The heavy silence of the private suite was broken only by Meng Yan's soft, exhausted breathing. She lay completely unconscious, her magnificent, flushed body sprawling across the ruined silk sheets, entirely oblivious to the predator standing over her.
Shen Yu's polite, saintly smile vanished, replaced by a mask of cold, calculating ambition.
He didn't waste a single second admiring his handiwork. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.
The air in the room was thick, almost viscous, with the sheer volume of Yin Qi she had expelled. It hung in the room like a faint, pearlescent mist, carrying the sweet, heavy scent of her climax mixed with the medicinal herbs. For a normal cultivator, inhaling this would simply feel like breathing in a humid sauna. But for the inheritor of the Primordial Yin-Yang Scripture, the room was a treasure trove of overflowing, pure energy.
Shen Yu stepped away from the bed, his boots making no sound on the marble floor. He found a woven meditation mat in the corner of the room, dragged it to the center of the suite, and sat down in the lotus position.
He formed a complex hand seal, resting his wrists on his knees.
"Primordial Yin-Yang Scripture"
The moment he activated the core technique of the inheritance, Shen Yu's body acted like a localized black hole. The pearlescent mist in the air swirled, drawn inexorably toward him. It seeped into his pores, rushed down his throat with his breath, and flooded directly into his broken meridians.
Instantly, Shen Yu's eyes snapped open, his golden irises contracting into sharp slits.
'Strong!'
The difference between absorbing Mei Lixue's Yin Qi and Meng Yan's was like comparing a gentle, babbling brook to a raging, paradoxical ocean. Lixue's energy, being only at the Qi Condensation realm, was pure, cool, and easily digestible, a soft trickle of water.
But Meng Yan was at the Golden Core realm.
Her Yin Qi crashed into his fragile meridians with terrifying weight and density. And worse, it was deeply chaotic. Because of her Lunar Fire Stagnation, the energy was a violent contradiction. It felt like swallowing molten lava and swallowing shards of glacial ice at the exact same time. It scorched his pathways while simultaneously threatening to freeze his blood.
A violent shudder wracked Shen Yu's body. Sweat immediately beaded on his forehead, mixing with the ambient humidity.
The Golden Core energy was simply too potent for his current, unrefined mortal vessel. It raged inside him like a wild beast, fighting against the pull of his cultivation technique.
'Submit!' Shen Yu roared in his mind, his four-hundred-year-old willpower clamping down on the rampant energy with an iron grip.
He gritted his teeth, his jaw locking so tightly the muscles bulged beneath his perfect skin. As he forced the tyrannical Qi to circulate and repair his shattered foundation, the pain arrived.
It did not feel like a gentle healing process. It felt as though tens of thousands of red-hot needles were being violently driven into his flesh, stitching his torn meridians back together by sheer, brutal force. Every inch of his internal network screamed in agony.
But Shen Yu's expression, though strained, remained eerily calm. In his past life, he had endured the corrosion of the Blood Path; he had bathed in vats of acidic venom just to gain an inch of power. Physical pain was an old friend. He simply closed his eyes, synchronized his breathing with the agonizing rhythm of the needles, and pushed through.
For half an hour, the suite remained dead silent, save for the faint whistling of the Qi spiraling into Shen Yu's body.
Slowly, the vortex of energy began to slow down. The violent trembling in Shen Yu's shoulders ceased.
He opened his eyes and exhaled a long breath of turbid, grayish air.
He looked around the room. The mist had thinned considerably, but it wasn't gone. Shen Yu let out a quiet, slightly frustrated sigh. He had absorbed a little over 50% of the expelled Yin Qi hovering in the room. The remaining energy was simply too dense, too heavily saturated with her Golden Core essence for his newly-repaired meridians to handle. If he tried to forcefully absorb the rest right now, his body would pop like an overinflated waterskin.
'What a waste,' he thought, shaking his head. 'But I am completely full. My current vessel has reached its absolute limit.'
He couldn't do anything about the remaining Qi, so he quickly discarded his disappointment. A demon who mourned spilled water would never conquer the heavens.
Shen Yu closed his eyes again to stabilize the turbulent energy crashing around his newly expanded dantian. Once the paradoxical fire and ice had been perfectly refined into pure Yin-Yang Qi by the scripture, he sent his spiritual sense inward to inspect his progress.
When he saw the state of his meridians, a satisfied smirk touched his lips.
They had healed from 17% to 51%.
A massive jump of thirty-four percent in a single, thirty-minute session. And this was just from absorbing the ambient Qi released into the air from her climax, not even directly dual-cultivating with her.
He wasn't surprised by the explosive growth. This was the very first release of a stagnation that had been building up inside a Golden Core cultivator for years. The sheer density of the Lunar Fire she had purged was a once in a lifetime harvest.
'If I possessed a better body and could have absorbed the remaining half of the Qi in this room, I might have healed up to 70% or even 80%,' Shen Yu calculated rationally.
But there was no use dwelling on hypotheticals.
He had indeed taken a massive step toward his goals.
Shen Yu stood up from the woven mat, looking down at his ruined clothes. The amber oil and the sheer volume of Meng Yan's expelled Yin essence had dried into the fabric of his sleeves, leaving behind a heavy, intoxicating musk.
But that wasn't the only mess.
Beneath his robes, his skin felt slick and uncomfortable, coated in a thin layer of foul-smelling, black sludge. It was a natural consequence of his rapid healing; as his broken meridians crossed the fifty-percent threshold of repair, his body had violently expelled decades of accumulated, toxic impurities through his pores. The mixture of Meng Yan's sweet nectar and his own bitter toxins was thoroughly unpleasant.
He needed to wash.
Leaving the unconscious woman on the bed, Shen Yu stepped into the lavish en-suite bathing chamber attached to the suite. He stripped off his soiled garments and placed them inside a Cleansing Receptacle in the corner. It was a common, box-like luxury artifact inscribed with minor water and wind arrays, functioning exactly like a washing machine, only much faster and powered by low-grade spirit stones.
As the artifact hummed to life, Shen Yu stepped under a stream of hot, spiritually-infused water. He thoroughly scrubbed the black filth from his perfectly sculpted body. He watched the dark water swirl down the jade drain, leaving his pale skin glowing with a flawless, healthy vitality that hadn't been there an hour ago.
Once clean, he dried his lean muscles with a plush silk towel and retrieved his white robes from the artifact. The arrays had done their work flawlessly; the silk was spotless, perfectly dry, and smelled faintly of fresh rain. He dressed with elegance, tying his dark hair back with a simple silver ribbon to complete his scholarly appearance.
He walked back into the main suite and glanced out the window. The vibrant twilight had completely yielded to the dark velvet of night.
7:00 PM.
If he lingered outside much longer, Aunt Yilan and his devoted Lixue would start to worry. So, it was time to go home.
Shen Yu walked over to the bed, looking down at the Matriarch of the Jin Clan. It was time to wake her up and collect his gratitude.