The full moon bathed the Serene Wind Plateau in silver, cold light. Yù Méi sat on the stone railing of the terrace, a wine amphora resting beside her. She was not drinking. Her fingers idly traced the edge of her emerald‑green silk sleeve, while her enhanced hearing—through her millions of open pores—captured the mountain's silence.
It was a deceptive silence. Inside the pavilion, isolated by layers of wood and muffling spells that did not work against her perception, her sister and brother‑in‑law were occupied. She could not make out the details tonight, but the density of the air and the ghostly heat that made her skin tingle told her everything she needed to know.
Yù Méi sighed, crossing her legs and feeling a suffocating, damp irritation building in her lower belly.
Then the mountain's silence was torn.
An unnatural gust of wind hissed through the courtyard. Yù Méi turned her face just as Mù Chén landed on the terrace. The Core Disciple did not use a flying sword to show off this time; he moved with the lethal speed of an eighth‑stage cultivator, his eyes gleaming with a hatred stained with arrogance and lust.
"I thought you prairie rats had more survival instincts," Mù Chén hissed, his voice low to avoid alerting the main pavilion. He drew his longsword, the blade humming faintly as he imbued it with the Qi from his dantian, pushing the durability and sharpness of mortal steel to its absolute limit. "Rejecting my presence this afternoon was your last mistake, insolent bitch. I will rip out your arrogance before I break the legs of your sham Senior."
Yù Méi did not smile. Did not crack her knuckles. The boredom and repressed sexual tension had left her with little patience for speeches. She simply rose from the low wall and walked toward him.
Mù Chén narrowed his eyes. He did not wait.
"Phantom Wind Cut!"
The two‑hundred‑year‑old "young master's" blade sliced the air in a perfect arc. He was not creating wind from nothing; his sect's technique consisted of ejecting Qi through the sword's motion to capture, accelerate, and compress the physical air around him. A blade of condensed wind shot toward Yù Méi's neck.
The Untouchable Petal ducked in a raw reflex, twisting her torso. The over‑compressed air passed grazing her shoulder, not cutting her flesh but violently tearing the left sleeve of her emerald‑green silk tunic. The fine fabric shredded, falling to the stone floor.
Yù Méi stopped. She looked at her exposed arm, then at the torn silk on the ground. The dress her sister had chosen for her with the bear's gold.
Yù Méi's fury was not poetic. It was a carnivorous instinct.
She charged like a cannonball. Mù Chén tried to raise his sword to defend, but Yù Méi ignored the blade. Her right fist struck like an iron sledgehammer directly against the cultivator's chest.
Yù Méi expected the familiar crack of bones turning to powder, the explosion of blood, the instant collapse—as had happened with the sixth‑stage mercenaries.
But the crack did not come.
The impact resonated like a bell striking a granite wall. Mù Chén was hurled three meters backward, bouncing on the terrace's stone floor, but he rolled and stopped on his knees. He coughed up a mouthful of blood, his eyes wide in absolute shock at the woman's absurd physical strength, but his chest was intact.
Yù Méi blinked, surprised.
Tempered bones. Purified organs. Refined Body. She remembered Zhì Yuǎn's lessons. That two‑hundred‑year‑old idiot was not made of glass; his mortal foundation was at the peak of human perfection. He was the toughest thing she had ever punched.
"Wretched woman!" Mù Chén roared, abandoning flashy distance techniques and charging with his sword gleaming with pure Qi, trying to slice her with the hyper‑sharp blade in a test of brute strength.
The fight lost any resemblance to the elegant martial dances of the sects. It became a crushing, prolonged street brawl.
Yù Méi ducked under the sword's arc and drove a left hook into his stomach. The flesh gave, but his muscles were hard as old roots. She could not penetrate. Instead of retreating, she grabbed his white silk collar and began to beat him.
Punch after punch. The sound was grotesque. Mù Chén's aristocratic face began to deform, the flesh of his brow and cheeks tearing under the friction of Yù Méi's hyper‑dense knuckles. He tried to fight back, punching her ribs, conjuring small bursts of wind to push her away, but the Brutal Blade seemed immune to pain.
With each blow she landed, the skin of his face tore a little more. It took a dozen direct punches for the first bone of his nose to finally crack—a thin, stubborn fissure that resisted destruction.
In an act of pure desperation, his face transformed into a bloody pulp, Mù Chén released his sword and tried to grab Yù Méi's waist and bare leg to bring her down.
The moment the man's sweaty, trembling hands touched her thigh, a wave of absolute, cold, nauseating revulsion shot through Yù Méi's body.
Disgusting, her mind hissed, her skin's pores prickling in pure disgust. His hands are disgusting. His touch is disgusting.
Her flesh, hyper‑dense, forged in fire and opened to the world by the hands of a god, rejected that fragile touch as an unforgivable offense. Only the man who had transformed her had the right to touch that skin.
Revulsion converted into brute force. Yù Méi released Mù Chén's collar. Tired of punching that ridiculous skull that refused to shatter all at once, she changed tactics. With a punch to the face and a yank on the adjacent shoulder, she abruptly turned him, then squatted, wrapping the cultivator's head in both arms in a brutal chokehold.
Mù Chén, looking like a sack of bloodied rags, realized what was about to happen. He tried to summon his Qi, tried to force his own hyper‑refined neck tendons to resist. The man's flesh and ligaments locked in an absolute struggle of strength against Yù Méi's arms.
