Zhì Yuǎn's gaze was still drinking in the ancient darkness of the fissure when Yù Méi took the first step onto the bloodstained snow.
The youngest sister lifted her chin, her body already leaning toward the threshold, the wind tugging at the edges of her robes.
"One moment, Méi," Yù Qíng's serene voice cut in. The First Wife barely needed to move; the calm weight of her tone alone was enough to check the adventurer's impulse. Her placid gaze swept the slaughter in the canyon. "The door is open, but we still have to deal with the loose end left down there."
Yù Méi clicked her tongue and crossed her arms, forced to swallow her own excitement under her elder sister's authority.
Hearing Yù Qíng's words, Zhì Yuǎn let out a low laugh of agreement. His fingers, which had still been stroking Xú Lán's silver hair in a lazy rhythm, stilled. He drew his hand away from the slave and descended slowly through the air, hovering a few steps from the only survivor of the orthodox vanguard.
Down below, the Purple Flame Elder still lay slumped against the canyon wall. The Elder's eyes did not beg for mercy.
Zhì Yuǎn offered no bargain. He simply raised his right hand and pointed his index finger at the man's head.
An invisible seed, woven from the heavy chains of Karma and honed with the lethality of the Law of Destruction, pierced the void and drove itself straight into the Elder's Sea of Consciousness.
The cultivator's survival instinct screamed. A raw, primitive, desperate thought formed in his mind: flee.
That was enough.
Before a single trace of Qi could leave his meridians, the seed answered the thought. The Elder's vocal cords tore in a mute shriek, smothered by the blood that surged into his throat. He collapsed to his knees, digging his nails into his own face and raking the skin down to living flesh. His eyes rolled back. Every fiber of his soul felt as if it were being roasted, dismembered, and rewritten in grotesque fashion.
The spiritual torture lasted only three breaths, but to the man it felt like a century of agony in purgatory.
When control returned to his trembling body, the cultivator's independent will had been completely obliterated. What remained was an invisible collar, where any mere thought of disloyalty would trigger the immediate and irreversible detonation of his soul.
Zhì Yuǎn watched the slave spasm on the ground, the faint lethal smile returning to his lips.
"Raise your head," the order sounded casual, but it fell upon the man's soul like a divine decree. "Your name."
The Elder swallowed the thick blood with difficulty. His wide eyes were replaced by pure terror.
"Liè Huī…" His voice came out hoarse, ruined. "This humble servant is called Liè Huī."
"Liè Huī. An acceptable name." Zhì Yuǎn lowered his hand and clasped it behind his back. "You will return to the Purple Flame Sect today. Your report will be simple: the manifestation in this canyon was not a treasure being born."
Liè Huī held his breath, absorbing every syllable.
"A Spirit Beast of a spatial bloodline tried to advance in the depths of this canyon," Zhì Yuǎn dictated the lie in a mild voice, building an irrefutable scene. "The elusive bloodline clouded the domain and disguised space's lethal signature. You only realized the nature of the creature once you were already inside its jaws. The disciples were chewed apart by the turbulence of the advancement, and you escaped by a miracle."
The Elder nodded frantically. The Karma seal in his mind recorded the instructions, burning them in as his purest truth.
"Scram," Zhì Yuǎn concluded, his dark eyes gleaming coldly.
Liè Huī did not hesitate. He pressed his forehead to the bloodstained snow in a bow of total submission and, in the next instant, shot into the sky, already fishing healing pills from his spatial ring for his wounds, abandoning the canyon without looking back.
Watching the pawn vanish into the clouds, Yù Méi wasted no time.
"Ready, husband?" the adventurer pressed, already turning her back on him and facing the fissure that exhaled archaic scents.
Zhì Yuǎn let out a deep laugh at his wife's impatience and floated back toward them. Instead of ordering the advance, however, his gaze swept Lín Jié and the slaves.
"One last thing, Méi," he stopped her again, pointing casually at the obliterated remains of the vanguard at the anomaly's entrance. "If we want to take the guard dogs and my Jié in there, we'll need to dress them properly first."
