"What's going on?"
Xu Lanqing was still a little dazed. His head was spinning, as though he hadn't recovered yet. Was he hallucinating?
"This passage is strange." The cool voice beside him reminded him that it wasn't a hallucination. The Ice Empress and the Titan Snow Demon King really had vanished without a trace.
The Snow Empress turned back, but was stopped at the exit. She reached out with her empty left hand and touched an invisible barrier. Beyond it, the ice passage looked normal, but the familiar figures were nowhere to be seen.
Xu Lanqing looked at the Snow Empress. "Can we get out?"
Screech—
A flash of icy-blue light vanished in an instant, carving a white scratch across the invisible barrier. A piercing, grating sound rang out as white light burst in every direction.
Holding the Emperor Sword, the Snow Empress looked at the mark that had appeared and disappeared within a few breaths, then shook her head. "I'm afraid not."
"So we can get in, but not out? That's some real bandit behavior!"
"By rights, we're outsiders coveting treasure. We're more like the bandits."
"..."
I was just making a sarcastic remark. Why'd you have to go and agree with me?
Xu Lanqing forced himself to calm down and assess the situation. "They were only a few steps behind us. We came in, so they should have followed. But now there's no sign of them...
"If they saw us disappear, they'd definitely rush in after us. But it's been several minutes, and they're still nowhere to be seen. One possibility is that they can't get in. Maybe there's a restriction on this passage, and they had no choice but to take another route. The other possibility is that they were transported somewhere else."
The Snow Empress didn't