The immeasurable bronze doors, engraved with the image of the eyeless beast, closed behind the family with a deep and irrevocable groan. The metallic sound sealed the group in the definitive bowels of the Cradle of the Empty Eye.
The abyssal darkness expected from the heart of a ruin gave way to a vast, circular sanctuary, carved directly into the foundation of the vacuum. The air smelled of an intoxicating and ancient freshness. The density of the Qi in the environment was so thick that the physical energy condensed into small silver clouds near the vaulted ceiling, floating like pieces of a bottled heaven.
In the exact center of the hall, a colossal pool of liquid jade boiled silently, bathing the stone in a ghostly emerald light. Rising around that pool, like sentinels of an erased era, rested true mountains of pure ore. The Immortal Crystals were cut into perfect blocks, radiating a stellar light that blinded the vision.
The pool of liquid jade bubbled.
The emerald mist rose from the boiling lake, condensing in rapid spirals until it formed a gigantic silhouette that nearly touched the stone ceiling. The core of the dimension projected the visual form of an elderly man with flowing white beards, celestial robes, and shining eyes.
The illusion, however, faltered before the first word was even spoken. The atmospheric pressure collided with the gravitational void of the man who had just entered.
Zhì Yuǎn took a single step forward.
The lethargy in the man's dark gaze did not waver. His leather boots cracked against the smooth stone. The Inner Universe at the bottom of his Dantian merely expanded its own gravity for a fraction of a second.
Crack.
The millennial illusion, sixty meters tall, was crushed from the outside in, shattering into thousands of pieces of green smoke with the sound of breaking glass.
When the smoke dissipated, the entity's true form was revealed. Floating a few handspans above the liquid jade, there was no immortal ancestor. There was only a small, translucent soul orb. The surface of the spiritual globe was covered in cracks, which flickered in a sickly green hue as it tried to process the anomaly.
The spirit descended until it almost touched the pool. It didn't squeak or stutter hysterically. The voice that resonated in the hall carried the worn weight of eons of waiting, mixed with a haunted reverence.
"The Cradle greets the calamity..." the orb vibrated, its light oscillating in a solemn bow. "The matrix of this hall was forged to withstand Tribulation, but it yields merely to the weight of your breath. I surrender, Lord. My purpose of testing the seeds is finally over."
Zhì Yuǎn stopped at the edge of the jade lake. The darkness in his irises locked onto the small, cracked soul.
"You talk too much, caretaker," Zhì Yuǎn's deep voice echoed in the hall, dry and heavy as a sinking anchor.
"This Cradle does not belong to this plane of dust, Lord," the orb explained, its green light stabilizing into an ancient melancholy. "We were forged even before the earth of the Three Thousand Worlds was separated. We navigated the vacuum, crossed immortal continents, and hid deep underground. I tested descendants of gods and pure-blooded heirs for eras. But their minds always melted before our Dao."
Anchored in the air just behind her husband's shoulder, Yù Qíng let out a low, velvet laugh. The goddess in blue rested her chin on her hand, her black eyes sparkling.
"A vault traveling through the vacuum, hiding for eons..." murmured Yù Qíng, her ruby lips curving. "Who were your masters fleeing from, ghost?"
The orb trembled subtly, the memory of its own ruin darkening the emerald light.
"Fleeing from annihilation, Lady," the spirit answered. "My creators were hunted by the Divine Emperor and an immortal coalition. We were exterminated down to the last root. Only this relic survived the massacre, carrying the key and the foundation of our home."
Zhì Yuǎn adjusted the collar of his charcoal-gray tunic.
"And what justified your extermination?"
The pool of liquid jade beneath the orb slowly split into two halves.
From the bottom of the emerald lake, two small obsidian pedestals rose. On the first rested a hexagonal prism forged from a dark ore that swallowed light, studded with silver runes so fine they looked like strands of a spider's web. On the second rested a long, thin splinter of black jade, exuding an invisible, hostile pressure.
"The prism is not a hollow ring, Lords," the orb indicated the first relic. "The builders sewed a world into it. There are rivers, forests, and plains. A folded, living sanctuary in space that obeys these runes."
Lín Jié caught her breath. Cold sweat ran down the ex-secretary's pale neck as the heavy green-velvet Hanfu strained against her ample chest. The woman's pale, immaculate fingers squeezed her own thigh. Her green eyes widened as she processed the monumental scale of it: an entire ecosystem that didn't need fixed roots. A pocket continent.
