The misty peak of the once‑imposing Celestial Mirror was an isolated refuge from the collapse devouring the continent. Protected by the absolute spatial matrices forged by Zhì Yuǎn, the courtyard of white stone and bamboo rested in untouched silence.
When the distortion of the air announced the return of the two women, there was not a single stain of dirt or dust upon them.
Yù Méi landed gracefully on the flagstones. The invisible barrier of the Floating Lotus had repelled all the blood and pulverized bone pulp from the Dry Bones Valley. The warrior displayed her incredibly clean milky jade skin and her immaculate golden dress, although the smile on her full lips still overflowed with the euphoria of someone who had just crushed thousands of arrogant fools. Beside her, Bái Wǎn glided through the air, emanating a lethal peace that contrasted with the carnage that her own freshly boiled water had wrought.
On the veranda of the main pavilion, the old Mò Zhōng was already waiting.
The butler served the steaming tea with the precision of a shadow. He asked no questions about the absence of survivors outside. His existence boiled down to serving.
Zhì Yuǎn was reclining in an ebony armchair, his dark gaze following the servant's methodical movement. The god raised his hand, stopping the porcelain teapot in mid‑air.
"Blind loyalty demands foundations that time cannot erode," Zhì Yuǎn's deep voice echoed in the silent courtyard. "The ceiling we are about to tear open would soon crush the bones you possess now, Mò Zhōng. Your service deserves sharper fangs."
Before the old man could react, Zhì Yuǎn extended his index finger and touched the center of the butler's chest.
The barrier of Mò Zhōng's mortal soul was obliterated. A purified torrent of Primordial Qi, refined by Zhì Yuǎn's own Universe, flooded the servant's veins. The pain of reconstruction lasted a tenth of a second, replaced by a volcanic vitality.
The old man's bones cracked, thickening and darkening. His wrinkled appearance melted like wax, and the butler's features violently regressed until they stopped at the apex of biological youth: a thirty‑year‑old man. His skin gained the dense, cold aspect of dark steel, and the energy now radiating from his flesh was not that of a mere 1st Transcendent Stage cultivator, but that of a beast forged to bear the weight of stars.
Mò Zhōng gasped, falling to his knees with a thud that cracked the stone. The butler did not give thanks with empty words; he merely lowered his head until his forehead pressed against the rock, his devotion engraved for eternity into his new, formidable flesh.
In the air, Yù Qíng let out a low, crystalline laugh.
"A well‑fed dog does not slip its collar," the priestess murmured, settling languidly onto Zhì Yuǎn's shoulders, her pale legs swinging as her arms wrapped around her husband's neck. "But your wives' collars need tightening, my love. Their sea is stagnating at the edge."
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Two years evaporated under the peak's isolation.
While the continent below drowned in blood, anarchy, and ruin, the interior of the bamboo pavilion lost any sense of the passage of time. The air was perpetually saturated with sweat, pure Yin, and the thick ozone of the god's inexhaustible Yang.
The Weaving of the Tides had reached its extreme limit.
On the ruined sheets, under the brutal friction and the colossal thrusts of Zhì Yuǎn, the liquid Qi in the dantians of Mò Yán, Yù Méi, and Bái Wǎn could no longer be compressed horizontally. The energy meshes formed a solid wall.
But there was an anomaly in the altar's hierarchy.
Yù Qíng, resting exhausted yet sovereign against her husband's chest, displayed an impossible foundation. While the seas of the three sisters reached physical boundaries, the eldest's Ocean of Devotion was a bottomless abyss. Because her core had been born in the exact millisecond when Zhì Yuǎn's dantian collapsed to form the Singularity, Yù Qíng's biology was a dark mirror of his void. The absurd weight and scope of the Primordial Qi she contained proved overwhelmingly why she reigned unquestioned over her sisters.
But even the ocean needed to take shape.
In the dimness of the twenty‑fourth month, evolution erupted.
Zhì Yuǎn drove himself into Mò Yán, discharging the torrent of a sun into the white‑haired young woman's belly. The impact did not merely fill the girl; it pushed matter beyond the limits of physics.
Inside the four women, gravitational collapse began. The Weaving's mesh gave way. Each of their Seas of Qi imploded upon itself with excruciating violence. Their backs arched in unison, nails tearing silk, throats howling in a cataclysmic mixture of cellular pain and pleasure spasms that biology struggled to register.
The implosion sucked away all light. And then, it ignited.
Where stagnant mortals would have formed small planets of dead stone, their wombs gave birth to Stars.
At the center of each of their dantians, a colossal, crushing Astral Body stabilized, pulsing with the absolute light of their concepts. Yán's Mandate. Méi's Rupture. Wān's Serenity. Qíng's Absolute Devotion.
The gravitational force of the new astral bodies was so brutal that the bamboo structure of the pavilion creaked. If they did not immediately contain their newly acquired weight, the mere presence of the four would crack the entire mountain. They had entered the 3rd Transcendent Stage.
Zhì Yuǎn observed the stars burning inside his wives. They were bright, colossal, but purely solitary.
"A sun does not sustain a system if it is alone in the dark," his deep voice vibrated in the darkness of the room.
He did not pull away. With their naked bodies pressed together, sweat mingling, Zhì Yuǎn grabbed Yù Qíng's face and kissed her deeply and possessively. The Primordial Mill spun, but he did not send his raw Yang. The god plunged into his own Inner Universe, capturing the dead stars and the fragments of Laws he had swallowed from the world: Space, the Crane's Illusion, Stagnant Water, Shadow Venom, White Light, Sword Metal.
