The sound was a deep, resonant thud, followed by the metallic schlick of a dozen heavy bolts sliding into their stone sockets. The great, carved spirit-wood door to Elder Wan's dwelling cave was sealed.
Miles away, at the exact same moment, a cold, grinding scrape of stone on stone, a sound of absolute finality, echoed as the glacial-jade disk sealing Elder Zhuoyan's chambers locked into place.
They were, at last, alone.
The silence that descended was not peace; it was a vacuum. A suffocating void that served only to amplify the new, permanent, and horrific reality of their existence.
The frantic, high-stakes terror of being discovered, the adrenaline-fueled, agonizing, bow-legged shuffle through the pre-dawn shadows, the hateful, shared intimacy of the hot spring—all of it evaporated, leaving only one, inescapable truth.
The thrum.it was a low, insidious, electric hum. A constant, nauseating vibration originating from the very core of their beings.
For Zhuoyan, it was a high-frequency, jangling torment, a spark of profane, unwanted pleasure wrapped in a universe of deep, structural agony. For Wan, it was a deeper, resonant, vibrational ache, a low-level, sickening pulse of sensation that fogged her mind and turned her own flesh into a prison.
In her cold, austere cavern, Zhuoyan stood perfectly still, her forehead pressed against the unyielding, icy surface of her sealed door. Her entire body was a single, rigid pillar of tension, trembling with the aftershocks of the night. Her hands, balled into white-knuckled fists at her sides, were the only outward sign of the war still raging within her.
Zhuoyan's Internal Monologue: "Sealed. I am sealed. But I am not safe. The enemy is inside. This silence… it is a mockery. It is an amphitheater, and the thrum is the only performer. I can feel it. Every breath. Every heartbeat. A constant, grinding reminder. She is inside me. That thing is inside me. She has branded me from within, marked me in a place no one can see but I can never, ever ignore. Every second, it hums. hum-thrum-hum-thrum. It is the sound of her victory, and it is a sound I will never, ever escape."
She had traded one prison for another. The public humiliation of her stilted, unnatural walk was over, but the private, claustrophobic hell was just beginning.
First, the armor.
The hateful, layered defense she had been forced to construct.
Her fingers, stiff and clumsy with pain, fumbled with the heavy, intricate clasp of her formal Elder's belt, the one made of interlocking, polished jade slats.
It felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. She unhooked it, and the multiple, cascading layers of her glacial-white heavy silk robes fell open, pooling around her feet.
The simple act of the weight lifting from her shoulders sent a fresh jolt of pain through her bruised body.
She stood now in the complex, layered absurdity of her under-armour. The outer, form-fitting chemise and trousers. The looser, ice-blue silk trousers beneath that.
And finally, the true source of her current, grinding agony: the binding shorts.
The glacial-white linen-silk was stiff, unyielding, and damp with cold sweat.
It was a band of steel, a medieval girdle that was crushing the hard crystal sphere of the plug's base into her torn, inflamed flesh with brutal, unforgiving force.
The pressure was a constant, sharp, and focused pain, a separate agony from the internal thrum.
She began the agonizing process of removal. She had to brace herself against the cavern wall, her body trembling, as she pushed the layers down.
Her breath came in short, sharp hisses through her teeth. The fabric was rough, and it scraped against her chafed, hypersensitive Jade Bloom, sending sparks of fire up her nerves.
Then came the binding shorts. As she shimmied the brutally tight garment down over her hips, the constricting pressure was finally released.And a new, profound, and terrible agony took its place.
Zhuoyan cried out, a raw, strangled sound, her hand flying to the wall to steady herself as her vision went white. The plug, no longer pressed flat and immobile by the binding, settled. It dropped. The full, dead weight of the heavy crystal, pulled by its own gravity, was now hanging entirely from the five flared, anchored petals.
It was the feeling of her insides being dragged downwards. The sensation of her torn fascia and ligaments, which had been stretched to their breaking point, now taking the full, oscillating burden. The thrum, which had been a grinding, high-frequency buzz from the pressure, now deepened into a low, swinging, nauseating wobble. It was, impossibly, worse.
