Wang Ying fell to her knees. The knife slipped from her hand, only for her to instinctively grip it tight again.
Zheng Xiaofeng swayed twice, then fell flat on his back with a crash.
Even Cao Xianming only managed to open his mouth before collapsing, without getting a word out.
Yang Yong was the last.
His consciousness was far stronger than the others', but that fragrance seeped into every opening, as though penetrating straight into his soul.
He felt his body growing lighter, everything around him receding, darkness surging in from all sides.
He collapsed.
Only Yezi remained.
Only Yezi stood in that cloyingly sweet fragrance, completely unaffected.
She looked at the people who had fallen around her, then at the approaching roots. There was no fear on her face, only a kind of... resolve.
She pressed both hands to the ground.
A Virginia creeper shot out of her palm.
At first, it was just a tiny, slender vine that looked too frail to withstand a breeze.
But it grew at an astonishing speed. In the blink of an eye, it covered the ground, climbed the surrounding vehicles, and surged upward, bursting apart three meters above the ground into countless branches.
Each branch was as agile as a snake, moving out to meet the oncoming roots.
The branches coiled around the roots.
They did not simply wrap around them, but constricted them in a death grip-one coil, two, three, tightening, then tightening again.
The branch tips were sharp as needles. They plunged into the roots' outer layers, piercing deep into the wood.
Then the roots began to wither.
Those thick, ferocious roots that blotted out everything shriveled at a visible rate after the creeper's branches pierced them.
Their surfaces lost their luster, their bark split, and their inner structures were