Sword Qi crisscrossed from your hand as Xingyao's Minor Destiny Art held the white-robed woman across from you still for an instant.
At the same time, the Beast Emperor struck. Beast Bind empowered the Four Symbols spirit beasts, and overwhelming pressure descended like a mountain, locking down the woman's aura.
The white-robed woman held a hazy gray sphere of annihilating light in her palm and chanted softly:
"One year, withering and flourishing; one year, calamity and annihilation."
Even Xingyao had to give the aura radiating from that sphere a wide berth. You did not dare take it head-on either.
Against the three of you together, the woman could no longer hold out. She drove the sphere of annihilating light into her own body.
Her grievously wounded body, on the verge of perishing, began to recover at astonishing speed. Flesh regrew, bare bones gleamed anew. It was as though life and death had been reversed.
This was the ultimate realm of Annihilation True Intent: at the end of calamity and annihilation lay new life.
Xingyao and the Beast Emperor had already "killed" her twice, yet she had returned to life both times by this method.
Seeing her attempt the same trick again, you raised the Universal Sword once more.
Hundreds of thousands of sword lights poured across the ground like spilled mercury, seeping into every opening. They sliced the woman's re-forming body apart inch by inch and ground the sphere of annihilation essence in her hand into nothingness.
At last, the woman in the white crane-feather cloak raised her eyes and gave you one long look. Her gaze was clear and still.
Her figure crumbled. She died.
Xingyao let out a long breath. "The legacies of Medieval Antiquity sects truly are extraordinary. This woman was at the Dao Embryo Dharma Aspect