The aura of the 3rd Transcendent Stage burned around Qīng Yì like a lone star falling over the capital.
Ignoring the panting pleas of the secretary Lín Jié, whose ink-stained fingers vainly tried to grasp his sword's scabbard, the Young Master marched through the gardens of the outer ring. The elite guards, leaning on their halberds with thin streams of blood trickling from their noses, could barely raise their eyes when he passed.
To Qīng Yì, that asphyxiating air of lead and ozone was not the symptom of a deadly plague. The illusion of benevolence had cracked in his mind. The Holy Healer had been locked for three days at the origin of that crushing epicenter. Whatever those outsiders truly were, they were beasts, absolute calamities, and the sickening silence proved that the fairy of his clan was being devoured alive in the dark.
He stopped before the heavy gates of the Autumn Wind Pavilion's inner courtyard.
"Yǔ!" Qīng Yì's voice thundered through the gardens, torn by despair and urgency. His hand gripped the steel sword's hilt so tightly his knuckles cracked. He channeled the resonance of his Inner Astro into his throat. "Step away from the door! I am going to break it down!"
He raised the blade. The purest Qi gathered in the steel, shining with the promise to strike down the monsters and rescue the untouchable woman from the clutches of that filth.
But before the sword could descend to cleave the solid wood, the iron latch clicked from the inside.
The heavy cedar door slid open with a drawn-out creak.
Qīng Yì froze. The blade stopped inches from the wood. The man's breath caught in his throat, his chest rising and falling in feverish expectation, ready to support a wounded, exhausted, or terrified fairy.
The sight that filled the crack, however, was a sledgehammer blow straight to his spine.
Qīng Yǔ stood in the doorway.
The woman the empire venerated did not wear her jade crown or the seven layers of ceremonial silk. She wore only a loose white tunic, completely untied at the waist. The wide-open neckline exposed the full, heaving curve of her pale breasts and the line of her collarbone, which was violently marked by purple bruises and recent bite marks.
Her once perfectly aligned hair fell in a chaotic tangle, stuck to her neck and face by thick sweat. The woman's immaculate skin boiled in a scandalous, feverish blush, and her full lips were swollen, slightly bruised, and wet with saliva.
But it was the smell that delivered the killing blow.
When the door opened, a thick gust of air from inside the room escaped into the courtyard. It did not smell of medicinal herbs or purifying incense. The stagnant atmosphere was a solid wall of sandalwood, ozone, and the raw, sweet, and unmistakable scent of musk and sex. Her Yin did not pulse in a healing calm; it radiated a satiated, corrupted, and heavy turbulence, overflowing from her pores like a cup that had been filled until it spilled dozens of times.
Qīng Yì's knees gave out. His mind frantically searched for the diagnosis of a hallucinogenic poison, a carnal curse, any biological thing that would justify the unjustifiable.
"Yǔ... what... what did they do to you...?" His voice came out as a strangled wheeze. The sword rattled in the air.
Qīng Yǔ raised her face.
The healer's blue eyes did not well up with relief. There were no tears of a kidnapped victim. There was only a genuine, dark, and absolutely fierce irritation at having her intimacy interrupted. The glare she shot at Qīng Yì was the same a beast would cast at a pesky buzzing insect near its meal.
"How dare you scream at my door?" Qīng Yǔ's voice came out hoarse, torn by nights of uninterrupted moans, dripping with a relentless disgust.
She did not assume a martial stance. She merely raised her sweaty right hand and flicked her fingers in a sharp gesture, like someone sweeping away trash.
The Qi purified by the Primordial Mill within her womb, fused with the residual gravity of Zhì Yuǎn's Dantian that still soaked her entrails, exploded forward. The invisible impact was not a wind technique of her sect; it was a wall of colossal density that collided directly against Qīng Yì's chest.
CRACK.
Qīng Yì's ribs gave way. He was thrown backward like a rag doll, his feet losing contact with the ground. The man flew across the courtyard and collided violently against the base of a jade statue, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the white marble.
The steel sword slipped from his limp fingers, falling with a metallic clink.
Behind him, the secretary Lín Jié covered her mouth with both ink-stained hands, her entire body trembling in absolute panic upon seeing the Young Master of the 3rd Stage crushed like dust by a single wave of the healing fairy's hand.
Qīng Yǔ did not even glance at the body lying on the ground. The woman's clouded blue irises swept over the elite guards who were still trying to stay on their feet leaning against the outer walls.
"Captain of the Guard!" Qīng Yǔ's command cut through the gardens, her voice laced with a dirty and lethal possessiveness. "Drag this noisy trash off my steps. If any worm screams near this pavilion again and disturbs my heaven's sleep... I will come out and rip your heads off myself."
No guard dared to breathe.