Zhuoyan's Internal Monologue: "No… no, no… put it back on! The pressure was better than the weight! This… this is… it feels like my insides are falling out. It feels like a stone is trying to pull my very spirit out of my body through this… this profane gate. I cannot… I cannot stand this."
Panting, sobbing with a dry, tearless frustration, she stripped the final, thin layer of her chemise. She stood naked, shivering, in the cold, still air of her cavern. She was a ruin.
She had to see. She had to know the extent of the desecration.
With a pulse of her qi, she summoned a full-length, silver-backed mirror, a spiritual artifact that showed not just the reflection, but the truth.
She stood before it, her front a mask of cold, alabaster beauty, her lean, hard muscles and taut breasts a testament to her discipline. Then, with a slow, mechanical movement that felt disconnected from her own will, she turned.And she saw.
She let out a low, involuntary gasp, a sound of pure, intellectual horror. Her mind, a thing of ice and calculation, simply shut down for a moment, unable to process the data.
It was not her body. It was a defiled thing, a piece of meat that had been brutalized and altered.
Her back, usually a smooth, pale expanse, was a landscape of mottled, angry bruises, the shadows of Wan's desperate, hateful grip. Her firm, sculpted buttocks, which should have been clenched tight in a perfect, smooth curve, were held permanently, unnaturally apart. They were splayed, forced into a grotesque, swollen V-shape.
And in the center, at the base of her spine, was the source. The 3-inch, spherical base of the smoky-black crystal plug. It was not a subtle bulge. It was an object. A perfect, alien sphere, glistening with a mixture of her own internal fluids and the residue of the elixir, hammered into her flesh like a trophy. The skin around it was not bloody, but it was a canvas of terrible, bloodless trauma.
It was an angry, inflamed, deep-purple ring, swollen and stretched taut, radiating outwards like a dark, bruised halo. It was the mark of a body stretched past its natural limits, of fascia and ligaments torn by blunt, structural force.
Her gaze traveled lower, to her Jade Bloom. The skin was red, chafed raw from the grinding, hateful friction of the Serpent's Embrace, a stark, painful-looking wound against the pale marble of her inner thighs.
She had been mapped. Stretched. Impaled. Violated. And now, she was permanently occupied.
"This..." she whispered to the empty room, her voice a shredded ruin. "This is what she has made me."
A surge of pure, cold, undiluted hatred, more potent than any she had ever known, flooded her system. It was a welcome, familiar sensation in a world that had become alien.
The hatred was an anchor. She would not be broken. She would endure. And she would win.
First, she had to treat the surface. She moved stiffly to her alchemy cabinet. She summoned her most potent healing elixirs. A clear, glacial-blue salve that smelled of ice-lotus and mountain mint, renowned for cooling inflammation.
A second, thicker, pearlescent cream for deep tissue trauma.
This new ritual was a fresh humiliation. She stood, one leg propped on a low stool. Her hand, her own hand, had to apply the cooling salve to her ravaged Jade Bloom.
She hissed as her fingers brushed the raw, chafed skin. The salve was a cold fire, a shocking relief that was its own kind of pain.
Then, she had to treat the greater wound. She took a dollop of the pearlescent cream. She reached behind her. Her fingers, which had commanded armies of ice and signed execution orders, were now forced to trace the edge of the swollen, bruised, inflamed skin of her own Abyss Gate. And then, her fingers met the hard, cold, unyielding crystal of the plug.
She couldn't. She couldn't treat the wound. The instrument of her torture was in the way. It was a barrier to her own healing.
A low growl of pure, animalistic frustration was ripped from her throat. She could only apply the salve around the obscene object, a useless, pathetic gesture.
The salve cooled the surface, the chafed outer ring. But it did nothing for the deep, structural tearing. It did nothing for the torn ligaments.
And it did nothing for the thrum.
The thrum continued, mocking her, a nauseating, electric hum from a place she could not reach.
