The cedar floor of the Autumn Wind Pavilion released an agonized groan.
It was a tiny sound, yet it echoed like thunder in Zhì Yuǎn's mind.
He had not moved. He had only set down the empty cup and drawn in the cold night air.
Using his will, he pulled back the fraction of weight that had escaped, redistributing it into the inner void. The creaking of the wood ceased at once.
Zhì Yuǎn released his breath, cold sweat beading at his temple. If he lost concentration for even a single second, the brutal density of his own body would punch through the terrace, crush the supporting beams, and sink him into the earth like a stone thrown into a lake.
Such was the irony the heavens had cast upon his current existence.
Zhì Yuǎn raised his right hand, observing the pale skin under the starlight. His Inner Universe was an abyss that never stopped expanding. And that was precisely the problem. The Primordial Qi he cultivated did not flow. It spread. The energy claimed new territory with each passing moment. Without borders to contain it, the endless expansion only increased the raw force and the sheer physical mass of his flesh—a weight that had long since shattered the limits of this plane.
He closed his fingers into a fist, making the air around his hand crackle.
Zhì Yuǎn knew that if he drove his fist into the chest of any of those old monsters, the strength of his body would reduce an Ancestor to a mist of blood and crushed bone. But what good would that do?
Cultivators at the Seventh Stage of Immortal Establishment—the Animic Ocean—did not wander freely through the world. Prodigies ascended quickly, while the old ones who took too long to break through isolated themselves for millennia, becoming living myths. And the legends recorded in the ancient texts Zhì Yuǎn had assimilated since arriving on this plane agreed upon one absolute truth. At that level, flesh was a mere formality.
The essence of the soul was fused into every fiber of their being, every drop of blood. That mass of destroyed flesh would simply float in the air and, in a fraction of a second, the high-quality animic energy of the Ancestor would weave its form back into place.
To annihilate such existences, he needed density. A blade of concentrated energy capable of obliterating the very root of the soul, or the Law of Destruction with a density to match theirs. Without that, he was merely a colossus—too heavy to be killed, yet with Qi too dispersed to be lethal.
His dark eyes shifted toward the interior of the room, where his wives meditated in silence.
Mò Yán's aura pulsed with a lethal and enviable stability. Zhì Yuǎn's mind analyzed the flow of her cultivation with bitter clarity. The path for Mò Yán—and for the others—was simple and direct. When the women absorbed Primordial Qi through dual cultivation, the high-quality energy was immediately filtered and converted into the Qi of their respective Conceptual Laws. A defined, controllable energy.
And above all, that energy flowed into a Dantian. No matter how titanic and vast their Inner Realms were, they possessed limits. They could condense and compress their Qi simply by pushing it against those boundaries.
Zhì Yuǎn sighed, closing his eyes.
I have no walls, he thought, pure frustration rippling through his mind. The Laws I have comprehended are not solid enough to contain anything. They only absorb all the Primordial Qi I pour into them, and I cannot even compress the resulting Law Qi. Free energy has nothing to strike against. It merely colonizes empty space… pushing the edges of the universe into eternity.
Compressing his Qi was like a mortal trying to squeeze a gale with bare hands.
He could not advance. The world outside was marching toward a slaughter, and he remained trapped beneath the colossal weight of his own power.
After another fruitless stretch of time, Zhì Yuǎn rose.
He descended the stone steps of the terrace in silence. He walked through the gloom of the courtyard, guided only by the pale moonlight that outlined the leaves of a weeping willow.
Lín Jié was seated at a small stone table beneath the canopy of a thousand-year-old plum tree. A Jade Heart Lantern bathed the place in warm light, floating gently in the cold night air. She did not raise her eyes when his silent footsteps approached. Her attention remained fixed on a thin branch of the tree, where a small deep-moon spider worked.
"You should be resting," Zhì Yuǎn said, stopping two steps from her.
Lín Jié adjusted the collar of her rough tunic. Physical purification had removed the visible fatigue from her face, yet her gaze still carried the weight of someone who had spent an entire decade calculating other people's lives on ledgers.
"Cultivators do not sleep, my Lord," she answered, her soft voice mixing with the cold wind.
"You are still mortal, Jié," he pointed out, his tone calm but irrefutable. "And you have demanded too much of yourself these past days."
