made one want to vomit, rolled in like a tsunami from the night sky directly ahead.
Bang, bang, bang—!
The sturdy window latticework around Star Gazing Pavilion, built from Century Ironwood, was instantly torn apart by the gale into a storm of flying splinters.
Han Yuchen sat upright in his red sandalwood armchair and did not even lift his eyelids.
The violent wind was silently dissolved by an invisible field of starlight three feet from his body; not even a single ripple stirred on the surface of the tea in his cup.
The second Shadow Emissary had arrived.
Its enormous body was like a moving mountain of black flesh, smashing straight down onto the bluestone plaza in front of Star Gazing Pavilion.
The ground of the entire plaza shook violently, and web-like cracks spread out over a hundred meters in an instant.
This Emissary was even more deformed than the one on Vermilion Bird Street. Its body was not only covered in heavy black bone armor; dark-purple rotten flesh curled outward from the gaps in the armor as well.
That rotten flesh seemed to have a life of its own, constantly squirming and dripping highly corrosive black slime.
When the slime dripped onto the bluestone slabs, it instantly corroded deep pits into the hard stone, sending up