The sword tip hurtled closer.
At this moment, everyone's movements seemed incomparably slow.
In Ying Zheng's pupils, that point of cold light rapidly swelled. He could even make out the fine frost patterns on the blade, and the final obsession burning within Gongshu Yuan's cloudy eyes.
His feet seemed nailed to the brocade carpet. He wanted to retreat, yet felt everything slowing down, his own movements sluggish as a snail's.
Dun Ruo's face turned ashen in an instant.
His short sword had long since left its sheath, its blade held across Ying Zheng's front. Inner force roared through his meridians like a dragon, all his aura locked onto the incoming Frost Sword.
Yet faced with the old man's unstoppable momentum, with a sword into which he had wagered his lifelong cultivation and his very life, he actually felt...
Not entirely certain.
It was a warrior's instinctive intuition.
This sword could not be stopped.
At least, stopping it without paying a price would be difficult.
At that very instant.
Three shadows had, at some unknown time, silently appeared beyond the window.
They arrived without the slightest warning, as though condensed from dusk itself, or as though they had always lurked within the void, revealing themselves only now.
The three shadows simultaneously blanketed Gongshu Yuan, shrouding both him and the Frost Sword in a profound darkness that was nearly solid.
Gongshu Yuan and Dun Ruo were both startled!
Gongshu Yuan's cloudy eyes trembled sharply as he caught sight, from the corner of his eye, of three figures appearing at his side, behind him, and overhead.
Who were they?
Qin ambushers?
Or had the Chu State made other arrangements...?
When had they appeared there? Why had he not noticed them?
His heart clenched violently in his chest, but then an even madder ruthlessness