Inside the shimmering expanse of the silver unconsciousness, Xiao Diao was currently undergoing a profound crisis of identity. The mental realm of the Void Heavenly Seal was a mercurial place, shifting between non-existence and overwhelming sensory input.
When the demonic mink had first arrived within this internal space, his ego had been at its absolute zenith. He had stood before a staircase consisting of a thousand translucent steps, at the summit of which floated the elusive seal, pulsing with an inviting, silver light.
He had smirked then, a look of pure, unadulterated arrogance crossing his small face.
"A test? Too easy. You'd best be ready to be conquered," he had declared to the silent void.
Then, the climbing began. For two gruelling days, Xiao Diao hauled his spiritual form up those steps. Beads of sweat flew from his brow, his teeth remained gritted in a permanent snarl of determination, and his muscles screamed in protest. Every step felt like dragging his soul through thick molasses.
Yet, his pride sustained him. As he finally crested the thousandth step and stood panting before the glowing seal, he allowed himself a moment of smug triumph.
"It wasn't even that difficult," he wheezed, wiping his brow. "That old geezer Shi was clearly just hyping it up to make himself feel important."
With a flourish of victory, he extended a confident hand to grasp the seal. His fingers closed—or rather, they didn't. His hand passed straight through the silver light as if it were a mere projection.
He lunged again. Nothing. He tried to bite it. His jaw snapped shut on empty air. It took a full minute of frantic grabbing for the realization to dawn on him: the seal wasn't actually there.
It was occupying a different spatial dimension entirely, hovering a fraction of a distance away from his perception while remaining utterly untouchable.
He froze, his whiskers twitching in a violent tremor of rage. He looked at the seal, which seemed to shimmer with a newfound, mocking brilliance.
"This is bullying!" he roared into the silver sky. "This is blatant, spatial harassment!"
Infuriated, Xiao Diao opened his mouth wide, gathering a massive amount of purple spiritual energy. He condensed it into a sphere of pure destruction, intending to shatter the very dimension that dared to toy with him.
He launched the attack with a cry of fury. However, space curved in a sickening, warped loop. The purple sphere vanished into a ripple and immediately reappeared directly behind his head.
Boom.
Xiao Diao was sent sprawling by the recoil of his own desperate attack.
Outside, in the physical world of the silver dimension, Nibi the cat sat watching the mink's twitching, unconscious body. She let out a series of high-pitched, judgmental chirps that sounded suspiciously like feline laughter.
She flicked her five tails with a sense of rhythm, clearly enjoying the spectacle of the mink's internal torment.
Back within the trial, the torture evolved. The staircase vanished, replaced by a boundless sea of roiling lava. Xiao Diao roared, shifting into his original, gargantuan form to dominate the landscape, only to find that the laws of size had been inverted. He continued to grow in his mind, but his physical presence shrank until he was nothing more than a purple fly hovering over a volcanic soup.
Just as he adjusted to being an insect, the scenery shifted again. He found himself being chased across a frozen tundra by a female version of himself from a divergent timeline. She was twice his size and possessed a terrifyingly romantic gleam in her eyes, shouting that he was her long-lost partner and it was time to settle down and raise a litter of thousand-mink kits.
Finally, the trial took its most humiliating turn. Xiao Diao found himself surrounded by thousands of his own offspring from parallel timelines he never had. They swarm him.
Xiao Diao spends three hours telling increasingly desperate bedtime stories about "the great mink who definitely conquered everything and definitely wasn't a house pet."
Nibi, watching from the outside, eventually decided that the entertainment had reached its limit. She was getting bored, and a bored Nibi was a dangerous Nibi. She let out a sharp, commanding meow.
Mu Chen picked the cat up in his arms and stroked her fur.
"Okay," he murmured to the empty air. "That's enough."
The Void Heavenly Seal, hearing that voice, gave a sudden, violent shudder. Although it had been thoroughly enjoying the process of mentally deconstructing the arrogant little mink, it recognized the weight of the speaker. It decided, to end the trial immediately.
Xiao Diao's eyes snapped open. He sat bolt upright on the obsidian floor of the hall, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He looked around wildly, checking for female mink or thousands of little mink.
When he saw Mu Chen's calm face, he immediately smoothed his fur and fixed his expression into one of stoic, hard-won victory. He stood up, dusting off his chest as if he had just finished a mild workout.
Mu Chen looked down at him, his expression unreadable. "So, how did it go?"
