The black vacuum that had replaced the Secret Realm was glacial and suffocating, held together solely by the crushing Will radiating from the man in the charcoal-gray robe.
At the center of that bubble of dead space, Zhì Yuǎn took a step forward. The Primordial Water Drop glinted, trapped between his thumb and forefinger. The deep-blue light the small sphere exuded was the only illumination in the absolute darkness, casting distorted shadows across the face of the girl trembling in the dust.
Bái Wǎn instinctively crawled backward, her brown eyes wide. The cold emanating from that single drop was so lethal that the thin air around it hissed in protest, freezing the sweat at the young woman's temples.
"Your sect idolized your foundation, Bái Wǎn." Zhì Yuǎn's deep, unshakeable voice echoed in the silence of nothingness. He stopped before her, his massive shadow covering the scholar's curled body. "A Perfect Sea of Qi. The cleanest, most untouched glass cup your grandfather's mountain has produced in a thousand years."
The twenty-two-year-old girl swallowed. Her breath came out in small white clouds of vapor.
"M-My Lord..." she whispered, her arms hugging her own ribs in a futile attempt to ward off the cold of death.
"A perfect glass cup is still nothing but glass," the god observed, his dark, unfathomable eyes dissecting the girl's trembling biology. "If I were to pour the weight of my universe into your foundation now, your flesh would evaporate in a thousandth of a second. Mortality is a disease of limits. And the cure demands the destruction of the shell."
Zhì Yuǎn did not ask if she was ready. He offered no comfort. Kneeling with the slowness of a mountain settling into place, he pressed his left palm flat against the girl's sternum, pinning her back against the dark dust.
With his right hand, he brought the Primordial Water Drop toward her chest.
He did not force her to swallow the drop whole. The ocean compacted within it would have exploded her. Using his Wisdom, Zhì Yuǎn peeled an invisible fraction of the elemental relic's aura, fusing that absolute moisture with a thick thread of his own golden Primordial Qi.
And drove his fingers into the center of Bái Wǎn's chest.
The impact did not tear her white robe or break her skin. The energy passed through matter like a lethal phantom.
Bái Wǎn opened her mouth, but the sound died in her frozen vocal cords.
The infusion of Primordial Water blended with the fire of his golden Qi struck the scholar's heart. In the first second, the blood in Bái Wǎn's veins froze completely. The cold of the elemental abyss crystallized the vessels, paralyzing life itself. In the second that followed, Zhì Yuǎn's Primordial Qi acted as the furnace. The cosmic fire melted the mortal ice, boiling the marrow and forcing the water element to fuse directly into the structure of her bones.
Bái Wǎn's slender body arched violently on the dead ground. Her heels beat against the dark dust. The pain of having her own anatomy destroyed and rewritten at a cellular level was excruciating.
A few steps away, the shadows watched the mutation.
Mò Yán held her breath. The snow-haired diplomat pressed her thighs together beneath the heavy black skirt of her Hanfu. The feverish flush spread across the exposed skin of her generous neckline. She remembered with perfect clarity the pain of her own cellular breaching and how his fire had transformed that agony into the most obscene of luxuries.
Yù Méi, arms crossed beneath her monumental bust sheathed in golden silk, licked her moist lips. The Brutal Blade smiled, her almond-shaped eyes blazing with an empathetic predation as she listened to the sound of the novice's bones cracking and readjusting beneath her husband's hand.
"The old root is being torn out," Yù Qíng's velvety voice floated through the void, her delicate feet landing silently on the dark ground. The priestess stopped beside her husband, her black eyes overflowing with a sadistic, doctrinal adoration. "Don't fight the fire our heaven gives you, little lotus. The pain of the shell breaking is nothing but the announcement of spring."
Bái Wǎn's body convulsed in uncontrollable spasms. But the priestess's promise drove itself like an undeniable law into her mind.
The friction between the Primordial Water that destroyed and the golden Qi that rebuilt flooded the girl's nervous system with an absurd charge of endorphins. The agony began to melt. Where the mortal meridians cracked, an electric current of intoxicating, warm, numbing pleasure surged in to take their place.
The girl's muffled moans began to bleed through.
"Ahn... mnn... p-please..." Bái Wǎn whimpered, her head rolling from side to side in the dust, her small fingers digging into her own shoulders.
A dark, foul-smelling slime began to seep from the pores of her skin. These were the biological residues — the toxins and mortal filth that had not been expelled during the opening of the pores — now being violently purged from her flesh. Her Mortal Body was being razed, clearing the path for the Primordial Water Physique.
And before the eyes of the trinity, the former scholar was reborn.
