The smell of blood in the Cloud Pavilion was already behind them. The afternoon advanced over the first city of the Golden Prairies, and the Thunder Clan, once the terror of the eastern district, was now merely an echo of broken bones and shattered pride.
Yù Méi walked ahead, guiding four pure‑blood horses whose hooves struck heavily against the cobblestones. They were magnificent beasts, with coats as black as night, bought at a premium moments before. They pulled a colossal carriage—a true fortress on wheels. The structure was of dark, solid wood, reinforced with iron details. At the front, a wide, cushioned bench upholstered in velvet was protected by an elegant awning, designed to comfortably seat two. The rear was a closed compartment with double steel doors—a mobile vault made to transport fortunes without drawing the eyes of road bandits.
Their destination was the eastern district. The setting sun reflected off the Golden Vault Medallion that Yù Qíng held between her fingertips, the dark‑green jade gleaming with the promise of eighty thousand coins and treasury funds.
The Thunder Clan's Treasure House was not a shop. It was a stone fortress embedded at the base of an artificial hill. When the carriage stopped before the bronze gates, the guards on duty tried to raise their spears. But as soon as Yù Qíng raised the Patriarch's medallion and Yù Méi cracked her neck, exuding a killing Qi that still reeked of the sixth‑stage mercenaries' blood, the weapons clattered to the ground. The guards retreated, opening the heavy gates without a single word. Fear traveled faster than horses in that city.
The interior of the vault was cold and smelled of dust and copper. Yù Qíng walked through the rows of shelves with the same serenity she walked through the bamboo grove. She ignored the fine silks, the mortal‑grade steel weapons, the low‑level artifacts. Her black, cold, appraising eyes sought only what mattered.
"There," she said, her voice echoing in the vast space.
Yù Méi advanced. In the center of the strongroom stood a chest of solid iron. She did not bother to search for the key. Her fingers closed around the tempered steel lock, and with a single pull powered by her wide‑open pores, the metal snapped like dry clay.
Inside, perfect rows of gold bars gleamed under the torchlight. It was wealth enough to buy the entire city. Yù Méi lifted the chest with both hands. It weighed hundreds of kilograms, but to muscles forged in years of Yin and Yang herbs and the world's free Qi, it was as light as a basket of laundry.
But what truly caught the Untouchable Petal's attention was not the gold.
In the darkest corner of the vault, protected by a cage of frosted glass, rested two rustic leather sacks, each the size of a potato bag. When Yù Méi approached, the millions of pores in her skin prickled. A dense, tingling, familiar energy radiated from within the leather.
She opened one of the sacks. Irregular stones, the size of walnuts, glowed with a milky inner light. It was not the sparse, dispersed Qi of the air; it was physical, solid Qi.
"Low‑grade spirit stones," Yù Qíng murmured, approaching. She picked up one of the stones. The Yin in her Sea of Devotion reacted faintly to the object's purity. "The true treasure. Gold is what they use to subjugate mortals. These stones are what they use to try to offend the heavens."
Yù Méi said nothing, but a predatory smile spread across her face. She hoisted the heavy sacks of spirit stones onto one shoulder and the chest of gold bars onto the other. She walked to the carriage and deposited everything in the armored rear compartment, alongside the bags of clothes and the smaller chest of coins they already possessed. She closed the steel doors with a dull thud that echoed through the empty street.
While her sister handled the weight, Yù Qíng did not stay idle. As the mastermind behind her god's sustenance, she walked to the vault's record table. The Thunder Clan, being a commercial power, had an information network that extended far beyond the Golden Prairies. She leafed through ancient maps, scrolls of trade routes, and scout reports.
Her eyes fixed on a map of the far south.
Beyond the Prairies, the terrain changed drastically. The map showed a mountain range that did not look like ordinary mountains. They were drawn as stone needles—thin, sparse pillars that tore through the earth and rose far above the clouds. Wooden bridges suspended in the void connected these dizzying peaks. And at the top of the largest plateaus of this mystical region, hundreds of kilometers apart, four great crests were drawn. The Four Major Sects.
Yù Qíng collected the map and scrolls. The stage was set.
---
The interior cabin of the luxurious carriage was a world apart. Cushions of dark silk lined the seats, and the air inside was strangely calm, isolated from the noise of the stone city.
Zhì Yuǎn sat in the center, legs crossed, the black silk cloak draped over his shoulders. His eyes were open, but his mind navigated the vast, dark Inner Universe that had formed in the collapse of his dantian. The void within him was infinite, and the Hunger… the hunger was a constant echo, a black hole demanding light, Laws, and matter to establish order in the primordial darkness.
The cabin door opened softly. Yù Qíng entered, her bare feet sinking into the plush carpet. She knelt before him, placing the open map and a handful of the milky spirit stones on the low table.
