"Boom...!"
Almost at the same moment Xiahou You saw the woman's phantom image, Heavenly Calamity Blightbone's fists swept past her, bearing the force to annihilate heaven and earth, and smashed straight toward the sacrificial platform where Xu Taiping stood.
Xiahou You's heart tightened.
"Boom!!"
But at that critical instant, the mass of true fire swirling around Xu Taiping suddenly transformed into an enormous palm, blocking those fists.
"Bang...!"
Amid the tremendous collision, the palm formed from innate threefold true fire shattered almost upon impact.
But Xu Taiping had already vanished.
Heavenly Calamity Blightbone's fists struck empty air.
"Boom!!"
Before Xiahou You and the others could recover, another flaming palm formed from threefold true fire came crashing down.
"Bang...!"
With a tremendous crash, Heavenly Calamity Blightbone's arms were all pinned beneath that palm.
Following the direction from which the palm had descended, everyone looked up and saw the woman, divine intent radiating around her, suspended high in the sky with the charcoal-black Xu Taiping in her arms.
"Boom!!"
Then Heavenly Calamity Blightbone abruptly broke free of the true-fire palm shadow's restraints, suddenly raising his fingers together to point at the woman bathed in divine light.
"Boom-!!"
In an instant, an enormous black vortex appeared before the woman, and the divine light around her was visibly swallowed by those black vortices.
The woman's phantom image, expressionless until now, suddenly showed anger and rebuked him in an exceptionally lovely voice:
"Wretched creature!"
As her words fell, a ribbon of threefold true fire swirling around her suddenly erupted with a dazzling radiance like a great sun.
"Boom-!!!"
Then, before everyone's horrified eyes, that ribbon of threefold true fire abruptly manifested as several dazzling spears, which shot into the vortices together.
"Boom!"
In an instant, the vortices that could devour others' magic power and qi