The outer corridor of the pavilion was plunged in cold darkness. The night wind of the mountain howled beyond the rice paper windows, but inside the house, the silence was so thick that Bái Wǎn could hear the beating of her own heart.
The twenty-two-year-old girl was kneeling on the bamboo floor, a few inches from the heavy solid cedar double doors. Beside her knees, a copper basin of boiling water cooled slowly, accompanied by a pile of pristine white towels.
Bái Wǎn kept her hands flat against her own thighs, her posture perfectly straight. She had read the classics on the conduct of an impeccable servant. She believed her role there would be simply to wait, in silence, until the guests finished discussing politics, exchanging martial knowledge, or meditating.
But the books in her grandfather's libraries had not prepared her for what was about to happen.
Crack.
The sound was low, like glass fracturing under pressure.
Bái Wǎn blinked, lifting her face in the dim light. The runic lines carved into the frame of the double doors — sonic dampening and spatial isolation matrices forged by 3rd Saint Pillar cultivators — glowed with a sickly blue hue. In the next second, the runes simply burst, dissolving into silver dust that rained down over the wood.
The sect's protective matrices had not been attacked. They had simply collapsed, unable to contain the atmospheric weight and the colossal Yang density that had begun to expand on the other side of the wall.
With the breaking of the seal, the air in the corridor changed brutally.
The icy mountain breeze was swallowed whole. A wave of thick, heavy, humid heat seeped under the door and through the cracks in the cedar wood, striking Bái Wǎn directly in the face.
The young scholar gasped. The smell was nothing like the incense or fresh ink she was accustomed to. It was a dense, intoxicating mixture of pure ozone, sandalwood, and a musky, sweetish odor so potent it made her head spin on the spot.
And then came the sounds.
There was no serene silence of meditation. What crossed the cedar doors was a wet, deafening impact of flesh colliding against flesh.
Slap. Slap. Slap.
The solid wood bed inside the chamber groaned with a frightening violence, slamming against the wall in a primitive, heavy, relentless rhythm. Bái Wǎn's large brown eyes went wide, her breath locking in her throat.
"More... just tear it off, husband..." A guttural, breathless voice bled through the wood. Bái Wǎn recognized the timbre. It was the woman in the golden dress — the same one who had shattered stones with a kick in the courtyard. But now, her carnivorous ferocity was laced with a ragged, near-desperate sob. "Break everything... don't stop... ahhh!"
Another brutal impact made the floor tremble beneath Bái Wǎn's knees.
The common girl's mind short-circuited. The scrolls described Dual Cultivation as a harmonious exchange of energies, seated in a lotus position. What she was hearing sounded like a massacre being carried out in the dark.
"Your seed... my heaven..." A second voice rose over the chaos, velvety, poetic, but melted into a submissive, devoted lust so profound it made the hair on Bái Wǎn's arms stand on end. It was the woman in blue. The gentle and terrifying goddess. "Sink your roots... pour your weight into our soil... mnnn..."
Slap! Slap!
"On your knees, Yán." The male voice cut through the chamber's sonic chaos. Deep, laconic, unshakeable. A low thunder that carried no effort, only a lethargic and absolute authority.
Bái Wǎn pressed her hands against her own stomach. The sound of his voice, even muffled by the door, carried the same cosmic resonance that, hours earlier, had paused death inside her grandfather's heart.
"Y-Yes, husband... ahhn... yes..." The white-haired diplomat's voice stuttered, the strict pride of the woman who wore suffocating collars crumbling into a thin, broken cry of pure pleasure and surrender. "Fill me... destroy my discipline, my heaven... please..."
Bái Wǎn's breathing accelerated until it became a loud hiss in the empty corridor.
The Perfect Sea of Qi in the girl's belly — which had flowed for twenty-two years, calm and unshakeable as an untouched lake — recognized the invisible storm leaking through those cracks. The Primordial Qi being forged on the other side of the wall, born from the extreme grinding of Zhì Yuǎn's infinite Yang against his wives' pure Yin, had saturated the oxygen in the corridor.
Bái Wǎn breathed that air in. And her biology betrayed her.
A feverish, unfamiliar heat exploded at the center of her abdomen. Her Sea of Qi began to boil. The calm fluidity transformed into a violent gravitational pull, instinctively imploring to be dragged toward the pulsing core in that room.
What is this?, her mind screamed, her teeth digging into her lower lip to keep from making a sound. What is happening to my body?!
She did not understand lust. She did not know how to name what sex was, or what the forging of the flesh meant. To her, that thick heat was a terrifying radiation. A heavy, warm, entirely alien wetness began to accumulate between her thighs, soaking the intimate fabric with a speed that horrified her.
The friction on the other side of the door accelerated. The sound of brutal thrusts became a continuous storm, blending with the muffled, overlapping cries of three women being carried beyond the limits of sensory exhaustion.
"AHHH! ZHÌ YUǍN! I'M COMING!" Yù Méi's strangled scream tore through the night.
