Zhì Yuǎn stopped in front of the black wall.
He planted his boots on the gravel floor, twisted his waist, and transferred his body weight directly into his bare fist. His hand struck the obsidian. The massive rock shattered on the first impact, collapsing into pieces and opening a wide hole at the back of the cavern.
A wave of hot, dry air struck his face. In the center of the violated space, resting on a pedestal, lay the energy core. The sphere pulsed slowly, red and heavy.
Zhì Yuǎn crossed the threshold, extended his hand, and grabbed the ember.
The skin of his palm hissed at once. The smell of burning flesh rose into the air, but the man's Will crushed the pain. His thumb locked around the relic in an unbreakable grip.
The moment of contact, his vision invaded the stone.
It was not the vision of an ordinary cultivator. It was that same profound gaze that had awakened when he swallowed the light of the sun — the vision that tore through the veil of the world and allowed him to see the structure of all things. To Zhì Yuǎn, the energy inside was not chaotic fire. There was a pattern. Red and golden threads crossed each other, forming a script carved directly into the essence of matter.
It was the naked, raw rule of how reality unravels.
The Law of Destruction.
He understood it in the time of a single breath.
At the same instant, the Golden Qi inside him attacked the relic, violently sucking the destructive force of the stone into his own veins. The shock descended directly into his viscera.
The Law of Destruction tried to tear him apart from the inside. The Primordial Gold resisted, squeezing the invading force from all sides and forcing it against its own center. The pressure of the collision exceeded any physical limit.
Instead of expanding, the energy center in Zhì Yuǎn's chest imploded.
He arched his back. A dry crack traveled up his spine.
The entire ocean of Qi condensed into a single, minuscule, and infinitely heavy point. What remained in his chest was the void. A dark space without limits, governed purely by the gravity of that dense point.
The Singularity was born.
The red stone in his hand turned to gray dust and slipped between his calloused fingers.
Zhì Yuǎn opened his eyes.
A few steps away, the navy-blue silk whipped violently forward. The air in the chamber was dragged toward the man's chest. And it was not only the air.
Yù Qíng's black irises dilated to the extreme. The infinite void that had opened in Zhì Yuǎn's viscera seized the invisible link created by their dual cultivation method. The gravity of that Singularity pierced into the wife's entrails, pulling her core toward her husband with an absurd physical force.
The soles of Yù Qíng's shoes scraped against the volcanic rock.
She could not take a step back. The vacuum pulsing inside Zhì Yuǎn's chest ignored physical distance. The energy running through the woman's veins had been forged on the same straw and with the same blood. Her body recognized his foundation as its own axis.
The pull dragged the girl with the brutality of a collapse.
Her small body collided against Zhì Yuǎn's broad chest. The impact cracked sharply, but the attraction did not stop at the skin. The black hole in the man's viscera continued pulling.
Below Yù Qíng's navel, her Dantian reacted. The young woman's energy center was at the limit of the Ninth Mortal Stage, packed with thick Golden Qi. When the Singularity's gravity tried to swallow that energy through their link, the internal structure of the woman was stretched to the extreme.
A sharp, tearing pain shot up the girl's spine. Her nails dug into her husband's gray tunic, ripping the linen.
The bottleneck of mortality did not give way gradually. It was broken open from the inside out.
The pressure deformed and shattered the barrier that limited her flesh. To avoid being sucked in and destroyed by her husband's void, Yù Qíng's Dantian expanded violently, opening a colossal space within the girl's entrails. The Golden Qi that had previously filled her foundation like thick mist lost its support. The gas collapsed under its own weight, condensing in fractions of a second.
Heavy, pure drops of liquid gold began to rain inside the newly vast space. The liquid fell with a silent roar, flooding the widened base and forming a heavy tide.
The Mortal Realm was left behind.
There, deep within her flesh, the Ocean of Qi was born.
Yù Qíng's knees gave out. Her legs trembled and she sank against her husband's body, supported only by the arms that wrapped around her at the same instant. The girl's breathing faltered, coming out in short, choked gasps.
The newly born ocean was immense, but dangerously hollow. The vastness created by the retreat of the Qi left a terrible empty space in the young woman's viscera, and Zhì Yuǎn's Singularity remained there, millimeters away, hungry and exerting a crushing pull.
A feverish, desperate heat rose through the woman's thighs. The survival instinct screamed alongside the deranged possessiveness she nurtured. If that ocean was not quickly anchored by an external charge of extreme mass, her husband's attraction would tear her body in half.
She needed the physical weight and Yang of Zhì Yuǎn driven inside her to cement her own advancement.
And she needed it now.
Zhì Yuǎn did not waste time with words. He understood the urgency in the same fraction of a second that the girl's weight gave way against his chest.
His calloused hands descended and grabbed Yù Qíng's slender thighs. He lifted her from the dirty gravel, twisted his torso, and pressed her back against the remains of the obsidian wall he had just demolished. The impact of the stones broke the silence.
The navy-blue silk tore beneath the man's thick fingers. The fabric fell uselessly onto the hot floor of the cavern. There was no space for preliminaries; the inner walls of the woman were collapsing. He opened his pants, gripped her hips with force, and drove his shaft inside her in a single thrust.
