The gravity of Zhì Yuǎn's Inner Universe kept thousands of assassins pinned against the black rock of the canyon. The Dead Echo Valley smelled of crushed dust and absolute panic.
Yù Méi approached Zhì Yuǎn. The warrior's erect posture dissolved into palpable anxiety, her fingers gripping the sleeve of her husband's charcoal‑gray tunic. Her flesh, sculpted in fire, trembled in pure anticipation.
"Husband… please," Yù Méi begged, her guttural voice vibrating with undeniable physical need. "Let me play. Just a little. There are so many people here, and I really want to hear the sound of their necks snapping. Please, my heaven…"
The darkness in Zhì Yuǎn's eyes receded, giving way to a warm, possessive glow that he reserved exclusively for those women. His calloused thumb slid across the youngest's cheek.
"Enjoy yourself, Méi," his deep voice reverberated through the canyon. "But leave their leader intact. He has a greater purpose."
Yù Méi's face broke into a wide, euphoric smile.
Ecstatic, the warrior threw her arms around Zhì Yuǎn's neck. She pressed her lips to his in a brutal, voracious kiss, her warm tongue invading her husband's mouth and eagerly tasting possession. When she pulled back, the youngest's full chest rose and fell violently. She panted, her breath stolen by the intensity of the Yang emanating from that man.
With her legs trembling with lust and her eyes gleaming in living gold, Yù Méi turned to the arena.
The youngest consciously dispelled the Floating Lotus Step. Her bare soles touched the blood‑soaked, muddy ground. At the same instant, Zhì Yuǎn retracted the weight of his gravity from the stands. Only the Sect Master, Lóu Jiàn, remained crushed against the stone.
Feeling the pressure vanish, the thousands of disciples did not surrender. Believing it to be a flaw in the invader's foundation, dozens of men drew Yin‑poisoned blades, barbed chains, and heavy axes, roaring with fury as they charged at the unprotected blonde woman.
Yù Méi laughed. A rough, dirty laugh.
The Law of Rupture boiled in her veins. The warrior advanced. The first axe descended against her shoulder. The steel collided with her immaculate jade skin and turned to opaque dust. Yù Méi drove her bare fist into the attacker's chest. The sound of the ribcage imploding from the inside out echoed like a wet thunderclap. The man vomited his own organs in a scarlet explosion that bathed the woman's face and golden silk.
The bloodbath ignited her.
Two 1st Pillar Saint elders flanked her, channeling toxic green Qi into heavy sabers. They aimed at Yù Méi's neck and waist. The youngest did not retreat a millimeter. She opened her arms and grabbed the two living blades with her bare palms. The intention of Rupture traveled through her fingers. The elders' tempered steel groaned, rusted, and crumbled like wet sand.
Before shock could register on the old men's wrinkled faces, Yù Méi grabbed both their heads.
SPLAT.
She smashed the two skulls together. Gray matter and eyeballs sprayed through the air, raining down on the stunned crowd. The headless bodies collapsed at her feet.
"Too soft!" Yù Méi snarled, licking a drop of hot blood running down her own lip. "Where's your perversity?!"
Absolute terror replaced the clan's fury. The illusion of superiority crumbled. The assassins who had spent their lives preaching the survival of the fittest turned their backs, shoving each other in bestial panic, running like sheep toward the deepest tunnels of the canyon.
Yù Méi did not let them escape. Painted in warm red and laughing at the top of her lungs, the warrior charged.
She used no flying techniques. Her bare heels struck the stones with lethal force, opening craters in the rock with each step. She caught the fleeing group's rear guard. A punch to a female disciple's back made her spine tear through her own skin and fly out of her body. A side kick split three men in half simultaneously, slippery viscera cascading like a waterfall onto the valley floor.
The sound of the slaughterhouse was a rustic symphony of Crack, Crunch, and strangled gurgles. The strong smell of blood fouled the air. Yù Méi's golden silk was soaked and heavy with scarlet, plastered to her voluptuous body, but she continued hunting, turning the "Path of Perversity" into a mere puddle of fertilizer.
On the arena's elevated terrace, Bái Wǎn clutched the hem of her pearlescent silk. The girl's oceanic irises captured the screams of despair from men and women being split in half. A sharp pang of pity compressed her chest as she witnessed the raw deaths.
"Does the melody of breaking bones disturb you, little lotus?" Yù Qíng's cold, pale hand rested on Bái Wǎn's tense shoulder.
