The Great Elder's blood stained the white stones of the courtyard. The silence that followed was not merely shock; it was the structural collapse of egos that had taken centuries to inflate.
Zhì Yuǎn did not even lift his eyes from the Astrolabe of a Thousand Bridges. The silver gleamed in his hands, and the threads of the Law of Space leaking from the relic fascinated his infinite Wisdom far more than the insects crying in the garden.
It was Yù Qíng who set down her porcelain cup on the table. The clink of ceramic sounded like a funeral bell.
The priestess sighed, a melodious and profoundly bored sound. She did not rise, did not form hand seals, did not invoke nature's magics. She simply stopped containing herself. The super‑dense Primordial Qi, forged through Yin and Yang violently consumed in the nights of intimacy, leaked from her unfathomable Sea of Devotion.
There was no fire or ice. There was only density.
The gravity on the Serene Wind Plateau seemed to multiply a thousandfold. The physical air became denser than mercury. In the sky, the fifty flying swords that hummed with the trembling Qi of the elite disciples instantly lost resonance. One by one, the cultivators began to plummet from the sky like dead flies, crashing against the stone floor with muffled groans and cracked bones.
In the garden, the Sect Master Zhào Fēng and the Great Elder Lín Wújiàn felt their knees slam against the white stone, crushed by an invisible pressure that paralyzed the air in their lungs.
"You make too much noise," Yù Qíng said, her voice velvety, cold, and absolutely serene. She looked at the kneeling men with the same pity reserved for dust. "Your voices shake the ground and destabilize the wind. My husband is busy deciphering the stars, and I have no patience to listen to rats fighting over a bone that no longer belongs to them."
The Sect Master tried to lift his face, veins bulging in his neck, but his eyes found only absolute terror. How could that woman's energy be so brutally pure?
At the center of it all, oblivious to the crushing humiliation of her leaders, Lín Xiù remained with her arms spread before Zhì Yuǎn. The brutal pressure of Yù Qíng's Qi had deliberately bypassed the girl, which only fed the madness in her mind.
He is protecting me!, Lín Xiù's illusion screamed, her eyes gleaming in reverence as she looked over her shoulder at Zhì Yuǎn's back. The Senior has restrained my sect so they won't disturb us!
Lín Xiù turned to the woman in blue, sporting a proud, victorious smile.
"You don't need to threaten them," Lín Xiù declared, assuming the voice of a magnanimous hostess. "They were ignorant, but now they will understand. The Senior will spare them for my sa—"
Yù Qíng raised her pale hand.
Lín Xiù's smile did not have time to die.
With a casual motion, like shooing a fly from a plate of food, Yù Qíng released a torrent of Primordial Qi directly into the blind guide's chest. The impact lacked the elegance of the sect's sword dances; it was brutal, direct, and merciless.
CRACK.
The sickening sound of ribs breaking echoed through the silent courtyard.
Lín Xiù was hurled backward like a rag doll whose strings had been cut. Air was violently expelled from her lungs in a spray of blood. She flew across the courtyard and collided violently with the stone floor, sliding to a stop at the feet of her grandfather, the Great Elder, who watched the scene paralyzed by terror.
The "Genius" of Misty Peak gasped, her eyes rolling in pain as her eighth‑stage dantian—maintained with such pampering and arrogance for eighty years—began to leak Qi like a cracked jar.
Yù Méi, sitting on the veranda railing, crossed her arms and clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Sister really has no salvation, the Untouchable Petal thought, resigned. If it were me, I'd have ripped that idiot's head off already.
"My compassion has its limits, elder," Yù Qíng's voice slid across the courtyard, laden with cutting disgust, her black eyes fixed on Lín Xiù's broken body. "You were useful in opening the doors for us and delivering the key. That meager usefulness is the only reason I allowed you to continue breathing the same air as my heaven for a few more seconds. But your voice is shrill, and your mere existence offends my sight."
Yù Qíng turned her gaze to the Sect Master and the Great Elder, who now cradled his bloodied granddaughter with trembling hands.
"Collect your trash," the blue priestess ordered, the abyssal smile blooming on her lips. "Gather your dogs and disappear from here. Pretend you still rule these ruins. But if a single shout, a single bell toll, or a single hurried step ever interrupts my husband's concentration again… I will not leave a single stone of this mountain atop another."