Zhuoyan's Internal Monologue: "Useless. This is like applying a cooling leaf to a volcano. The pain is not of the skin. It is of the architecture. It is of the soul. She has given me a wound I cannot treat, a torment I cannot soothe. There is no relief. There is only endurance."
Miles away, in an opulent cavern filled with the scent of jasmine and sandalwood, Elder Wan was experiencing a parallel, mirrored hell.
She had entered through her secret passage, collapsed at her meditation cushion, and confirmed her alibi. Now, she rose. Her entire body was a symphony of agony. The binding shorts she wore, the black martial silk, were soaked with sweat, the fabric grinding the 3-inch, rose-quartz sphere into her softer, more yielding flesh with every breath.
With a groan, she began the hateful process of undressing. Her formal amethyst robes, her layered trousers, her chemises… they all fell to the floor in a pool of expensive, useless fabric. When she finally worked the black, constricting binding shorts down her bruised thighs, her relief was, like Zhuoyan's, immediate and terrible.
She cried out, her legs giving way, and she fell to her knees as the full, dragging weight of the plug settled. It was a heavy, sickening lurch in her core, a feeling of being pulled downwards from within, of her insides being torn by the anchored petals.
Wan's Internal Monologue: "My own design… it is a perfect, inescapable hell. The cost… I calculated the cost, but I did not know it. I did not know the weight. I did not know the drag. Now I know. This is a price that may be too high. But I must pay it. I must endure. She is feeling this. I must endure it better than her. My philosophy must be stronger."
She, too, crawled to her full-length, silver-gilt mirror. She, too, turned.
Her reflection was a different kind of horror. Where Zhuoyan was a shattered statue of alabaster, Wan was a ruined painting.
Her softer, creamier flesh had taken the abuse in a more colorful, spectacular fashion. Deep, purplish-yellow bruises, the ghost of Zhuoyan's furious, hateful grip, mottled her hips, stomach, and thighs.
Her full, heavy breasts were tender, her rosy-brown nipples chafed and sensitive.
But it was the view from behind that held her captive. Her famously opulent, rounded buttocks were even more grotesquely distorted than Zhuoyan's.
The rose-quartz sphere was a obscene, beautiful tumor, a perfect, pinkish crystal bubble emerging from her inflamed, swollen flesh. The skin around it was a deep, angry purple, swollen to almost twice its normal size.
Her Jade Bloom, plump and rosy, was similarly chafed, swollen, and glistening. It was a flower that had been trampled, its petals bruised and torn.
She applied her own elixirs—a warm, golden-colored healing balm that smelled of honey and spirit-ginseng. She performed the same, hateful, intimate ritual.
Her fingers applied the balm to her chafed Jade Bloom, a hissing intake of breath her only comment. Her fingers, trembling with her own pain, tried to apply the salve to her ravaged Abyss Gate, only to meet the same, cold, hard, unyielding crystal.
The same futility. The same, mocking, endless thrum.
Now, the true, sleepless torture began.
Zhuoyan, in her cave, was exhausted. Her body screamed for rest, for meditation, for the simple relief of oblivion. She staggered to her meditation platform—a simple, flat block of polished, glacial-blue jade. It was her sanctuary, the place she went to order her mind.
She attempted to sit.The moment her weight began to shift, the instant her body began to lower, the spherical base of the plug, which was now protruding, made contact with the unyielding jade platform.
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic.The 3-inch, hard crystal sphere was driven upwards into her body with the full force of her own weight. The five flared petals, locked deep inside, ground against her torn, screaming fascia.
The thrum exploded into a blinding, white-hot, jangling spike of such profound agony that her vision blacked out.
A scream, a sound no living disciple had ever heard her utter, ripped through the sealed cavern. It was a sound of pure, system-shocking torment. She lurched to her feet, her body convulsing, her heart hammering as if it would burst from her chest.
She stood, panting, her entire body drenched in a new, cold sweat.
