"Lirae!" one of the aunts gasped, clutching her chest. "What is this? What have you done?!" Even the royal elders, who had centuries of cultivation behind them, felt their vitality ebbing with every pulse of her aura.
Another staggered back. "She's… draining us. Just by standing there!"
The patriarch snarled, "You dare threaten your elders? You dare use corruption-born power against the blood that raised you?"
Damon's poison was already seeping into the air, invisible, silent, numbing. Combined with Lirae's aura, the royal family found themselves trapped in a suffocating pressure that they had never imagined could come from the girl they once dismissed as fragile and useless.
The patriarch's composure finally cracked. "Impossible… The Legacy should not have allowed this! That… thing… should belong to the heir of the family, not-"
