The smell of fresh ink mixed with the scent of sandalwood inside the luxurious campaign pavilion.
Mò Yán was bent over a heavy ebony table, the brush held firmly between her pale fingers. The white‑haired young woman breathed slightly heavily, and the pure white silk of her Hanfu strained against the full curve of her breasts with each movement. The febrile flush stained her pale neck. With a quick, merciless stroke, she carved a red "X" over the crest of the Cutting Wind Valley. It was the third crest crossed out on that map in less than five days.
"The third sect of the east has been cleaned, husband," Mò Yán reported. Her melodious voice overflowed with burning devotion, and the girl's scarlet irises gleamed with pure ecstasy at the chance to be useful as she raised her face to him. "The dust of their vaults has been collected, and the old men have already been dispatched beyond the ceiling. The route to the south is open."
Reclining languidly on a mountain of silk cushions just behind the table, Yù Qíng smiled. The blue priestess rested her head on Zhì Yuǎn's thigh, her black eyes sparkling in approval as she savored the diplomat's predatory precision.
Zhì Yuǎn, who kept one hand resting absently on the eldest's dark hair, looked at the wet ink on the scroll. The unfathomable void of his irises absorbed the cartography, mapping the next meal.
"The Shadow Venom Sect," the god dictated, his deep voice reverberating through the pavilion's silk, pointing to a valley surrounded by swamps. "Dismantle the tent."
---
The central courtyard of the Shadow Venom Sect was unrecognizable.
Where cauldrons of poison and jade serpent statues once stood, there were now only craters and pools of boiling acid mixed with blood. The air smelled of sulfur and burnt flesh. The disciples of the Path of Perversity lay crushed against the toxic mud, their bones ground by the heavy gravity leaking from the man in the charcoal‑gray tunic who walked through the courtyard.
Suddenly, the black rock in the center of the valley exploded.
A suffocating green aura erupted from the underground catacombs, melting the surrounding stones. A skeletal man, his skin covered in purulent scales and his eyes blazing with pure hatred, floated into the sky. He was the sect's Old Monster, an ancestral 4th Pillar Saint who had been in closed reclusion for half a millennium, awakened by the ruin of his foundation.
"WHO DARES PROFANE MY SWAMP?!" the ancestor roared, his voice sounding like the screech of a thousand snakes. His toxic Qi expanded, obliterating the sunlight and forming a thick cloud of corrosive acid that threatened to rain over the entire valley. "I WILL MELT YOUR FLESH AND DRINK YOUR—"
Yù Méi huffed. The sound was loud, irritated, and profoundly bored.
The Brutal Blade, displaying her bare legs through the slits of her golden silk and with her face perfectly clean under the sunlight, did not even bother to look up. She took a step forward. The girl's bare heel struck the poison‑soaked ground. The courtyard's foundation stone cracked in a spiderweb that stretched for a hundred meters.
With a casual impulse of her muscles, Yù Méi vanished.
The air cracked. She reappeared directly in front of the ancestor, floating in the middle of the toxic cloud that could not even scratch the immaculate glow of her skin.
The old monster's eyes bulged. Before he could channel a single beam of venom or cross his arms in defense, Yù Méi drove her bare fist into the center of his chest.
There was no resistance. The sound of the 4th Pillar Saint breaking was that of a rotten melon being smashed by a forge hammer. The ancestor's chest imploded from back to front. The cultivator burst into a grotesque mist of blood, bones, and melted organs. The shockwave of Yù Méi's punch tore the venom cloud in half, dissipating the lethal attack and opening the blue sky above the valley with a single blow.
The dust of blood rained onto the mud.
Yù Méi landed gracefully on the ground. She shook her hand dirty with dark red, splattering drops on the broken floor. Instead of celebrating, the warrior's shoulders slumped. She turned to Zhì Yuǎn, crossing her arms under her full bust and forming a pouty face.
"Wet paper!" Yù Méi complained, her childish frustration contrasting bizarrely with the rain of viscera falling around her. She kicked a cracked skull that rolled near her foot. "You said we were going to have work, husband! The old men here are made of wet paper! I didn't even close my fist properly and his chest already burst. Where are the hard stones for me to break?!"
Zhì Yuǎn ignored the youngest's bloodthirsty tantrum. He continued walking, his calm gaze descending on the pathetic figure trembling on his knees at the door of the ruined hall: the current leader of the Shadow Venom Sect.
The man wept compulsively, his sanity shattered upon seeing his clan's untouchable legend turned into fertilizer by a casual punch from a girl offended by her own boredom.
Zhì Yuǎn stopped a step from the pool of bile. He raised his right hand and drove his incandescent finger directly into the cultivator's chest, sewing the Laws of Karma and Devotion into his soul in one go.