The black slime peeled away. Her skin, once common, became an immaculate porcelain, as though it had never been touched by mundane dust. Perfectly light and natural pink tones ignited in her rounded cheeks, lending the twenty-two-year-old a purely soft and innocent charm. Her features underwent drastic alterations beneath the god's hands: her nose shrank, reaching an impeccable contour, and her lips swelled subtly into an inviting softness.
The girl's slender frame did not gain the scandalous volume of Mò Yán or the imposing density of Yù Méi. Her curves increased slightly, rounding her breasts and hips in a compact, divinely sculpted way, preserving her small stature of 1.56m while overflowing with the proportions of a perfect jade statue.
The most violent mutation, however, struck the top of her head.
Her short, reddish-brown hair began to lose its color from the root, turning white and pale as paper, drained by the effort of the forging. And then the essence of the Primordial Water claimed it. A rich, pure, deep blue rose through the strands, flecked with tones of emerald and dark sapphire that glittered with the vitality of an untouched ocean. The hair grew at a dizzying speed. It cascaded onto the dark floor like a tapestry of liquid silk, pooling around her arched body until it reached the exact and monumental length of the girl herself.
Bái Wǎn opened her eyes. Her irises, once brown, had been filled by the elemental abyss. They blazed now in a crystalline, hypnotic light blue, purified by the water.
Zhì Yuǎn kept his hand firm against her chest. He could see the blue and golden veins pulsing beneath that new porcelain.
"The vessel is forged," he murmured, his baritone grazing the girl's trembling ears, his dark eyes recognizing the beauty of a goddess of untouched waters blooming beneath his fingers. "But it is still full of old water."
He slid his large, warm hand downward. His calloused touch grazed Bái Wǎn's belly, slick with cold sweat, stopping exactly over the girl's lower abdomen.
The energy of the Primordial Water Drop and the golden Qi that had previously been spread through her bones were suddenly pulled with a gravitational violence toward the center of her abdomen. The target was no longer the flesh. It was Bái Wǎn's old Perfect Sea of Qi. The stagnant, pristine lake of the mortal world.
Zhì Yuǎn injected the pressure inside it.
"N-No!" Bái Wǎn choked, her light blue irises going wide as she felt her own cultivation base — her static identity — being compressed like a bubble in a giant's hand.
"Mortal perfection must make way for the Sea of Laws I will forge inside you," he decreed.
His Inner Universe crushed her vessel.
Crack.
The sound was conceptual, shattering in the minds of all present. Bái Wǎn's Perfect Sea of Qi fractured. The pain of the cultivation base being excised was acute, blind, and terrifying. And then he applied the final force.
The girl's mortal Dantian fragmented into millions of invisible shards, turning to dust. Every scrap of energy she had cultivated throughout her life was erased, purged, reduced to an absolute nothing.
Bái Wǎn let out a strangled cry, her slender body arching so high that the long mantle of oceanic hair slid across her bare back. Her breathing stopped for three full seconds. She collapsed against the dark dust.
The water goddess was completely emptied. Her cultivation had been destroyed. The newly forged body was now a flawless and incredibly beautiful vessel, but absolutely hollow. The absence of the Sea of Qi left a throbbing, painful, and wet vacuum at the depths of her insides.
Divine biology abhors a vacuum. And Bái Wǎn's new Water Physique reacted instinctively.
Fever seized the young woman's soft, innocent face. The abundant, rich, desperate moisture leaked from between the girl's thighs, soaking the fabric of her torn robe. She had no more defenses. Her liquid Yin throbbed hysterically, the smooth internal walls contracting and imploring for a heavy, dense gravity to fill her and save her body from that agonizing void.
Zhì Yuǎn withdrew his hand from her belly. His thumb slipped away and stored the Primordial Water Drop — still glowing intensely — in one of the dimensional folds of his own space. The bulk of the Drop would not be used externally; he needed blood, friction, and heat to melt it from the inside and forge the girl's new sea.
He rose slowly.
The Hunger in his Dantian, intoxicated by the pungent smell of that purified and hollow root, roared. The cold lethargy that inhabited the god receded completely. The lethal, possessive lust of one who was about to shape his own creation darkened the vacuum bubble surrounding them.
Yù Qíng, watching the feverish skin of the tiny girl writhing in the dust and crying out for fulfillment, slid her tongue along her crimson lips. The contrast between the new recruit's absurdly soft appearance and the wet desperation of her lust activated every last thread of the priestess's maternal sadism.
"The old filth has turned to dust, my innocent flower," the goddess in blue whispered, her voice intoxicated by another's submission, as she walked slowly beside her husband. "Your soil is wide open, hollow, and dripping with thirst. And our heaven is finally ready to sink his roots into it once and for all."