The cadaverous stench of mortal purification reeked within the luxurious quarters of the Sect Master. The thick, oily black sludge—the biological residue of nineteen years of mundane flesh expelled through Yù Méi's millions of pores—stained the scarlet silk sheets.
Yù Qíng, elegant and wrapped only in her dark robe, delicately covered her nose. As the new high priestess of the cult of devotion to her husband, the priestess's black eyes gleamed with fanatical complicity and dark pride as she observed her purified sister.
"The clay has finally shed its mud," she murmured, her voice laden with lethal poetry.
Zhì Yuǎn did not bother to summon servants. Sitting naked on the edge of the bed, he formed no hand seals or recited long incantations. Instead, a tiny fragment of the Law of Destruction radiated directly from his Inner Universe. There were no flames or thunder. In a surgical, absolute erasure of reality, the black sludge, the putrid odor, and the ruined sheets simply ceased to exist.
"Take her to the water," Zhì Yuǎn ordered, his tone deep, laconic, and focused on his untouchable authority.
Yù Qíng nodded with a fluid bow. She helped the exhausted younger sister rise and silently guided her to the attached bath chamber.
The bathtub, carved directly from the mountain's black rock, was fed by a searing hot spring. Yù Méi slipped into the hot water, letting out a long, trembling sigh. The hypersensitivity left in her nerves by his lethal Yang still made every muscle throb.
Yù Qíng knelt at the edge, wetting a silk sponge, and began to wash the residual filth from her sister's shoulders with meticulous tenderness. Her movements overflowed with a sisterly affection that perfectly masked her calculating sadism. The steam‑filled room became the perfect altar for the beginning of indoctrination.
"It hurt to listen through the walls, didn't it, little flower?" Yù Qíng whispered, her voice dropping to a terrifyingly calm octave, cradled by the echo of the water.
Yù Méi's mind—always carnivorous, impatient, instinctive—tried to raise a barrier of martial pride. But her body, drowned in endorphins after the first overwhelming climax of her life, had no defenses left against her sister's psychological attack. The warrior's face flushed violently.
"It hurt," Yù Méi admitted, her voice hoarse, weeks of suppressed frustration surfacing all at once, the warm water washing away shame.
"Sound deceives the mind," Yù Qíng continued, the sponge sliding down the younger sister's nape. The priestess chose her words with lethal, botanical elegance. "The inexperienced seed thinks the storm comes only to destroy it with its lightning. But when the earth finally opens… being filled and forged by his rain was far more overwhelming than you fantasized on those sleepless nights, wasn't it?"
An electric shiver ran down Yù Méi's spine. The Brutal Blade used to reject complex analogies and poetry, focusing strictly on the literalness of breaking bones and consuming flesh. Yet her sister's analogy translated with relentless accuracy what she had just endured.
"That fire… I thought my meridians would melt," Yù Méi closed her almond eyes, surrendering to the febrile memory, letting her head fall back against the stone edge. "But when the friction purified my flesh, the pain became something I never wanted to stop."
Yù Qíng's dark, triumphant smile deepened. She knew the girl was falling perfectly into her web.
"The storm is frightening, but we are the soil privileged to sustain it. Do not debase yourself to common mortality any longer, Méi. We are the roots of the same tree now." Yù Qíng leaned in, her lips nearly touching her sister's damp ear. And then, the Qi of her dantian fluctuated. "He is our heaven."
The phrase was not merely spoken. The Law of Devotion vibrating in Yù Qíng's Sea of Qi resonated along with her voice. It was an invisible, intoxicating echo that seeped into the steam of the room, penetrating directly into the warrior's soul. The words pulled at the strings of Yù Méi's already adoring, surrendered heart, aligning the girl's mind fanatically with that new truth. Impatient rebellion was buried under an absolute need to belong and serve.
Yù Méi blinked away drops of water. The warrior felt the undeniable truth drown her pride. The carnal pact was sealed, and shared submission sounded surprisingly perfect and unbreakable.
"Yes," Yù Méi agreed, her sigh carrying the weight of blind devotion, her almond irises gleaming in trance. "Our heaven. Our husband."
The seed was planted. The High Priestess's cult had just gained its first Acolyte.
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While the ideological baptism took place in the water, Zhì Yuǎn remained in the bedroom. The god of imperturbable, silent facade closed his eyes to the mortal world and focused entirely on the engineering of his new state.
