With Qingyi Duxing and Huanyu acting so strangely and speaking such baffling words, every expert on the scene was completely dumbfounded.
Were Qingyi Duxing and Huanyu actually monsters?
In the past, when they spotted a monster, they simply charged in and cut it down—no complicated drama involved. If they could win, they fought; if they couldn't, they ran. But now they couldn't even tell whether the people in front of them were monsters or not. How were they supposed to fight?
The entire area fell into dead silence as everyone exchanged uneasy glances.
At this point, neither attacking nor standing still was an option. They could only remain frozen in place, warily watching each other, terrified that the companion standing right beside them might secretly be a monster in disguise.
And the two people at the center of it all—Huanyu and Qingyi Duxing—were just as wary of each other. The sheer absurdity of the scene was something none of the present players had ever heard of, let alone witnessed.
However, the eerie atmosphere had barely lasted a few seconds before the sky suddenly shattered. The once sunlit heavens turned an ashen gray, and bolts of lightning crackled and thunder rumbled all around.
At some unknowable moment, everyone nearby had vanished. A monstrous creature roughly five or six meters tall, its gaping maw stretched impossibly wide and its body ethereal like a phantom of the soul, had already devoured nearly half of her soul.
Before her eyes, she could even see a copy of herself—expression vacant, standing perfectly still before the creature like a lifeless puppet…
And yet a magic blade had already pierced through the creature's heart, eliciting a piercing shriek so shrill that her head felt ready to split apart.
"What the hell is going on?"
Qingyi Duxing, now existing as little more than a soul, wore a blank expression, completely unable to comprehend what had just happened.
At this point, she truly could no longer tell what was real and what was false—as though she had woken from a dream only to find herself still dreaming.
Before she could even react, the wounded Soul Beast lunged at her again, desperate to devour its meal before it could escape.
Having returned to her body, Qingyi Duxing had absolutely no power to resist the Soul Beast. The mere act of it drawing near filled her with overwhelming dread and a searing pain in her brain, leaving her utterly incapable of fighting back.
Soul Devourer — Soul Demon — Great Lord — Level 124 — HP: 44,000,000 But in the blink of an eye, a figure appeared before the Soul Beast. Countless magic blades materialized and spun outward like a cascade of starlight.
-34,514,724!
-71,514,654!
-35,164,412!
…
A relentless barrage of over a dozen devastating damage numbers popped up one after another above the Soul Beast's head, completely draining its health pool in moments. It then dropped over a dozen crystal fragments before dissolving into countless motes of light and vanishing.
"Black Flame?"
Qingyi Duxing, her mind in an extremely weakened state, stared at Shi Feng standing not far away, barely able to believe what she was seeing. Even her voice carried a heavy note of uncertainty.
"You were hit by their mental attack, and nearly half your soul has been devoured. It's best not to move around too much." Shi Feng glanced at Qingyi Duxing's spectral form without offering much explanation, and said simply, "Still, you managed to walk out of that area in the end. If you hadn't, there wouldn't have been anything I could do to save you."
"Mental attack?" Qingyi Duxing froze. "How is that possible?"
This was the first time she had ever even heard the term. Everything that had just happened had felt completely, indistinguishably real. Such a thing was utterly unheard of.
She had experienced earth-shattering battles before, but a hallucination this terrifying—she never could have imagined that this was one of the monster's methods of attack.
"In the Divine Realm, nothing is impossible—especially here in this human forbidden zone." Shi Feng shook his head at the disbelieving Qingyi Duxing and said, "The dangers of the Divine Realm go far beyond the strength of monsters and the harshness of the environment. They have countless hidden methods of attack and traps that most people never learn about. It isn't limited to just physical and magical attacks. Even if a player's combat power far surpasses the monsters', a single moment of carelessness can still cost them their life."