Zhuoyan's Internal Monologue: "I... I cannot sit. I can never sit. To sit is to be impaled anew, over and over. She knew. That... that bitch. She knew. This isn't a trial of endurance. It's a trial of sleeplessness. Of standing. I cannot meditate. I cannot rest. I cannot even think."
She was trapped. Trapped on her own two feet.
She tried her bed, a simple stone slab with a thin, hard mattress. Lying on her back was an impossibility, a grotesque joke. The plug would be driven in, just as it had been on the platform.
She tried lying on her side. The moment her weight settled, the heavy, spherical plug acted like a lever, twisting her internal structure, grinding the petals against a new, fresh set of nerves. She cried out again, rolling off the slab.
She tried lying on her stomach. This, at least, was a new sensation. The weight was off her feet. But as she settled, a new, nauseating horror began. The pressure of her own abdomen on the hard slab began to press her internal organs against the flared petals from the inside. It was a dull, deep, sickening pressure, a feeling of being filled and crushed simultaneously. And the thrum... oh, the thrum. It was worse. It was now vibrating through her organs.
With a sob of pure, abject despair, she pushed herself off the bed.
She could not sit. She could not lie down. She could only stand.
Her legs, already trembling with exhaustion from the night's ordeals, began to quiver. She would not be able to stand for days. She would collapse.
Across the sect, Wan, in her opulent chamber, was discovering the same, terrible truth.She staggered to her meditation platform—a large, plush cushion of deep, soft velvet. Surely, she thought, this softness will be different.
She attempted to sit.The plush cushion was worse. Instead of a single, hard point of pressure, the soft velvet enveloped her, pressing the plug upwards from all sides, a soft, suffocating, agonizing clench. She, too, screamed and lurdged to her feet, her body shaking.
She tried her bed—a vast, soft, silk-sheeted mattress. The same result. Lying on her back was a joke. Lying on her side was a twisting, grinding agony. Lying on her stomach was a nauseating, internal pressure that made her want to vomit.
She was in the same, inescapable hell. She could not rest. She could not sleep. She could not meditate.Her legs, unused to such strain, began to buckle. She was going to fall. She had to find a way.
She staggered back to her meditation cushion, her mind racing, a cornered animal. She couldn't stand. She couldn't sit. She couldn't lie. What was left?
She collapsed. But in a last, desperate, instinctual movement, she caught herself.
She fell to her knees, her arms lurching forward to brace themselves on the plush velvet of the cushion. Her head, too heavy to hold up, dropped, her forehead coming to rest on her crossed forearms.
And the world stopped spinning.
The pressure on her Abyss Gate was gone. The agonizing, dragging weight was gone; her posture was now supporting it. The grinding had stopped.
The thrum was still there. Oh, yes. It was a deafening, maddening, constant hum in the silence. But the acute pain, the pain of movement, the agony of gravity, was... gone.
She had found it. The only sustainable posture.
Wan's Internal Monologue: "This... this is the only way. The only posture that doesn't feel like being torn in two. It is... a relief. A horrifying, humiliating, desperate relief. She has reduced me to this. I must spend my days... my nights... presenting myself to an empty room, just to find a moment's peace. The perfect, diabolical irony. She... she must be... she must be doing this too."
At that exact same moment, Zhuoyan, in her own cold, empty cave, her legs finally giving out, discovered the same, terrible solution. She collapsed to her knees. She braced her arms on her hard, cold jade meditation block. She lowered her forehead to rest on her arms.
The same, agonizing relief flooded her system. The weight was gone. The pressure was gone. There was only the thrum.
She saw it, in her mind's eye. A perfect, crystal-clear image. She saw Wan, miles away, in her opulent prison, in the exact same posture. The posture of a defeated, broken animal. The posture of a slave in supplication. The posture of a devotee in prayer.
It was the most profound humiliation of all. It was the only way they could survive.
They knelt, alone, in their sealed sanctuaries. Two of the most powerful women in the Sect, forced into a position of absolute, debased surrender, not by an external force, but by the enemy they carried within. The night was over, but the long, sleepless, agonizing day—and the trial of their lives—had only just begun.