They were surrounded.
With wolves in front and tigers behind, they could neither advance nor retreat. There was no way out.
Zhang Lexuan tried to fly away with two unconscious students, but she had barely risen ten meters when an upside-down sensation of weightlessness sent her crashing to the ground.
When she raised her head again, the funeral and wedding music had stopped. The paper figures and women in red dresses had mingled, standing together in an intermingled mass of white mourning clothes and red wedding attire.
The coffins and bridal sedan chairs were close at hand, hemming their group of twelve in from either side. The water vengeful spirits sitting atop the coffins and the ghost brides sitting in the sedan chairs looked down at them with hollow, lifeless eyes.
It's over!
The thought had barely crossed Zhang Lexuan's mind when phantom coffins and bridal sedan chairs enveloped the Inner Court disciples lying on the ground.
Five coffins and six sedan chairs, crushing souls and stealing spirits.
The Inner Court disciples trapped in the phantom coffins were surrounded by foul, filthy water that rapidly filled them. Drowning and suffocating, they struggled and convulsed helplessly inside.
The water in the coffins was corpse water, highly corrosive and poisonous enough to dissolve even bones.
The Inner Court disciples trapped in the phantom bridal sedan chairs suddenly found themselves engulfed in cold, eerie green flames. Though the flames were bitterly cold, they inflicted an unbearable, searing agony as they burned, leaving the disciples howling and writhing as they rolled about inside the chairs.
The fire in the bridal sedan chairs was candle flame fueled by human fat, which burned the three souls and seven spirits. The souls of those it burned had nowhere to hide.
Only Zhang Lexuan was neither trapped in a coffin nor imprisoned in a bridal sedan chair.
She refused to sit and wait for death, attempting to use her Soul Skills to shatter the coffins and bridal sedan chairs imprisoning her juniors.
But her attacks passed through the phantom coffins and sedan chairs, striking two of the junior brothers trapped inside them squarely.
Already struggling to resist, they immediately had their defenses broken by Zhang Lexuan's sudden attacks. Within seconds, they dissolved into pus and turned to ash amid their howls.
She... had indirectly killed two of her junior brothers, two of her teammates.
After that, Zhang Lexuan no longer dared to attack.
She could only watch helplessly as her teammates, these junior brothers and sisters of hers, were dissolved into pus and blood by corpse water in the coffins and burned to ash by human-fat candle flames in the bridal sedan chairs.
The phantom coffins and bridal sedan chairs gradually faded, vanishing without a trace along with the Inner Court disciples.
Eleven Inner Court elites, all with cultivation at or above the Soul Emperor level, had died. Not one survived.
Zhang Lexuan collapsed to her knees, two streams of bloody tears slowly running down her cheeks.
It was the second time.
This was the second time she had led a team and watched her teammates die one after another before her eyes, while she stood helpless, unable to protect or save a single one of them.
"Xuan Zi... where is Xuan Zi?"
Zhang Lexuan's eyes flickered, but a mocking smile soon appeared on her face.
It was the same as ever.
It had happened again.
It was always like this.
When it came to being disappointing, the esteemed deputy leader of the Inspection Corps, Xuan Zi, never disappointed.
"Since you're incapable and I can't rely on you, I'll do it myself." Looking at the paper figures in mourning clothes and female ghosts in wedding attire that still surrounded her, Zhang Lexuan felt the pain in her eyes gradually fade, replaced by madness and sharp resolve.
They had been ambushed.
From the very beginning, they had fallen into the enemy's trap. The mental attacks were impossible to guard against, and their entire team had been wiped out before they could display even thirty percent of their strength.
Zhang Lexuan was puzzled. She did not understand how the enemy had done it.
Zhang Lexuan was unwilling to accept it. They should have been able to do better.
But there was no point in saying any of that now. Her teammates were all dead, leaving her alone and without help, still trapped in the midst of the enemy.
She did not know whether she could return alive, nor did she know whether she could avenge the junior brothers and sisters who had died so horribly.
She knew only that... they could not be allowed to die in vain like this.
Ding-
Ding-
With two clear chimes, Zhang Lexuan slowly rose from her knees. At some point, a gap had opened in the clouds that blotted out the sky, and clear moonlight spilled down on her.
At the same time, Zhang Lexuan's presence began to rise steadily. Violent fluctuations of Soul Power drove the paper figures and female ghosts around her back one after another, and their previously orderly, frenzied dance fell into disarray.
Seventh Soul Skill-Martial Soul Avatar.
Eighth Soul Skill-Blood Moon.
Zhang Lexuan vanished. In her place was a bleak, deathly silent blood moon, its scarlet light scattering in every direction and shining upon those ghostly beings.
Even the full moon in the sky was tinged scarlet at that moment.
Her teammates had lost their senses to the bizarre mental attacks, and right up until their miserable deaths, they had failed to launch any effective attacks.
As the last survivor and the only member to retain her full fighting strength through the mental attacks, Zhang Lexuan would show the strength they possessed as elites of the Shrek Inner Court, even if she could not escape death tonight.
"You rats who hide your heads and show only your tails, die!!"
The full blood moon erupted with intense red light. The paper figures and female ghosts caught in its glow were like hard ice under the sun. Thick black Qi poured from their bodies as they were set alight and melted beneath the moonlight, their faces twisted.
Half a minute later.
The full blood moon vanished, and Zhang Lexuan reappeared, clad in an ink-black robe.
Her robe was now in tatters, revealing the white dress she wore beneath it. The monster mask on her face was gone as well, and faint red tearstains that had yet to dry marked her pale, lovely face.
The surrounding paper figures and female ghosts had been completely vaporized by Blood Moon, and all the plants within a hundred meters had turned to ash along with them. The exposed ground was a scorched blackish gray.
The only remains were the ruined bridal sedan chair, burned down to its frame, and less than a fifth of a shattered coffin.
The ghost bride in the bridal sedan chair and the water vengeful spirit on the Yin coffin had been reduced to ashes along with the female ghosts and paper figures in the procession.
Her slender body crashed to the ground.
Scalding tears once again slid from Zhang Lexuan's eyes, and she murmured softly.
"I... avenged you..."
Weakness enveloped her, and her depleted Soul Power made her vision darken. It seemed she would fall unconscious at any moment.
But just before she closed her eyes and slipped into sleep, faint footsteps sounded in the silent mountain forest.
Her eyes flew open. Forcing her weakened body to move, she raised her head and looked in the direction of the footsteps.
"Clap, clap, clap..."
The newcomer clapped softly while walking, a chilling chuckle echoing through the mountain forest.
"As expected of an outstanding disciple of Shrek Academy. You do have some tricks."
"You, you..." Zhang Lexuan's vision was doubled. She strained to open her eyes wide, but could see only a tall figure, unable to make out the person's face.
Then the figure walked up to her and looked down at her from above.
"Revenge?"
"What a ridiculous obsession."