Lín Jié swallowed hard, instinctively drawing her shoulders in, and Xú Lán frowned. Lóu Jiàn and Jiàn Wúshuang remained motionless, knowing the Master's words were the purest truth. Unprotected, the Qi incompatibility would burst their meridians in the blink of an eye—just as it had happened to those young cultivators.
Without waiting for any preparation, Zhì Yuǎn raised his right hand. Thick threads of Primordial Qi, dark and dense as liquid pitch, sprouted from his fingers. He touched the base of Lín Jié's nape.
The woman choked. The energy invaded her body like white-hot iron, sliding along her bones and forcing its way into the meridians of her new Dantian. The pain was blinding, but it lasted only an instant. The heat cooled abruptly, solidifying into an invisible film beneath the skin, shielding her interior against Immortal Qi.
Lóu Jiàn and Jiàn Wúshuang stepped forward without needing orders. They knelt in the air and lowered their heads.
Zhì Yuǎn repeated the process. The Primordial Qi melted over the spines of the two hegemonic slaves, stitching the isolation over the foundations of their cultivation.
"The lining will repel the dense Qi," Zhì Yuǎn's voice cut the silence, mild and pragmatic.
Yù Méi did not wait another second. The youngest sister leapt toward the fissure and was swallowed by the dimensional curtain. The rest of the wives followed. Flanking Lín Jié, the two slaves crossed the threshold in perfect synchrony.
Only Zhì Yuǎn and Xú Lán remained on the bloodstained snow of the canyon.
The ice woman kept her head lowered, waiting in silence.
"You're coming too," Zhì Yuǎn's deep voice cut through the whistle of the freezing wind. He extended his hand. "After all, the merit is yours."
Xú Lán's eyes shone with a sick fanaticism. The relief of not being discarded made her advance at once, kneeling at his feet. The Primordial Qi descended upon the assassin's nape, thick and lethal, burning her ice meridians to forge the second skin. Xú Lán only clenched her teeth, trembling, savoring the searing pain as the purest reward.
"Go in," he ordered, withdrawing his hand.
She bowed deeply and shot into the fissure.
Alone in the canyon, Zhì Yuǎn did not cross the anomaly at once. His hands folded behind his back again. He turned his face slowly, those unfathomable eyes locking onto a specific and seemingly empty point on the distant horizon. The predatory smile returned to his lips in silence.
Without uttering a single word, Zhì Yuǎn raised his right hand and turned his wrist.
The fabric of reality snapped. Local space folded over itself in a grotesque twist, tangled its own dimensional coordinates into a chaotic knot.
Satisfied, he took a calm step and let the darkness pull him in.
The transition was a silent, nauseating tug, as if the fabric of reality swallowed them and spat them out at the same time.
When Zhì Yuǎn's feet touched the ground on the other side, the cold and snow of the middle plane had ceased to exist.
The soil beneath the family's boots was a crystallized black earth, with the texture of blood coagulated over millions of years. A few li away rose a colossal forest; the trunks of the trees looked fused from pure bronze, and immense roots tore the earth like metallic veins. Above them, the sky had neither sun nor moon. The dark dome was slashed by scars of chaotic light and sickly auroras that lit the pale horizon.
The density of Immortal Qi in the air was so absurd it distorted the light itself. The spatial pressure pulled at their shoulders with three times the natural weight. The environment exhaled the intoxicating, metallic scent of a storm.
Yù Méi drew a deep breath, her shoulders easing under the crushing pressure.
"Ah…" she murmured. A lethal smile tore across the adventurer's face. "What refreshing air."
Beside her, the other wives were already expanding their Divine Senses in silence. Lóu Jiàn and Jiàn Wúshuang established a guard perimeter around Lín Jié.
With his hands clasped behind his back, Zhì Yuǎn took the first step onto the black earth, guiding the party into the bronze forest. The space exhaled a primal, suffocating silence. There was no rustle of leaves, no hum of insects, not even the breath of wind.