She offered a tired half-smile. "I am not working. I am only watching this small creature."
Guided by her gaze, Zhì Yuǎn shifted his focus to the insect. The spider drew a thin thread from itself, anchoring it to a dry leaf before leaping to the opposite branch.
"She has neither the strength of a tiger nor the venom of an earth serpent," Lín Jié continued, her voice soft in the night. "Yet she can paralyze prey dozens of times heavier than herself."
"She understands structure," he commented, his mind deciphering the workings of the web. "The secret is not the thickness of the thread—it is the tension. If loose, the mere weight of dew snaps it. If stretched to the exact point, it dissipates force."
"Yes." Lín Jié turned her face to look at him, her beautiful green eyes reflecting the glow of the lantern. "She does not try to raise a barrier against the wind. She simply stretches her threads and lets the storm pass straight through. She uses the very movement of the environment to anchor her web."
Her words echoed in the silence of the courtyard.
She uses the very movement…
Zhì Yuǎn blinked slowly. In the darkness of his Inner Universe, the accumulation of Primordial Qi continued to expand through the void, never stopping while he cultivated.
He had been trying to build a stone dam to hold an ocean that had no shores. He had been trying to push Primordial Qi against walls that did not exist, fighting against the very nature of his boundless cultivation.
But what if the secret was not to squeeze? What if it was to apply tension?
If his universe continued to expand forever, why not use that very force of expansion in his favor?
If he took the Primordial Qi—floating free and light as cotton in the vacuum—and spun it, twisting it into tight threads, like a rope-maker…
And if he anchored one end of those threads at the center of his being?
The endless growth itself would become the loom.
"A weaver's tether," Zhì Yuǎn murmured, a subtle, cold smile tugging at the corner of his lips.
"My Lord?" Lín Jié tilted her head, not understanding the change in his expression.
"Nothing, Jié." He took a step back, the gleam in his eyes giving way to a softer look. "It will not take long before we begin cultivating. I hope your heart is resolved by then."
Without waiting for a reply, Zhì Yuǎn turned on his heels and walked toward the meditation chamber at the back of the pavilion, leaving the bureaucrat alone with the spider under the moonlight.
------
The meditation chamber was silent. Seated on the rough limestone platform, Zhì Yuǎn breathed slowly, keeping his eyes closed. The scent of sandalwood from the pavilion could not cross the isolation arrays he himself had activated.
He turned his consciousness inward, plunging into the abyss of his Inner Universe.
Under the lens of his spiritual sense, the Primordial Qi revealed itself as a liquid ocean—dense and dark—distinct from the absolute void that floated around it. That vital sap, the purest in the Universe, filled the space, yet it lacked rigidity. It merely floated, dispersed, stretching across distances that the mind of an ordinary cultivator could not even measure.
Zhì Yuǎn concentrated on his spiritual energy. Just like his physical weight and the size of his universe, this energy was also fed directly by the continuous expansion of his existence. It grew every instant—vast and malleable.
Using that spiritual energy as the invisible hands of a weaver, Zhì Yuǎn plunged it into the liquid ocean of Primordial Qi.
He did not try to push or squeeze the liquid into a container. Instead, his spiritual fingers seized a current of that dark sap and began to spin. He drew the liquid, twisting it upon itself, applying a constant rotation until the amorphous flow began to take a defined shape. A thread. Long, thin, and malleable, stretching through the gloom of his inner world.
Now for the true test.
Zhì Yuǎn sought his physical body, which was the absolute center of that formation. Every fiber of his flesh composed the infinite universe, and the infinite universe composed his flesh.
He anchored the first end of that Primordial Qi thread directly into his physical spine, at the fulcrum where his marrow fused with the void. Then he stretched the other end across millions of li through the darkness, casting it to the extreme limit of the universe—the invisible edge where Primordial Qi continued to advance and colonize infinite space.
He released the tip of the thread at the edge, poured more Qi processed by the Primordial Mill, and waited.
The expansion began again. The extreme limit continued to pull away, pushing the edge outward. But now, as it moved, the edge pulled the Primordial Qi thread that was tied to the center of Zhì Yuǎn's body.
The tension began.
