In that moment of wild sensation, caught between pleasure and suffering, she opened just the tiniest sliver of her inner world to Li Xun.
His pupils began to spin, not turning inside his eyes, but the pupils themselves rotating unnaturally, in defiance of all anatomy.
What he saw now wasn't the room, or her body.
It was waves; the rawest, most primal pulses from the depths of Consort Qin's soul.
Those blood-red eyes made him look like a devil…
A devil tearing open the delicate shell of her mind with bloodied hands, prying into her most secret, buried truths.
He saw everything:
Pain. Lust. Fear. Bitterness. Realization. Cold clarity. Scorn. Even a faint trace of masochistic pleasure
And further down, something deeper still. A blurry shadow, hiding behind all the layers.
It was like a flower, lush, beautiful, and layered in dense petals. And as the "season" arrived, those petals began to peel away, one by one.
And that's when Li Xun realized something profound.
Reading a woman's heart was like reading a thick book: messy threads, emotional fragments, contradictions everywhere, no discernible pattern.
And that was why a woman's heart was always impossible to truly understand.
He wanted to strip away every petal, to reach the very core….her essence.
But halfway through, he couldn't go on.
His energy drained, his mind blurred, and in the end, everything was swallowed by a thick fog. He had to close his eyes, silently admitting that this round… he had lost.
After a long time, he opened his eyes again.
Only now did he finally understand: up until this moment, he hadn't truly conquered Consort Qin; neither her body, nor her heart.
Even though she was just a frail, delicate woman, barely able to stand against the wind.
That truth left a bitter taste in his mouth.
But he quickly pushed it aside and lifted his spirits.
After all, victory didn't always mean total domination, did it? Take this moment; could it not be called conquest too?
He gently caressed Consort Qin's warm, jade-like body.
Meanwhile, passage by passage of cultivation esoteric flowed through his mind like running water, and a faint smile tugged at his lips.
The union of man and woman mirrored the cosmic balance of yin and yang. Their sexual union wasn't just about desire. It was the ultimate principle of reproduction and generation; there was both loss and gain, a mutual complement of opposites that followed heaven's natural order.
Yet some cultivation paths twisted that balance.
They didn't just seek harmony, they exploited it.
They made sure the user always came out on top, forcing the partner to lose their primal essence and vital energy at the height of their arousal, absorbing it for their own gain.
Such methods could indeed skyrocket one's power.
The more people you drained, the faster your cultivation advanced.
But there were costs: impure true breath, and conflicts in vital essence… were truly a headache to deal with.
That, too, was part of the fairness of the heavenly Dao.
Even the Six Sovereign Yin-Yang Transformation had similar techniques.
On the surface, it looked like any other dual cultivation art—one-sided gain, draining the partner for one's gain. But instead of merely extracting and absorbing the other person's life force, it used delicate yin-yang transformations to turn them into a genuine furnace cauldron.
A cauldron; it was nothing more than a vessel to be burned, so that its essence could be extracted.
The target's body was the container. The user's true breath was the fire.
By skillfully manipulating the Bright Winds and Six Qi, the user could channel a highly concentrated flow of primordial energy from heaven and earth into the furnace cauldron, then extract it through special methods at astonishing efficiency.
In effect, the target became a kind of amplifier.
The same amount of primordial energy from heaven and earth could now be absorbed at ten, even twenty times the normal rate.
And because that energy had already been partially refined inside the target's body, preheated, so to speak, the usual side effects like impure true breath or conflicting vital essence were barely noticeable.
Who could possibly resist such temptation?
Certainly not Li Xun.
Following the method exactly as the cultivation manual described, step by step, he took complete control of Consort Qin's body. Once that was done, he drew in the Six Qi and aligned them with the semen within her body—all in accordance with theheavenlyDao's natural flow.
At the same time, using various techniques he teased her, pushing her to the very edge; so close to death that her essence, spirit, and soul began to drift from her body…
Then, just as they were about to scatter, they fused together into a potent substance: a kind of "great elixir", ripe for harvest.
And Li Xun took it, smiling all the while.
Consort Qin screamed again.
Weakness, pain, carnal desire. All those sensations crashed into her in a violent surge. The impact was too much. She passed out again.
Li Xun felt nothing short of reborn.
His mind was clear, his spirit high, and his injuries seemingly gone. The true breath inside him was unusually lively, surging as if it wanted to roar skyward.
He got up and adjusted his clothes. Not a shred of pity crossed his heart.
Bad luck for you, I guess.
He gave Consort Qin's high, round backside a light slap and let out a short laugh.
Just then, he remembered the two items on the table and turned toward them.
But before his gaze fully shifted, something flickered at the corner of his eye. A shadow, fast as lightning!
His instincts kicked in. Without thinking, he lashed out with a backward palm strike—
But it hit nothing.