But the absolute quiet was an insult to the youngest sister's instinct.
After the time it takes an incense stick to burn, walking just behind her husband, Yù Méi clenched her hands. The knuckles of her fingers cracked in a loud, rhythmic beat as Qi ran through her flesh, the dry sound echoing alone among the dead trees. Her shoulders were tight, her fists itching with the promise of crushing anything that dared leap from those shadows. Her gaze swept the metallic trunks with the hunger of a predator let loose in a pasture.
Nothing reacted to her presence.
"Where are they?" the youngest sister muttered, locking her jaw, irritated by the absence of visible threats.
Mò Yán frowned, the calculating gleam in her eyes giving way to a rare confusion, as if her own mind were groping in the dark. Bái Wǎn stopped beside one of the monumental trees and slid a fingernail along the trunk.
"It isn't metal," the scholar whispered, breaking off a sliver of the hard bark with extreme ease. The interior crumbled instantly, falling as gray dust onto the black earth. "It's a kind of ancestral spirit wood. Completely petrified inside."
Zhì Yuǎn stretched his hand into the air, closing his fingers slowly, as if measuring the invisible texture of the Immortal Qi in the environment.
"Relax your fists, Méi," he instructed, his deep voice echoing through the silent vastness. "There's nothing here for you to beat. Everything that breathed in this place died millions of years, perhaps eons, ago."
Yù Méi let the air out noisily, her face twisted in frustration.
"An entire empty world?" she grumbled. "What a waste of Qi."
"It isn't waste, Méi. It's stagnation," Yù Qíng corrected with her usual softness, positioning herself exactly at Zhì Yuǎn's side. The First Wife lifted her serene eyes to the fractured dome of the firmament. "Without the Will of the Heavens to recycle the energies, the Qi consumed by the ancient inhabitants had nowhere to go. It simply leaked from their bodies over time and saturated this environment forever. Apparently even Immortals are not… immortal."
She looked down at the black, crystallized earth.
"And because the Laws of this world fragment are broken and there is no Celestial Dao to guide them, no new life could be generated across eons to make use of that energy. Everything that existed simply withered until only… this dead husk remained."
She turned her face upward, looking at Zhì Yuǎn.
"Isn't that so, husband?"
Taking advantage of her closeness, he slid his arm around Yù Qíng's waist and pulled her firmly against his chest. Lifting her slightly off the ground, he took the First Wife's lips in a deep, dominating kiss, rewarding his woman's sharp mind.
When he set her back on the ground, still holding her against himself, his lethal smile gleamed in the dark.
"Exactly," he agreed, his voice velvet.
The Three Thousand Worlds lived under the constant watch of the Celestial Dao, subject to tribulations and punitive eyes. But this piece of rock floating in the forgotten void… if he sealed this world abandoned by the cosmos…
A blind spot.
Zhì Yuǎn's mind spun ages into the future in a matter of instants. That stagnant Qi could be purged and the dead space flooded with the essence of his own Inner Universe. He had not merely found a ruin; he had just discovered the untraceable foundation for his personal domain.
It will take time to turn this into something usable, but the link I can make in short order.
While he planned, they advanced. When they took a few steps beyond the tree line, the black earth ended abruptly. Lín Jié's breath hitched, and Zhì Yuǎn's brow furrowed.
They were standing at the edge of a precipice, upon a continental mass suspended over a bottomless abyss.
Stretching for thousands of li ahead, the landscape obliterated any sense of scale.
The mountain ranges that dominated the center of the continent had been entirely carved into titanic lotus shapes. Colossal palaces were set directly into the monumental rock, stacking upon one another in intricate layers until they pierced the dead sky thousands of li high. The vast plains below the peaks were paved without a single seam, formed of a material like melted vitreous jade that returned a cold, desolate reflection.
