The scent of lotus incense was not enough to mask the odor of stagnant sweat and cheap perfume that plagued the luxurious office of the Firmament Auction.
Seated behind the immense ebony desk, Mèng Lián wore the sweetest, most languid and unattainable smile in the world. The Mistress of Shadows wore her inseparable crimson silk dress, the fabric embracing the monumental curve of her hips and the generous neckline that rose and fell in perfectly controlled breathing.
"Your generosity outshines the very crystals of this hall, Patriarch Lu," the woman's melodious and intoxicating voice floated through the room, as she delicately withdrew her own hand — milliseconds before the old lord's lips dared touch her skin. "The Consortium will ensure your clan has the prime seats at the next turn of the moon."
The old Patriarch, his eyes clouded and glazed over the redhead's exposed neckline, swallowed hard. Drunk on the empty promise and the poisonous charm of his hostess, he bowed heavily and left.
The heavy ebony doors closed with a mute click. The subtle hum of the sound-blocking arrays filled the room.
In the exact instant the lock snapped, Mèng Lián's perfect smile melted like wax over fire.
The Mistress of Shadows rose with a jolt, the wooden chair scraping noisily backward. Her nails, painted an impeccable red, drove into her own palm until the skin threatened to tear. She walked in hard, fast strides to a silver basin sculpted in the corner of the room, plunged both hands into the icy water, and began scrubbing her own fingers.
She scrubbed with violence. The frantic friction of her nails against her own flesh turned the pale skin of her wrists and palms red, irritated, and raw.
Disgusting.
The revulsion churning in her stomach was no ordinary mortal repulsion. In the depths of her Dantian, the hyper-dense drop of Primordial Qi that Zhì Yuǎn had driven into her Crystal Soul pulsed. The absolute, predatory, and divinely pure energy of the abyss ran through her veins like acid, rejecting the dust, the breath, and the very existence of any man from that outer world.
The scandalous redhead's breathing faltered. Mèng Lián propped her raw and trembling hands on the edge of the silver basin, staring at her own distorted reflection in the water.
For three hundred years, she had used that mature face, those voluptuous curves, and those painted lips as her greatest weapons of war. Before commanding the underworld, she had governed the Celestial Heron Sect. She had slept in generals' beds, spread her legs for false heroes, and whispered promises into hypocritical lords' ears, trading her own flesh to build her foundation. To the empire that venerated her from a distance, she was an untouchable widow goddess — powerful and unreachable.
But under the crushing scrutiny of that energy burning in her chest, she felt only the weight of flesh that had already been sold. The rancid smell of centuries of carnal negotiations seemed impregnated into her very bones, making her feel like a carcass where insects had crawled.
She stumbled back from the basin, tripping over the plush rug. Mèng Lián pressed her back against the cold stone wall, her generous chest heaving in suffocating spasms.
It was then that the olfactory ghost struck her.
A wave of thick, dense, musky heat seemed to rise through her neck. The sensory memory of ozone, sandalwood, and boiling Yin — the irrefutable mark of the man in the charcoal-gray tunic who had subjugated her and spared her life — invaded her nostrils in the locked room.
Mèng Lián's mature legs buckled, losing all strength completely.
The Yin in her core, awakened and whipped by the memory of his gravitational weight, throbbed with absurd violence. The heat descended like molten lead into her lower belly. She slid down the stone wall until she collapsed seated on the floor, knees bent.
A shameful, involuntary, and desperate dampness was already soaking her silk underwear.
Mèng Lián hated her own past with every fiber of her being, yet she whimpered in pure arousal from merely remembering the shadow of the man who compelled her to feel that revulsion.
"My Lord..." the whisper escaped her painted lips, drawn out, feverish, and pathetic.
The Mistress of Shadows' mind cracked under the contrast. Unable to bear the acid tension of her self-revulsion and the absolute hunger to belong to that altar, Mèng Lián's trembling hands slid downward.
She pulled the crimson silk dress, bunching it above her thick, mature thighs. Her pale fingers descended and tore through the barrier of her own undergarment. The woman's cleft was already wide open, swollen, and dripping with thick nectar.
Mèng Lián squeezed her eyes shut, throwing her head back against the cold stone wall.
There was no delicacy. She drove two fingers directly into her own wetness, thrusting deep and without mercy, while her thumb rubbed the rigid nerve in frantic circles. The wet, obscene sound echoed through the empty office. Mèng Lián panted with her mouth open, hot tears smearing her impeccable makeup. Every thrust was a punishment and a prayer at the same time.
