Harem Link Cultivation System

The word tore from his throat, raw and final.

Power surged out of him, a torrent of silver and gold screaming back along the bonds. Xueya gasped, a sharp intake of breath that was both pain and shock. Su Lan’s mental presence flared bright with alarm, then hardened into focus. The drain on him stopped, and for one terrifying heartbeat, Lin Tian was empty.

Mu Chen’s glacial fist descended, a mountain of killing intent.

Lin Tian’s body moved on instinct, on the last dregs of borrowed strength. He didn’t have the energy to block. So he didn’t. He dropped his sword.

The crowd roared. He’s given up!

His left hand came up, palm open. Not to catch the blow. To meet it. The memory of Su Lan’s fire, the precise, clinical heat of her Flowing Ember Body, flashed through his mind. Not the technique, but the principle. The Ember Palm was about containment and release, about holding a sun’s worth of heat in a human hand.

He had no fire of his own. But he had the echo of hers, the resonant imprint left in his spirit. He channeled the last whisper of Ice Flame Qi through that template.

His palm met the edge of the phantom glacier.

There was no explosion. A hiss, vast and searing, like a red-hot blade plunged into a frozen lake. White steam erupted in a cloud, swallowing Lin Tian and Mu Chen whole. The glacial fist shattered, not from impact, but from a sudden, violent phase change. It vaporized a foot from his skin.

Inside the steam cloud, the world was blinding white and deafening silence.

Lin Tian hit the ground on one knee, his lungs burning, his left arm numb to the shoulder. That wasn’t Ember Palms. That was a desperate parody. But it had worked. He’d turned solid ice into fog.

Mu Chen staggered back, his perfect stance broken. His eyes, wide with disbelief, scanned the vapor. "A cheap trick," he spat, but his voice lacked its earlier certainty. He raised Eternal Zero again, the blade’s glow flickering. The technique had cost him, too.

The Overclock state was gone. The borrowed power was spent. Lin Tian was running on fumes and the solid, unshakable foundation of his own Fifth Level True Spirit Realm cultivation. He felt it now, not as a reservoir of power, but as bedrock. Deep. Dense. Unmoving.

He pushed himself to his feet. His jian lay three steps away. He didn’t go for it.

Instead, he took a breath, and his body settled into a stance he had never physically practiced. His feet found positions on the slick ice, weight distributed just so. His arms lifted, fingers poised as if holding a blade of moonlight. It was elegant, lethal, and utterly cold.

The Moonfrost Sword Dance. Xueya’s signature technique. He’d seen it in her memories, felt its contours in her spirit. A dance of absolute zero, where every movement aimed to freeze an opponent’s blood, their qi, their will.

Mu Chen recognized it. His sneer returned. "You think to use her dance? You lack the physique. You lack the bloodline. You lack everything!"

Lin Tian didn’t answer. He began to move.

It was clumsy at first. His muscles protested the unfamiliar precision. But the foundation was there. His dense qi responded, flowing into the patterns Xueya had carved into her soul. He wasn’t her. He couldn’t become the Ice Phoenix. But he could trace the shape of its shadow.

He glided forward, a series of slow, deliberate steps. Frost crystallized in his wake, not the wild, jagged ice of Mu Chen’s attacks, but a smooth, perfect sheet.

Mu Chen laughed, a short, harsh sound. He thrust Eternal Zero forward, a simple spear of ice aimed at Lin Tian’s heart. "Die in her footsteps, then."

Lin Tian’s drifting form wasn’t there when the thrust arrived. He’d pivoted on the ball of his foot, the motion so smooth it looked like the ice itself had shifted him. The Moonfrost Dance was evasion, a series of feints and repositionings meant to lure an opponent into overcommitting.

Mu Chen’s thrust extended too far. For a fraction of a second, his center of balance was forward.

Lin Tian’s left hand shot out, not in a fist, but with fingers splayed. Again, the ghost of Su Lan’s technique. But this time, he didn’t try to contain heat. He reversed it. He took the ambient cold, the residual frost of Mu Chen’s own attack, and he compressed it. He funneled it through the Ember Palm’s principle of focused release, but the fuel was frost, not flame.

A beam of concentrated, hyper-cold energy, thinner than a needle, lanced from his fingertips.

It didn’t hit Mu Chen. It hit Eternal Zero, an inch from the hilt.

The sound was a high, clear ping, like a crystal glass struck. A tiny, perfect circle of white appeared on the dark blue blade. A crack.

Mu Chen stared at his sword, his face blank with shock. A crack. In a spirit weapon. From a True Spirit Realm ant.

Lin Tian didn’t let him process it. The Dance demanded fluidity. He was already moving again, circling, his steps etching a wider ring of frost. He was learning. The Moonfrost Dance was a framework. The Ember Palm principle was a tool. His own dense, stable qi was the power source.

He wasn’t copying. He was adapting.