The gaze of Zhì Yuǎn descended to the black prism.
The god reached out his right hand. The artifact levitated from the pedestal and landed softly on the man's calloused palm. In the exact instant of touch, his innate Wisdom dove into the depths of the relic. The unfathomable void in Zhì Yuǎn's eyes receded slightly.
"They folded the spatial nodes upon themselves, tying echoes of the Law of Life so the fauna wouldn't rot in the dark," Zhì Yuǎn's deep voice reverberated in the hall, dry, but laden with absolute respect. His calloused thumb glided over the silver runes. "The spatial Laws in this middle plane are shallow. Their engineering... is magnificent."
Without taking his eyes off the black prism, Zhì Yuǎn allowed a minuscule fraction of his own Qi to flow into the conceptual lock. He didn't open the physical portal; he merely expanded the artifact's resonance, forcing the sensation of the internal world to overflow to the women around him.
The obsidian sanctuary and the mountains of crystals vanished from the altar's immediate perception.
Lín Jié gasped, her knees weakening. The wind. A gust of fresh air, carrying the scent of infinite grassy plains, violently struck her face. Mò Yán blinked, her scarlet irises dilating as she heard the roar of colossal rivers rushing through valleys that weren't there. Qīng Yǔ let out a marveled sigh, the pores of her porcelain skin absorbing the perfumed moisture of an untouched forest. The scale wasn't a large room; it was the infinity of a horizon bathed in perennial sun, pressed into the size of a hand-held stone.
The connection closed with a mute snap. The green jade cavern returned.
Yù Méi licked her lips, her almond eyes shining like molten gold as she cracked the knuckles of her hands. She rubbed her palms together, her entire body boiling as she calculated how many giant beasts she could throw into those plains.
Yù Qíng rested her cold nape directly against the warm chest of the charcoal-gray tunic. The priestess's pale arms wrapped around her husband's waist, her face rubbing against the silk of his shoulder in possessive friction.
"An entire world... just ours," she whispered, her voice husky with possessive desire.
The soul orb drew attention to the second pedestal, pointing to the black jade splinter.
"The space is just the vessel," the spirit's voice floated. "The reason we were hunted is carved on this stone. The Devourer of Eons Sutra. The supreme path for the evolution of the Soul. They said devouring souls was a crime against the heavens... but it's the only way to transform soul energy qualitatively! The Sutra teaches how to slaughter enemies and devour their minds to feed one's own foundation!"
Before the splinter could even be offered, the animic aura exuding from that jade clashed against the women. It wasn't pure. It was thick, putrid, and laden with the static of thousands of invisible laments.
Zhì Yuǎn did not even reach out his hand.
The man's dark gaze descended upon the artifact, dissecting the currents of putrid intent. The Inner Universe at the bottom of his belly expanded its own Will, swallowing the ancestral Sutra's conceptual structure in exactly two seconds. He saw how the technique worked, and the gross, sloppy solution bored him immediately.
The god let out a low, drawn-out, and purely lethargic sigh.
"So that is why you were turned to dust," Zhì Yuǎn's dry and harsh voice cut through the emerald light of the hall, tearing apart the sickly tension that suffocated the environment. He averted his face from the jade splinter as one avoids a rotting carcass. "Chewing on the fears, traumas, and biological trash of dead ants to try and fill your own head. Beggar's leftovers."
Behind him, Yù Méi shuddered. The youngest's jade skin bristled beneath the dark golden silk in absolute physical repulsion.
"Ew," the warrior growled, her throat emitting a high-pitched sound, rubbing her bare arms nervously. "Filling my brain with the crying of the cowards we kill. Chewing on other people's shit... What the fuck, that's disgusting."
The irony was palpable. The woman who felt a euphoric pleasure in taking literal hot blood baths, crushing skulls, and dipping her bare feet in pools of thick viscera, displayed a purely disgusted repulsion at the idea of consuming a soul.
Zhì Yuǎn tilted his head a millimeter. The lethargy in the god's dark gaze receded slightly, and the corner of his mouth almost curved.
"Ironic," he murmured, his deep and dry voice almost amused. "The woman who loves bathing in the blood of her enemies is disgusted by grinding their souls."
