The morning sun had not yet reached its zenith when Bái Wǎn stopped outside the doors of the main hall of the bamboo pavilion.
The twenty-two-year-old girl was squeezing her right thumb, where the darkened silver ring rested heavy with all the knowledge stolen from her sect. Her heart hammered erratically. She wanted to cross the threshold. She wanted to offer her own life. But the words locked in her throat, her inexperience terrorizing her courage. How did a common mortal ask to be unmade and remade by a god?
An inexplicably cold breeze, perfumed with sandalwood, grazed the back of her neck.
"Fear hardens the soil, little lotus." The velvety voice floated just behind her ear, sweet and laden with an intoxicating venom.
Bái Wǎn choked, spinning around abruptly. Yù Qíng was there, her bare feet hovering millimeters above the wooden floor, the navy blue dress impeccable. Just behind the priestess, Mò Yán waited in silence, her silver-gray robe straining against her full chest, her scarlet eyes observing the novice with a strict complicity.
"I... I don't know what to say to him, my Lady," Bái Wǎn whispered, lowering her face, her fingers trembling. "How do I offer my Sea of Qi?"
Yù Qíng's cold, pale fingers touched the girl's chin, lifting it with a gentle dominance.
"You don't offer only your Qi, Bái Wǎn. You offer your end and your beginning," the goddess in blue instructed, her voice dropping to a soft, doctrinal register, planting exactly the right seeds in the girl's fragile mind. "Don't ask to be taught. My husband is not a sect master. Tell him you no longer want the dust. Tell him you wish to break your dogmas. Ask to belong to our household's altar."
Bái Wǎn swallowed. Those words sounded dense and heavy, like a one-way oath. But the Yin in her belly, which had been throbbing since the night before, agreed with every syllable. She nodded, her brown eyes taking on the blind gleam of determination.
The sliding door opened with a dry crack.
Bái Wǎn crossed the threshold, breathless. She stopped in the center of the hall and raised her right hand. The darkened silver ring blazed, and an avalanche of thousands of jade scrolls, millennia-old bone tablets, and silk books cascaded onto the wooden floor, raising a cloud of ancient dust.
The girl did not look at the treasure. Her irises were fixed on the man in the charcoal-gray robe reclining in the lounger.
Bái Wǎn's knees gave out. She dropped onto her own heels, her white robe crumpling against her trembling legs.
"I no longer want the dust, my Lord." Bái Wǎn's melodious voice echoed through the hall, trembling but unmistakably hungry. Cold sweat trickled down her round face. "My body is still locked inside the glass box my grandfather built. Transform me. Break my dogmas. I want to be on the other side. I want to belong to your altar."
The silence fell heavy over the bamboo pavilion.
Zhì Yuǎn stopped tracing the invisible wind currents. He raised his unfathomable eyes and fixed his gaze on the kneeling girl. He absorbed the weight of her words: dogmas, belong to the altar, dust.
The man in black blinked slowly. The abyssal emptiness of his gaze shifted away from Bái Wǎn for a second, rising above the girl's head until it found the outer corridor. There, leaning gracefully against the doorframe, Yù Qíng was taking a sip of tea from her porcelain cup, displaying the most innocent, sweet, and shamelessly sadistic smile in the world. Beside her, Mò Yán kept her head lowered in a flawless servant's posture, though the diplomat's pointed ears were completely red.
A long, resigned sigh, laden with a purely marital exhaustion, escaped Zhì Yuǎn's lips. His gaze crossed the first wife's in a silent, lethal exchange. You can't spend a single morning without turning people into a cult of fanatics, can you?
Yù Qíng simply blinked slowly at him, sipping her tea.
A quiet, genuine warmth of amusement heated the darkness in the god's eyes. He accepted the diseased nature of his family. Turning his attention back to the prostrated girl awaiting his judgment, Zhì Yuǎn rose from the wood.
The man's massive presence crushed the air of the pavilion as he walked toward her. Zhì Yuǎn stopped, the tip of his dark boot touching the girl's knees. He extended his large, calloused hand, his long fingers gripping Bái Wǎn's trembling chin and tilting her face upward.
"I do not turn away roots that beg for rain." His deep, unshakeable voice vibrated directly against the young woman's bones.
He leaned in. The scent of ozone and pure musk swallowed Bái Wǎn's oxygen. Zhì Yuǎn's mouth crushed her lips without any warning. The soft, full texture yielded instantly beneath his teeth, which bit down on the girl's lower lip with a slow, predatory possessiveness, claiming her flesh.
Bái Wǎn gasped against his mouth, her heart hammering desperately against her ribs, feeling the overwhelming heat invade her breathing. It was not a kiss of unbridled lust; it was a seal of possession, a contract branded in fire onto the novice's skin.
When he pulled his face back, her naturally full lips were intensely red, swollen, and shining with saliva, silently begging for more. The young woman's brown irises floated in a blind devotion.
"Your sect's path tries to lock an ocean inside a glass cup," Zhì Yuǎn murmured, his Wisdom mapping the girl's blockages. "We need to throw your pores wide open to the world before I can fill you. We will do it slowly."
