Chapter 94 – The Last Breath
Zhì Yuǎn kept the Law of Mandate driven into his own family, his dark eyes fixed on the nearly invisible cracks in the vitreous jade beneath his boots.
Law of Space? The thought echoed cold in his mind, discarded at once.
The only way out was dissection. He needed to force his Primordial Qi to mirror the resonance of that stagnant Immortal Qi, slipping into the reddish web to untie the formation’s knots one by one.
Time, under the Mandate’s absolute restriction, became a drawn-out torture.
In Zhì Yuǎn’s mind, frantic deductions assembled and shattered thousands of diagrams with every blink. His Primordial Qi was transmuted to imitate a new energy. Beneath the jade, a scarlet thread trembled and went dark. Then another. But the core resisted, exacting an absurd price from his Will.
Though not even half the time it takes an incense stick to burn had passed, the weight of the quiet stretched everyone’s perception. Each instant felt like days.
Behind them, Lóu Jiàn and Jiàn Wúshuang’s instincts began to betray them. Though their souls were submissive, the minds of the former Hegemonics still turned, hunting any spark of knowledge that might help the Master. The tension made both men’s blood boil, and a single drop of sweat beaded on Lóu Jiàn’s temple.
“Stop sweating, you useless dogs!”
Xú Lán’s voice transmission whipped across the slaves’ Seas of Consciousness like a blade. The ice woman kept her eyes fixed on Zhì Yuǎn’s back, fanaticism burning in her pupils.
“Do you want to break the Master’s concentration? If you can’t help, shut your own minds!”
The cruel rebuke yanked the cultivators out of their futile thoughts. Noticing the involuntary tension in their muscles, both sealed their own pores and crushed any independent thought. Their duty was to be their lord’s wall.
Amid the silent chaos, Qīng Yǔ and Bái Wǎn tried to anchor their sisters’ sanity. Though Bái Wǎn could not openly invoke her Law of Serenity, the gentle ripples of her soul leaked through the voice transmissions, damping the growing desperation of Yù Méi and Huáng Bìyù, whose martial instincts nearly drove them mad from the immobility.
Yù Qíng, unshaken, did not take her eyes off her husband for a single instant.
“I’m already dismantling the core. Just a few more breaths,” Zhì Yuǎn’s voice descended upon the group’s souls, serene, disguising the collapse unfolding inside his own meridians.
From the corner of her eye, Mò Yán watched Lín Jié. The new sister kept her eyes closed. Her rewritten constitution showed a resistance beyond expectations, but the pain was real. The woman’s throat burned as if she were swallowing live coals, and a thick taste of blood rose to her mouth. Holding her breath for so long under the density of Immortal Qi was a torturous miracle.
With the dead world around them, they looked like a collection of statues trapped inside a glass mausoleum.
But the illusion of control collapsed at the exact moment Zhì Yuǎn forced the breaking of the formation’s penultimate knot.
The jade reacted.
The reddish veins beneath his boots expanded brutally, pulsing through the translucent stone. Strength drained from everyone’s bodies as the scarlet glow flooded the floor. The concentration of energy converged in a terrifying way, stacking layers of Immortal Qi in an instant.
The array had erupted.
Faced with imminent annihilation, everyone’s minds cleared. There were no demands to flee, no lamentations, no regrets. In their final moment, the wives thought only of declaring their love. The transmissions reached their husband’s soul in the same instant.
On the other side, Lóu Jiàn and Jiàn Wúshuang tried desperately to move.
Xú Lán whispered a fanatic prayer in her mind, worshipping her Master and welcoming death at his side as her greatest glory.
Lín Jié, without the cultivation to transmit her own voice, could not join her sisters. She only fixed her gaze on Zhì Yuǎn’s broad back. Solitary tears ran down her face.
Then she closed her eyes.
There was no despair in her silence. After an entire existence crushed by the world, she had finally found her Heaven.
The weight of all the bitterness of her past seemed small now. Being there, at his side, made life worth living. If the inevitable fate was to turn to dust upon that archaic jade, she accepted it. Her only hope was to be able to love him again in the next life.
The scarlet glow flared, swallowing everyone’s vision in a blinding white.
Wuuuuuummmmm.
A deep, vibrating hum invaded their minds, climbing in resonance. The array reached its peak, ready to devour them all.
