"The extraction of the Ice Flower's essence requires fires that its rocky peaks fail to keep lit. The price of this batch of pills has tripled this season. It is the toll of our refinement."
The smell of cheap sandalwood burning in bronze censers struggled to mask the acrid odor of ashes and scorched roots that permeated the hall. The elder of the host sect crossed his arms over his prominent belly. He leaned his heavy back against the oak chair, raising his chin while the armed guards behind him struck iron spears against the floor.
At the opposite end of the massive wooden table, silence reigned.
The figure seated in the high-backed chair kept her head perfectly erect, knees together beneath the table, and pale palms resting on her own lap. The twenty-one-year-old woman exhaled the art of silence. A thick, ceremonial mantle of silver-gray silk covered her body. The heavy, high-collared fabric tensed with every breath, crushing itself against the generous curve of her breasts and the width of her hips. Beside her, the elder of the Central Pillar remained standing, mute as a stone gargoyle, acting purely as the armed arm of the authority the girl exercised.
The deep scarlet irises descended slowly from the host's face to the open jade box in the center of the table.
The pills rested on velvet. The surface of those spheres displayed microscopic fissures and gray clouds of impurities. The young woman's stomach turned before the filth offered. Alchemy in these borders amounted to a slaughterhouse of the blind. They boiled sludge and toxins in rustic cauldrons, demanding the weight of silver for the hardened mud left at the bottom.
The memory cut through the young emissary's mind, sharp and bitter. Eight years earlier. The moonlit courtyard and the thin smoke rising from the Central Pillar's forges. Her grandfather, the man whose bones carried the most devastating martial strength the Remnants of the South had ever seen, had crushed an identical pill between thumb and forefinger until it turned to dust.
"They adorn their own stagnation with gold dust," the old man's hoarse voice echoed in her memory. "My cultivation suffocates in this theater."
The young woman blinked slowly, dragging her perception back to the perfumed hall. The pulse beneath the silver silk maintained its mild cadence. She inclined her face millimetrically forward.
"The vision of Your Excellency acts as a beacon for our coffers," Mò Yán's voice floated through the hall. The timbre was melodious, velvety, and carried the unquestionable politeness of one born for the game of courts. "We will accept triple the value demanded for this batch."
The elder's small eyes widened. His short fingers drummed rapidly on the wood before the sudden flow of easy silver.
"However…" the word slid from the woman's plump lips, paralyzing the man's fingers. Mò Yán smoothed an imaginary fold in her own sleeve. "To justify such extortion before our patriarchs, I request that Your Excellency include three full carts of raw medicinal herbs in tomorrow's shipment."
The elder narrowed his eyes. His face paled subtly, and the man's tone of voice rose an octave, tearing the sandalwood of the environment.
"This is pure usury! We have a blood-sworn agreement with the Blood Blade Sect! If your Central Pillar thinks it can dry our stocks using intimidation, they are completely mistaken!"
Mò Yán pressed her pale palms against her own lap. The veiled friction had just been thrown onto the table. He was using the shadow of the Blood Blade Sect as a guard dog.
"The alliance of your venerable house with the Blood Blade is famous, elder," she murmured. The courteous smile carved a trench of ice in the room. "They are voracious dogs. However, a dog dies of starvation when the Shadow Valley Sect freezes the rivers and cuts their hunting routes. The vigil our warriors maintain on the eastern border acts as the only dam capable of preventing their cavalry from swallowing both your gates simultaneously."
The sound of incense crackling in bronze became deafening.
"The spears forged by my grandfather's lineage are still the densest iron in the entire South," her voice descended to a placid and implacable whisper. "It would be a tragedy if our leadership, exhausted by the cost of these pills, decided to withdraw the border guard. Your Excellency would be free to test the resistance of your stone walls against the Shadow Valley. Three carts of herbs sounds like a harmless price to keep the spears of our Pillar raised in your favor."
The elder's throat rasped audibly.
Mò Yán had wrapped the massacre of an entire mountain in silk and cordial words. The antiquity and martial supremacy of her sect crushed the old man's bravado with the precision of a rockslide.
Cold sweat ran down the host's temple. The wrinkled, trembling hand grabbed his own thigh beneath the table to stop the trembling of his muscles. He swallowed dry, forcing his face to contort back into a tense, defeated smile. He would profit in gold, but he had just handed over the security of his supplies and control of his primary stocks.
