After a short wait, the formation at the bottom of the lake lit up once more, and the crimson water took on an eerie, yin-drenched glow that sent chills down everyone's spine.
With two rounds of experience already under their belts, everyone knew the third batch of artifacts was about to appear. The onlookers eager for the coming battle craned their necks in anticipation, jockeying for the best angles and positions while waiting for the show to begin.
Whoosh whoosh whoosh…
A hundred beams of light shot out once again — another hundred artifacts materialized.
"Go! Anyone who tries to snatch them, kill them!"
At nearly the same moment, Yang Shen and Yang Ying issued identical commands. Their faces were set in savage expressions, as though they were irreconcilable enemies of every living person present.
But when those three groups charged out, everyone discovered with bewilderment that two more parties had yet to move.
One was
The eldest and youngest of the brothers both seemed content with their earlier hauls and had no intention of joining the scramble.
"What the hell? Why aren't those two moving?" the onlookers clamored. A six-way melee was what made things interesting — with two factions sitting it out, the whole thing would be far less entertaining.
"Scared, maybe? If you've got guts this small, why even show up for the battle for succession?"
"Charge already! What are you standing around for, you bunch of pigs? It's killing me!"
"Damn it, what a golden opportunity, and they're just letting it slip? If my sect weren't such garbage, I could've pledged myself to one of the young lords and gone artifact-snatching myself today."
…
The shouts were a chaotic mess.
"Come back!" The next instant,
Those fighters, pumped up and ready to unleash hell, had already charged halfway to the lake bed. They were on the verge of grabbing artifacts. When
Some quick-witted ones immediately wheeled back to
It seemed to trigger something catastrophic. The instant those fighters seized the artifacts, a chaotic surge of energy exploded in the air directly above the center of Broken Mirror Lake.
Rumble rumble, whoosh whoosh, crack crack…
Flames flickered, lightning crackled, ice and snow crashed down, and dazzling sword beams erupted. Icy stalagmites appeared as if from nowhere, strange and jagged. Golden threads danced through the sky like razor-sharp blades, cutting through anything in their path. Centered on the hundred artifacts, a torrent of attacks radiated outward in every direction.
Everyone froze.
The onlookers who had been shouting moments ago about
Most of them were only at the Zhenyuan Realm. They had never imagined such a catastrophe could befall them.
Truth be told, each individual attack wasn't overwhelmingly powerful, and the barrage was a mishmash of different elements. But the nightmare was that countless attacks detonated all at once.
Grains of sand pile into a tower; drops of water form a river. How could these Zhenyuan Realm fighters possibly withstand that?
In the blink of an eye, the fighters clustered at the center were obliterated. Severed limbs and mangled flesh flew in every direction. Blood rained down like a summer storm.
Within a radius of twenty zhang, a vacuum zone appeared — as though an invisible black hole had devoured everything in that space.
Fighters who had been only slightly farther out scrambled to flee, not daring to remain in place. Those who looked back and beheld the carnage wore masks of horror and terror, their eyes brimming with dread and the desperate relief of survivors.
The scene fell silent. The only sound was the splash of corpses dropping into the lake water, sharp and piercing.
"Vicious!"
That sudden eruption of energy hadn't come from the fighters — it was caused by the hundred artifacts themselves.
The third batch of artifacts had clearly been tampered with well in advance. Powerful cultivators had infused them with zhenyuan beforehand, and the moment someone grabbed them, the hidden power would detonate, catching the fighters completely off guard.
This was nothing but a trap — a trap the Yang family had set specifically for those who came to seize the artifacts!
Two successive batches had appeared first, lulling the fighters into complacency. Then the third batch struck without warning…
"If our people had charged in just now…" Shu Xiaoyu's face had gone pale. She wasn't a stranger to death — during her trials outside the sect, she had killed with her own hands, and she had just witnessed nearly fifty fighters die in the scramble for artifacts.
But seeing dozens of people wiped out in an instant was still horrifying.