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Landon stood rooted to the spot, utterly dumbfounded. He felt an immense disconnect between his perception of reality and reality itself. A sense of unreality filled his mind.

Why was it that the girl had merely raised her hand slightly, yet his subordinates—the black-robed men—had disappeared one after another? There had been no fluctuation of spiritual energy. No movement signaling an attack. They had not even screamed.

With nothing more than a soft “puff,” black flames had flickered for an instant, and they had vanished. Not a single trace had been left behind. It was as though a street performer had just performed one of those tricks where a person seemingly vanished into thin air.

In an instant, the girl had made hundreds of his subordinates disappear. Landon could not understand it, much less accept it. Because even with his current strength in the Saint realm, he could not begin to imagine how something like this could possibly be accomplished.

So, he could only keep searching within himself for a *reasonable,correct answer*.

“An illusion! This has to be an illusion! You used that same trick from earlier!” Landon’s expression twisted viciously, his eyes filled with murderous fury. Yet he himself did not realize that he was quietly retreating, gradually putting more distance between himself and the seemingly harmless girl before him.

“I already told you, I really don’t know any illusion magic.” Lilith found it incredibly difficult to communicate with these people. She had clearly been telling them the truth, yet they still refused to believe her, always choosing to trust their own *common sense*.

But something like *common sense* simply could not be applied to her.

“Forget it. I won’t waste any more time explaining.” Lilith flexed her fingers and worked her joints, the crisp sound of cracking knuckles coming from her hands. It looked as though she were warming up.

She looked at Landon, whose expression had grown increasingly grim, and suddenly broke into a captivating smile. “Step one, cutting off your wings, is complete. Now it’s time for step two.”

“Step two?”

“Didn’t I tell you before? I’m going to knock you down from your lofty pedestal. Really… I mean knock you down with my fists.”

The moment she finished speaking, Landon’s alarm bells went off. It was as though some terrifying monster were about to burst from the girl’s body like a creature breaking free from its cocoon. Yet the girl still appeared completely unchanged.

“Go to hell!” Landon finally could not bear the terrifying sense of danger any longer. Seizing the initiative, he struck out with a palm toward Lilith. It was a full-powered strike from a Saint-realm expert.

The space before him visibly caved inward, forming a transparent depression. The palm crossed the short distance between them and struck Lilith squarely in the chest. The resulting boom was like a thunderclap.

Lilith did not resist in the slightest, nor did she dodge. She simply allowed the palm strike to send her flying as violently as though she were nothing more than a mosquito being swatted. Her petite figure instantly became like a rag doll, crashing through one residential building after another.

Walls shattered one after another, while countless houses were caught in the terrifying shockwave and reduced to rubble. Dust billowed everywhere, resembling the morning mist.

“Little girl!”
“Jasmine!”

Daoist Kumu and Lauren both instinctively cried out in alarm.

“Ha… ha… As expected, it was nothing but hocus-pocus…”

Looking toward the place where the dust had spread without a sound, Landon once again revealed a vicious smile. He was breathing heavily, but his excitement was impossible to conceal.

He was certain that his palm had struck its target. He was also certain that even a Saint-realm expert would die after taking the full force of that attack! Therefore, there was no way that little girl could possibly have survived!

“I’ve been thinking about something this whole time.”

The excitement on Landon’s face suddenly froze. Even Daoist Kumu revealed a look of astonishment.

“How could I make you die a little more slowly, and make it a little more painful?”

When that voice rang out, Landon felt as though all the blood in his body were flowing backward. He looked toward the center of the cloud of dust and rasped, “That’s impossible. You took that attack head-on. There’s no way you could be completely unharmed. Even if you didn’t die… even if you didn’t die, you should at least be seriously injured. There’s no way you could stand back up.”

“I’m troubled, you know. Because for me, killing someone is easy, but torturing someone takes an awful lot of thought.”

Steady footsteps sounded from within the dust and smoke. A figure drew closer and closer.

“After thinking it over, I decided this form would still be the most convenient.”

Lilith stepped out from the dust and into everyone’s view. Completely unharmed. A smile on her face. Her golden hair danced in the wind, like a dazzling afterimage illuminated by the rising sun.

“You—” Looking at Lilith and sensing the aura emanating from her, Landon took a stunned step backward. He suddenly tripped over a piece of rubble and stumbled, falling onto the ground.

For a Saint-realm expert to actually trip over something was rather laughable. But no one at the scene could bring themselves to laugh. In fact, no one even noticed Landon’s embarrassing predicament. Because they were all staring at Lilith in horror.

At that golden-haired girl who appeared to have changed little on the outside, yet was completely different from before. The unsightly freckles had long since vanished from her face, leaving her features as exquisite as a porcelain doll crafted by a divine artisan.

As her bangs fluttered in the breeze, her golden pupils burned with a heat like molten iron.

Only Liana, who was so excited that she could barely even speak, showed no fear. Because she alone knew that this was the true appearance of Mountain Ghost.

“This aura… A demon? No, there’s no demonic aura. But this isn’t an aura that a human should possess, either. Just what are you?” A sudden terror descended upon Landon. It was precisely because of that terrifying aura surging from the girl.

How could that aura be described? It was like an ancient ferocious beast suddenly awakening and casting an indifferent gaze upon the mortal world. Yet strangely, it did not give off the vicious, bloodthirsty aura of a savage creature. Instead, it carried a majesty that made one instinctively want to fall to their knees.

This was not a difference in strength at the level of cultivation, but an overwhelming disparity in the level of life itself. It was like a phoenix soaring high above the heavens. It would not even need to cast a glance downward to make the sparrows in the forest below afraid to spread their wings.

Lilith felt the surging blood energy coursing through her body. This was the *mimicry* she was most familiar with. The mimicry known as the *Dragon Princess*.

“I feel more at ease like this.” After all, throughout the nine million years she had once spent in this world, this was the form in which she had existed. “Since I want you to suffer, I can’t set the power level too high, can I? Otherwise, there’d be no point in taking this form. —So I’ll use the version of myself I’m most familiar with, the me at the peak of the Ninth Stage. That should be enough to deal with you.”

Lilith murmured to herself before raising her head and looking at Landon, the Saint-realm expert whose power was clearly unstable.

“So, are you—ready?”

“Wha—” Landon had not even had time to react. In his field of vision, the golden-haired girl’s lips moved a few times. Then, without warning, the ground beneath her feet shattered as though it had been struck by a meteorite, leaving behind a massive depression.

The girl vanished into thin air. Then she reappeared. Right in front of Landon, so close that they were practically face-to-face. Only then did Landon finally hear the howling of the wind.

And mingled within that rushing wind was the sentence the girl had just spoken, arriving alongside her figure.

“Are you ready… to grit your teeth and endure it?”