"They're begging…" Bái Wǎn whispered, her voice faltering before the carnage.
"The Law of Rupture that inhabits our little sister's core demands friction and matter, Wǎn'er," Yù Qíng's lethal sweetness dripped from every syllable. "Her Sea of Gold distorts patience, amplifying carnal hunger until carnage becomes pure worship. She loves blood because it is the visual proof that the world yields to the weight our husband gave us."
Mò Yán stepped forward, her scarlet irises assessing the rain of severed limbs in the lower arena.
"Do not waste your empathy on this filth, Sister Wǎn," Mò Yán's voice dissected the novice's pity with an implacable, devout fervor, her disgust for the scum overflowing in her syllables. "These people venerate cruelty. They disembowel mortals and feast on the corpses of the weak. Sister Méi is merely cleaning a well of pests."
The words settled into the former academic's reasoning. Bái Wǎn looked again at the arena, remembering the brutality with which those same men had killed each other minutes before her family arrived. Pity evaporated, replaced by a chill of absolute fascination. The work of her new home was beautiful.
In the center of the ruined arena, at the epicenter of the mud pool, Lóu Jiàn remained on his knees.
The Sect Master's Crystal Soul throbbed under the gravitational pressure that prevented him from moving a single muscle. The man who had preached the survival of the fittest for millennia watched his entire sect reduced to a carpet of ground meat by a single laughing woman.
Zhì Yuǎn's dark leather boots stopped inches from the leader's face.
Lóu Jiàn raised his eyes, bathed in blood and dust, meeting the abyssal void of that man.
"Your philosophy of life was always correct, Lóu Jiàn," Zhì Yuǎn's deep voice reverberated through the canyon. "The wolf does indeed devour the lamb."
The god tilted his face slightly, his shadow engulfing his sculpted features.
"But let's just say you were unlucky today."
The Sect Master trembled, expecting the final blow. But Zhì Yuǎn raised the index finger of his right hand.
"We will need bloodhounds beyond the ceiling of this world," Zhì Yuǎn dictated.
Silver threads of the Law of Karma materialized around his long fingers. Simultaneously, the dark, possessive essence of the Law of Devotion, anchored to his deep connection with Yù Qíng's sea, seeped into those cords. Zhì Yuǎn fused the two universal rules into a black, shimmering mark.
He drove his finger directly into the center of Lóu Jiàn's chest.
The mark pierced the invisible defenses of the 4th Pillar Saint and brutally sank into the old cultivator's Crystal Soul. The pain was not physical; it was the complete annihilation of free will. Lóu Jiàn's eyes widened. His identity, millennia of pride, and selfish memories were incinerated, replaced by a blind, absolute, fanatical obedience. The threads of Karma sealed his soul as traceable property of the god before him.
Lóu Jiàn's eyes lost focus for a second, and then they overflowed with canine adoration.
"When the dimensional plane opens its throat to swallow you, you will find safe soil and establish our foundations on the other side of the veil," Zhì Yuǎn ordered, unquestionable. "The Law of Karma will allow me to see and dictate your steps across the distances of that world. Prepare our arrival."
"My existence serves only your path, Master," Lóu Jiàn babbled, his rough voice overflowing with sick reverence.
Zhì Yuǎn wasted no more time. With the puppet forged, the god drove his index and middle fingers into the servant's chest.
He guided a thick, colossal thread of his own Primordial Qi, injecting the brute force of his Inner Universe directly into the Crystal Cage that housed the old man's corrupted soul.
The Crystal Soul began to inflate. The Primordial Energy grotesquely fattened the Sect Master's dantian. The veins in the leader's neck and arms turned black and bulged beneath his skin. His aura, once limited to the 4th Pillar Saint, was stretched and artificially catapulted to a density that the fabric of that dimensional plane simply could not bear. Lóu Jiàn's body glowed with a sickly gray light, throbbing like a pig fattened for cosmic slaughter.
The environment reacted.
The canyon's stones trembled. Thick clouds laden with apocalyptic purple began to spin directly over the Dead Echo Valley. The sound of ancient, suffocating thunder echoed in the heights, tearing the mountain's silence.
The Will of the World had awakened, sensing the anomalous weight of the test subject.
Zhì Yuǎn raised his face to the storm forming on the dimension's ceiling. The Hunger in his black eyes boiled, greeting the Heavenly Tribulation.
"Heaven will open the door to vomit out our bait," the god pronounced to his wives, absolute ambition mapping the route of ascension. "And we will steal the exit."
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