Under the paralyzing pressure of Primordial Qi and the cosmic terror exuded by Yù Qíng's actions, the leaders of Misty Peak did not protest. Humiliated, defeated, and stripped of their inheritance, the strongest cultivators of the South merely lowered their heads. Leaning on one another, they dragged Lín Xiù's agonizing body and Mù Chén's forgotten corpse out of the pavilion, fleeing in silence.
The arrogant sovereignty of Misty Peak had been annihilated by a woman drinking tea and a god who had not even deigned to look in their direction.
---
Zhì Yuǎn stopped spinning the Astrolabe. Silver light reflected in his unfathomable eyes as Wisdom decoded the artifact's final geometric lock.
"The central root is not here," Zhì Yuǎn declared, his voice echoing calmly, oblivious to the fact that the courtyard had just been the stage for a humiliating slaughter. He looked toward the misty horizon. "The primordial matrix that connects all the bridges of this territory rests on the central pillar. The highest mountain to the southeast. Shattered Heaven."
Yù Qíng drank the last of her tea, ignoring the blood staining the stones a few meters away, and smiled with profound devotion.
"Then we will tear that heaven apart, my love," she murmured, rising to follow him.
---
Far above the sea of clouds, hundreds of kilometers to the southeast, the structure of the world was different.
Rising like a monolithic lance piercing the firmament itself stood the central pillar of the southern mountains. It was the domain of the Shattered Heaven Sect.
In the depths of that colossal needle, carved into the heart of the black rock, rested the Ruin of the Throne. The walls of the vast circular hall were lined with veins of dead jade and oxidized silver—matrices long dormant from the Transcendent Age.
Kneeling at the exact center of the matrix in absolute meditation wasMò Yán[1].
By the stagnant standards of the mortal world, she was a monster—an anomaly forged once in a millennium. She was only twenty‑five years old, but the Qi flowing through her veins was not that of a novice. Her organs had been washed clean. Her flesh was at its peak. She had just stabilized the seventh stage—the Refined Body.
But it was not merely her cultivation that made her an anomaly; it was her physical presence—a beauty so excessively voluptuous it seemed a divine punishment for any cultivator who took vows of purity.
Mò Yán breathed slowly and deeply, and with each inhalation, her garments seemed to protest against her form. She wore a heavy, opaque silk tunic in a silver‑gray tone, adorned with complex borders and details in matte gold, with a high collar and strict sleeves. It was structured clothing, made to convey absolute discipline and austerity. But on her body, modesty failed miserably. The heavy fabric, meant to hide, only accentuated the dramatic curve of her hips and the impossible fullness of her chest, which strained against the silk with every breath. Her waist, impossibly narrow, was cinched by a silver belt that only emphasized the contrast. Her skin was pale as fresh snow, and her hair, white as frost, cascaded down her back like a frozen waterfall. Her eyes were the color of fresh blood—crimson irises that held a discipline so severe it seemed to burn.
She was the image of contained perfection, a blade wrapped in silk, a flower of ice and steel.
The heavy stone door at the back of the hall opened with a grinding echo, and the figure of the Sect Master, Mò Tiān, entered. A tall, severe man with sharp features, gray hair pulled into a tight bun, and robes of dark gray embroidered with silver clouds, he exuded the authority of one who had ruled the southern peak for decades. His sharp eyes, still holding the ambition of his prime, settled on his kneeling granddaughter.
"Yán'er," he called, his voice grave, echoing in the cavernous hall. "The matrices have stirred."
Mò Yán opened her eyes. Her crimson irises, usually as cold and disciplined as the rest of her, gleamed with a spark of something deeper—curiosity, expectation, the hunger of a cultivator who had already reached the limits of her mortal foundation and craved the next step.
She rose with the fluid grace of a willow bending in the wind. The heavy silver‑gray silks shifted around her curves with a soft rustle, and she bowed slightly—a disciplined reverence that made the tight robes strain even more across her chest. Despite being alone in the deep corridors, her formality was unbreakable.