The collapse of his dantian had created a formidable Singularity: his own Inner Universe. But the stellar darkness within him was agonizingly empty, roaring with a Hunger that needed to be filled.
He began to organize the meal.
First, he isolated the residual Yin that Yù Méi had released in the brutal preliminaries—the essence extracted by the involuntary spasms as he sucked her breasts and chewed on her resistance. Casting this flow into the mill of his universe, he applied the untouchable secret of his forging: he inverted the polarity of the energy nine consecutive times.
The result of those preliminaries disappointed him. The amount of Primordial Qi generated was merely a drop compared to the oceans of energy the High Priestess Yù Qíng routinely provided him.
But then, Zhì Yuǎn guided the main course into the center of the void: the Virgin Yin.
The untouched energy that had been concentrated for nineteen years and brutally harvested in the instant he broke the girl's barrier and opened the invisible space within her belly.
When Zhì Yuǎn subjected this dense treasure to the nine consecutive inversions, the energy displayed absurd resilience. At the ninth inversion, Yù Méi's Virgin Yin exploded into a supernova of golden, absolute Primordial Qi. The pure energy yield was astonishingly a hundred times greater than one of the long, exhausting sessions with Yù Qíng. The final density remained incredibly preserved. His abyss drank the supernova with overwhelming satisfaction, calming the tremor of his void.
An ironic, crooked smile appeared on the god's lips.
The mathematics of immortality are a dark joke, Zhì Yuǎn thought, his old humor returning before that impossible calculation. If the cosmic rhythm demands this, I would have to devour every virgin woman in this universe in an exhausting crusade… and still, it would fill nothing.
The Furnace of the Flesh would keep the trinity invincible, but the raw energy of Universal Laws would be the only viable long‑term solution for his ultimate ascension.
Suddenly, a grotesque sound cut through the room.
CREAK.
The heavy, massive cedar bed, designed to support tons of rock, suddenly groaned and cracked in the middle under Zhì Yuǎn's legs.
He opened his black eyes, slightly surprised. He had made no muscular effort. He had not even emitted oppressive Qi into the external environment. But the understanding of his new state descended upon him.
His entire body was the physical boundary of a contained universe. With the brutal incorporation of the mass of Primordial Qi generated by the Virgin Yin, the stellar density of his interior began to reflect outwardly as "existential weight."
I am becoming conceptually heavier, the god realized with clinical fascination. If the accumulation of stars in my void continues to grow at this rate, I will no longer need to use Laws in battle. The mere physical weight of my body will bend the world's gravity. A casual slap will carry the crushing mass of celestial bodies.
The bathroom door unlocked.
Zhì Yuǎn raised his eyes, and for an entire second, his divine lethargy evaporated.
Yù Méi emerged from the bath chamber wrapped in a clean silk tunic. The Brutal Blade had died, and physical purification had revealed the terrifying perfection of the Refined Body.
Her hair, once a dark blonde constantly dirty with battle dust, now gleamed in a much more golden hue, falling damp and silky down her back. Her broad shoulders and dense torso, originally forged to withstand the impact of breaking bones, had compacted. Refinement had replaced brutality with a structural delicacy that did not match the girl's predatory personality at all.
She had grown another three centimeters during purification, reaching an imposing 1.69 meters in height. And, for the visual torment of any man, Yù Méi's already full breasts had swollen and grown slightly. It was a subtle difference, but enough to drastically deepen the abyss of voluptuous proportions between her and her sister's silhouette.
From head to toe, her once slightly pale skin now glowed like milky jade, exuding a damp, musky, sensual radiance as appealing and devastating as that of the High Priestess who accompanied her. Her already beautiful face had gained excessively sensual contours, her full lips flushed by the bath steam.
But it was her eyes that hooked him. Her almond eyes, once always narrow and aggressive, had gained an abyssal depth and a submissive languor that betrayed her fierce nature. It was a blind devotion, a silent invitation that dragged anyone who looked at her directly into the depths of the most profane carnal desires.
When Zhì Yuǎn turned his unfathomable face toward her, the sight of that freshly harvested Petal exuding lust struck the gravity of his universe head‑on. The void in his dantian roared, the Hunger returning in full force.
A carnal perfection begging to be broken open, the god thought, his apathy stained by lethal lust, his eyes fixed on the young woman's belly. I will break this untouched void now. I will tear her flesh until I force that dantian to be born.
The Furnace was ready for the true forging.
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