The silver-white sword talisman spun for who knew how long—perhaps a dozen days, perhaps several months.
At last, it stopped and fell into the dust.
Several dozen more days passed.
A group flew in from afar. At their head lay a plump old man on a jade bed, his breath a mere thread and his life force almost entirely gone. Only the Shadow-Puppet Divine Lord of the Immortal Artifact Sect, working at his side, barely kept him alive.
"That ant must have escaped..."
The Shadow-Puppet Divine Lord picked up the jade talisman from the ground and sighed. "He must have used some kind of extreme-range teleportation array to leave the quasi-eighth-rank sword talisman's lock in an instant. Or perhaps he had a way to conceal himself from it, or a way to feign death... In the world of immortal cultivation, anything is possible."
"An ant..."
"Hahaha!"
Divine Lord Xuan Yang had been following them all along. At those words, he could not help mocking him. "That Sun Lineage sword cultivator is highly unusual, and he strikes me as one to hold a grudge. Shadow-Puppet, you don't think that because he never showed any killing intent toward you and was always perfectly respectful, he won't remember you, do you?"
"I'd wager that in another few thousand years, when he advances to Void Refining... Heh. I hope you can still call him an ant then."
His voice dripped with mockery.
The Shadow-Puppet Divine Lord's face turned livid.
Having a sword-wielding killer who was approaching the level of a Dao Child set his sights on him felt dreadful. It was like a thorn in his back, as though the star of his death might descend at any moment.
"Shadow-Puppet... fellow Daoist..."
"Please..."
The plump old man on the jade bed mustered every scrap