She imagined his colossal weight crushing her against the rug. She imagined the fire of his Inner Universe burning away every mortal touch that had ever profaned her flesh, melting centuries of filth down to nothing but ashes — so that he could mold her anew, clean, new, his alone.
"Ahnn… purify me… burn me whole…" she choked, her voluptuous body arching violently on the floor. Her thighs trembled, her heels striking the floor. Her corrupted mind exploded in climax, a solitary and desperate orgasm that made her gush against her own fingers as she sobbed his name in silence.
The Paper Queen came alone on the floor of her own office, trembling with cold and shame, wanting more than her own life to be rewritten by the hands of that god.
Mèng Lián's ragged breathing and spasms still echoed in the office's silence when the fabric of reality gave way.
Riiip.
The space folded with the dry and violent sound of thick silk being torn open. A black rift, its edges vibrating in pure silver light, split wide open at the center of the luxurious office, a few steps from the fallen woman.
Mò Yán and Lín Jié emerged from the dimensional distortion. Both women's perfectly bare, pale feet did not touch the office floor; anchored by the Lotus of the Void, they floated exactly three millimeters above the Persian rug. The two goddesses had spent the last hour leaping through a relentless logistical march — from the Imperial Palace to the Syndicate's Cavern, then to the Northern Black Ports, and finally to the Firmament Auction. Physical exhaustion simply did not exist in bodies forged by that altar, but the martial impatience to return to their husband's sheets was palpable in the tension of their shoulders.
And the smell they had brought from that bed had traveled with them.
The dense wave of sandalwood, ozone, and the sweet musk of boiled Yin drowned the office. The abyss god's essence was impregnated into the folds of their clothes, into their sweaty skin and their very breath.
Mèng Lián froze.
The Mistress of Shadows' hand was still beneath the crimson silk bunched up over her thighs, her fingers drenched in her own nectar, her face flushed and streaked with tears of humiliation. Caught red-handed at the peak of her most pathetic moment, the redhead's heart skipped a beat. She tried to pull her hand back quickly, rubbing her dirty fingers against her own dress with biological terror as shame burned her neck.
Mò Yán did not let the moment slip.
The snow-haired diplomat straightened the crossed collar of her black and white Hanfu. The feverish flush that always adorned her pale neck contrasted with the aristocratic, icy, and deeply mocking smile that curved her full lips. Mò Yán's scarlet irises descended upon the woman sprawled on the floor, dissecting the scene with polished sadism.
"Our house demands extreme usefulness for the shadow empire, Mèng Lián," Mò Yán's melodious voice flowed through the office, sharp and laden with an unreachable superiority. "But I confess it is hilarious and pathetic to see the old queen of the underworld sprawled on her own rug, rubbing herself and whimpering like a bitch in heat from merely inhaling the shadow of our husband's scent."
The verbal blow shattered what remained of the redhead's pride. Mèng Lián threw her face directly against the plush floor, the crimson silk spreading around her in absolute prostration, her voluptuous body trembling uncontrollably.
"T-This servant begs forgiveness..." Mèng Lián's voice came out strangled against the rug's fibers.
Lín Jié took a merciless step through the air, the hem of her heavy green velvet Hanfu grazing the prostrated woman's face.
Mèng Lián raised her gaze slightly — just enough to focus on the newcomer. The Mistress of Shadows controlled the empire's information network; she knew exactly who Lín Jié was. The stagnant bureaucrat. The thirty-five-year-old secretary, hunched under the weight of an ungrateful faction, covered in ink stains and deep eye bags. A paper tool that lords ignored.
But the woman hovering in the air now was not a broken tool.
The green velvet embraced the colossal voluptuousness of Lín Jié's mature body. Her dark hair cascaded like a wild and majestic waterfall down her back. Her skin shone with the milky gleam of freshly polished jade, exhaling an absurd vitality and the lethal density forged in fire. The former secretary overflowed with such dense vigor and such profane satisfaction that Mèng Lián's stomach turned. Lín Jié's very pores seemed to openly perspire the glory of having been broken open, undone, and rebuilt piece by piece under the weight of that god.
A sharp, acidic, and physical pain tore through the Mistress of Shadows' core.
