The entire gray sky twisted and writhed violently, as if it were alive.
The next moment, countless massive gray torrents poured down like rivers spilling from the heavens, or like innumerable tentacles.
They erupted from the gray canopy overhead and plunged toward the vast earth below.
One torrent was thicker than the rest, and it was headed straight for the Xiao family estate.
"No!"
Xiao Huohuo's eyes widened in terror. He tried to flee at once.
But everything happened too fast.
The gray torrent engulfed the entire Xiao family estate and a hundred miles around it with unerring precision.
Whoosh~
Without a sound, every member of the Xiao family—servants, guards, Elders, even the clan's prodigy Xiao Huohuo and the star slave Lan Yanyan—froze in place. Their movements, expressions, and thoughts all stopped in an instant.
As though someone had pressed pause, everyone remained in the posture they had held a moment before. The rolling gray mist bound them where they stood; they could not even move their eyes.
At that very moment,
before Zhang Sanxian, hidden deep within the Little Blue Bottle, and Player 8, concealed inside the Infinite Restart Mirror,
a translucent information panel covered in shifting, strange runes appeared out of thin air:
[Project participants detected: Player 12 (Mysterious Little Blue Bottle) and Player 8 (Infinite Restart Mirror) have come into close contact, triggering the special rule: Fated Duel.] [Rule summary: The spaces within both treasures will temporarily merge to form an independent battlefield. The participants must fight a one-on-one duel within it.] [The winner's treasure may devour the loser's treasure, absorb its core rules, and evolve.] [The loser and their bound host will be utterly annihilated and reduced to dust.] [The duel begins immediately.]
Zhang Sanxian paused at the sudden message, then smiled with interest.