Water Moon Mirror Flower (4)

Zhu Yaoyao was also sorting through her thoughts.

This journey into the secret realm had truly brought fortune and disaster hand in hand.

After entering the secret realm and opening her eyes again, she found damp, slick rotting leaves beneath her feet and ancient branches overhead that blotted out the sky and sun, splintering even the daylight into fragments.

She had intended to first get a grasp of the secret realm's layout, but before she could begin investigating, a powerful stench of blood and beasts rushed at her—seven or eight wolf-shaped demonic beasts, silver-gray from head to toe, had surrounded her. Their bared fangs gleamed with a ghastly white chill beneath the dim light.

With her Golden Core stage cultivation, she should not have needed to regard such beasts as a threat. Yet once the fighting truly began, she discovered that these wolf demons were not only swift but coordinated with astonishing precision—two lunged at her from the front to draw her attention, while the others circled behind her. Their claws sliced through the air with shrill tearing sounds, faintly forming the momentum of an encircling kill.

Unwilling to become entangled with them, Zhu Yaoyao severed the throat of a slightly smaller she-wolf with her long silk ribbon as she hurried to escape. With a soft rip, the she-wolf did not even have time to howl before crashing heavily to the ground. Her body twitched a few times, then fell still.

At once, the entire wolf pack fell silent.

The wolf king—the silver-gray giant wolf nearly twice as large as the other wolf demons—slowly lowered its head and nudged the she-wolf's corpse with its snout. Its originally emerald-green pupils were instantly flooded with blood-red, and a low, mournful whine rose from its throat. It did not sound like a beast's