But Zhì Yuǎn did not retreat. Understanding that he would not be able to unravel the formation’s last knot in time, he changed his approach at the final instant. Instead of trying to untie the web, he ripped out its source.
Throwing open the floodgates of his own Dantian, Zhì Yuǎn used his Will as a bridge and redirected the torrential flow of energy straight into his Inner Universe. Now that he understood enough about Immortal Qi and had dismantled part of the array, he drained the fuel an instant before the final trigger.
The colossal torrent of Qi flooded his core. The mental effort and the absurd concentration required to guide that chaotic ocean without letting a single drop leak to trigger the formation’s activation stretched his soul to the limit.
And then…
Silence.
The white vanished as suddenly as it had come. The Mandate’s absolute restriction broke, and the weight of the world exacted its toll.
Everyone collapsed against the vitreous jade, dragging air back into their lungs in violent gasps. Lín Jié fell onto her side, coughing blood as the air invaded her throat like ground glass. Lóu Jiàn and Jiàn Wúshuang braced their hands on the floor, trembling.
The wives, however, paid no attention to themselves.
Zhì Yuǎn lay collapsed, inert on the polished surface. The drain of mental force needed to decipher the complexity of Immortal Qi, added to the precision required to guide that torrential flow, snuffed out his consciousness in a single stroke.
His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow, and the predatory aura that always wrapped him had receded into the depths of his core, plunging the man into a sepulchral quiet.
Yù Qíng was the first to react. Ignoring the burn in her own meridians, the First Wife folded space and appeared at his side. Hands that rarely lost their composure trembled as they touched her husband’s chest. Her Divine Sense frantically scoured the man’s foundation for any damage.
“He’s exhausted,” her voice broke the courtyard’s funereal silence.
When she turned her face toward her sisters, the wet gleam of tears at the corners of her serene eyes betrayed the unshakable control she had always worn.
She settled her posture on the cold floor and lifted her husband’s head with care, resting it in her own lap. Her slender fingers brushed away the strands of hair plastered with sweat.
“He only needs to rest…” she whispered, her voice faltering for a moment. “After straining so hard to keep us safe…”
She rubbed his pale face with her thumb.
“It’s all right.” Yù Qíng repeated it, beginning the mantra in a continuous murmur, again and again, guided by a blind devotion, rocking him.
The sound of ragged breaths filled the courtyard.
Another person whose eyes never left the man was Xú Lán. The ice woman remained sitting on her heels, still as a statue, staring at her Master. For her, the rest of the world seemed not to exist while he was not conscious to observe it.
A few paces away, Lóu Jiàn and Jiàn Wúshuang already stood on guard side by side while Qīng Yǔ began to channel her Qi. Beautiful blue flames danced over her skin and entered Lín Jié’s mouth and nostrils, healing the internal wounds caused by the paralysis and the asphyxiation.
The rest of the wives began to pull themselves together.
Yù Méi paced back and forth. Despite the surplus of energy, the adventurer’s eyes always returned to her husband, visibly disturbed by the gravity of a threat that had forced her man into that miserable state.
“Why didn’t he use the Law of Space?” Mò Yán asked as she straightened her robes.
Bái Wǎn stared at the darkened veins in the jade floor.
“Because the formation has a direct resonance with the Fundamental Laws,” the scholar theorized. “It doesn’t trigger with purely conceptual Laws, as we observed with the Mandate. But the instant a primary Law like Space was manipulated, the entire array would explode at the same moment.”
She shook her head, a shiver climbing her spine as the variables locked perfectly into place in her mind.
“The fissure would not have time to close. The explosion would reach us in the middle of the dimensional leap, obliterating our souls and vaporizing this entire ruin. Trying to flee was an absolute death sentence.”
Huáng Bìyù, her hand resting loosely on her sword hilt, looked toward the untouched horizon of floating palaces and then brought her eyes back to their husband, who now slept peacefully.
“So, faced with an inevitable death, he risked himself to keep us alive and still leave everything here intact,” she commented, her lethal voice tempered with reverent admiration. “This man of ours… at this rate, there will be no end to the sisters he gathers for us with that kind of ambition.”
The others could not help letting out low laughs. Even Yù Qíng could not hold back a sweet smile as she continued stroking her husband’s face, thinking how infinitely lucky every woman he chose to take for himself would be.