Above the main landmass, entire archipelagos of rock and minerals hung in the vacuum. They were connected to the mountains by immense bridges that crossed space, interwoven with the precision of metallic silk threads. Everything there floated in a terrifying silence, frozen forever in its original orbital routes.
Mò Yán adjusted the silk of her sleeve. She drew a deep breath, the air clearing her lungs with an intoxicating freshness, like pure water after centuries of drought—though it was still only a thin broth compared to the Primordial essence that governed her core.
"The range of my Divine Sense meets no resistance at all," she reported, her brow folding into a crease of pure distrust. "But the reading is total chaos. The nuances of this Immortal Qi seem… indiscernible. It's like trying to read scripture in the dark. We're practically blind."
Zhì Yuǎn nodded slowly, his dark eyes fixed on the first jade plain stretching beyond the abyss, connected to the forest's edge by a wide, translucent bridge.
"Hold formation. We go slowly," he ordered. "I'm still making sense of this world."
They advanced across the bridge. The wives floated lightly while the sound of Zhì Yuǎn's heavy boots echoed through the void. Lóu Jiàn and Jiàn Wúshuang still flanked Lín Jié, their muscles taut beneath the primordial lining. Yù Méi walked just ahead, her eyes shining with expectation, about to step onto the paved area of the first archaic courtyard.
At that exact moment, before the sole of her perfect bare foot touched the jade, Zhì Yuǎn acted.
Silent and implacable, the Law of Mandate crashed down on all of them.
Yù Méi froze in the air, a hair's breadth from touching the ground. Behind her, her sisters and the slaves locked in the same instant, unable to move a single muscle.
The breath caught in everyone's lungs. Lín Jié felt her ribcage burn.
The slaves, loyal to the marrow, did not show so much as a ripple.
But the wives, caught off guard by so extreme a use of their own husband's force, flinched. The world's silence was immediately torn by a torrent of desperate voices via Divine Sense.
"My Heaven, what happened?" Yù Qíng's voice came first, losing its usual calm. "Are we under attack?! From where?!" Huáng Bìyù cut in, her mind sweeping hundreds of li around in a frantic, useless search. "Let me go! Let me tear whoever it is apart!" Yù Méi roared mentally, her battle instinct boiling beneath the paralysis.
"Silence."
Zhì Yuǎn's mental voice echoed through the minds of the wives and the dogs like the toll of a funeral bell. His tone carried neither malice nor irony. It was cold, shallow, and lethally serious.
The tension chilled the group's souls to the core.
"I paralyzed you," Zhì Yuǎn explained, his mind spinning in frantic deduction while his dark eyes pierced the microscopic cracks in the vitreous jade beneath them. "My ignorance exacted its toll. I still don't fully understand the patterns of Immortal Qi."
Sweat ran down Qīng Yǔ's frozen face. From the corner of her eye, Bái Wǎn noticed a pulsing reddish gleam, thin as a strand of hair, running beneath the translucent stone where they were standing. It was not just one thread. There were millions of them. A lethal web woven into the foundation of the entire courtyard.
"The great slaughter arrays at the center of the continent truly ceased to exist with time, but these peripheral traps did not. They use the environment's own Qi as veil and fuel," Zhì Yuǎn continued, making no effort to disguise the gravity of the situation. "The energy signature is so natural I only managed to perceive it at the exact instant we crossed the array's threshold and the compression of space changed."
Lín Jié felt her vision blur from lack of air. Jiàn Wúshuang kept his eyes fixed on the reddish web beneath his boots.
"Husband… if this detonates… we can take it, right?" Yù Méi asked, her mental voice wavering for the first time.
Zhì Yuǎn's silence lasted an entire breath, stretching everyone's nerves to the edge of snapping.
"If this restriction detonates…" his answer echoed cold. The memory of that Senior's terrifying aura crossed his mind. "A concentrated explosion of energy at this level would probably be enough to… gravely wound an Immortal."
They remained perfectly still, frozen on a razor's edge, while Zhì Yuǎn calculated in silence how to dismantle the invisible array beneath their boots.