The resonance of that climax sent a shockwave of raw energy rippling outward. Primordial Qi spread through the wooden door — invisible, but dense as mercury — and struck Bái Wǎn directly in the chest.
The girl couldn't hold on.
Her Perfect Sea erupted into simultaneous boiling. Without a single finger touching her skin, without her even understanding the nature of what she was feeling, Bái Wǎn's inexperienced body arched violently backward in the dark corridor.
The white towel slipped from her fingers, falling into the copper basin with a faint splash.
Her brown eyes rolled back. Her small nails scraped desperately at the bamboo floor. Her lower abdomen contracted in painful, overwhelming spasms, releasing a torrent of thin nectar that ran warm down her own thighs and dripped onto the wooden floor.
Bái Wǎn smothered her own climax by grinding her face into the sleeve of her robe, weeping copiously as the thermal shock of the phantom pleasure left her breathless, blind, and pathetically curled in the dark.
The sheer act of breathing the same air as that man had shattered the purity of her body.
On the other side of the cedar door, the sound of flesh striking flesh did not diminish. The rhythm simply resumed — merciless, continuous — the Hunger of that universe still demanding matter, while the new servant, thrown on the cold corridor floor, realized with absolute biological terror that her true submission lay not in her bent knees, but in the inevitable boiling of her own insides.
---
The echo of her biological submission still vibrated in the corridor's planks.
Bái Wǎn remained on the bamboo floor, her knees drawn up against her own chest. Her breath came in short, desperate gasps. The white robe, once impeccably clean, was crumpled and damp. Cold sweat plastered the brown strands of hair to her forehead, and the shame of having her own body shattered by nothing more than the invisible resonance of that room made her tremble without end.
She pressed her thighs together. The warm, thick wetness staining her intimate skin was irrefutable proof that the libraries and the scrolls had lied. Cultivation was not a journey of peace and isolated purity. The true foundation of the world smelled of sweat, musk, and pure domination.
The sound of brutal thrusts on the other side of the cedar wall had ceased a few minutes ago, replaced by a dense silence laden with a heavy static charge.
Click.
The latch on the double door moved.
Bái Wǎn choked, trying to pull herself upright, dragging herself pathetically backward until her back struck the corridor wall. She lowered her head, her eyes fixed on the wooden floor, terrified at the possibility of meeting the fury of that man's gaze.
But the one who crossed the threshold was not the god in the charcoal-gray robe.
The door slid open just enough for a slender figure to pass through, closing immediately afterward with a muffled thud that locked the beast inside.
Yù Qíng stood in the dimness of the corridor. The goddess was not wearing her multiple layers of navy blue silk. She was wrapped only in a thin, dark silk robe, loosely tied at the waist. The priestess's pale, flawless skin glowed faintly in the weak moonlight, entirely bathed in a thick sheen of feverish sweat.
The scent that poured from the woman when the door opened hit Bái Wǎn like a fist to the face. It was an essence saturated with pure Primordial energy — the sweet, intoxicating odor of a female who had been taken beyond every biological limit of exhaustion and pleasure.
Yù Qíng leaned the back of her head against the wooden door, releasing a long, trembling, hoarse sigh. The priestess's black eyes were veiled by a blind torpor, her porcelain legs wavering slightly beneath the hem of the robe.
"My heaven's storm consumes the very last breath of air..." Yù Qíng murmured, her voice dropping to a drawling, languid, scandalously satisfied register. The woman in blue trailed the tips of her pale fingers along her own damp collarbone. "I needed the mountain wind to cool the fever of my skin before returning to that altar."
Bái Wǎn dared not raise her face, but her heart was pounding so loudly it seemed to fill the corridor. Yù Qíng's explanation sounded plausible to the girl's innocent ears. After all, the young scholar had barely survived the heat leaking through the cracks; being at the epicenter of that volcano must have been excruciating.
But Bái Wǎn lacked the Wisdom to read the game. She could not see that the shadowed goddess adored every drop of that sweat and essence covering her. The "exhaustion" was real, but the exit from the room had been perfectly calculated. Yù Qíng's instinct had sensed the girl's collapse and phantom climax in the corridor, and the priestess had not stepped out to cool herself — she had stepped out to plant her corruption directly into that newly broken root.
Sliding along the wall, Yù Qíng walked barefoot toward the curled-up girl.
The priestess did not float. She allowed her tired knees to bend until she sat on the bamboo floor, face to face with Bái Wǎn. The woman's black, unfathomable eyes descended, mapping the heaving chest, the feverish flush on the servant's round cheeks, and the damp tension between her legs.
A poetic, sadistic, and incredibly welcoming smile curved Yù Qíng's swollen, red lips.
"The dry earth trembled before the first drop of rain even fell." Yù Qíng's velvet voice floated in the darkness, breaking the silence. "You don't need to hide your face from me, little lotus. Your Perfect Sea of Qi recognized the weight of a true heaven. What you felt just now was not a weakness. It was your own body begging to be tilled."
