The morning sun warmed the green grass at the back of the Pavilion of the Autumn Wind. The smell of freshly served tea mingled with the thick aroma of sandalwood and ozone emanating from the wicker lounger, creating a bubble of isolation and pure indulgence.
Zhì Yuǎn rested lazily beneath the shade of the peach tree. Nestled directly against his broad chest, Bái Wǎn panted softly. The ocean-haired girl kept her head resting against her husband's collarbone, her lips red and glistening with saliva after having stolen his breath for long minutes.
But she was not the only one.
The moment Bái Wǎn drew her face back to breathe, the heavy scarlet cascade of Huáng Bìyù's hair tilted over the lounger. Kneeling in the grass, the former legend of the empire took Zhì Yuǎn's mouth in a deep, needy kiss. Her tongue met his, and the wet sound of the exchange echoed through the peaceful garden. Minutes later, Bìyù gasped and pulled back with a flushed face, allowing Bái Wǎn to stretch her neck and capture the husband's lips again, restarting the cycle.
A few steps away, leaning against the stone table, Yù Méi rolled her eyes.
The younger sister had her cheeks completely puffed out, chewing a succulent piece of roasted meat. The golden silk of her dress fluttered lightly in the breeze as she watched the uninterrupted rotation at the lounger.
"By our heaven," Yù Méi grumbled, her voice coming out muffled and chewing. She swallowed loudly and pointed a clean bone at the two of them. "Are you going to swallow our husband whole before noon? Wǎn can barely keep her eyes open and she's already pulling his face back again."
Bái Wǎn merely smiled against the warm skin of Zhì Yuǎn's jugular, rubbing her tiny nose there with a gentle sigh. Zhì Yuǎn let out a low laugh, his large hand descending to caress the girl's back as she lay over him, the quiet warmth of his gaze overflowing with a lethargic satisfaction.
But the calm was torn apart.
The sky above the courtyard darkened.
It was not rain clouds that swallowed the sun. The light itself was distorted and strangled by a brutal atmospheric density that collapsed upon the capital. The air stopped circulating, replaced instantly by a volcanic heat and a suffocating weight of compacted earth.
BOOOM!
A dull thunderclap collided against the empty air thirty meters above the garden. The impact generated a visible shockwave that flattened the trees in the neighboring blocks, raising a storm of dust that swept the jade street outside.
The invisible dome woven by Zhì Yuǎn trembled. It swallowed the kinetic force of the attack without allowing a single blade of grass in the pavilion to sway.
In her husband's lap, Bái Wǎn opened her large eyes. Qīng Yǔ, resting nearby, furrowed her delicate brows, her cosmic-blue irises blazing with pure annoyance that anyone dared to make noise near her altar's sleep and peace.
BOOOM! BOOOM!
Two new impacts collapsed against the invisible ceiling. Gusts of blue flames and massive earth pillars hammered the barrier. The raw power of two Animic Ocean monsters attempted to crush the dome through sheer physical force and instinct.
Crack.
The sharp, harsh sound of cracking glass cut through the courtyard. A silver fracture line spread through the air above them.
At the stone table, Yù Méi froze.
The warrior stopped chewing at the same instant. Her almond eyes went wide in pure disbelief as she stared at the crack in the sky. The blood boiled in her living-gold veins.
"They bwoke it?!" Yù Méi's voice came out muffled, her canines gleaming as she chewed rapidly and swallowed everything at once. She cracked her knuckles. "Someone out there finally has enough spine to crack your dome, husband?!"
Zhì Yuǎn did not move. His dark gaze rose toward the silver fissure spreading through the air. He did not see his barrier yielding. The Laws he had woven remained perfectly intact and implacable. What was cracking was not his defense.
"My dome did not yield, Méi," the man's deep, unshakeable voice echoed through the courtyard, carrying the observation of someone noticing an error in nature. "It is the fabric of this world that is too thin. The impact of their power against my Laws is crushing the intermediary space. The canvas of mortal reality is tearing because it cannot bear the strain."
The Lotus of the Void rippled the air.
Yù Qíng floated silently and stopped beside the lounger. The priestess in blue touched the wicker backrest, her black eyes glinting.
"If they keep striking against your mountain, the sky of this continent will shatter and eject them into the void before they even enter our gate," Yù Qíng murmured, a sweet smile drawing itself across her crimson lips.
Zhì Yuǎn raised his hand, gently setting Bái Wǎn's oceanic hair aside from his lap, and rose. The black silk cape fell heavily over his broad shoulders, drinking the little light remaining in the courtyard. The unfathomable void returned to his eyes.
"The ceiling of this plane cannot bear the weight of a conversation in the backyard," the man adjusted the collar of his charcoal-grey robe. "Let us go to the front. It is rude to leave guests breaking the doorstep before entering."
Yù Méi let out a short, filthy laugh, already striding with heavy steps toward the front courtyard, her golden silk fluttering. Slowly, Lín Jié, Mò Yán, and the others straightened their postures, following their own heaven toward the great stone gates.
