After hearing Han Li's confident words and watching him take out a cyan talisman and sit down with his eyes closed, Chen Qiaoqian and Zhong Weiniang also silently pulled a red and a yellow talisman treasure respectively from their storage pouches and sat cross-legged to activate them.
Chen Qiaoqian's senior brother and Song Meng exchanged bitter smiles. Neither of them had any talisman treasures of their own. Although Chen Qiaoqian's senior brother did have a blue talisman treasure left behind by his Dao companion, he had only just obtained it and barely understood its power and uses, so naturally he wouldn't rashly attempt to employ something he was so unfamiliar with. As for Song Meng's gray spear talisman treasure, it had already been completely drained after the battle with the Ice Monster.
So the two of them simply stood there dryly beside Han Li and the others, standing guard while the three of them cultivated.
At that moment, the Yue Emperor, trapped in the sky above, seemed to realize that blindly charging around like a headless fly was not going to solve anything. He stopped moving and hovered motionless in the air, looking down in contemplation.
After a brief pause, the Yue Emperor suddenly raised his head and, with a savage expression, tore the golden crown from his head. His long black hair billowed out and danced in the wind, covering half his face. Set against the crimson light surrounding his body, he looked increasingly eerie and otherworldly.
He took a deep breath, then suddenly drew his sharp fingernails across both of his wrists in an X pattern. A torrent of blood gushed out, all of it merging into the crimson light around his body. The brilliant red glow abruptly dimmed, instantly shifting to a dark crimson hue.
The nauseating stench of blood was now so overpowering that even Song Meng and the others, despite being so far away, could catch a whiff or two of it. Their faces changed slightly, but there was nothing they could do—they could only watch helplessly as the enemy continued his technique.
Once the transformation of the crimson light around his body was complete, the Yue Emperor opened his mouth and spat two streams of red qi onto his wrists. Some unknown spell took effect, as the deep wounds immediately stopped bleeding and gradually faded from red to nothing. But the Yue Emperor's complexion had clearly turned much paler.
Then a harsh gleam flashed across his face, and he reached into his robes. When his hand emerged, it held a plain, pitch-black sword hilt. The hilt was not large—about half a foot long—but it was dull, worn, and exceedingly unremarkable.
Yet the Yue Emperor cradled it with the utmost care, as though the object were not some lifeless thing but something incredibly dangerous.
His eyes fixed on the hilt, and he began to chant in a low voice.
The incantation was quiet and difficult to understand, its words harsh and archaic. But within that slow, measured rhythm, there was a faint aura of savage antiquity that gradually spread outward, giving everyone an immediate sense of primordial power.
"What is he doing?" Song Meng watched the scene from far below, greatly alarmed, and couldn't help asking reflexively.
"I don't know. He might be casting some powerful technique!" The fellow disciple beside him, equally unable to understand the incantation, replied with some worry.
Though neither of them knew the enemy's intent, the sight of him mutilating himself and shedding his own blood made it clear that the Yue Emperor was cornered and desperate—ready to stake everything on one final gamble.
Just as Song Meng and his companion were growing increasingly uneasy, the chanting from the Yue Emperor's mouth suddenly accelerated in pace, and that aura of savage antiquity intensified dramatically.
A flash of crimson light blazed in the Yue Emperor's eyes, and an astonishing sight appeared.
The sword hilt, amid the chanting, suddenly erupted with a burst of black light. Shrouded in that dark radiance, it rose into the air on its own, floating upward until it hovered roughly a foot above his head, where it remained suspended.
Seeing this, the Yue Emperor became even more cautious. His hands swiftly formed a series of strange seals, causing threads of black blood to emerge from the crimson light around his body. The moment these threads appeared, they raced of their own accord toward the sword hilt.
At first, only one or two—then a few—black blood threads surfaced. But before long, they were emerging by the dozen, the score, even the hundred, all pouring from the crimson light and surging toward the hilt like moths flying into a flame.
In the blink of an eye, the hilt was densely wrapped by a web of black blood threads so thick that not even wind or rain could penetrate. After a period of writhing, the threads coagulated into a sizable clot of tainted blood.
The hilt was now completely sealed within it.
Looking more closely, this clot was black shot through with red, emitting an eerie glow. Just looking at it gave one the uncanny sensation that it could suck away one's very soul—a truly sinister sight.
Yet the Yue Emperor, who was still forming hand seals, showed a look of delight upon seeing this.
He was just about to release his seals and move on to another method when the black blood, which had appeared to stop moving, suddenly blazed with an intensely dazzling black light and began writhing violently once more—churning, then swelling, in wildly unstable surges.
At the sight of this, the joy that had just appeared on the Yue Emperor's face vanished, replaced by a look of terror.