"Your vision of war is… very broad," the elder's voice came out pasty. His right hand pushed the jade box toward the girl. "We will close the shipment of additional herbs tomorrow morning. It was a pleasure doing business with you, Mò Yán."
Mò Yán rose from the chair with the exactness of a blade being sheathed. The folds of the silver mantle fell perfectly over her firm legs. The man before her clung to stones and gold, focused on immediate gain and ignoring the collar the young woman had just tied around her sect's neck.
"The pleasure of cultivating peace honors our pillars, Your Excellency," Mò Yán replied with a slight bow of her head.
The young representative turned her back and marched out of the pestilent hall. Her rigorous mind, supported by the abandoned teachings of the strongest man in the mortal world, was already articulating the heavy foundations and the dispatch of men for the next step of her clan.
---
While the South slowly suffocated beneath the web of influence and silent intrigues of its stone courts, thousands of kilometers away, in the isolated heart of the eastern bamboo grove, the passage of days was not measured by politics or the sun. Time had simply dissolved inside the cabin, devoured purely by the continuous friction of two bodies.
The weeks of uninterrupted isolation exacted the structural price from the dead matter around them. The rustic room was unrecognizable. The straw bed and the thick logs that supported it had been ground by constant friction until only a thin layer of ashen dust remained. The bamboo floor itself had yielded, sinking entire centimeters into the dark earth, crushed beneath the brutal gravity the Forge of Flesh exhaled with every impact.
The thick, asphyxiating air distorted the afternoon light leaking through the cracks.
Lying prone on the pulverized remains of the mattress, the skin of Yù Qíng's back and generous curves reflected the penumbra with the polished and frighteningly symmetrical texture of the purest white nephrite. The dark sludge of the first dawns had been entirely purged. The woman's wide-open pores pulled and returned air in an autonomous rhythm, cementing a physical barrier of immaculate freshness.
Positioned right behind her, Zhì Yuǎn kept his own weight anchored over his wife's hips. The young man's bare chest and broad arms resembled incandescent marble. The muscle fibers of both throbbed, saturated to the last drop with the thick gold they had forged in those weeks.
The merciless friction reached the rim of the vessel.
Zhì Yuǎn drove his hips in a long, non-negotiable thrust. The man's large, calloused hand advanced over the young woman's shoulder and plunged mercilessly into Yù Qíng's black hair. His firm fingers grabbed his wife's nape, pulling the girl's pale neck upward and backward with violence. Yù Qíng's spine arched in the same instant, exposing her stretched throat while her hips were crushed against the mattress by the young man's pelvis.
The giant, burning shaft invaded the moist channel. The massive inertia of the thrust collided directly against a physical seal. A carnal barrier the carpenter had already broken years ago.
The girl's flesh, ground and cemented fiber by fiber beneath the fire of Primordial Gold during those weeks of isolation, had not merely purged mortal sludge; the absolute foundation had forged the anatomy back to immaculate origin, weaving the very veil of purity back into place. The invasion tore the newly born chastity dry. The rupture of the sacred tissue discarded mundane pain and rustic blood; the elastic resilience of the deified body devoured the friction, transmuting the reopening of untouched soil into a wave of dense, burning submission that opened the path until striking head-on against the absolute limit of the uterus.
"Nnnngh!" a strangled roar of pure territorial shock tore from Yù Qíng's reddened lips, her icy fingers digging into the straw of the bed itself.
"Swallow it all, Qíng," his grave voice vibrated, rustic and lethargic, a heavy command descending directly against the girl's ear. "Squeeze."
The order crushed the last resistances of her mind.
"Yes… husband…" she whimpered in a dragged manner, her sweat-stained face pulling into pure possessive adoration as her flesh trembled. "Fill me…"
The maximum tension broke. A torrent of thick, scalding seed loaded with the densest Yang fire gushed violently into the woman's depths.
The burning impact shattered Yù Qíng's last barrier of sanity. The girl lying prone gasped, breath failing in her lungs. Her inner walls convulsed in frantic spasms, milking her husband's flesh implacably and crushing him from all sides while her own slight body overflowed a heavy tide of her icy, original Yin.
His incandescent seed and her dark nectar collided.