The impact of the invasion tore a euphoric scream from Yù Qíng's throat.
The heavy, scalding Yang invaded the girl's void. At the same instant, her structure stopped trembling. The absurd density of his flesh and energy served as a pillar. Her dangerously hollow Ocean of Qi clung to that filling like a man clings to a lifebuoy at sea.
But the void in Zhì Yuǎn's chest continued spinning. The dark, bottomless point in his viscera wanted to pull everything around it, and she was the closest prey. The attraction tried to crush her new ocean.
Yù Qíng's instinct reacted. Not with fear, but with demented obsession.
The girl's nails tore at the linen tunic and marked her husband's broad back. Her slender legs locked around his waist with desperate strength. Her possessive mind only determined one absolute truth: I am his. And what is his cannot be destroyed — not even by himself.
Her will manifested.
At the bottom of the newly created ocean, the woman's fanatical possessiveness, fueled by blind faith in her husband, began to shape the Primordial Qi she was absorbing. The Primordial Mill spun with violence, transforming Zhì Yuǎn's dense Yang into pure Primordial Qi. And this Qi, influenced by the Singularity pulsing centimeters away, did not spread chaotically.
It organized itself.
The heavy drops of liquid Qi began to arrange themselves on their own, weaving a fine, golden mesh to isolate the water. It was the woman's unwavering will, the fanaticism and sick certainty that she belonged to him and he to her, which, together with the properties of Primordial Qi, formed the Law of Devotion within her entrails — a distorted rule, born of obsession, survival, and absolute adoration.
But the newly born rule was thin and fragile. To avoid cracking under the gravitational pull that Zhì Yuǎn exuded, the Law required thickening with real mass.
— More… — Yù Qíng's voice came out strangled, her pale face buried in the curve of his neck, cold sweat running down her temple. — Fill me all at once, A-Yuǎn. Pound hard. Cement this inside me.
Zhì Yuǎn locked his jaw. His Will sensed the desperate suction of her walls trying to extract his strength to survive. He pulled his wife's waist and drove his hips forward with his full weight.
Slap.
The sound of wet flesh cracked loudly in the cavern. The impact made her head hit the obsidian.
Zhì Yuǎn did not slow his pace. He pulled back and thrust again, even deeper. Every impact drove the dense Yang directly into her Primordial Mill. The violent friction and the heat rising from the clash of their bodies became the raw mortar that the Law of Yù Qíng needed to take hold. She let out a long moan, her trembling body surrendering completely to his weight.
The hot seed erupted powerfully. The flow lasted entire minutes, flooding Yù Qíng's insides without pause.
But the woman's womb did not swell. As soon as the masculine liquid struck the depths, her Primordial Mill went into action. The dual cultivation technique spun with brutality, crushing and grinding all that seed, converting Zhì Yuǎn's dense vitality directly into pure Primordial Qi.
Dense, golden drops began to rain into the widened Dantian, falling heavily to line the bottom of the new ocean.
At the same time, Yù Qíng's pure Yin gushed outward, flooding his shaft. Zhì Yuǎn did not waste a single drop. His body pulled in his wife's cold water. The Yin rose through the man's veins directly into his chest. The Singularity swallowed the ice, breaking the cold and converting it back into thick Primordial Qi. Without interrupting his thrusts, Zhì Yuǎn injected that golden energy back into her depths, driving the force directly against the woman's walls to feed the expansion.
They continued for hours.
Zhì Yuǎn finally stopped moving and laid her on her back against the obsidian stone. His body was still buried inside her, but the rhythm had ceased.
He stayed above her, his broad torso hovering over his wife's small frame. Sweat ran down his chest, but his breathing was steady. The void in his chest was still hungry, yet now it was stable. The Singularity had found its first anchor.
He looked at her face for a second, then spoke in a low voice:
— I have it too now. The Law you formed. At the center of the void, beyond the dark-red star of Destruction… there is a completely black star. It is anchoring my void.
Yù Qíng blinked slowly.
The young wife was exhausted, limp, and sweating on the rock. The Law of Devotion she had forged within her entrails had finally stabilized. The golden mesh that isolated the Qi no longer trembled under the Singularity's pull. It was stable.
Yù Qíng looked at her husband in the dim light of the cavern, her black eyes shining with an insatiable hunger.
— Your Yang… — she murmured, her velvety voice. — It's much denser and stronger than before.
Yù Qíng's trembling fingers rose and grabbed the back of his neck, pulling her husband's face close to hers. Her voice came out low, but loaded with sick certainty:
— We're not leaving here anytime soon, A-Yuǎn. I'm still empty. And I won't stop until I fill this ocean with everything you have to give me.
Zhì Yuǎn looked at her face for a moment. His vision had already sensed the true scale of what was forming within his wife's entrails. That was not a common Sea of Qi. It was something colossal, far too dense, far too vast. The records of the Transcendent Realm spoke of seas of different sizes and qualities. What she was building inside herself was far beyond a Perfect Sea of Qi — it deserved to be called an Ocean.
He did not speak of this out loud.
He simply smiled sideways and descended once more.