---
The front courtyard was paved with flawless white jade slabs. Zhì Yuǎn stopped at the center of the garden, flanked by his wives, and simply lowered his hand.
The invisible containment dome deactivated with a silent snap. The canvas of reality yielded.
The air above the courtyard distorted violently.
The weight of two Animic Ocean cultivators collapsed upon the pavilion like a continent in freefall. The green grass around the courtyard's edges was crushed against the earth. Leaves turned to dust before even reaching the ground, and the wind stagnated — suffocated by the pressure of souls that had been fused to blood.
Two figures descended floating from the cracked sky. A broad-shouldered old man with earthy skin, accompanied by a skeletal man whose silks crackled with blue fire. Just behind them, dragged by their necks on leashes of glowing Qi, the two current Patriarchs of the empire choked — their faces bathed in blood.
The Ancestors' boots touched the white jade with the sound of a funeral gong.
The Azure Fire Ancestor raised his chin. The air around his fingers boiled, ready to incinerate the intruders' audacity. He opened his mouth to dictate the death sentence.
But the first syllable never came.
The skeletal old man's millennial eyes swept the group. There were eight people there, covered by the illusory veil projecting the image of rustic peasants. There were no divine silks, no gold, no immaculate glow of forged flesh.
Yet the instinct forged through ten thousand years of carnage screamed inside his blood.
The old man blinked, attempting to focus on the "peasant" women. His perception collided against the veil, failing to see their true forms, but his biology reacted with a violent repulsion. The space hummed with a contained lethality, akin to colossal beasts caged and ready to gut the mountain the moment the chain was released.
The Ancestor swallowed hard. The fire in his sleeves diminished. He drove his eyes into the figure in the dark robe and black cape leading the group, hurling the vastness of his Animic Ocean against Zhì Yuǎn to gauge the opponent.
His perception found no resistance. Found no wall of Qi.
Found absolutely nothing.
It was a terrifying, infinite void. The old man's gaze plunged and kept falling into an abyss devoid of edges, with no sign of mortal or immortal life. Cold sweat broke on the Azure Fire Ancestor's temple. His orthodox arrogance cracked, swallowed by a glacial, paralyzing terror. Beside him, the Earth Ancestor also froze — his clenched fists loosening as he perceived that the ground beneath Zhì Yuǎn's boots was not crushed, but rather submissive to his weight.
The skeletal old man cleared his throat. The fire in his silks extinguished entirely. He released the Qi leashes, letting the two Patriarchs fall to the ground, and joined his hands before his chest, forcing his own facial muscles to compose a mask of deep diplomatic caution.
"The mountain was rude in its initial approach..." the Ancestor's voice flowed — calculated, stripped of fury, echoing through the courtyard with the care of one stepping across a minefield. He inclined his head slightly. "Fellow Daoist... we do not know from which distant plains or hidden realm the venerable one has traveled. But the weight of your hands on the roots of our city did not go unnoticed. If it is of interest to your group... what are the intentions that bring you to the gates of this cap—"
The old man did not get the chance to finish the diplomacy.
Zhì Yuǎn maintained his perfectly relaxed posture. His dark eyes swept the four figures before him, his Wisdom evaluating the resistance of the air, the earth, and the flesh of the intruders.
The assessment was surgical. The two men at the front had fused their own Crystal Souls to their blood. They stood at the absolute apex of that plane of existence. Their mere presence already strained the dimension's fabric, forcing the sky to attempt to eject them. If Zhì Yuǎn were to use the Laws tethered to that mortal world to subjugate them, the fabric of reality would tear before containing them. The friction of the local Dao against their strength would generate a rupture in space, offering the old men an imperceptible opening to retaliate.
Zhì Yuǎn did not give openings.
He did not use the world's Laws. He formed no seals. He simply chose mass.
The god allowed a minuscule fraction of his Inner Universe's raw gravity to leak — projecting the crushing weight of countless stars in a single straight, horizontal line forward.
In the first millisecond, the invisible force struck the two Patriarchs crawling just behind. The atmospheric pressure crushed the fifth-stage bodies from the outside in. The skin tore, the bones turned to powder, and the water in their muscles boiled instantly under the friction. In the blink of an eye, the leaders of the capital's two greatest families transmuted into a red mist — disintegrating into atoms before the blood could even splatter on the old men's boots ahead of them.
In the third millisecond, the white jade floor of the courtyard yielded.
The subsidence of the ground displaced the air with a terrifying violence. A lethal shockwave swept the front of the property. The high stone walls, the neighboring mansions, and the plazas within an exact three-kilometer radius in front of Zhì Yuǎn were obliterated. Kinetic force alone converted rock, wood, and steel into a cloud of fine dust — brutally pushed to the city's limits.
Where the noble heart of the capital had previously existed, nothing remained but a perfectly flat and sterile crater.
In the tenth millisecond, gravity captured the primary targets.