Leaning on her husband, Yù Qíng let out a low, venomous laugh, her black eyes locked onto the orb with a silent sneer, taking pity on the sloppy technique that had reduced an entire sect to ashes.
Zhì Yuǎn didn't open his mouth to explain his own Dao to old stones. He closed his eyes.
The habitual lethargy evaporated for good. Instead of opening his pores to suck the disgusting energy of the technique, the Hunger of his own Dantian roared inward. The Primordial Qi from the Singularity—golden, thick, intolerable, and absurdly superior to any chewed-up mortal soul—rose in an incandescent torrent through the veins of his chest, tearing through his throat and lodging directly in his glabella.
The Palace of Shen. The Upper Dantian.
Zhì Yuǎn did not swallow foreign intentions. The infinite fire of his own belly would forge the ceiling of his existence. He structured a mill of conceptual pressure within his own flesh.
Two rotating, titanic forces of pure Will locked between the man's eyebrows. The Primordial Qi was mercilessly injected between these invisible metaphysical stones. Then, he forced the gear to turn.
The conceptual friction of the absolute energy itself being crushed and ground against itself distorted the emerald light of the hall. The glow of the liquid jade pool shrank, blinded by an invisible and asphyxiating mental pressure.
But the transcendent feat demanded its biological and immediate toll from his flesh.
A thick bead of sweat ran down Zhì Yuǎn's pale temple. The thick vein on the side of his neck bulged, pulsing frantically against his skin, and the god's breathing became audibly heavy and noisy. He was using his own gravity to grind infinity. The brute, suffocating force required to crush the dense Primordial Qi until it became Soul Force began to violently suck in the environment.
Crack.
A sharp snap erupted in the heights of the sanctuary. The thick walls of the pocket dimension began to yield. Dark fissures spread across the vaulted ceiling. The colossal mountain of Immortal Crystals creaked, and the ores burst into dry dust under the crushing mental gravity that had just been born in the center of his brain.
The impact of that mental forge hit the altar head-on.
Yù Qíng's pale knees hit the obsidian with a dull thud. The goddess in blue gasped violently, hot tears overflowing from her black eyes as she tried to breathe an air that no longer obeyed physics. Yù Méi gritted her teeth until her jaw popped, digging her own nails into her bare arms, drops of ruby blood staining her jade skin as she fought hysterically not to crawl on her belly to his boots, intoxicated by that crushing weight.
Behind them, the others' support collapsed.
Lín Jié gasped, clinging to one of the black stone pillars. The heavy green-velvet Hanfu darkened with cold sweat at the base of her neck. Her green irises dilated in blind panic as her mind collapsed before the brute force that disdained all sacred soul cultivation manuals ever written.
Bái Wǎn's short legs gave out. The ex-academic plummeted sideways onto the polished floor, her tiny hands gripping the pearlescent fabric of her dress. Thick tears of cosmic awe streamed down the young woman's chubby cheeks, the Perfect Sea in her womb trembling in terror and fascination under the sound of millennial stones splitting apart.
Mò Yán bit her own lower lip so hard the taste of blood invaded her mouth. The white-haired diplomat squeezed her thighs beneath the scarlet silk, her entire body trembling as the pure Yin in her veins begged to be subjugated by that colossal pressure.
A few steps away, the immaculate skin of the scarlet warrior hardened instinctively, only for Bìyù's animic shield to shatter in a thousandth of a second under the Mill's mental vibration, leaving her and Qīng Yǔ trembling, supporting each other so as not to lose consciousness.
The Primordial Qi had been ground to its final consequence. Zhì Yuǎn's Soul Force was not a disgusting mass of weeping foreign minds; it was the weight of existence itself, molded by Hunger, crushing reality.
Zhì Yuǎn opened his eyes. The man's hoarse breathing stabilized. The sound of the air cracking and tearing before him echoed in the hall. The abyssal calm of his dark gaze now bent the little light left in the sanctuary.
At the edge of the dry pool, the small ancestral orb blinked in faint shades of green, watching its people's Untouchable Sutra turn to unnecessary trash before the power of a man who processed his own soul with gritted teeth.
The leather of Zhì Yuǎn's boot cracked on the obsidian. The man walked over to Yù Qíng. His warm, rough thumb, damp with sweat, touched the exact space between the first wife's eyebrows.