"It has happened, Sect Master," she replied, her voice firm, melodious, and extremely respectful. She lifted her scarlet irises to meet his. "The jade resonated. The Central Matrix sensed something on the southern borders. The flow of space vibrated as if an ancient gear had been forced to turn."
Mò Tiān clasped his hands behind his back, walking to the edge of the terrace and looking out at the sea of gray clouds.
"If our ruin is reacting, then the legend of the Spatial Foundation is not merely a dead myth," he murmured, cautious ambition gleaming on his face. "There is an anomaly awakening in the mountains of Misty Peak."
Mò Yán's serious expression softened for a fraction of a second, her full lips curving into a trace of melancholy as she remembered the only man who could break through her reserve.
"If my grandfather were here, he would know what to do," she said, her tone lowering, revealing genuine, painful affection. "He is the only man in the South to have touched the mythical ninth stage—Condensation of the Void. He would decipher this spatial resonance in a single glance."
The Sect Master sighed, pride wounded by an old absence.
"Your grandfather believed that the sects here were blind, trying to climb an empty sky," Mò Tiān replied, shaking his head. "That is why he abdicated his title twelve years ago and disappeared into the dust of the mortal world in the North. A supreme expert at the ninth stage, trading our empire in the clouds to open an old bookshop full of dust and useless herbs. An eccentric."
Mò Yán lowered her red eyes to her wooden sandals, from where the blush of her delicate skin still peeked. She remembered him clearly. The gentle old man who brought her sweets from the North and carried her on his shoulders when the world seemed too large. The same old man who had said that "the truth of the Dao often walks on foot, in the middle of the crowd."
"The wisest eccentric in the world, Sect Master," she corrected politely, maintaining her reverent tone to her father.
"Yes. But his wisdom is missed today," Mò Tiān retorted, turning back to his daughter. His gaze assessed her refined body, the mortal peak she had reached so young. "Yán'er. Prepare your sword. Misty Peak is hiding something that managed to wake our walls. Go there and investigate this anomaly. But you will not go alone. Take the Great Elder with you and… take Hán Léi."
The name struck Mò Yán's ears like a deeply discordant note, making her long white lashes tremble.
Hán Léi was the sect's Outstanding Disciple—the only one of her generation, besides herself, to have reached the peak of the sixth mortal stage. But to Mò Yán's rigorous mind, he was little more than an animal focused on his own base instincts. An arrogant debaucher who used his clan's status to cover up his promiscuous nights in the mortal brothels at the mountain's base. Worse than that was the disgusting way he had looked at her for years. Behind polished "martial brother" smiles, Hán Léi's eyes always seemed to try to strip away the structured tunic she wore, openly coveting the voluptuous curves she fought so hard to hide from the world.
A wave of disgust and irritation threatened to break her mask of pure tranquility. The fair, immaculate skin of her neck warmed slightly with frustration, a subtle blush that only accentuated her beauty.
"Sect Master…" she began, her melodious voice maintaining its reverent tone, though her full lips were pressed tight. "The Great Elder's guidance and strength will be invaluable. However… Martial Brother Hán Léi has a volatile temperament and a conduct that is… undisciplined. I fear that his lack of focus and his worldly vices may be a hindrance to a mission that requires such discretion and seriousness."
Mò Tiān sighed heavily, shaking his head. He knew the boy's flaws and lust all too well, but leadership demanded politics.
"His martial talent is undeniable, Yán'er, and his family carries enormous weight in our sect's resource pavilion. He needs real experience on the borders to harden his character and stop acting like a brothel boy. Besides, you are the only person on this mountain he dares not disobey. Keep him in line. That is an order."
The incontestable weight of her father's and master's authority silenced any further protest that might arise in her strict mind. Mò Yán swallowed her disgust, her delicate shoulders tensing under the silver‑gray silk with the burden of that unwanted responsibility. She would never break the precepts of modesty and obedience.
"Yes, Sect Master," said the restrained flower, bowing once more. The movement made the pink edges of her feet press slightly against the wood of her sandals, betraying the tension she did not allow into her voice.
The young woman turned to prepare herself, her snow‑white hair swirling behind her, unaware that as she marched toward the lands of Misty Peak accompanied by the man she most despised, she was walking directly into the center of an abyss that would never end.
---
[1] Don't search this name! Lol