The dimensional rift swallowed all five and snapped shut with a dry crack, severing the smell of blood and crushed viscera that painted the entrance of the cave.
On the other side of the veil, the silence was absolute.
Bái Wǎn blinked, her lungs heaving violently as she drew in air. The young woman's blood ran faster, warming her cheeks. The oxygen there was no common air; it was a thick, sweetish mist, saturated with a humidity so dense it could almost be chewed.
Before them, the Secret Realm of Stagnant Water unfolded in an improbable vastness. The sky held no sun or stars, shining instead with a perpetual turquoise vault. Islands of emerald earth and white rock drifted slowly through space, defying gravity. From them, waterfalls of the purest water plunged into the infinite, transforming into liquid ribbons that rose and fell along the horizon like the veins of a gigantic living organism.
Bái Wǎn took a trembling step forward, her large brown eyes brimming. The legend she had spent her entire childhood reading in old scrolls was taking shape before her.
"It's real..." the girl whispered, stretching out her hand to try to touch a floating drop of dew that drifted past her face.
The drop never reached her fingers.
A dull thud of a leather boot against immaculate grass broke the trance. Yù Méi strode past the girl with heavy steps, the dark-gold silk swaying as the warrior's almond-shaped eyes swept the floating islands with profound boredom.
"What a hellish bore," Yù Méi muttered, kicking a white jade stone that rolled off into the abyss and vanished into the clouds below. The youngest crossed her arms, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "So much useless water and not a single large creature for me to hit. There aren't even guards hiding in the trees. Just undergrowth and waterfalls."
A few steps away, Mò Yán adjusted the revealing crossed collar of her Hanfu. The diplomat did not allow herself to be swept away by the paradise's aesthetics. Her scarlet irises fixed on the absurd density of the water ribbons cutting across the sky. The pale, exposed valley of her generous neckline took on an immediate feverish pink hue; she knew perfectly well the brutal friction that elemental Qi would cause in the man at her side come the time of the forging.
Yù Qíng, anchored three millimeters above the grass by the Lotus of the Void, glided until she stopped beside Zhì Yuǎn. The woman in blue tilted her head, her cold fingers grazing the sleeve of her husband's charcoal-gray robe.
"A pretty puddle that the old men of the mountain locked away in their backyard, my love," Yù Qíng murmured, a sweet smile laden with pure utilitarianism blooming on her lips. "Still water is clean, but it doesn't quench the thirst of those who drink storms. Let's drain this land."
Zhì Yuǎn did not respond immediately. The Hunger burning in the depths of his abdomen remained silent.
The man in the dark robe walked slowly to the edge of the grassy abyss. The lethargic void in his eyes dissipated. The calm, genuinely marveled brightness took over. He raised his hand and allowed one of the floating water ribbons to flow between his calloused fingers. The water was cold, pure, and carried a structure far too ancient to belong to this millennium.
"They didn't build this, Qíng." Zhì Yuǎn's deep voice resonated, stripped of all arrogance, sounding purely like the reverence of someone admiring a work of art.
He turned his face. His dark gaze found Bái Wǎn's brown eyes, which still clung to her own arms.
"The mortals of your lineage wouldn't have had the weight necessary to weave gravity in this way, Bái Wǎn," Zhì Yuǎn instructed, his tone mild and serene. He pointed toward the floating islands. "This place is a fragment of a superior world that shattered in the past. Your ancestors merely stumbled upon this magnificent ruin and put a padlock on the door."
Bái Wǎn swallowed, absorbing every word.
"And since their crystal souls would have evaporated had they tried to swallow this density all at once, they would only come here once every millennium, collect a few drops with trembling hands, and flee back to the safety of the mountain," he continued.
Zhì Yuǎn closed his hand, feeling the water's intent drain between the knuckles of his fingers. He looked at the perfect dance of the inverted waterfalls. The way the Law of Water and the Law of Space intertwined to keep the grass alive and the rocks suspended was of a breathtaking fluidity.
"Look at the stitching of these waterfalls. It is a flawless equilibrium," the god murmured, his voice dropping to a thick, contemplative timbre, honoring the raw nature of the Dao present there. "A perfect painting of the universe."
He opened his hand, letting the moisture drip onto the grass.
"But the canvas is rotting in the dark," Zhì Yuǎn observed. The serenity in his eyes darkened suddenly. "And I am going to swallow the paint."