Bái Wǎn sobbed softly, pressing her arms around her knees, her face burning in absolute shame.
"I... I didn't mean to..." the girl's voice came out thin, high-pitched, and trembling, denying her own biology. "The scrolls... the balance of the Dao... I never... I don't know what happened to me, my Lady..."
Yù Qíng's cold, pale hand reached forward.
The priestess's fingers touched Bái Wǎn's sweaty chin softly, lifting the girl's face with an irresistible pressure, forcing her to meet the immensity of that black gaze.
"The scrolls your grandfather forced you to read are full of dead ash, Bái Wǎn." Yù Qíng's tone was a spell of poisonous sweetness, seeping directly into the novice's eardrums. "They teach mortals to flee from fire, to lock away their own emotions, and to crystallize the soul out of sheer terror of being burned by the vastness of the universe. But stagnation is the coffin of cowards."
Yù Qíng leaned slightly forward. The dark robe loosened, and the intoxicating scent of friction and Zhì Yuǎn's hyper-dense Yang invaded Bái Wǎn's pores, making the girl's belly contract in a painful, involuntary spasm.
"The true foundation of cultivation is not born from the silence of a library. It is born from chaos," Yù Qíng whispered, her eyes blazing with a fanatical, feverish devotion. "It is born when my husband's infinite Yang collides with our Yin. The friction you heard, the impact that crushed my flesh against the sheets... that was not a mere carnal indulgence. That is a furnace. The mill where the limits of mortality are shattered and converted into the most absolute perfection."
Bái Wǎn's brown irises went wide. Her academic mind attempted to process the shock. The magnitude of the power that man wielded did not come from static meditation? It came from... that?
"The pleasure and pain that his weight imposes on us are not a punishment. They are the chisel that sculpts our immortality," Yù Qíng continued, her lips brushing Bái Wǎn's cheek. The priestess's hand descended, pressing flat against the girl's trembling abdomen, right above where her Perfect Sea pulsed. "Your womb wept and melted tonight simply from breathing the dust of his storm. Imagine, little flower... what would happen if his root sank directly to the bottom of your ocean?"
The shiver that whipped down Bái Wǎn's spine was so violent that she let her head fall back against the wall. A new wave of warm wetness seeped between her thighs. The girl's fertile, untouched imagination painted the scene vividly: the colossal weight of that man pinning her against the planks, the pain of her purity being broken fusing with a blind ecstasy that would make her forget her own name.
"I... my body would tear apart..." Bái Wǎn choked, her voice hoarse, her eyes losing focus before the seduction of that lethal promise.
"Your mortal ego would tear apart," Yù Qíng corrected, the smile expanding into pure possessive, doctrinal glory. "The pain of being opened by him is only the seed casing splitting. After the pain, Bái Wǎn... after he pours his universe inside your void and purifies your flesh with his own fire... what remains is eternity."
Yù Qíng withdrew her hand, adjusting the robe with indolent ease, letting the words settle and rot away what remained of the orthodox academy's morality.
"He has not taken you yet because your body is like a fragile, virgin crystal. He respects it too much to shatter it before you beg for it yourself," the priestess observed, rising from the floor with a feline grace, her feet already hovering millimeters above the wood, the vitality of her 2nd Transcendent Stage masking her former exhaustion.
The woman in blue turned her face toward the heavy cedar doors. Her gaze darkened, the hunger that never truly sated returning to her own blind devotion.
"He can take that pure foundation of yours and transform it into a true goddess, little flower. He can rewrite your very veins and grant you a dominion that your pathetic grandfather never dreamed of reaching," Yù Qíng's voice dropped to a soft register, casting the final rope for the girl to hang herself with willingly. "But the sun does not descend to the bottom of a well unless the water allows it. Keep boiling our water in the dark and cleaning our floors. When despair and your own lust make you understand that the only salvation for your flesh is to belong to my heaven... then the doors of our house will open for you."
Without looking back, Yù Qíng slid the cedar double door open just enough to pass through.
Before the wood closed, the sound of a low, possessive, unmistakably hungry growl echoed from inside the room, and the dense thud of a body being yanked violently back against the mattress reached Bái Wǎn's ears. The latch clicked shut, sealing the symphony of flesh and Yù Qíng's desperate moans back inside the furnace.
In the frozen corridor, Bái Wǎn was left alone.
The twenty-two-year-old girl remained leaning against the wall, her chest heaving in spasms. She stared at the locked door, the couple's scent still thick in the air. The woman in blue's words throbbed in her mind, competing with the obscene pulsing of her own insides.
Her academic innocence had been beheaded. Her fear of the sect's old monsters had vanished. All that remained in Bái Wǎn's mind was the abyss of that man — and the biological certainty that, sooner or later, she would throw herself to her knees and beg him to consume her down to the very last drop of her soul.