The two Ancestors — who no longer possessed any vulnerable weak points — were knocked flat by absolute physics. The weight of the firmament collapsed exclusively upon their shoulders, pinning them facedown at the bottom of the crater of compressed earth. The impact expelled the air from their lungs with a wet hiss. The dense, repulsive sound of indestructible ribs snapping echoed through the newly silenced capital. The Earth Ancestor's face sank into the dirt, his skull bones cracking under the pressure suffocating his foundation.
The cloud of dust and destruction stagnated at the crater's edges. The air above the ruin was perfectly clean, purged by gravity.
Behind Zhì Yuǎn, the pavilion remained intact. The air in the back courtyard had not so much as stirred his wives' hair. Yù Qíng, Yù Méi, Bái Wǎn, and Mò Yán remained standing on the immaculate white slabs. On the stone table just behind them, the hot liquid in the porcelain cup had not formed a single ripple.
Gravity forced every particle of earth back into the ground. At the bottom of the basin of compressed earth, the sound of asphyxiation was pathetic. The Azure Fire Ancestor scratched the dirt with his skeletal fingers. Beside him, the Earth Ancestor had the left side of his face sunken into the mud formed by his own blood, his pupils dilating as he perceived that his immortality was nothing but hollow glass before the weight crushing them.
Zhì Yuǎn's dark leather boots clicked softly against the edge of the white jade floor remaining in the courtyard.
The god stopped at the crater's rim. The black silk cape fluttered lightly with the breeze that resumed circulating through the pavilion. He looked down, dissecting the ancient monsters' agony with the same attention one gives to dry leaves being stepped on.
Zhì Yuǎn adjusted the collar of his charcoal-grey robe with casual slowness.
"Now we can talk," his deep voice descended over the crater, carrying a dry, somber, and devastating humor. "After all, I could not risk the two of you accidentally moving the wind near my wives."
The silence that followed those words was absolute.
Behind him, on the immaculate jade courtyard, the impact of those words collided directly against the altar's biology.
The air escaped Lín Jié's lungs. The still-purely-mortal flesh of the former secretary yielded beneath the weight of that protection. Her knees failed instantly. The heavy velvet-green silk spread across the clean floor as she dropped seated onto her own heels, a feverish flush swallowing her neck while unrestrained dampness soaked her intimacy. Her trembling hands pressed against her own lap in pure surrender.
Beside her, Bái Wǎn bit her lower lip with such force she nearly drew blood. The young former academic pressed her slight thighs together. The monumental Astral Body of Serenity in her abdomen pulsed — the star spinning erratically, intoxicated and drowned in the insurmountable security that man radiated.
A few steps away, Mò Yán gasped. The rigid diplomatic mask shattered into a thousand pieces. Her scarlet irises unfocused in a damp stupor, and her grey tunic strained dangerously against her full chest. The Astral Body of Mandate throbbed in her core with such violence that she had to press her pale hand against one of the columns to keep from collapsing, breathing through her mouth.
Yù Méi made no attempt to contain herself. The golden warrior threw her head back and released a raspy, breathless laugh. Her canines gleamed in the dimness. Her hands dug into her own bare arms, and the Astral Body of Rupture burned like a sun at her center — her flesh vibrating in pure lust at savoring her husband's cold brutality.
And just behind the younger sister, the two former legends of the empire dissolved. Still lacking the solidity of a star, Huáng Bìyù and Qīng Yǔ could not bear the magnitude of that protective instinct. The ex-warrior's fluid skin prickled entirely, her amber eyes melting in submission. The former healer gasped, her cosmic-blue irises overflowing with adoration, while both their heavy Seas of Laws boiled in a painful and delicious unison.
But it was Yù Qíng who sealed the work.
The priestess floated silently across the jade courtyard, the gravity of her own Black Star anchoring her bare feet millimeters above the ground. The eldest sister's pale, glacial arms entwined around Zhì Yuǎn's broad torso from behind, and she pressed her flushed cheek directly between the god's shoulder blades.
"Your care spoils us terribly, my heaven," Yù Qíng purred, her velvet voice dropping an octave lower and huskier, rubbing against the warm skin of his back. The woman's dark, sadistic gaze descended over the crater's rim, appraising the two monsters choking on their own arrogance. "But the useless wind they attempted to move can still serve to till our soil."
The goddess's cold fingers slid across the chest of her husband's charcoal-grey robe, her crimson lips curving into a perverse and perfectly utilitarian smile.
"Our altar will need new foundations to tread upon the corpses of this world," the priestess whispered in his ear, her predatory mind working over the ashes. "And it seems to me that two very old, very obedient new dogs have just presented themselves at our door — begging for their owner to place the collar around their necks."
Zhì Yuǎn lowered his dark eyes to the two empire legends tearing their own throats in the mud in an attempt to breathe. The unfathomable void gave way to a calm, absolute calculation.
Silver and black threads of the Law of Karma and of Devotion began to silently condense around his calloused fingers. That empire would not merely die to cease disturbing his household — the ancient monsters who led it would work for the abyss until their bones turned to dust.