Liu Yu was uncertain whether the three could escape.
It would take not only strength, but also sufficiently powerful "trump cards" and enough "luck."
I hope those teammates don't all perish in there. Ideally, one or two will escape.
He thought to himself.
If all three teammates perished, leaving only him and Zhuo Mengzhen to continue, the road ahead would be far too difficult.
To obtain more information and have more teammates to share the burden when danger struck, Liu Yu still chose to wait three hours.
But once the time was up, if the three remained nowhere to be seen, he would leave without hesitation.
Their failure to appear within the agreed time would almost certainly mean they had met with disaster.
If he chose to keep waiting, the risk he had to bear would rise rapidly.
Leaving immediately would have best served his and Zhuo Mengzhen's interests. Choosing to wait for the sake of the journey ahead was already doing all that duty and kindness demanded.
At that point, it could hardly be called abandonment.
"."
Inside the temporary cave abode beneath the small lake, the two fell silent.
Zhuo Mengzhen stared blankly at the white Spirit-Communicating Jade, looking weighed down by worries, though no one knew what she was thinking.
They had split up to flee within the Ten Thousand Demons Formation, raced against death with their lives hanging by a thread, and finally been rescued by Liu Yu.
Even now, she still felt shaken.
Everything had happened too quickly, catching her unprepared.
Even her Golden Core Realm cultivation had been powerless against that earlier predicament. She had never experienced such a feeling before.
Like a lone skiff on the ocean, her life and death had slipped entirely beyond her control, resting instead on elusive, intangible luck.