Meanwhile, the force restraining Shuang Lianzhou suddenly vanished as well. He staggered and fell headfirst onto the ground.
Li Yan had deliberately left him alone as a slight punishment.
But Shuang Lianzhou did not care that he had cracked his forehead. He simply stared blankly up at the figure standing with his hands behind his back in the darkness.
Ming Ling thought she had misheard as well. She stopped crying and looked toward Li Yan with her face streaked with tears.
For a moment, the only sounds in the night sky were the heavy breaths of the three people.
"Senior... are you... saying that you don't need the 'Puppet Arts'?"
Shuang Chongshan was, after all, the head of a household, and he was the first to react.
He asked in an uncertain tone, without even realizing that his voice had already turned hoarse.
"What? Are your Duye Household's 'Puppet Arts' really so powerful? Must you insist on giving them to Zhang?"
Li Yan chuckled. If it had been a cultivation method for spell cultivators or body cultivators, or a mid-grade or higher-grade alchemy formula, he would certainly have asked to examine it.
But Puppet Arts were dispensable to him. He had already learned a hodgepodge of techniques and did not have that much energy to cultivate mechanical puppetry. He had only learned a little from Bai Rou back then.
"Oh... oh... no, no, no, that isn't what this junior meant. The ancestral art of my household is treasured only by me and those low-level cultivators. How could it possibly enter Senior's eyes? It can't, it can't!"
Only then did Shuang Chongshan finally regain his clarity. He rapidly replayed everything that had happened in his mind, feeling as though it had all occurred in a dream.
Yet from the moment the