A burst of ghostly wails rang out. The Life-Claiming Infant Monk flicked his wrist, and the Crying Infant Ring spun into the air. One enormous infant skeleton after another emerged weeping, mouths stretched wide, their hollow gazes ferocious as they directly bit down on the first massive boulder to fall. Crack, crack, crack! The other ghost infants swarmed forward, and the huge stone spike was visibly bitten into fragments in the blink of an eye. Stone chips filled the sky.
Du Fenghu's expression tightened. With a wave of his hand, a gray cloak appeared behind him. He reached back with his right hand and seized it, then swept the gray cloak upward. Streams of gray spiritual power emerged from its corners, spiraling toward the stone spikes descending from above.
The spiraling force held back the falling stone spike, then pulled it to one side. The stone spike veered at an angle and fell past Du Fenghu's side, missing him by less than half a foot.
Old Monster Mu held out an earth-yellow stone jar, its surface rather coarse, about the size of an ordinary wine jar used by mortals. His beard and hair flared, his robes billowing as he struck the stone jar with a palmful of spiritual power.
A crimson whip-vine thicker than an arm suddenly shot out from the jar's mouth and lashed wildly through the air. The crimson whip-vine left behind streak after streak of afterimages, cracking loudly against the falling stone spikes. In moments, fissures appeared across the descending spikes. With a boom, the rocks exploded in midair.
Xiang Sicheng reacted no slower. He pointed toward his storage pouch, and a massive ice-blue fan shaped like a banana leaf appeared in his hand.
Runes danced across the ice-blue fan. It was unexpectedly a talisman spirit artifact.