The friction demanded mutual extermination. Zhì Yuǎn pulled his musculature and sucked the lethargic, cold matter of his wife directly into his own veins. He anchored the pressure in his skull, activating the invisible steel gears of the Mill in the center of his chest, and threw his wife's Yin between the teeth of the axle, forcing rotation.
Crack.
The Mill turned without mercy, massacring the dark water. One, two, nine uninterrupted inversions. The brutal friction crushed the invading Yin until the energy shattered, converting into a torrent of purest, incandescent golden Primordial Qi.
Beneath him, Yù Qíng's spine trembled beneath violent spasms. The wife executed the exact same slaughter. She locked her husband's scalding Yang in her own entrails, engaged the gears of her Mill, and massacred the fire seed repeatedly until grinding it, transforming the thermal aggression into the purest and thickest golden Qi for herself.
The Forge fulfilled the exchange. But the carnal foundation of both was already at the ceiling of its existence.
The newly sculpted bones and musculature physically repelled the new wave of Primordial Qi the Mills had just forged. With not a single millimeter of flesh free to occupy, the heavy golden matter was violently hurled downward, crushing vital organs and plummeting in free fall toward the vacuum located just beneath their sternum.
The energy collided against the dark abyss of the abdomen.
The brutal impact excavated the Dantian hole dry. The golden matter anchored itself in the new bed. The absolute weight of that concentration plummeted like a lead anvil directly into the center of gravity of both.
The physical body of both reacted in the same instant. The feverish temperature and insane heat their skin had exhaled for weeks vanished in the blink of an eye. The untamable fire was swallowed and locked with seven keys in the new chamber. The girl's dermis beneath him cooled drastically, cementing into an icy, impenetrable wall from the outside.
Zhì Yuǎn interrupted the friction. The man released his wife's nape, grave breath filling the room while the broad muscles of his arms lost extreme tension.
He passed his thumb over his own sternum, feeling the internal vacuum finally occupied. The entire gear of the body had locked on the perfect axle.
The young man's calloused hand descended, spreading lightly over Yù Qíng's smooth, pale lower abdomen, feeling the tense swelling of his own burning volume retained and cemented beneath her skin.
"You gained weight, Qíng," his rustic voice broke the penumbra, loaded with that silent, provocative humor. "Your belly is protruding."
Yù Qíng turned her face crushed in the ruined straw. Territorial stubbornness pulled her reddened lips, but black eyes shone with dragged, satisfied possessiveness.
"And whose fault is it for filling me so many times in a row until I almost burst?" she retorted, velvety voice failing in a whiny whisper, thin legs relaxing heavily on the bed.
Zhì Yuǎn let out a low laugh through his nose. He raised his broad torso, rising in the middle of the room's destruction, and retrieved the dark linen trousers thrown in the corner.
"Your father closed the cart rental this morning," he sentenced, practicality dominating his steps as he tied the leather belt around his waist. "The isolation is over. We will cross the square stalls today to cover both your faces, and we will tie the horses for the Qīngshí road at the first light of dawn."
---
The heavy wooden log that barred the bamboo cabin was finally removed with a dull thud, dragged aside by Zhì Yuǎn's large, calloused hand. The cold morning air invaded the rustic room all at once, sweeping away the thick smell of nectar and ozone.
At the edge of the backyard trail, Yù Méi's rapid steps crushed dry leaves. The youngest marched impatiently, carrying a basket with fruit, ready to pound against the door slat until her fists hurt. But the sound of the bar opening froze her mid-step.
The fourteen-year-old adolescent raised her face. And her breath simply vanished from her lungs.
The first figure to cross the threshold was her sister. Yù Qíng stepped onto the veranda barefoot, wearing the same faded blue cotton nightgown. However, the peasant girl Yù Méi knew no longer existed. Sunlight bathed a creature that exhaled frightening symmetry. Yù Qíng's skin shone with the translucent coldness of porcelain polished in ice, free of any mortal flaw or roughness. Black hair fell heavy and dense, and the eldest's face displayed the unattainable indifference of a statue sculpted for blind adoration.
The fruit basket slipped from Yù Méi's hands, the woven bamboo striking the soft earth.
But the weight of that vision became unbearable the following second, when the massive silhouette of Zhì Yuǎn emerged right behind his wife. The young man had not yet dressed in his tunic. Morning clarity burst directly against his bare chest and shoulders nearly two meters wide.