The invasion was brutal and incredibly intimate. The god's Universe invaded the priestess's mental sea, capturing her formless mist. With the precision of a blacksmith molding incandescent steel, Zhì Yuǎn replicated the lethal structure of the Animic Primordial Mill and drove it directly into Yù Qíng's mind.
The blue-clad woman's soft body arched violently forward, brushing against his charcoal-gray tunic. A wet, strangled gasp tore from Yù Qíng's throat, sweat staining her pale neck as the pain of expansion mixed with the feverish lust of devotion.
He didn't stop. His hand moved. Zhì Yuǎn's hot, rough thumb pressed against Yù Méi's glabella.
The warrior gritted her teeth hard enough to make her jaw pop noisily. The veins in her neck bulged, thick and feverish beneath her jade skin, her forged muscles vibrating in uncontrollable spasms as her mind's raw mist was pressed, ground, and rebuilt under the new structure. The crushing pain collided in her brain.
Zhì Yuǎn did not smile, but his baritone resonated low, warm, and almost affectionate, meant only for the youngest's panting ears:
"There, Méi. Now you can improve your soul without dirtying your boots... or being disgusted."
The affectionate and possessive provocation in the midst of the mental fire made Yù Méi let out a guttural moan, her almond eyes rolling back as the divine machinery took root.
He stopped before Lín Jié. The touch on the ink-stained woman's glabella was a plunge into chaos. The woman's rigorous mind was crushed and reassembled without rules in a second, forcing Lín Jié to arch her back, sweat glistening on her neck beneath the green velvet.
His hand slid to Bái Wǎn. The chubby-cheeked girl sobbed softly when the unbearable heat touched her glabella. The immensity of a stellar soul filled the tiny, perfect space of the young woman, reducing her to hot tears.
And then the touch drove into Mò Yán. The diplomat's spine locked immediately. The snow-haired girl's discipline melted under the pressure on her forehead, her dogmas incinerated by the gears.
Finally, Bìyù and Yǔ gasped simultaneously under the man's calloused fingers. The Valkyrie's flesh burned as she was forged in the brain, while the healer's mind was submerged by brutal grinding tactics. The god had planted the immortal seed in the panting minds of his entire altar.
The trembling silence of the shattered sanctuary was broken only by the harem's panting breaths.
On the stone floor, Yù Qíng opened her eyes. The priestess's newborn Soul Force, driven by the continuous spin of her own Qi in the Upper Dantian, already pulsed thick and lethal. Her ruby lips curved into a soft, dark, and irrefutable smile.
The goddess in blue rose slowly, her bare feet gliding across the slabs now covered in dead crystal dust. She turned her face toward the furthest columns of the hall, where a colossal black jade statue, sculpted in the shape of a millennial guardian beast, rested in the shadows.
Yù Qíng did not raise her hands. She did not evoke any Law in her womb.
The priestess merely narrowed her black eyes and drove her newly forged mental Intent directly into the stone.
BOOOM!
The thirty-meter-tall statue imploded from the inside out. The massive jade was crushed by the gravity of her thought and ground into millions of grains of green dust in a single hundredth of a second. The shockwave hissed through the hall, spreading a dense curtain of sand that whipped the silk of all the wives present.
Yù Méi let out a dirty, hoarse, and deeply carnivorous laugh, the guttural sound mixing with the dust settling on the floor. The warrior rubbed her own hot temple, her nostrils flaring as she felt her own mental trigger now cocked and boiling, ready to tear apart the minds of the arrogant.
Yù Qíng slid her sweaty, pale face against Zhì Yuǎn's arm, leaning her skin against the charcoal-gray fabric.
Zhì Yuǎn adjusted the collar of his tunic. The unwavering lethargy in his dark eyes swept over the shattered hall, the mist of ground stone, and the caretaker's orb that blinked uselessly in the dark after seeing its own relic humiliated. The harvest in the vacuum had been absolute.
"Gather the key, the lake, and the crystals. We are leaving the rest behind," Zhì Yuǎn's deep and dry voice echoed through the sanctuary, dictating the final cleanup and the definitive end of the Cradle of the Empty Eye. His leather footsteps cracked on the rock as he turned his back on the pathetic ghosts of that dead era. "Let's see how the sects outside behave before you now."
The bronze doors yielded before the new and lethal foundation of the family. The altar marched mercilessly toward the exit.