"Husband," her voice was sweet, laden with a reverence only he deserved. "The vault has been cleaned. The gold is secure, but I found this. Their information network points south. Beyond the prairies, there is a territory where the sky itself seems to have been broken. Mountains thin as spears, so tall they pierce the clouds. They say the Four Major Sects rule there from above."
Zhì Yuǎn lowered his eyes to the spirit stones, then to the map. The Wisdom in his mind spun. The remnant of the Transcendent Age, the vision of the Bridges and Furnaces he had witnessed in the abyss beneath the volcano, instantly connected to those drawn mountains.
"Gold buys the comfort of mortal flesh," Zhì Yuǎn began, his deep voice resonating in the cabin. He crushed one of the spirit stones between thumb and forefinger. The energy within it was sucked through his pores in a fraction of a second, vanishing into the void without even causing a ripple. "And these stones are merely rudimentary condensations of sparse energy. They do not serve my limit."
He lifted his black, unfathomable eyes to his wife.
"My Inner Universe is an infinite void, Qíng. The only sustenance capable of sustaining it is Primordial Qi—the kind we forged in the furnace of our flesh, when my Yang and your Yin merge. But your body has physical limits. The intensity of our exchange exhausts your flesh, driving you to the extremes of pleasure and fatigue long before my universe's hunger is sated. The ordinary world has nothing that can fill this void."
He extended his hand, his long finger tracing the drawn pillars on the map.
"These mountains… they are not natural formations. The Wisdom shows me what they are. They are the pillars of the Matrices. The skeletons of the Bridges the transcendents used in the past to tear open the sky and leave this world."
Yù Qíng watched her husband, her eyes wide in absolute fascination. The way he spoke, dissecting the secrets of forgotten ages, made the ocean of devotion within her overflow.
"And the Four Sects that live there?" she asked.
Zhì Yuǎn shook his head slightly, with the indifference of a god evaluating ants.
"There are no transcendents anymore, Qíng. After the Bridges sucked the Qi from the world, the gift was lost. No one alive can open a Sea of Qi. These cultivators who proclaim themselves masters in the heights are merely mortals who reached the limit of their bodies and stagnated, parasitizing the ruins and residual Qi of a dead age."
He lifted his face, and the primordial vastness reflected in his irises.
"We need to go south. I need to see the state of these remnants. I need to know whether the Ancient Bridges still hold any foundation, any integrity, and whether we might one day reuse them to leave this desolate world behind."
Yù Qíng smiled. But the smile lost the rigidity of a religious fanatic and transformed into the delicious trap of a corrupted goddess. She knew exactly what his hunger demanded—not only in Laws, but in flesh.
With fluid slowness, she adjusted her kneeling posture. Her delicate arms were positioned precisely before her body, her palms sinking into the soft velvet carpet. As she bowed, her soft thighs pressed against her own calves, and the skirt of her navy‑blue dress, which lay back covering her feet, lifted slightly, revealing porcelain skin in a silent, tempting invitation.
She tilted her head slightly to the side and upward, lifting her gaze to him. The movement traced a perfectly seductive line from the pale, exposed curve of her neck, uninterrupted down to the shadow of the deep opening between her full breasts, offered there as the main course of a feast.
The rite of submission had become a lethal technique of seduction.
Keeping her black, fathomless eyes fixed on him, her lips parted in a promise exuding lust and ruin, she whispered:
"As you command, my heaven… We will go south. I will deliver their ruins into your hands. And the whole world as an offering to your dominion."
---
Outside, the sun plunged toward the horizon, painting the Golden Prairies in shades of blood and amber.
Yù Méi took the reins on the wide front bench of the carriage. Yù Qíng glided out of the inner cabin, sitting beside her sister on the velvet seat. The dark fairy in the blue dress adjusted her black hair, the cool afternoon breeze brushing against her porcelain skin.
"Everything locked up in back?" Yù Qíng asked casually.
"Gold bars, sacks of stones, and three steel‑locked underwear trunks," Yù Méi answered, snapping the whip in the air with an agile, impatient flick of her brute‑forged wrist. "Where to now, sister?"
"South." Yù Qíng pointed toward the gray stone road cutting through the sea of golden grass. "Beyond the prairies. Husband has business with the remnants of an old age."
Yù Méi asked no questions. She smiled, revealing the wild freshness of a newly unleashed predator, and cracked the reins. The four black horses reared and bolted.
The colossal carriage moved with impressive speed, the sound of its iron wheels echoing through the streets. The mortals and guards on the walls watched the luxurious vehicle leave the city, disappearing toward the horizon. They saw only the incalculable wealth of the exterior and the two divinely beautiful women on the front bench. They had no idea that, locked in the darkness of the armored cabin and invisible to the world, a rising universe traveled to inspect what remained of the Transcendent Age.
The Golden Prairies fell behind. The true Dao of Thread and Root was about to enter new territory.
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