Yù Méi's heart pounded with brutal force against her own ribs. The sound of blood roared in her eardrums. Her brother-in-law's anatomy had been tempered and cemented by nights of collision. Every muscle fiber and every visible tendon of Zhì Yuǎn displayed the heavy tension of steel freshly taken from the forge. His face, with its sharp jaw and dark, abyssal irises, projected a predatory weight that ignored any familiar boundary.
The adolescent's throat dried completely. Her thin legs trembled beneath her skirt. An instinctive heat boiled at the base of the girl's stomach, scaling with violence to her face and staining Yù Méi's pale cheeks with a scandalous, feverish red. Her mouth opened slightly, almond eyes locking on his rigid abdomen, sweeping the innocence of her age into darkness.
Silence weighed on the backyard for long, asphyxiating seconds.
Yù Méi swallowed dry, the tremor of her own breath struggling to break the torpor. The shock of her own audacity boiled at the youngest's nape, crushing the trance and forcing the adolescent to hurriedly divert her face to the beaten earth floor to recover her breath and formulate a sentence.
"They are… they are ready," the youngest stammered, voice failing in a rustic thread while trying to respond about the luggage. "But you are crazy if you think we are going to set foot in the city of Qīngshí like this."
Honesty tore through the adolescent's surprise.
"The entire village will stop. The court guards will drag sister to the lord's house," her voice dragged, the blush still burning her own neck. "Your skin, your bones… you cannot cross the big house street, brother-in-law. People will be drooling in front of us before the cart even turns the corner of the stone road."
Yù Qíng stopped on the veranda. The lethal gaze of the young wife captured the audacity of her sister's words, and immediately descended to the shining thread of saliva moistening the half-open lips of the gaping youngest.
The eldest's crimson lip drew a smile of pure ice. Yù Qíng descended the steps in two mute steps. Her pale hand advanced like a whip, roughly grabbing the adolescent's jaw with cold fingers and locking Yù Méi's face in place. Yù Qíng's jade-white thumb dragged with force across the side of her sister's mouth, disdainfully cleaning the drool threatening to drip from the young woman.
"Then start drying your own mouth, little one," Yù Qíng hissed the retort, venom overflowing in direct and physical humiliation. She released the youngest's face with a short push. "Pack your things. The road awaits us."
Yù Méi rubbed her jaw, breath still uneven, face catching fire before the realization of what she had been doing. The girl nodded her head in a lethargic movement and retreated one step.
Zhì Yuǎn picked up the charcoal-gray tunic resting on the veranda bench, threading his broad arms through it. The rustic, raw evaluation of the girl matched his calculations. The newly refined flesh repelled dust, exhaling an unreal cleanliness for the mortal world.
"The square fair opened its stalls three days ago, Méi," Zhì Yuǎn's grave, lethargic voice cut the air, bringing pragmatism back to the backyard and ignoring the friction between the two. He tied the leather belt around his waist. "The peddler is still stationed there. We will cover the damage to both your faces this afternoon."
---
The yellowish dust of the Qīngshān square permeated the air with the smell of dry straw and old horses. The murmur of villagers haggling vanished the exact instant the trio crossed the line of stalls.
Despite the rustic attempt at concealment, their presence demanded space.
Zhì Yuǎn walked with the unshakeable posture of a stone pillar. The one-meter-ninety body was drowned beneath a heavy, wide rustic tunic, and the young man wore a large conical hat of braided straw, tilted forward, whose dense brims swallowed the man's face in an impenetrable darkness of shadows. To his right flank, Yù Qíng had improvised a thick, dark scrap tied firmly from the base of her nose to her nape. The veil covered her features, but the contrast of black eyes bored into the square and the white nephrite skin at the edges of the fabric still forced merchants to lower their heads, unable to sustain the vision.
They stopped before the peddler's main tent, crammed with cedar chests, folded silks, and rolls of thick linen.
"Pure silver," Zhì Yuǎn said, throwing three whole pieces of heavy silver onto the merchant's wooden counter. It was the generous remainder Yù Chéng had given the young man for the discovery of the intact coal vein in the mountain. "The uncut rolls."
The peddler's eyes nearly jumped from their orbits, greed swallowing any fear before the shadows of the hat brims. He ran to unlock the most expensive chests.
