Cui Jiuchuan's abrupt halt and fall quickly put Ling Xiangyu on guard. Without a second thought, he chose to stop flying forward with Ling Wanshan and cease the pursuit.
As Ling Xiangyu stopped, you no longer pretended to flee. You turned back with Wan Huaiyi and looked at him as though your scheme had succeeded, the corners of your mouth unconsciously lifting into a faint smile.
It was clearly an utterly ordinary smile, yet to Ling Xiangyu and Ling Wanshan, it seemed somewhat ferocious. Even now, he had not considered poison, only assuming that someone was hidden nearby. Whoever was hiding had to possess extraordinary methods, perhaps even enough to strike the three of them silently without their noticing.
Ling Xiangyu had originally thought that once the hidden person saw they had noticed something was wrong and stopped, they would launch another attack against the two of them. Yet things did not unfold as they had expected. There was no movement around them, and you and Wan Huaiyi, who were gradually drawing closer, showed no urgency to attack.
Before Ling Xiangyu could puzzle over it, Ling Wanshan beside him was the first to falter. An extreme drowsiness like Cui Jiuchuan's surged through him. In a daze, he could barely even maintain his flight. The exhaustion came with astonishing speed—one moment he was merely somewhat weary, and the next his eyes shut despite himself.
Then Ling Wanshan followed in Cui Jiuchuan's footsteps!
Ling Xiangyu was stronger, so his body's resistance far surpassed those of the other two. Yet when Ling Wanshan, an Immortal King Second Realm cultivator, briefly lost consciousness, he understood that he would have difficulty escaping this calamity as well. Before he could even beg for mercy, the poison in his body erupted completely. The further it progressed, the