He slid his hand to the back of her neck, his fingers threading into the short strands of her hair. Primordial Qi — golden and scalding — flowed from his palm directly into the base of the girl's spine.
Zhì Yuǎn's internal massage was of a surgical and violent precision. The heat drowned Bái Wǎn's nerves in a sea of endorphins. Millions of pores locked in her skin were forced open simultaneously, tearing through the seal of mortality.
Bái Wǎn arched her back, her small breasts rising beneath the robe. A long, drawn-out, shamefully loud moan escaped her throat as the heat melted the tension from her muscles. She collapsed against his legs, breathless, her body trembling as the mountain's heavy Qi began to enter freely through her skin, meeting no resistance whatsoever.
But perfection demands cleanliness.
Seconds after the intoxicating pleasure, Bái Wǎn's skin began to expel a thick, dark, foul-smelling slime. The biological residue of twenty-two years of stagnation was being violently purged from her organs and blood.
Before the cadaverous stench could foul the pavilion's air and Zhì Yuǎn's impeccable boots, a silver-gray figure moved with extreme efficiency.
Mò Yán seized Bái Wǎn by the shoulders. The diplomat's scarlet irises gleamed with the agility of someone who knew this purifying humiliation intimately.
"Come. Our husband does not need to breathe your rotten mortality," Mò Yán ordered, hauling the dazed girl upright and dragging her toward the back bathroom before the bulk of the slime could hit the floor.
---
Approximately half an hour later, the sliding door opened softly.
Bái Wǎn returned. The white robe was perfectly clean. Her frame remained slender and small, delicate compared to the colossal voluptuousness of Mò Yán or Yù Méi. But the mundane dust had been washed away forever.
Her skin was radiant. Clear, dewy, and flawless, it shone with a tone of translucent porcelain that radiated an untameable vitality. Her hair, previously a dull brown, had taken on a rich, vivid shade of reddish-brown, falling over her shoulders with the texture of the purest silk. The round face had been subtly sculpted by the purification, illuminated by the full, red, moist lips that dominated her features, exuding a docile and irresistibly inviting beauty. The library mouse had bloomed.
Zhì Yuǎn assessed the transformation. The soil was perfectly prepared.
"The sun has not yet reached the middle of the sky," Zhì Yuǎn observed, his unfathomable gaze shifting to the horizon beyond the pavilion doors, where clouds covered the mountain. The time for academic harvest was over. "The lock awaits us."
He walked outside. Yù Qíng, Yù Méi, and Mò Yán followed in silence, with Bái Wǎn close behind.
They walked the isolated trails at the base of the central peak. The destination was not a majestic palace, but a natural, irregular fissure carved into the damp, dark rock. It was the sealed portal to the Secret Realm of Stagnant Water. The air around the opening smelled of sludge and rotting Qi.
Blocking the entrance to the fissure, a living mountain of green scales and stone carapace lay at rest.
The Heavy-Water Dragon Turtle. The ancestral beast, fed by generations of Hegemony patriarchs, opened its reptilian eyes at the approach. The massive monster raised its scaly neck.
The creature's Qi distorted the very gravity of the trail. An invisible domain of Stagnant Water expanded outward, projecting an atmospheric pressure designed to crush the bones of any intruder. The stone ground cracked beneath the invisible ocean.
Zhì Yuǎn did not so much as slow his stride.
Just behind him, a sharp crack of bone cut through the damp air.
Yù Méi rolled her neck. The youngest wore her utilitarian dark-gold robe with the opaque veil over her face, but her almond-shaped eyes blazed with pure, incandescent predatory euphoria.
"Finally," Yù Méi growled, her voice guttural and trembling with ecstasy, her hyper-dense muscles tensing beneath the heavy silk. "A door I can break."
The Dragon Turtle roared. The pressure of the water surged forward like a lethal tidal wave.
Yù Méi drew no weapons. She did not even conjure a nullification technique. The Brutal Blade stepped forward, wading into the invisible domain as though walking against a light breeze. Her right arm drew back, and she threw a single, dry, purely casual punch directly at the center of the beast's colossal shell.
The Sea of Gold in the warrior's lower abdomen pulsed with pure fury. The Law of Rupture seeped into the knuckles and penetrated matter.
CRUNCH. SPLAT.
The millennia-old carapace simply disintegrated from the inside out. The mountain of scales exploded into a torrential downpour of dark blood, boiling viscera, and powdered bone. The legendary and invincible guardian beast of the sect became a patty of red flesh and mud that painted the entrance rocks in a single heartbeat.
Bái Wǎn went still. A single drop of dark blood splashed and trickled down her freshly purified cheek.
The untouchable legend she had read about in dozens of revered tomes had been turned into a blood mist with a bored punch. The girl with the reddish-brown hair looked at the woman in gold. The moral dread was swallowed instantly by a hypnotic adoration of that profane power.
Yù Méi shook her hand, flicking a piece of smoking cartilage from her fingers, and smiled broadly behind the black veil.
"The welcome mat was dirty, husband. But the path is clear now," the warrior announced, stepping aside with brute reverence.
Zhì Yuǎn nodded. His black cape billowed as he crossed the pool of blood and plunged into the dimensional void of the Secret Realm, followed closely by the inseparable shadows of his calamities.