Xiao Diao puffed out his chest, looking every bit the dominant overlord. "Huh? Oh, you know, Mu Chen... it was nothing more than child's play. I had to show that seal who was boss, but it eventually realized that my persistence is unmatched."
Mu Chen and Shen Xi couldn't help but let out a synchronized chuckle. Nibi, perched in Mu Chen's arms, looked the mink directly in the eye and flicked her tails one by one, her gaze clearly saying: Yes, it was indeed child's play.
Xiao Diao saw the look, cleared his throat loudly, and acted as though absolutely nothing had happened.
He quickly pivoted the conversation. "Mu Chen, what about the Demon King?"
Shen Xi gestured toward the horizon. There, pressed against the silver sky, was the two-dimensional, static image of the once-terrifying King. He was a silent watermark on reality, his thousand eyes frozen in a rictus of confusion.
Xiao Diao floated up to Mu Chen's shoulder, squinting at the flattened demon. "Well," he noted with a smirk, "now it serves a better purpose, at least."
"Okay," Mu Chen said. "Let us go now from here."
The silver world dissolved. The group was no longer standing in the mercurial dimension.
...
Mu Chen and his group reappeared on the central platform of Azure City. It was the only place left intact; for miles in every direction, the city was a graveyard of rubble and cooling stone.
The other cultivators—the princes, the sect disciples, and the clan elites—had already been forcibly ejected from the realm the moment Mu Chen had entered the silver dimension.
Suddenly, the sky above the ruins turned a violent shade of black. Lightning began to crackle through the clouds, but it wasn't the white or blue of a natural storm. It was a terrifying, nine-color heaven tribulation. The air grew heavy with weight of divine judgment, giving everyone the distinct feeling that the world was about to end.
Shen Xi looked up and said in casual tone. "It looks like it's the mink's heavenly tribulation."
Xiao Diao's eyes widened. After inheriting the Void Heavenly Seal, his cultivation had surged, pushing him firmly into the mid-Nascent Soul realm.
From the Golden Core Realm cultivators were required to undergo a heavenly tribulation. And this was no ordinary trial—it was a Nascent Soul tribulation, one meant for a cultivator who bore a Heavenly Seal. Compared to others, its destructive force was on an entirely different level. This wasn't just a storm; it was an execution.
Xiao Diao felt a cold chill race down his spine as the clouds churned. "Your mother! Damn it, just let me breathe for five minutes!"
He had barely finished processing his "bedtime story" trauma, and now he was being greeted by nine-coloured lightning. A massive bolt of concentrated energy suddenly tore through the sky, striking downward toward the platform.
The sheer pressure and devastation of the descending bolt flattened dozens of miles of rubble before it even hit. What remained of Azure City's ruins was reduced to fine dust, and a crater hundreds of meters deep formed as the earth itself sank under the weight of the heavenly strike.
However, the strike never landed.
The bolt hovered above Mu Chen's head, suspended in the air like a spear of concentrated annihilation that had forgotten its purpose. It paused mid-fall, a jagged question mark of raw power.
The nine colors—crimson, azure, gold, violet, emerald, silver, obsidian, pearl, and a ninth hue that defied human description—swirled and churned within the bolt's core. It promised destruction on a scale that would make the gods weep.
The central platform remained perfectly intact beneath them, the only surviving piece of the city, now floating in the air as the ground all around it had sunken into the abyss.
A second bolt gathered. Then a third. A fourth. Soon, the sky was pregnant with a dozen frozen apocalypses, each one waiting its turn like a polite, well-dressed guest at a very exclusive restaurant.
Nibi, who had been napping in the crook of Mu Chen's arm, cracked one eye open. The nine-color radiance reflecting off the frozen lightning painted her fur in shifting, psychedelic patterns.
For a moment, she looked like a cat constructed of stained glass and very bad decisions. She let out a long yawn, showing her sharp teeth, and then reached out and smacked Mu Chen's chest with a tiny paw.
Thwap.
The sound was small and domestic, utterly disconnected from the end of the world hanging overhead.
Mu Chen looked down at the cat. "Oh," he said, his voice flat. "You want to play?"
Nibi's second meow wasn't a request for a snack; it was a confirmation that she wanted entertainment.
"Okay," Mu Chen agreed. He reached up with his free hand—not toward the lightning in a defensive gesture, but directly through it. His fingers spread wide, and the nine-color bolts, which had been preparing to unmake the very concept of matter, suddenly found themselves being redirected by an invisible hand.