His heart skipped a beat.
He spun sharply, eyes locked on the two items on the table, and lunged.
Anything else could be lost. But not those two things. Absolutely not.
Just as he leapt, a strange, low chuckle echoed by his ear.
In that instant, the air around him froze solid, as if the entire world had turned to ice.
His body, driven by momentum, slammed into the invisible barrier with a dull thud.
A grunt escaped his lips. The wounds he had just healed… reopened.
But it didn't end there. In that split second when his body was momentarily halted, a cold hand pressed against the center of his back, releasing a subtle force.
With a crash, Li Xun was hurled forward like a clumsy boulder, slamming straight into the desk ahead.
Even as he was still midair, he felt a sharp, needle-like surge of true breath piercing into him;it tore through his body's defenses like ripping through paper!
That true breath shot straight for his heart, so fast he didn't even have time to react!
A dull thud echoed as Li Xun's chest exploded in a mist of blood. He smashed down onto the desk, pulverizing it on impact. And in that same instant, the two items on the desk vanished.
Li Xun felt his soul drifting away from his body. Death… had never been this close.
Even under the pressure of the Demon Phoenix, it had only brushed his skin. But this time—it was dragging his very soul out.
So this… is death?
What a strange sensation.
Just moments ago, his body had been overflowing with life. Now, void was the only thing he could feel.
In that dizzying transition, he noticed something. Something unusual.
It was like tipping over a cup of water. The water, naturally, would spill…his life, pouring out.
But what Li Xun sensed wasn't the water itself. It was the force that caused it to spill.
A faint, subtle ripple of Qi.
In that fleeting instant, Li Xun etched this Qi-mechanism deep into his soul.
> "It moves in stillness, still in motion—the Dao never departs, it cycles on.
> Life from life, death from death—the Dao never ends, it returns and repeats."
These incantations fell like droplets of water into the empty vessel of his mind.
With every drop, a mist of vitality began to rise. Its rhythm harmonized, self-sustaining, slowly permeating his entire being.
His heart beat again. Steady. Powerful.
As if that needle-like true breath from earlier… had been nothing more than a ridiculous illusion.
Li Xun's awareness slowly returned. Yet everything still felt unreal. Like a dream.
He still couldn't quite believe it and reached up to touch his chest, only to find his hand covered in blood. The front of his clothes was indeed torn with a small hole, and upon closer touch, there was a tiny pin-sized puncture in his chest muscle. Clearly the bleeding point from just now
It was real. So what… just happened?
Before he could make sense of it, a low voice spoke by his ear:
"Good."
So familiar. Li Xun's heart jumped. "Master Aunt!" he blurted out.
He scrambled to his feet and turned—
There, seated at the edge of the bed, was Yin Wanderer, toying with the bottle and metal shard.
Her gaze settled on him, half a smile, half not; sharp as a blade, yet oddly captivating.
A sudden stir rippled through his heart, but he quickly snapped out of it, silently cursing himself for being possessed by a lustful demon. Not daring to show the slightest disrespect, he hurried forward and bowed.
"Master Aunt, greetings…"
Yin Wanderer weighed the two items in her hand, face calm and pleased. "Not bad. You managed to escape an ambush from five third-generation disciples of Heavenly Vigorous Sect, and kept these two items intact. Tell me, how should I reward you?"
Li Xun quickly responded with humble denials. But questions were bubbling inside him.
Noticing Yin Wanderer's good mood, he cautiously asked: "Master Aunt, just now, behind me… was that…?"
"Yes, it was me." Yin Wanderer didn't hesitate. "That was me testing your cultivation."
Li Xun's eyes went wide. Testing?! That was a test?!
Her inscrutable gaze met his, penetrating deep. "If Wei Bufan were here, even he would be surprised at your progress.
"From the looks of it, the Blood Nightmare has already fused with your heart aperture, hasn't it? That's how you survived that fatal blow. Your body vaporized into blood mist and dissipated the attack. Now think… how long has it been since he gave you the Blood God Child technique?"
Li Xun could sense something odd, even dangerous, behind her words.
Although he didn't know exactly what was going on, he knew that not long ago, around the time of the recent absorption, some very subtle and at the same time very interesting changes had occurred within his body.
And while that change felt like a boon, Yin Wanderer's ambiguous attitude toward it… made his skin crawl.
With that realization, Li Xun grew extremely cautious.
He played dumb, brushing off the details with vague confusion. Truthfully, he didn't understand how he had managed to refine the Blood Nightmare either.
Yin Wanderer's gaze was sharp and piercing; she understood Li Xun's situation and only spoke those words casually. Seeing Li Xun's confused expression, she let it go, and instead shifted the topic, asking about the earlier battle with the Heavenly Vigorous Sect disciples.