His Inner Universe turned.
There was no thunderclap. No flash of light, no techniques whispered into the air. Reality did not explode; it was violently dragged backward. The gravitational pull of an entire cosmos, meticulously contained until that very second, was released all at once upon the fragile pocket dimension.
The air vanished from Bái Wǎn's lungs. The round-faced girl dropped to her knees, her hands clutching her own throat, unable to breathe.
The turquoise sky above them cracked with a sharp, terrifying sound of glass being split clean in two.
The nearest floating lake — holding tens of thousands of tons of crystalline water — stopped flowing. In one heartbeat, the liquid mass trembled. In the next, the entire lake was sucked upward through the air, stretching into a vertical pillar that shot directly toward Zhì Yuǎn's outstretched palm.
The water did not strike his skin. Centimeters from the man's warm flesh, the ocean was disintegrated into pure elemental runes, converted into cosmic energy that silently vanished into the darkness of his body.
Crack. Riiip.
The islands of emerald earth began to crumble. Without the Absolute Water to lubricate the spatial gears of that dead dimension, the floating rocks lost their anchor. Entire mountains began to plunge into the abyss, colliding with one another and turning into white dust.
Bái Wǎn scrambled backward in desperation, her short nails scratching at the earth that shook hysterically beneath her. The girl's brown irises reflected the end of a world. The natural wonder of her sect was being drunk in colossal gulps. The centuries-old trees withered and crumbled to ash as the vital force of the realm was drained into the center of a single man's abdomen.
Mò Yán panted heavily. The chaotic wind of destruction pulled at her heavy black skirt and strained the white silk of her purest corpse against her full breasts. The flush on her pale neck spread down the valley of her neckline. She pressed her thighs together beneath the fabric, her knees trembling as the deep Yin of her womb responded with a raw, animalistic lust at witnessing that man's thirst for annihilation.
"Drink until the very last drop runs dry, my love..." Yù Qíng's voice floated out, intoxicated and drawn, cradled by a blind devotion. The priestess did not retreat to flee the gale; she opened her arms, smiling sweetly as paradise collapsed around her.
The pocket realm shrank.
The edges of the cracked sky curved inward. The pressure of Zhì Yuǎn's void was literally bending the dimension's extremities, crushing the fabric of space like someone crumpling a sheet of paper.
In less than three minutes, the sanctuary had vanished.
Where there had been skies, lakes, and the untouched spectacle of the universe, only a black, inhospitable, and glacial vacuum remained. The grass beneath Bái Wǎn's knees turned to dark dust. The air became thin and sterile. The vast dimension had been reduced to a spatial bubble of a few meters, sustained solely by the will of the man in the charcoal-gray robe so that they would not fall into nothingness.
Zhì Yuǎn lowered his hand.
The man's broad chest rose and fell slowly. A deep, dense sigh escaped his lips. The swallowed ocean had not sated the infinite Hunger, but it injected a formidable brightness into his irises.
Yet the dimension had not been entirely devoured.
At the center of the dead air, exactly two palms from Zhì Yuǎn's face, something remained. A single drop of liquid.
It was not made of common water. It was the size of a fingernail, dense as lead, pulsing with a deep-blue light that seemed to contain the mass of the entire annihilated ocean. The ambient temperature plummeted. The lethal cold that the small sphere radiated made the air around it hiss in physical protest.
Zhì Yuǎn's Wisdom dissected it instantly. The crystallized essence that had kept the law of that space flowing since the rupture of the superior world.
"The Primordial Water Drop," the man murmured, his voice echoing in the absolute silence of the void.
He did not swallow it. The Universe he was forging demanded vast fuels, and that raw concentrate had a far more urgent purpose. Instead, he trapped the small blue sphere between his thumb and forefinger.
Zhì Yuǎn turned his face slowly. His abyssal eyes descended upon the figure of the girl who remained sprawled in the gray dust of what had once been her grandfather's pride.
Bái Wǎn trembled uncontrollably. The young woman hugged her own arms, her round, sweaty face turned toward him. This invader's respect for that world had been genuine and academic, and his predation, in the next moment, frighteningly relentless.
Zhì Yuǎn took a step toward the former scholar, the drop of raw power glinting between his fingers. The god's shadow covered the girl's curled body, marking the burial of her old paper dogmas and the excruciating beginning of her biological forging.