The man's identity and dread evaporated, violently uprooted and replaced by a canine, unquestionable adoration.
Mò Yán was already positioned beside the god. The diplomat adjusted her sleeves and, with an unnegotiable voice, poured a torrent of logistical directives, coordinates of hiding places, and routes that the slave should establish in the higher plane. The leader merely nodded, drooling submission.
Satisfied, Mò Yán stepped back. Zhì Yuǎn injected a massive torrent of his Primordial Qi into the test subject. The man's veins darkened and swelled. The sky over the swamp reacted with instant repulsion, choking on the weight of the anomaly. The purple clouds of the Tribulation spun hysterically and, unable to annihilate the flesh, reality opened its throat and ejected the leader in a brutal vortex out of that world.
The rift closed with a thunderclap. The thread of Karma was driven into the god's stellar compass.
Zhì Yuǎn did not waste time looking at the dimension's ceiling. He turned his face to the fissure of mud and toxic gas at the back of the sect, where the barriers of their Secret Realm had yielded under his presence. It was a pocket dimension forged entirely in Miasma and Decay.
The god raised his hand. The space around the ravine twisted and imploded. The venomous realm was brutally torn from the world's fabric and sucked into the black abyss of his dantian. In the depths of his Inner Universe, another dead, gray star swallowed the acid foundation, igniting into a sickly sun of the Law of Venom.
Zhì Yuǎn lowered his arm, sliding his tongue across his lips as he savored the density of that new universal rule.
"To the next," he ordered.
---
The continent's sky went mad.
Over the following days, the celestial vault covering the vast expanses of this plane lost its very stability. In the east, purple Tribulation clouds erupted in the middle of the afternoon, flashing furiously before vomiting patriarchal figures into the void. Hours later, in the south. The next morning, in the northern snows.
The rhythm was sickening and unrelenting. The world seemed to have its guts turned inside out, trying to expel foreign bodies in a frenetic cadence that the millennial chronicles of the sects had never recorded.
Down below, the hierarchy of the ants collapsed.
In the richest cities and sheltered valleys, cultivators took to the streets to stare at the purple clouds in absolute dread. Communication between clans fell mute. The myth of the untouchable old monsters turned to smoke. Valuable Secret Realms simply disappeared from the map, leaving only smooth craters of dead rock. Without the anchor of force to impose respect, chaos tore through the walls of society. Blood began to run in the streets over scarce resources, anarchy devouring the continent while the charcoal‑gray tunic shadow strolled above the flames.
---
A few days later, silence reigned inside the family's luxurious campaign pavilion.
Mò Yán cleaned the tip of her brush in a cup of dirty water. The white‑haired young woman stepped away from the ebony table, her chest rising in pure satisfaction. The immense map of the continent spread over the wood was now nothing but a sea of red crosses. Every valley, every smaller mountain, and every swamp had been crossed out and emptied.
Only two massive crests remained, centered on the geographical epicenter of the scroll, intact beneath the ink: the Immortal Sword peak and the Celestial Crane lakes.
A few steps from the table, Bái Wǎn knelt docilely. The young woman's pearlescent dress brushed the thick carpet as she raised the steaming porcelain teapot. The girl's divinely sculpted face exuded a lethal innocence; her soft, slightly rosy cheeks, her small, perfect nose, and her full lips that seemed to beg for a bite formed a sinful contrast with the dress's deep neckline. She leaned her torso forward in a meticulously calculated manner, the silk yielding just enough to display the heaving, pressed fullness of her small, full breasts to whoever sat before her.
The former academic served the tea, her oceanic eyes overflowing with a soft lust as she delivered the cup directly into Zhì Yuǎn's hands.
The visual trap did not go unnoticed in the pavilion.
Yù Qíng, who lay languidly on a nearby divan, narrowed her black eyes, a sadistic, competitive smile curving her red lips as she crossed her porcelain legs, adjusting her skirt to rise dangerously up her thighs. In the opposite corner, Yù Méi licked her teeth, growling low while puffing out her monumental bust under the golden silk, ready to fight for space. Even Mò Yán, maintaining her posture at the table, adjusted the collar of her white Hanfu to expose a little more of the warm sweat running down her own collarbone.
The silent, dirty war was declared: who would be the first to be thrown onto the sheets and reduced to a piece of exhausted meat under their god's weight that night?
Zhì Yuǎn took the porcelain. His black, absolute eyes descended upon the only two remaining marks on the map, but the volcanic heat in his dantian already responded openly to the wet display of the four goddesses in his tent.
He took a sip, and the tip of his warm tongue slowly slid across his own lips in a gesture of pure predation.
---