Without waiting for a response, the Celestial Plume retreated into the hot and thick dimness of the room. The heavy cedar doors slammed shut with a violent bang, the iron latches dropping once more, sealing the profane lust back in the dark.
In the bloodied courtyard, silence reigned.
Blood trickled down Qīng Yì's chin, staining his white training tunic. But he did not cry from physical pain. The man's eyes were wide, glazed, and completely hollow. His retina was frozen on the sight of the wide-open tunic. The air in his lungs still carried the scent of musk and sandalwood. The pure legend he had venerated for fifteen years had been ruined; transformed into a vulgar, panting, and furious furnace for the ordinary and silent man he had seen through the carriage window.
---
The news of the disgrace and the breach of the Laws of Isolation leaked through the palace even before the sun rose the next day.
In the central hall of the Imperial Council, the venomous aunt, Qīng Mèng, did not waste a single second. The cultivator of the 1st Saint Pillar summoned the elders. Without the backing of heroism and without the protection of the Holy Healer—who was now locked behind closed doors to the empire's despair—the sentence was swift and non-negotiable.
Absolute Expropriation.
In the late afternoon, Lín Jié stood in the center of the Young Master's quarters. The jade bookshelves had been taken away. The silk carpets, rolled up by the council guards. The deeds of ownership for the crystal mines and trade routes that she had spent a decade organizing and protecting with her own ink were confiscated with the dragon seal.
The spacious room was now just an empty crate of cold wood.
Sitting on the bare floor, leaning against the wall, Qīng Yì hugged his own knees. His eyes lacked focus. His jaw trembled as he babbled into the void.
"It was an artifact..." Qīng Yì's hollow murmur scratched the silence of the emptied room. "A hallucinogenic poison from distant lands... They poisoned her. My Yǔ wouldn't... her clothes... her purity wouldn't be surrendered like that. The smell wasn't real. I need to warn the Council... I need to cure her of the illusion..."
Lín Jié clenched her fists. Her ink-stained fingers trembled violently.
The secretary looked at her own hands. Her cultivation had been stagnant at the 9th Mortal Stage for ten years. An entire decade drowning her own future in scrolls, sleeping three hours a night, covering resource deficits, and maneuvering the dirty politics of the Two-Faced Empire so that the man before her could shine immaculate under the sun.
And, in a single blind act, he had thrown two hundred years of his lineage's blood and ten years of her life down the drain.
"Wake up!"
Lín Jié's scream burst in the empty quarters.
She advanced with hard steps and kicked the last forgotten bamboo scroll on the floor, which flew and hit the wall right next to his face.
Qīng Yì merely blinked, his breath hitching.
"Hallucinogenic poison?!" Lín Jié spat the words, her face bathed in tears of indignation and hatred, her thin voice tearing the silence. "You felt the density of the air! You felt the force that broke your ribs! She wasn't poisoned, Qīng Yì! The woman you spent fifteen years venerating looked at you with disgust because you interrupted her orgasm!"
He hunched his shoulders, shutting his eyes tight, pressing his hands over his ears like a terrified child.
"No... Yǔ is pure... she wouldn't lie with the scum..."
"She spread her legs for a dirty peasant who didn't even need to leave the bed to obliterate you!" yelled Lín Jié, dropping to her knees on the wooden floor, her fists beating against her own legs. The repressed dedication of a lifetime overflowed in pure repulsion. "You broke the laws of our clan! You threw our mines, our lands, your father's sweat, and my ten years of stagnant cultivation straight into the Council's fire! All of this for a woman who never gave you a second glance and who preferred to serve as a furnace for a nameless man!"
The echo of the secretary's scream died on the bare walls of the room.
Lín Jié panted heavily, her brown eyes fixed on the man she had loved in secret. She expected fury. She expected him to stand up, draw what was left of his sword, and scream back, demanding respect.
But Qīng Yì did not scream.
The Young Master lowered his hands from his ears. His silence was hollow. He did not look at the scattered scrolls, he did not look at the secretary, and he did not look at his own empty hands. The light that had inhabited his irises for thirty-nine years had evaporated, leaving behind only the shell of a man who had watched his own faith spread her legs for the abyss.
He rested his hand on the wall and stood up slowly. His movements were stiff, mechanical, like a body that had forgotten the purpose of its own breathing.
Lín Jié held her breath, the hatred vanishing before the absence of life in those eyes.
Qīng Yì walked past Lín Jié in absolute silence, his white tunic still dirtied with the dried blood of the previous day, his feet dragging across the wooden floor as he crossed the doorway and disappeared into the darkness of the ruined courtyard's corridor.
Lín Jié remained kneeling on the cold floor. Thick tears streamed silently down her face, dripping onto the empty wood as the sound of the man's footsteps faded into the night, swallowed by the immensity of a capital that no longer belonged to them.