The next moment, Zhao Leer slowly pushed herself up.
The smile vanished from her round face.
In those large eyes churned a heavy, chilling gleam—the kind that came when someone had been driven to the very edge and suddenly decided she would endure no more.
"Long Yuan."
When she spoke, the soft sweetness had completely faded from her voice, leaving only a thin, level chill.
"Do you insist on forcing me to use my full strength?"
Long Yuan drew back his blade and held it horizontally before his chest.
He looked at the wounds covering Zhao Leer's body, and the scrutiny in his golden vertical pupils finally settled.
"Just as I thought."
He softly spoke those two words.
"You really were hiding something."
Zhao Leer did not answer again.
She slowly straightened up. As she raised her head to look at Long Yuan, a strange flush spread across her face beneath the dim arena lights.
The pupils in her large eyes began to expand. Her black irises spread outward like ink dropped into water, swiftly swallowing the whites of her eyes whole.
Both eyes became pools of pure ink-black, within whose depths dark-red points of light surged like blood-colored stars slowly burning in the night sky.
Her body began to change.
The first change was her height.
Her petite body, originally less than one and a half meters tall, began to stretch inch by inch from the spine. Her joints let out a dense series of crackles, as though something were forcing her open from within.
Her skirt slipped from above her knees to the middle of her thighs, then to the middle of her calves, then to her ankles.
Her legs lengthened, and her slender limbs became long and well-proportioned in the space of a breath.
Then came her