The redhead's red nails drove into the Persian rug, tearing the expensive threads. Envy. A biological and corrosive envy that made her want to vomit with self-hatred.
She was just a gray secretary swallowed by exhaustion, Mèng Lián's mind screamed, her eyes glazed over the immaculate gleam of Lín Jié's bare feet.
The redhead lowered her trembling irises to her own hands. She remembered her time in the orthodox world. She had spread her legs in the beds of false heroes, arrogant generals, and rotten lords to build her power, accumulating unwanted gazes and sweat on her skin across the centuries.
I gave myself to hundreds of hypocritical lords and generals for power... and the rotten touch of those mortal insects still crawls over me. Mèng Lián's chest heaved in suffocating spasms. But her... she was taken by heaven. She carries his essence and his scent inside her like an unreachable blessing. She was purified.
The seed of obsession took root violently in the darkness of that office.
For the first time in three hundred years, Madame Feng desired no more gold, no arrays, no imperial influence. She looked at Lín Jié's damp and sated glory and desired the fire. She desired, with a phantom pain that tore through her bones, for that man's radiation to burn her mature skin. For his calloused hands to melt her centuries of past and forge her from scratch.
If I could be remade... Mèng Lián swallowed a sick sob, her forehead pressed to the wood. If his hands could erase everything the other rats have already touched on me...
Lín Jié needed no mind-reading spells to dissect what was happening at her feet. The former secretary's analytical mind, now forged and amplified under the Law of the Edict, read the scene in the blink of an eye. She observed the nails tearing the Persian rug's fibers. She heard the suffocated, irregular breathing. She noticed the look of purest revulsion the Mistress of Shadows cast at her own crimson hands, contrasting with the sickly fascination with which the redhead stared at the immaculate skin of her own bare foot.
The diagnosis of acid envy was an obvious and pathetic report.
Lín Jié took a merciless step through the air. The heavy Hanfu hem grazed the prostrated woman's face.
"Envy is an acid that only corrodes those without purpose, Mèng Lián," the mature, husky voice, laden with the altar's bureaucratic lethality, cut through the silence — revealing that the former secretary had dissected her humiliation with surgical perfection. "Our house has no time for you to weep over your own stained flesh on the floor. Your past does not matter to our heaven. Only your usefulness does."
Mèng Lián choked, raising her shame-flushed face.
Before the redhead could stammer any defense, Lín Jié threw a heavy scroll of documents directly onto the rug, millimeters from the Mistress of Shadows' trembling hands. The dull thud of paper dictated the end of the eastern economic empire.
"The Syndicate's dogs are already at the frontiers pillaging the physical stock of metals and elixirs," the Ink Goddess declared, numbers and statistics flowing like poison on her tongue. "Your arena is paper, Mistress of Shadows. The Court of the Absolute Blade forges its own pride in steel and war, but their armies are financed by lines of credit and promissory notes that circulate through your auctions and banks."
Mèng Lián held her breath, her eyes wide as she seized the scroll.
"Freeze everything," Lín Jié smiled, her eyes gleaming with the mathematics of misery. "Execute the immediate collection of all debts the Consortium holds against the Absolute Blade's vassal sects. And if any orthodox clan attempts to lend gold or open their own coffers to aid them, ban them from the Firmament Auction forever. We don't want profit, Mèng Lián. I want their name to become synonymous with bankruptcy before the first Elder even comes down from the mountain."
An electric, sadistic chill ran down the Mistress of Shadows' spine. The plan was not to defeat them in battle; it was to force a martial empire to die of political starvation, with its own allies turning their backs out of fear of bankruptcy.
Beside Lín Jié, the heavy black and white silk rustled. Mò Yán took a minimal step through the air, the Restrained Flower hovering gracefully.
"When the financial despair strikes them, the old rats will attempt to seek political asylum in the beds of the capital's generals and lords," Mò Yán's voice descended — strictly polished, formal, and absurdly cruel, diplomacy guiding the carnage. The feverish flush on her neck contrasted with the cold order. "You are the lady of the night of this empire. Use your network of courtesans. Whisper in the luxury brothels and the tea houses."
Mò Yán tilted her face, her scarlet irises gleaming with the promise of absolute isolation.
"Spread the rumor that the Absolute Blade has offended an ancestral monster in the shadows and is marked for obliteration," the diplomat instructed, sealing their ruin. "Make their banner become an incurable plague in the high circles. Isolate their mountain in the dark, so our dogs can capture the new collars without the lords interfering."
