The hall was silent.
Where Ji Yunxi had stood moments ago, there was nothing but air—no trace of her, no shadow, not even a whisper of presence. She was simply… gone.
Mo Liancheng's outstretched hand trembled as he stared at the space she had vanished from. His usually cold, unshakable expression fractured. His breathing turned ragged, his chest heaving as though he had been stabbed straight through.
"She was right here…" His voice was hoarse, almost disbelieving. "She was just… here…"
Around him, whispers rose among the crowd.
"What just happened?""Did she… disappear?""Is it some trick?"
None of them mattered. The world itself seemed muted, irrelevant, compared to the gaping void in his chest.
Mo Liancheng turned slowly, his gaze falling on Lin Xi, who still stood on stage, pale and trembling. The audience's condemnation still burned against her, but at that moment, she looked less like a villain and more like a pitiful insect.
His eyes narrowed. The pressure of his aura rolled through the hall like a storm. People gasped, stepping back instinctively, as though facing a predator at the peak of its fury.
"You," Mo Liancheng's voice was like ice cracking across a frozen lake, "are not worth even a fraction of her shadow. And yet you dared to harm her."
Lin Xi's legs gave out beneath her. "I—I didn't—"
"Silence." The word cut like a blade. He didn't need to strike her. His presence alone was suffocating enough to crush her.
But then he looked back at the empty space again, and all his sharpness seemed to collapse into silence.
He lowered himself slowly to his knees, fingers brushing the cold floor where she had stood. For the first time, the untouchable, powerful Mo Liancheng looked utterly human—vulnerable, wounded.
"Ji Yunxi…" he whispered her name as though it were both a prayer and a curse. "No matter where you've gone… even if it's across worlds, across lifetimes—I'll find you."
The hall remained still. Not one person dared to speak. For they all understood one thing in that moment—The most dangerous man they had ever seen had lost the only person who mattered to him.
And when such a man decides to chase after something… nothing in heaven or earth could stop him.