Yù Méi slipped to the edge of the table. The adolescent's trembling hand slid over a loose dress of raw cotton, dyed in a richly golden tone. The fabric would form a direct contrast with the girl's tawny-yellow braids. The youngest's cheeks warmed in the same instant. The girl's mind did not visualize the approval of her village friends; her pulse accelerated imagining only whether the golden fabric would make the lethargic, unshakeable gaze beneath that straw hat descend to evaluate her body in the cart.
Zhì Yuǎn noticed the girl's hesitation. The man's calloused finger pushed one of the additional silver coins toward the merchant, sealing the purchase of the golden dress for his sister-in-law in silence. Yù Méi hugged the warm fabric against her chest, the blush scaling to the tips of her ears while a gasp of grateful breath died in her throat.
At the opposite end of the counter, Yù Qíng ignored the scene. The wife's icy, pale hand ran across the texture of luxurious rolls. She had learned the craft of cutting and needlework from her mother and, alongside Zhì Yuǎn's structural physics, had perfected sewing to blind precision. The young woman separated entire rolls of purest navy-blue silk, adorned at the edges with embroidery of small black lotuses. Then, her dark eyes fell upon the heaviest material in the display: thick silk in a pearl-gray tone and velvet as black as pitch.
Possessiveness crackled in the air. She would make her husband's own tunic. She would cover the skin that belonged to her with that impenetrable gray and sew a black cloak to isolate his shoulders from the road dust.
"Add the dark, braided breathable fabrics for the face," her voice muffled by the improvised veil hissed against the merchant, demanding the definitive disguise material.
Zhì Yuǎn raised his face beneath the shadow of the straw hat. His dark gaze crossed the crowded stall, evaluating the anxious, greedy murmur of the rustic mortals around. The dust of this square attracts trash very quickly, the young man concluded in silence, cold logic mapping the village streets and the gravel road awaiting them. If her skin continues reflecting this divine light on the journey, the entire crossing will be an unnecessary bloodbath because of curious worms. Anonymity is the cleanest shield.
His gaze bored into an isolated shelf. The man's left arm advanced, reaching a perfectly structured, circular hat with a deep base. It was woven from fine straw and dyed entirely black, finished with a lethal, cold silver border — an aesthetic and exact marriage with the pearl-gray fabric his wife had just chosen for him.
He tossed the black piece beside the silk and fished a second hat from the wooden hook. It was a smaller circular piece, braided with threads colored in toasted yellow and black, sewn with minute patterns of foliage and vines.
Zhì Yuǎn deposited the yellow-leaf hat directly onto Yù Qíng's pile of navy-blue silks. His calloused fingers evaluated the straw weave in a millisecond: the fiber was tight, without empty spaces. The dark brim would form the perfect awning, blocking the sun and swallowing any trace of light that might still reflect from his wife's white skin.
From the other side of the counter, Yù Méi hugged the golden dress against her stomach. The youngest took advantage of the market's distraction and raised her face. The adolescent's furtive, hungry gaze slid obliquely, attempting to invade the shadow of Zhì Yuǎn's hat brim to savor the sharp line of his jaw and rigid lips while he negotiated the final weight of silver.
The temperature around the table plummeted.
Yù Qíng did not turn her face entirely. Black, abyssal irises slid from the corner of her eye and bored into her sister's profile. The eldest narrowed her eyelids into a territorial slit, and her pale fingers crushed the pearl-gray silk on the wooden table, threatening to tear the expensive fabric purely from nerve tension.
"Collect the cargo, Méi," Yù Qíng hissed the command, voice sinking into the pure ice of mortal warning. The woman took a lateral, millimetric, absolute step, interposing her own shoulders like a wall between her younger sister and Zhì Yuǎn's back. "The carriage wheel awaits us at the valley exit tomorrow. And your body will not withstand the shaking of the wooden axle if your head is lost in the clouds."
The youngest swallowed dry, immediately retreating beneath the threat of having her attention torn away by her sister. Zhì Yuǎn stored the remainder of the silver in his belt. He turned his back on the mortified commerce, adjusting the edge of the dark hat, and the three marched in unison out of the central square. The leather harnesses were already being tied by the old man, and the long road of earth and stones to the city of Qīngshí awaited the gears of that familiar forge for dawn.