Emperor Jiang Wu slowly lowered his hands and let out a long, stale breath.
"You had an escape route planned from the start."
Zhou Xuan finished wiping the case and tossed the cloth aside.
"Obviously. Stir up a hornet's nest without figuring out how to run first, and aren't you just asking to die? The channel only transmitted in one direction. Control was always in my hands."
"If she wanted to strike back, she had to get past me first. If I wouldn't let her through, all her heaven-defying abilities could do was vent at empty space."
He patted the Black Iron Case.
"A brain is a wonderful thing. Shame that old hag never grew one in all her tens of thousands of years. The moment she got angry, she started flinging filthy water like a shrew, without even looking where she was throwing it."
Old Ancestor Xuanming: "..."
He silently wiped the blood essence from his palm and flung the half-formed ice crystal onto the floor.
How humiliating.
Compared with Zhou Xuan's breezy composure, their earlier air of facing a formidable enemy, ready to fight to the death, made them look like four children frightened to tears by firecrackers.
Old Ancestor Cangwu coughed and took the initiative to change the subject.
"That old crone swallowed three doses of poison, and her Dao Fruit was damaged again. She shouldn't be able to cause any more trouble for a while."
"Not just for a while." Zhou Xuan raised his head, the relaxed expression vanishing from his face. "She lost big this time."
He returned to the Black Iron Case, bent down, and peered inside.
Suddenly, his brow twitched.
"Wait."
Zhou Xuan reached his right hand into the case.
At the bottom, in the center of a recess that hadn't existed before,