Like the steel cable of a siege ballista stretched to its absolute limit, the thread snapped taut. The colossal force of the cosmos's growth acted directly upon the line. Under that relentless traction, the very essence of the liquid Qi inside the thread was squeezed upon itself, from the outside in.
Yet the untamed nature of Primordial Qi reacted. Crushed by the absurd pressure, the energy began to repel itself, fighting violently to disperse and shatter the structure of the thread.
To prevent the line from disintegrating in the vacuum, Zhì Yuǎn was forced to pour a torrent of his own spiritual energy, crushing the rebellion of the Qi and forcing the form of the cable into place. Under the crushing weight of the cosmos and the lock of his spirit, the thickness of the thread diminished, but its color changed—from opaque dark to a matte gold, heavy and compact like cooled quicksilver.
The very movement of the universe's expansion was pressing the energy, but it was his spiritual will that kept it from exploding.
Zhì Yuǎn felt the impact in his flesh immediately. A sharp, cold stab of pain rose through his spine, making his teeth clack together in the meditation chamber. Holding the anchor line of a growing universe—while fighting the repulsion of the energy itself—was like trying to restrain a runaway imperial carriage with a cable tied to one's own bones.
Ignoring the discomfort, he used spiritual energy to spin the second thread. Then the third. The tenth.
With every new line he anchored from his spine to the different edges of the void, the tension multiplied. The stone platform beneath his thighs groaned under the sudden increase of his physical pressure. A dull, heavy pain began to grind against his ribs, and cold sweat soaked the gray fabric of his tunic. The resistance of his body was being tested to the limit by the traction of the loom he himself had built. When the thirtieth line was stretched, Zhì Yuǎn stopped injecting more Primordial Qi. His entire body throbbed as if it were about to rupture from the inside out.
He tried to breathe deeply to contain the pain, but the crushing force in his chest exacted its price. A metallic taste flooded his mouth, and he spat a mouthful of dark blood onto the limestone platform.
The result in the vacuum was immediate.
Because Zhì Yuǎn had stopped injecting Primordial Qi, the solidification of those thirty currents generated a drastic structural change. When squeezed to absolute density, the lines reduced their own volume, opening pockets of void around them.
Without new energy to force the expansion, the extreme edge of the cosmos yielded.
The Inner Universe retreated by a hair's breadth. The borders shrank naturally to occupy the vacant space left by the condensation of the threads. The remaining dispersed Qi flowed into those gaps, stabilizing the pressure and the internal weight of the system.
When Zhì Yuǎn opened his eyes in the dark chamber, the pain in his bones began to ease, leaving only a deep fatigue. But when he looked into his Inner Universe, he saw it: the once amorphous and dispersed ocean was now crossed by thirty golden, shining scars.
Threads of ultra-condensed Primordial Qi, whose energy density was infinitely superior to anything he had ever cultivated. He had finally found a path.
Success!
A genuinely happy smile split his face, breaking the stoic facade he usually maintained.
While drawing the first lines taut, Zhì Yuǎn had been certain he had committed suicide. The brutal tension was so great that the collapse of his Inner Universe had seemed imminent, threatening to implode his soul and flesh out of existence in the blink of an eye. But in the end, the pain had been nothing more than an excruciating internal pressure.
He released a long, heavy sigh, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.
His eyes dropped to the thick pool staining the limestone of the platform. It had been a long time since he had last seen his own blood.
Thankfully, I didn't do this in front of them, he thought, with a trace of bitter relief.
The sweet aroma of his vitality began to saturate the confined air of the room. It was a scent so strong and intoxicating that it would have drawn beasts from dozens of kilometers away if he had not sealed the pavilion's space. With a light movement of his fingers, Zhì Yuǎn invoked the Law of Destruction. A silent gray mist swept across the stone, obliterating the blood and the scent in the blink of an eye.
With the chamber purified and his breathing stabilized, he plunged his attention back into the Inner Universe.
The triumph of success, however, soon cooled before the vastness of the problem. As he admired the thirty golden lines, the critical gaze of the craftsman settled upon the obvious. That was absolutely nothing compared to the infinite ocean of his cultivation. Spinning by hand, stretching line by line with pure spiritual will, had driven his body to the limit.
If I have to spin and anchor every single thread, it will take an eternity just to begin increasing the density. Now I need a technique to do this, he concluded, his mind already calculating the next step.