Yù Méi's leap from the carriage's driver's seat was light, almost lazy. When her sandals touched the black rock of the plateau, the skirt of her stunning golden silk dress rippled softly, the impact raising no dust and making no sound.
She walked toward Hán Léi with her shoulders loose, rolling her neck from side to side. All the tension in her body—the muscles that had been locked—had been completely melted by Zhì Yuǎn's deep massage the night before. Her hands, perfectly smooth and immaculate, bore not the slightest trace of the blood spilled in the previous day's fights. She felt incredibly fluid, every joint sliding with the perfection of a predator at the peak of its physical vigor.
Hán Léi, blinded by the confidence of his sixth mortal stage and inflated by his own vanity, smiled as he saw her approach unarmed. Since he did not yet possess an opened dantian at the eighth stage, he was physically incapable of imbuing his blade with Qi for external use. All his confidence rested on the brute strength of his purified organs and the lethal edge of his heavy steel sword.
He advanced. The attack was a violent horizontal slash, driven by the full physical strength of a sixth‑stage genius, aimed at severing Yù Méi's legs in one stroke.
Yù Méi did not retreat. She did not draw a weapon. With palpable boredom, she raised her left hand—the hand whose pale, newly healed fingers looked like the skin of a pampered princess—and placed it directly in the path of the steel.
CLANG.
The sound that echoed across the plateau was not that of flesh being torn. It was the piercing shriek of metal colliding against an unstoppable wall. Yù Méi caught the naked blade with her bare fingers. The sharp steel could not penetrate a single millimeter of her hyper‑dense skin, forged at the limits of flesh and saturated by the world's Qi.
Hán Léi's smile died. Primitive panic finally invaded his eyes.
Yù Méi did not say a word. The smile that bloomed on her lips was wide, carnivorous, and utterly repulsive. With a casual squeeze of her perfect fingers, she crushed the blade. The sect's elite sword shattered into dozens of pieces that rained down like broken glass on the rock floor.
Before Hán Léi could release the useless hilt, Yù Méi moved in a blur of brutal speed. She did not aim for his face or chest. She dove under his guard and, with the heel of her palm, delivered a surgically lethal strike to the disciple's lower back.
CRAAAACK.
The sound of Hán Léi's spine snapping in half was sickening.
The boy's eyes bulged from their sockets. All the air was expelled from his lungs in a sharp wheeze. The communication between his brain and his legs was severed instantly. The once‑imposing Outstanding Disciple collapsed onto the black rock floor like a marionette with its strings cut, falling face‑down, completely paralyzed from the waist down.
"W‑What… my legs…" Hán Léi stammered, choking on his own saliva, terror distorting his face as he tried to drag himself using only his arms, his nails scraping uselessly against the ancient stone.
"You were going to take us to your pavilion?" Yù Méi murmured, kneeling gracefully beside the inert body, the golden silk pooling around her like spilled sunlight. "Generous. But I think you need some adjustments first."
She grabbed his right wrist and, without the slightest hurry, bent Hán Léi's index finger backward.
Snap.
"AHHHHHH!" The boy's scream echoed across the black rock plateau, shrill and piercing.
Thirty paces away, the Great Elder and Mò Yán retreated, absolute horror freezing the blood in their veins. The scene was not a fight; it was an aberration playing mercilessly with its prey.
And while Mò Yán watched her nightmares come to life, Yù Qíng, who had been observing everything from the carriage's veranda since giving the order for her sister to clear the path, finally moved.
The cold plateau wind swayed the priestess's navy‑blue tunic and made her long black hair dance like ink spilled into the air. Using the Floating Lotus Step technique, Yù Qíng's bare feet did not touch the veranda's wood nor the dirty ground; she floated millimeters above the black stone, descending the invisible steps of the air with the majesty of an untouchable divinity.
In the background, Yù Méi broke Hán Léi's middle finger.
Snap.
"ARGH! PLEASE!"
Yù Qíng did not turn her face. The devoted, focused mind of the dark goddess completely ignored the bloodbath, the crawling boy, and the torturous screams as if they were merely the distant buzz of cicadas in summer. Her black, astute eyes fixed immediately on the tense, terrified figure of Mò Yán.
Mò Yán, feeling that she stood before Death incarnate, instinctively bent her knees, kneeling on the black stone. Her silver‑gray tunic strained against her full bust as she curved her body until her forehead nearly touched the ground, assuming a posture of absolute, terrified submission.
Yù Qíng floated calmly until she stopped before the diplomat.
"Little snow flower," Yù Qíng's voice drifted across the plateau, soft and velvety, like sweet poison dripping onto Mò Yán's frayed nerves. "Your patience in dealing with the insects of your own house is admirable, but equally disappointing."
