Underneath the dusty grey robes, those cold, jade-like legs that were usually wrapped in snow-white fox fur were still trembling slightly uncontrollably.
She walked very slowly, falling a full three paces behind Gu Yang.
Her lowered, autumn-water bright eyes stared fixedly at the grey hem of the man's robe, her mind a tangled mess.
Suddenly.
Deep within her dantian, beside the "Crimson Sub-Gu" that had fallen silent after a period of frenzied resonance.
Extremely abruptly, a trace of an incredibly faint, yet utterly pure, strange coolness emerged.
It carried a kind of lofty, vibrant vitality that seemed capable of nurturing all things, gently traveling through a major circulation cycle along her dried-up, damaged meridians.
"Boom—"
In Zhao Yuelian's mind, it was as if an ancient, primordial bell had been struck violently.
Wherever that coolness passed.
Her Dao foundation, riddled with holes from ten years of the "Thousand Threads Soul Entanglement Syndrome," was being forcefully stitched together and nourished at a speed visible to the naked eye!
Even her bottleneck at the peak of the Core Formation stage, which had been stagnant for years, loosened incredibly by a fraction!
Zhao Yuelian suddenly stopped in her tracks.
Her autumn-water bright eyes widened uncontrollably, a monstrous wave of shock rising in their depths.
What kind of power was this?!
It was not the overbearing Yang energy of the Great Sun True Fire at all, but an extreme pure Yin that was completely homologous to, and even countless times higher in grade than, her original cultivation method!
An invisible, intangible "illusory seed" was quietly taking root deep within her Qi sea.
Zhao Yuelian stood frozen in the cold wind, even her breathing stopped.
She looked up in disbelief at Gu Yang, whose back was as cold and hard as iron, walking ahead.
In her mind, those images that had originally been filled with extreme shame were instantly shattered and reassembled!
An incredibly absurd, yet logically perfectly self-consistent thought grew wildly in her mind like weeds.
"Such a pure Yin Dao seed that steals the fortune of heaven and earth is absolutely a supreme opportunity to defy the heavens and change one's fate!"
"The cultivation world emphasizes the mutual generation of Yin and Yang, and that things turn into their opposites when they reach the extreme."
"This kind of Dao seed definitely requires extremely harsh, extreme methods to stimulate!"
Zhao Yuelian's eye sockets slowly turned completely red.
She looked at Gu Yang's cold, unapproachable back, feeling her very soul trembling.
"He... he deliberately suppressed me with an illusion array in front of that outsider Yun Zhiwei, and even in front of Wanyin."
"He used the most brutal, unforgiving method to force me to shed all my lofty master disguises."
"He wasn't doing it to satisfy his own selfish desires at all!"
"He did it to act as the final trigger for this Dao seed to sprout!"
Too profound.
The Young Master's calculations, the Young Master's methods, were simply so profound it made one's scalp tingle!
He would rather bear the infamous reputation of being "reckless and tyrannical."
Just to forcefully use this method to smash my bottleneck and pave a smooth, heavenly path toward the Nascent Soul Great Dao for me!
The cold wind blew past.
On Zhao Yuelian's cold, stunningly beautiful face, the originally pale expression caused by weakness was swept away.
Replacing it was a blush of extreme, breathtaking intensity.
"For the Young Master to treat me like this..."
Her ten cold, white fingers, hidden in her wide sleeves, dug fiercely into her palms.
"Master?"
Beside her, Su Wanyin's crisp voice suddenly sounded, interrupting the chaotic, crazy mental gymnastics churning in Zhao Yuelian's heart.
Su Wanyin took a step forward, her watery peach-blossom eyes revealing a trace of sharp scrutiny.
Her gaze naturally fell on Zhao Yuelian's cheeks, which were so red they almost seemed to drip blood, and then swept over the layer of fine, fragrant sweat beading on her master's smooth forehead.
"Master, why is your face so red?"
Su Wanyin narrowed her eyes slightly.
As the Holy Maiden of the Joyous Union Sect, she was extremely sensitive to a certain special aura.
In the air, aside from the icy spiritual energy unique to Holy Heaven City, there was clearly a trace of an incredibly faint, yet sickeningly sweet lingering scent that made one's bones go soft.
It was the natural body fragrance emitted by a mature female cultivator.
Zhao Yuelian's entire body stiffened violently.
The sense of shame that had just been suppressed by gratitude instantly surged back like a tide.
She felt so guilty that she didn't dare to look her disciple in the eye.
"It's... it's nothing."
Zhao Yuelian flusteredly turned her head, pretending to look at the magical treasure stalls by the street.
"That Yun Zhiwei is malicious. The incense in the Heaven Number One elegant pavilion just now had some extremely hidden aphrodisiac fire poison mixed into it."
She braced herself and firmly pinned the blame on Yun Zhiwei.