The transformation happened without a single spark of violence. That was the most obscene part of the display. The lightning, the ultimate weapon of the heavens, didn't even try to resist.
It simply agreed that its current configuration as a weapon of mass destruction was less interesting than the alternative Mu Chen proposed. The colors separated, recombined, and shifted into something entirely different.
A massive sphere formed above the central platform, ten meters across. it rotated slowly, its surface segmented into thousands of facets, each holding a different hue of the original tribulation. Coherent beams of light sprayed from the sphere in a dizzying array, painting the floating platform in shifting patterns of crimson, gold, emerald, and that strange ninth color.
It was, objectively, a disco ball constructed from the raw materials of heavenly punishment.
Nibi didn't hesitate. She launched herself from Mu Chen's arms, becoming a streak of golden fur and absolute commitment as she chased the dancing beams. The lights swept across the platform, and she pursued them with a kitten's fervor—pawing at crimson patches, rolling through violet pools of light, and trying to bite the golden beams as they moved. Her tails left trails in the air, eight lines of delighted, glowing chaos.
Shen Xi watched the cat play with the wrath of the heavens, a faint smile on her face. "Mu Chen, she is starting to become quite demanding now."
Mu Chen looked at Nibi, a rare, genuine smile touching his lips. "Well, it suits her. A cat needs to be a bit dramatic to keep things interesting."
"That's true," Shen Xi agreed, her gaze returning to the shimmering light.
Xiao Diao looked at the disco ball flashing around him. This was supposed to be the ultimate test of his worthiness, a battle for his very soul, and it had been turned into a laser-pointer game for a cat.
He let out a short, dry chuckle. "Heaven must be absolutely furious right now... but who cares? It's just a normal day."
Mu Chen turned his gaze toward the mink. "So, little mink, what's next?"
Xiao Diao knew exactly what he was asking. Mu Chen was inquiring whether he wanted to continue tagging along or if it was time for him to go home. Xiao Diao had stated earlier that once they found the seal, he needed to return to his roots.
The mink's expression grew serious, the humour fading from his eyes. "I need to go. My enemies are still breathing, and they've significantly overstayed that privilege. And... I need to see my family. It's been a thousand years, Mu Chen."
Though Xiao Diao felt a profound reluctance to separate from the group, there were things that a Heavenly Demon Mink had to do for himself. If he asked Mu Chen to help with his revenge, the fire burning within his soul would never truly be quenched. He needed to settle his own debts.
Mu Chen nodded simply. "Okay."
He didn't offer any empty platitudes or extra words. No one understood Mu Chen's silent support better than Xiao Diao.
"Kid," Xiao Diao said, his voice cracking just a bit, "don't you dare forget the great, handsome, dominant, and lovable mink. And you'd better come to the Beast Continent eventually."
"Don't worry," Mu Chen said, his hands in his pockets. "I will come."
Xiao Diao hovered in the air for a moment, looking a bit embarrassed. "Mu Chen..."
Mu Chen tilted his head, a teasing glint in his eye. "Changed your mind?"
"No!" Xiao Diao snapped, his tail lashing. "No, I was just asking... can you send me?"
Reaching the Thousand Beast Continent from the Sky Continent would normally require years of travel. Even for a Nascent Soul cultivator—whose every step could span miles—the distance remained vast beyond easy crossing. Only by relying on a chain of extremely expensive long-distance teleportation arrays could one hope to shorten the journey.
Mu Chen gave a short nod. "Okay."
Xiao Diao was no longer there. He was simply gone, having arrived exactly where his heart desired to be.
Shen Xi looked at the empty space where the mink had been, then at Mu Chen. "Now, where next for us?"
Mu Chen thought for a second, his mind drifting back to a quiet manor in a small kingdom.
"Home," he replied.
It had been months since Mu Chen had left his family to wander the world. He decided it was time to see his parents again, and to check in on the little girl, Xiaoyu.
Shen Xi smiled warmly. "Okay."
She found herself genuinely looking forward to meeting the parents of a boy who treated the laws of reality like his personal toy collection.
At that moment, Nibi, who had finally grown tired of chasing the disco lights, hopped back into Mu Chen's arms. She settled into the crook of his elbow, letting out a soft meow that clearly signalled her approval of the plan to head home.
Mu Chen and Shen Xi looked at each other and shared a quiet smile.
The final remaining platform of Azure City turned into fine dust. The only thing that had been holding the stone together was no longer there.