"Tap, tap..."
The gray fog grew thicker and thicker as Lin Shisan and Zi Yuner walked forward side by side.
The soft, yielding feel beneath their feet gradually gave way to something firmer, and a gap suddenly opened in the fog ahead.
Beyond the gap lay a broad clearing, with a pitch-black stone pillar standing at its very center.
Dark red patterns covered the pillar's surface, and more than a dozen silvery-white chains wound around it, their other ends shackling a woman in white.
The woman knelt on one knee, her loose hair hiding most of her face.
She wore a plain white dress, its hem soaked through by the damp ground and stained with dark mud.
Her hands hung chained above her head, the skin around her wrists rubbed red and purple.
The dark red patterns on the chains slowly brightened and faded.
Each time they lit up, they drew an exceedingly fine strand of white light from her body and channeled it along the patterns into the depths of the pillar.
Her vitality was being forcibly drained.
Zi Yuner stopped short, her right palm already raised, a mass of deep purple spiritual power rapidly gathering in it.
"Youyou?"
The woman in white did not lift her head, but one of her suspended hands trembled slightly.
Lin Shisan took a step forward, his gaze falling on the silvery-white chains before following them to the patterns at the base of the pillar.
"That's not Youyou."
He crouched down, holding his fingertip three inches above the thickest pattern on the pillar's surface, sensing the fluctuations of aura coming from deep within it. "This is a spirit artifact's projection."
"A projection?"
The spiritual power in Zi Yuner's palm faltered slightly.
"The real Bai Youyou is somewhere else. This is just a phantom