"Just now... to guard against her acting out of desperation, your master secretly forced my spiritual energy to suppress that fire energy. Now, being suddenly exposed to the wind, my qi and blood are just flowing backwards. It's nothing serious."
The excuse was grandiose.
But her legs, hidden under her wide robes and still trembling slightly, couldn't deceive anyone.
Su Wanyin didn't speak.
She quietly looked at her master's evasive eyes, and then at Gu Yang, who was walking ahead with steps as steady as a rock.
The hem of her red skirt fluttered wildly in the wind...
...
...
Holy Heaven City, Lower City.
At the end of a dark, dead-end alley that never saw the light of day.
The air was filled with a pungent stench, the smell of rotting meat and sewer slop that had been accumulating and fermenting for years.
Gu Yang stopped in front of a dry well.
Underneath his dusty grey robes, his deep black eyes showed no ripples of emotion.
"Buzz—"
An incredibly faint spiritual light lit up on his fingertip as he gently pressed a moss-covered depression on the edge of the dry well, following the cyan jade array map Yun Zhiwei had given him.
There were no earth-shattering phenomena.
The mud at the bottom of the dry well rolled back to the sides like a living creature, revealing a bottomless, wet stone staircase extending downward.
A sickeningly thick smell of blood, mixed with the unique cold dampness of the underground, rushed at them like a tangible, chilling wind.
"Let's go."
Gu Yang took the lead and stepped into the darkness.
Su Wanyin followed closely, her watery peach-blossom eyes full of vigilance, her fingers already gripping a dark red poison dart.
But Zhao Yuelian, walking at the back, still had unsteady footing.
The stone steps beneath the dry well were extremely steep and covered in slippery, dark red moss.
This Fairy Lingshuang at the peak of the Core Formation stage actually slipped due to the uncontrollable weakness in her legs and fell forward uncontrollably.
"Ah..."
An extremely suppressed gasp had just escaped her throat.
A large hand with rough calluses shot out from the darkness with extreme precision, like iron pincers.
It firmly grasped her soft, slender waist.
"Thud."
Zhao Yuelian's breathtakingly voluptuous body crashed heavily into a hard, broad chest.
A strong masculine scent, mixed with the faint smell of ash from the Great Sun True Fire that made one's soul tremble, instantly enveloped her completely.
"Can't even walk steadily?"
Gu Yang's cold voice echoed in the extremely narrow, pitch-black tunnel.
His warm breath hit Zhao Yuelian's fragile earlobe, raising a layer of fine goosebumps.
Zhao Yuelian's entire body stiffened violently.
d intelligence to keep the plot moving, and sometimes even the protagonists are forced into absurdly dumb decisions. Why does the A-list celebrity heroine in urban romance novels ditch the top-tier movie star and become a lovestruck fool for a pockmarked male lead? Why do the leads in historical tragedy novels keep dancing between love and death, only for the blind healer to end up suffering the most? And Gu Wei never expected that after finally landing a villain role to stir up trouble, she’d pick the wrong gender! No choice now—she’ll just have to crush the protagonists as a girl!
iaobai: "Councilor Dad, front me some funds. I want to hire ten thousand professional miners for a project!" [Five-Star Mission Issued: Capture the leader of the Blood Heaven Pirate Gang, who is on the run in the Radiant Star Sector. It is said the gang has over a hundred members. Proceed with caution.] Lu Xiaobai: "Councilor Dad, lend me the family's hundred-thousand-strong Lu Army!" [Seven-Star Mission Issued: Subdue a juvenile Void Dragon Beast.] Lu Xiaobai: "Councilor Dad, I'm taking your tamed Void Dragon Beast King out for a family reunion!" I said, System, don't you have any slightly more challenging missions? You're just not up to par! [Nine-Star Mission Issued: Become the Human Councilor.] Lu Xiaobai: "Dad, there's a small matter I'd like to discuss with you..."
ut it can buy an entire year of absolutely perfect training results! Su Yu stared at his empty wallet and decisively opened up various online loan platforms. “Borrow a thousand bucks! Recharge my vitality!” Boom! His vitality broke a hundred points, shattering the limits of the human body! “Borrow ten thousand bucks! Recharge my combat skills!” Boom! A basic punching technique so common it was everywhere instantly maxed out, revealing the ultimate assassination technique of Five Elements Unity—Inner Force! When a rich kid hired assassins for a midnight ambush, aiming to break both of his legs, they instead ran headfirst into a monster—a human-shaped tyrannosaur, brimming with dragon-like vitality. With just two fingers, Su Yu snapped a steel staff reinforced with alloy. Staring at the killer’s stash of stolen cash—a staggering quarter-million dollars—he showed a corporate-sincere smile: “Thanks for the pre-exam gift pack, Mr. Zhao! I’m gonna go re-invest this!” Three days later, at the National Martial Arts College Entrance Exam, while everyone else struggled just to reach the passing line, Su Yu threw a single punch—and more than a thousand vitality points literally detonated the entire arena!
ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!