He’s stronger than me, Lin Tian thought, watching Mu Chen’s aura boil with Earth Spirit Realm pressure. But his strength is... thin. Spread out. Like a pond a mile wide and an inch deep.

Mu Chen roared, his composure shattered. He abandoned technique and unleashed raw power. A wave of glacial energy erupted from him, a expanding ring of ice shards and killing cold meant to obliterate everything in a thirty-foot radius.

Lin Tian didn’t retreat. He stepped into the wave.

He brought his hands together, left over right. In his right: the Moonfrost Dance’s essence—cold that slipped between molecules. In his left: the Ember Palm’s violent release.

He couldn’t overpower the wave. So he let it hit him.

The crowd screamed. Xueya’s mental cry was a knife in his skull.

Glacial energy washed over him. He absorbed it—not into his meridians, which would have frozen him solid, but guided by the Moonfrost principle, flowing around his core. He became a conduit.

And into that flowing torrent, he injected the Ember Palm’s release.

The result was instantaneous vaporisation.

Not ice shattering—transformation. The wave turned to steam, a roaring cloud that blasted back at Mu Chen with twice its force. The platform shook. Stones ripped free.

Mu Chen crossed his arms, Eternal Zero glowing furiously. The steam hit him like a wall—not cutting, but scouring, carrying his own power refined and weaponised against him.

When it cleared, he was still standing. Robes tattered. Fine cuts across his face and hands. Ragged breath. The crack in his sword had spiderwebbed outward.

Lin Tian stood in the settling mist, soaked, lightheaded, qi reserves critically low. But his dense Fifth Level core was unshaken, humming with steady resilience.

Mu Chen looked from his cracked sword to Lin Tian. For the first time, contempt wasn’t the only thing in his eyes. There was calculation. And beneath it, doubt.

"You’re not stealing techniques," he said quietly. "You’re warping them."

"I’m using them," Lin Tian corrected, voice hoarse. He pointed his blade at the crack in Eternal Zero. "You have a higher realm, a famed physique, a spirit weapon. But your foundation is hollow. You advanced on pills and prestige, not comprehension. Your seventh level is a paper castle."

The insult was so audacious it stole breath from the entire plaza.

Mu Chen’s face darkened with pure rage, the doubt burned away by fury. "I will show you hollow!"

He stopped holding back. The air thickened, temperature plummeting until moisture crystallised into a blizzard. He unleashed his Frozen Jade Body—skin taking on a translucent sheen as ice coalesced into armour, jagged spikes projecting from his shoulders and elbows, a crown of glacial thorns forming above him.

He became a walking fortress of ice.

"Now," Mu Chen growled, the words echoing with unnatural cold. "Let’s see your density."

He charged. Not with technique. With mass. He was a glacier on the move, each footfall cracking the platform stone, his spiked shoulders aimed to impale.

Lin Tian had one chance. The two halves of his improvised style—the frost and the flame—had worked separately. Now he had to fuse them. Not as a deflection, not as a counter. As a single, finishing strike.

He planted his feet, grounding himself through his dense core. He raised his jian, not in a sword form, but holding it like a conductor’s baton.

In his mind, he drew the final arc of the Moonfrost Sword Dance—the killing thrust, the point where the dance stopped being evasion and became absolute finality. The "Frostbite Puncture."

Simultaneously, he summoned every scrap of the Ember Palm principle left in his spirit. The concept of taking energy, containing it to a critical point, and releasing it in a single, catastrophic focus.

He didn’t have fire. He had the opposite. He had the absolute cold of the Dance, and the compression method of the Palm.

He poured his remaining qi, every last drop from his dense foundation, into the confluence. Into the tip of his jian.

The blade didn’t glow. It darkened. The light around it bent, sucked in. A tiny, swirling vortex of black and white appeared at its point, a pinprick of silent, hungry negation.

Mu Chen was upon him, a titan of ice, his spiked shoulder aimed for Lin Tian’s chest.

Lin Tian thrust.

Not at Mu Chen’s body. At the center of the glacial armor, at the densest knot of Mu Chen’s own hastily assembled power.

The tip of his jian, bearing the fused technique—the Vaporizing Strike—touched the ice.

There was no sound.

The ice armor didn’t crack. It didn’t shatter.

It disappeared.

A perfect cylindrical hole, two feet across, bored clean through the chest plate and shoulder spike. The edges were smooth, glassy—matter simply ceased to be. The negation met the cold and annihilated, sucking surrounding frost inward with a hollow whump.

Mu Chen’s charge faltered. He looked at the hole, at his intact robes beneath. No pain. The strike had bypassed flesh entirely, annihilating the spiritual construct wrapped around him.

His Frozen Jade Body flickered. The jade sheen faded, the crown of thorns melted, spikes drooping and clattering away. Not broken. Erased.

Lin Tian lowered his jian, swaying. Empty. But standing.

And Mu Chen’s glacial defenses were gone.

End of Chapter 106