The most miserable screams rang out in the air, utterly inhuman in sound. They came from the three phantom figures on the long staircase.
With Li Yan's knowledge, he recognized what those three phantom figures were at a glance.
They were figures condensed from three souls. Judging from their backs, they were two women and one man, all appearing to be human cultivators.
The women's long hair hung completely loose, concealing their features, though their figures were still curvaceous. All three had their backs to Li Yan as they struggled ceaselessly to climb the long staircase.
Yet every time they touched those gleaming blades, the hands gripping them were instantly severed and fell away.
Even so, they charged onward without hesitation. Amid shrill screams, they borrowed the brief force generated at the instant their hands were cut off and stomped both feet onto the gleaming blade of the next step.
But in the next moment, their feet too were sliced into by the incomparably sharp blades, followed immediately by their bodies being split open upward from the legs.
The gleaming blades sliced through them like paper, cutting each entire body into three straight sections. Their severed souls swiftly faded as they tumbled down...
Yet just as the fragments of those souls were about to completely scatter, one of the horse-headed evil ghosts below would abruptly raise a hand and draw out that black scaled whip.
Crack!
With a crisp snap, the barbed scaled whip swept through the air, its angle and speed both precise and swift.
It directly curled around the several sections of the victim's body, along with the severed soul-hands that had fallen away, and gathered them all up at once.
At that crisp crack, the fine tip of the black scaled whip merely trembled, and the sharp