Resistance. Force. More resistance. Veins bulged on Yù Méi's neck.
"Die already, you disgusting trash!" she snarled, twisting her torso with all the fury, disgust, and vigor the world's Qi gave her.
The resistance finally broke.
Crack.
The sound of the Core Disciple's neck snapping echoed like a dry branch breaking in the middle of the terrace. Mù Chén's body went limp instantly. Life, fed by two centuries of arrogance and stagnation, drained from those eyes once and for all.
Yù Méi gasped. She opened her arms and shoved the corpse aside with disgust, like discarding wet garbage. The "Young Master's" body fell in a lifeless heap in the corner of the courtyard.
She stood there, motionless. Her fists and arms were stained with blood that was not hers. Her chest rose and fell violently.
My first, Yù Méi realized. She had not killed the mercenaries, only crippled them. The bear was a beast. But this… this was a man. And there was no guilt, no remorse. Only the relief of silencing his irritating voice, mixed with the desperate need to wash the disgusting touch he had left on her skin.
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Two mountain peaks away, far above the training arena, silence reigned in the Great Elder's Record Hall.
Lín Xiù moved through the shadows. Her heart beat so fast she feared the guards outside might hear it. The navy‑blue woman's words still spun in her mind like sweet, intoxicating poison.
"He seeks the roots… The true weight of the world… A rare flower only attracts a god's attention if it has the courage to show its roots."
Lín Xiù swallowed hard. She stopped before the obsidian altar in the center of the hall, dimly lit by light crystals.
Her grandfather, the Great Elder Lín Wújiàn, had shown her that object years ago. Not out of duty, but out of pure nepotism and arrogance. Overprotective and focused on diverting the mountain's best resources to her, the old man had taken her there to prove that their lineage possessed true authority, far superior to the Sect Master himself.
He had made her swear secrecy and presented her with the Astrolabe of a ThousandBridges.
The artifact was not a weapon. It was a disc of black jade and silver, engraved with grooves that did not represent the stars in the sky, but the rifts in space. Her grandfather had told her the legend with bitterness: it was a direct inheritance from the Transcendent Age, a living map capable of resonating with the skeletons of the Spatial Matrices that supported those mountains, revealing paths the ancient gods had used to tear open the sky.
But the Great Elder had also confessed his greatest frustration. For the Misty Peak Sect, the Astrolabe was a useless paperweight. They were mere mortal cultivators stagnating on dead ruins. They did not possess the Qi or the understanding to make even the disc's silver shine.
For years, Lín Xiù had kept that secret, accepting that her family's treasure was doomed to gather dust.
But now… for the Senior… for the untouchable god who seemed to carry the weight of the cosmos on his shoulders, whose gaze seemed capable of piercing reality itself… this would not be a paperweight. This was the "true foundation." The root that would prove she was not like the other mortal bitches, but an equal—the only woman capable of delivering the heavens into his hands.
Lín Xiù extended her trembling hands and took the Astrolabe. The ancient silver was cold against her fingers. She hid it under the folds of her silk robe and turned, disappearing into the night, the smile of a deluded bride on her face.
---
Back at the Guest Pavilion, in the upstairs room, Yù Qíng brought her teacup to her lips. The cold liquid running down her throat was a strictly necessary relief to try to calm the residual heat that still left her swollen and throbbing in her belly.
She sat comfortably on the window's edge, her black eyes watching the shadows of the lower terrace where Yù Méi was now dragging Mù Chén's broken body to hide it. The little flower had endured the test well. Spilled blood was good fertilizer for her own tempering.
But it was not Yù Méi on whom the priestess's mind was focused now.
She looked over her shoulder into the room. Zhì Yuǎn was not sleeping or resting. An infinite universe knew no fatigue. He sat in the center of the chamber, his black eyes open and unfathomable, the Wisdom calmly dissecting the remnants of the invisible matrices in the mountain air. It was she who needed rest. The intensity of his absolute Yang exhausted her quickly, forcing them to stop so her mortal body would not collapse from pure, violent pleasure long before his insatiable hunger could be sated.
The world's Qi had rippled a few kilometers away. The subtle lines of destiny and space had vibrated.
Yù Qíng, anchored to her husband's Inner Universe, felt the shift in the environment and smiled. The seed she had planted in the blind guide's ego was finally bearing fruit.
She did not know the exact name or form of what Lín Xiù would bring. The intelligence reports she had stolen from the Thunder Clan only mentioned old rumors that Misty Peak guarded a relic from the Transcendent Age. That was why Yù Qíng had cast the poisoned bait with vague words about "roots" and "foundations," letting the old virgin's own romantic illusion fill the gaps.
And it had worked with pathetic perfection. Lín Xiù had bitten the bait and was now marching toward them. From the density of the spatial ripple leaking from the mountain, Yù Qíng deduced immediately: the foolish girl had just laid her hands on the matrix map.
Yet a crease of genuine irritation slightly marred the perfection of Yù Qíng's face.
The mere idea that Lín Xiù, that pathetic eighty‑year‑old virgin, genuinely believed that a handful of transcendental junk would be enough to buy a place in her husband's heart or bed… left Yù Qíng physically nauseated.
The seed will bring us the key, Yù Qíng thought, her black eyes taking on a cruel, merciless coldness as she tightened her grip on the porcelain cup. The key will be delivered to my heaven. But as soon as the key changes hands, this land will be burned. No one, under any pretext, shares my husband's altar without first passing through my absolute judgment.
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