Through lips, friction, and the touch of his large hands gripping their waists, Zhì Yuǎn breathed refined, perfect fragments of all these Laws directly into his women's virgin stars.
Bái Wǎn's star gained orbital currents of living Water and rings of blinding Light; Yù Méi's astral body was bathed in halos of volcanic Fire and unbreakable Metal; Mò Yán's world crystallized with dense layers of Illusion and the lethality of Venom. And Yù Qíng's black star swallowed the distortion of Space and incipient Time, anchoring the gravity of the others as the dark heart of the altar.
In seconds, the four assimilated a terrifying arsenal he had developed over the past years. Instinctive spatial distortion. Irrefutable illusory camouflages. Instant teleportation for short jumps. Conceptual speed that shattered any mortal's reaction time.
When the morning sun finally invaded the cracks, the forging was complete. The stars pulsed warm, full of life, complex ecosystems of Laws ready to annihilate any obstacle in their husband's path.
Yù Méi stretched languidly, her long legs swinging on the edge of the bed. The youngest reached for one of the heavy dark travel tunics and wrinkled her nose.
"It sucks having to hide all this now," the warrior grumbled, kicking the thick cloth and forming a perfectly pouty face. "Going back to wearing dark veils and those giant tunics so as not to draw attention up there is going to ruin my whole mood."
Zhì Yuǎn stopped before the bedroom door, adjusting the collar of his charcoal‑gray tunic. His dark gaze descended on the youngest, dissecting the uselessness of that complaint.
"Heavy silk and veils are a grotesque insult to the flesh I forged in you," his voice echoed flat and pragmatic. "Physically hiding attracts the glances that suspect shadows. Perfect invisibility is not being unseen; it is being looked at and instantly forgotten."
He raised his right hand.
The threads of the newly fused Law of Illusion, perfectly intertwined with the Law of Karma, sprouted from his fingers. The cosmic intention swept the pavilion and covered the bodies of Yù Qíng, Yù Méi, Bái Wǎn, and Mò Yán. Zhì Yuǎn wove the conceptual mesh even over himself.
There was no physical change for themselves. The majesty and weight of their beauty remained scandalous.
"Dress for our comfort, not for the world," he ordered, turning his back to allow them to prepare.
A few minutes later, the pavilion doors opened to the morning breeze.
Zhì Yuǎn walked to the stone courtyard, flanked by his altar. Yù Qíng wore her impeccable short navy‑blue dress; Yù Méi displayed her immaculate thighs through the slits of a luxurious golden silk; Mò Yán tensed the air with her deep‑necklined white and black Hanfu; and Bái Wǎn glided in her stunning pearlescent dress.
In the center of the courtyard, Mò Zhōng waited. The dark steel butler wore on his thumb a Peak Saint‑Grade storage ring, looted from the continent's deepest vaults, where the family's colossal armored carriage and luxuries rested ready for use.
The servant's gaze met the group.
He stared at Yù Méi's bare legs, Mò Yán's heaving bust, and Yù Qíng's divine face. But the butler did not blush. His breath did not falter. The servant's eyes passed over them and over the god himself as if looking at common gray street stones. To Mò Zhōng's mind, the women before him were ordinary peasant women, rustic and with features so mediocre that his brain did not even bother to register their presence. He merely recognized their identities through the bond of loyalty, made an apathetic bow, and waited.
Yù Qíng let out a lethal, fascinated laugh.
Thanks to the thread of Karma that intimately connected them to Zhì Yuǎn's Singularity, the harem was immune to the technique itself. They saw themselves exactly as they were: divine calamities of overwhelming beauty and voluptuousness. But to any external gaze, they were merely uninteresting dust walking to the fields.
"The lie shaped by our heaven is denser than the world's truth," Yù Qíng purred, her eyes overflowing with blind possession. She leaned against her husband's shoulder. "The flesh will remain only ours. And the ants will see only what we want them to see."
Zhì Yuǎn did not answer. The walk to the edge of the Celestial Mirror's peak was short.
Below them, the sea of gray clouds hid a continent reduced to ashes, futile wars, and spilled blood. The board had been cleaned, and the mortal world no longer had anything that the Singularity's Hunger wished to swallow.
The old butler stopped ten paces away, the ring gleaming faintly in his hand.
The four women hovered millimeters above the ground, the stars in their wombs pulsing with the vastness of the Dao, their hands ready to annihilate whatever breathed wrong on the other side.
Zhì Yuǎn stopped at the edge of the abyss. He did not look down. The god's black gaze fixed directly on the empty firmament.
He needed no stone altar. He did not wait for purple clouds of the Heavenly Tribulation or invitations from false divinities. His Hunger demanded new air.
Zhì Yuǎn raised both hands. His long, calloused fingers dug into the empty air. The Law of Space and the Law of Destruction obeyed the physical pull of that man.
RIIIIIP.
The vault of the mortal sky was torn in half like a screen of rotten paper. The sound of reality being flayed thundered through the mountains, revealing a colossal rift of silver and turbulent darkness.
"Upward," Zhì Yuǎn commanded, his black cloak fluttering with the cosmic wind that gushed from the tear.
He stepped into the abyss, followed immediately by the unshakable loyalty of his altar and the silent servant.
The rift collapsed behind them with a dull snap, leaving the ashes of the mortal world irrevocably behind. And the very second the god's boots touched the soil of the Higher Realm, the crushing atmosphere nearly bent the light around them, while the distant threads of Karma throbbed in the darkness: the old bloodhounds already sensed the arrival of their masters.
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