CRACK. Yù Méi had just broken the radius and ulna of Hán Léi's forearm with a raw squeeze of her immaculate hands.
"GOD! AHHHH! HELP! MASTER!" Hán Léi's howls echoed, shrill, as he spat blood on the stone.
Mò Yán did not dare lift her head, cold sweat running down her pale neck. The cognitive dissonance was maddening: a woman of divine beauty spoke to her in a poetic, soft tone, while two steps away, a methodical massacre filled the air with the sounds of bones being crushed.
"Our… offender failed the world and was executed by right of force, Lady," Mò Yán replied, her melodious, formal voice trembling only slightly, refusing to break dogmatic etiquette even before the abyss incarnate. "If our lives are the price to wash away the remainder of the insult, the Shattered Heaven Sect will accept your judgment."
Crack. Snap. Crunch. Yù Méi crushed Hán Léi's right hand against the stone floor, breaking each phalanx slowly as if cracking nuts, while the boy vomited bile, his face soaked with tears and snot.
"KILL ME! JUST KILL ME! AAAAAAAHHH!"
Yù Qíng smiled, the sweetness of the gesture grotesquely contrasting with the scene in the background. That obedient response from Mò Yán was nectar to her ears. The blue goddess leaned down, and her pale, cold finger lifted Mò Yán's perfectly sculpted chin, forcing the white‑haired genius to meet her eyes.
"The snow of your central pillar does not need to melt today, Mò Yán," Yù Qíng whispered, her warm, inviting breath brushing against the kneeling woman's pale face. "My husband seeks the ancient root that sleeps forgotten beneath your father's mountain. You control the stone gates."
In the background, Yù Méi grabbed the leg that Hán Léi could not feel or move because of his broken spine. She planted her boot on the boy's knee and pulled his heel in the opposite direction, forcing the joint to bend the wrong way.
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
Yù Qíng rose, majestic, ignoring the symphony of torture as if it were background music.
"Guide our carriage across your bridges," Yù Qíng continued, her black eyes piercing Mò Yán's terrified soul. "Throw open the deepest halls of your sect for my god. Show yourself the fertile, useful soil I believe you to be, and your clan will continue breathing tomorrow's air."
Mò Yán opened her mouth to swear absolute obedience, ready to deliver the world into the hands of that calamity to save her clan. But before she could utter the first syllable—
"Damn it!"
Yù Méi's frustrated shout interrupted the negotiation.
Yù Qíng stopped speaking. The priestess's delicate eyebrows furrowed slightly. She turned her body in the air, looking over her shoulder with genuine curiosity to see what had irritated her sister.
Yù Méi stood before Hán Léi's body. The Untouchable Petal, whose golden dress was now splattered with red spots, delivered a sulky, hard kick to the boy's ribs, but his body did not react. It rolled like an empty sack of potatoes, its eyes open and lifeless, drowned in blood and tears.
"What is it, little flower?" Yù Qíng asked.
Yù Méi threw her arms up, her expression overflowing with irritated, mocking boredom.
"He died!" the blonde complained, pointing at Hán Léi's destroyed carcass with indignation. "I hadn't even gotten to the arms yet—I was just playing with his fingers and that loose knee of his! That useless weakling's heart stopped from the pain! What trash, he couldn't even last five minutes of squeezing!"
Mò Yán and the Great Elder held their breath, bile rising in their throats at the mockery of their Outstanding Disciple's excruciating death.
Yù Qíng, for her part, merely sighed with the indulgence of a mother watching a child break a fragile toy.
"Don't worry, Méi," Yù Qíng murmured, her tone poetic and terribly casual, waving dismissively. "The world is large. Later we'll find you another toy, a little more durable, to amuse yourself. Go wash your hands; you've stained the new silk."
Yù Méi huffed, rolling her eyes before turning her back on Hán Léi's unrecognizable corpse and walking sulkily back to the carriage.
Yù Qíng turned again to Mò Yán, her immaculate, sweet smile back on her lips, resuming the negotiation exactly where it had been interrupted, as if death by pain shock were the natural weather of the afternoon.
"As I was saying, Mò Yán," the priestess whispered, her black eyes gleaming with satisfaction at the pure dread reflected in the girl's scarlet irises. "Prove yourself useful. And your sect will survive. Do we have an agreement?"
Trembling from head to toe, the restrained flower of Shattered Heaven pressed her face against the black rock, knowing she had just sold her soul.
"Yes, Lady," Mò Yán whispered, her voice thin and submissive. "We have an agreement."
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