The magnitude of the task made the Yin in Mèng Lián's belly boil. She pressed the scroll against her generous neckline, the crimson silk pulling taut. The Paper Queen was not merely receiving a political order; she was reciting the sutras of her own redemption. The revulsion she felt toward her own body was no longer an anchor — it had become the burning fuel that would make her set the entire continent's finances ablaze to prove her worth.
"Not one ounce of gold or promise of alliance will escape my web, my Ladies," Mèng Lián pressed her forehead to the floor's wooden boards, her voice thick with absolute, manic devotion. "I will deliver the Absolute Blade's neck and economy bound in paper."
The two emissaries of the abyss needed no further words. The usefulness had been extracted, and Mò Yán's martial impatience to return to her husband's sheets vibrated openly in the office air.
The Restrained Flower raised her pale hand. The fragment of the Law of Space carved into her Dantian oscillated.
Riiip.
The space folded with the tearing sound of thick silk. The black rift with silver edges split wide open again in the middle of the Persian rug. Without granting the prostrated woman a single further glance, Mò Yán and Lín Jié turned their backs. The green velvet and the heavy black and white Hanfu plunged into the vacuum, their voluptuous silhouettes disappearing into the dimensional distortion.
The rift collapsed upon itself with a mute snap.
Funereal silence crashed down over the Firmament Auction's office.
Alone, Mèng Lián remained kneeling. The redhead's trembling hands pressed the roll of encrypted scrolls against her generous neckline, crushing the thick paper against her own breasts as though the document were the only lifeline in a shallow ocean.
The Mistress of Shadows choked, pulling the stale air of the room into her lungs.
The emissaries had departed, but the smell had not. The thick, musky, intoxicating aroma of boiling Yin that had exhaled from Lín Jié and Mò Yán's skin, mingled with the overwhelming fragrance of sandalwood and ozone that belonged solely and exclusively to that god, had impregnated the curtains, the stone walls, and the plush rug itself. The atmosphere of the office felt dense, warm, and absurdly oppressive.
Mèng Lián looked at her own right hand.
The pale fingers, which for centuries had held wine cups and caressed hypocritical lords' shoulders, trembled. A deep and undeniable burning radiated from her Crystal Soul, rejecting the mortality around her. A wave of visceral revulsion swept over the redhead's mature skin. The ghost of the Patriarchs' hands, the false heroes' and orthodox masters' hands that she had allowed to climb up her thighs to build the old Celestial Heron empire, seemed to crawl over her flesh like repulsive worms.
Ruined, her mind screamed, hot tears smearing her impeccable makeup. Spent. Consumed. Used by the world's dust.
A strangled sob tore through the woman's throat. The corrosive pain of envy shattered the little composure she had left. Mèng Lián let the mission scrolls fall beside her on the rug.
Unable to bear her own weight and the insane heat descending into her lower belly, the Mistress of Shadows slipped and collapsed on her back on the floor.
The crimson silk dress, already bunched above her waist since the earlier humiliation, exposed her intimacy once more. The residual scent of Zhì Yuǎn in the air acted like a biological sledgehammer. The mature woman's cleft throbbed painfully, her inner walls contracting hysterically, overflowing with thick nectar that soaked through her red hair and ran down to stain the expensive threads of the Persian rug beneath her.
Mèng Lián squeezed her eyes shut, throwing her head back. She did not resist her own collapse.
Her right hand plunged back into her own wetness. Two slick fingers invaded the tight cavern all at once, punishing her own body and rubbing the rigid nerve with fury, while her mind hallucinated the impossible. Mèng Lián imagined the cosmic pressure of Zhì Yuǎn's body crushing her against that floor. She imagined his colossal, incandescent shaft — the same one that had broken open and purified the ink secretary — tearing through her entrance, fusing her impure skin, burning the memories of her past until nothing remained but ashes, and then rebuilding her in milky, divine jade.
"Ahnn... m-my Lord..." Mèng Lián whimpered, her heels weakly striking the wooden floor beneath the rug. Her generous legs trembled uncontrollably. "Burn me... tear them out of me... ahh!"
The envy of Lín Jié's glory and the hunger to belong to that altar converged in the redhead's stagnant core.
The solitary orgasm hit her like an avalanche. She gushed fluid against her own fingers, sobbing and drooling, completely dominated, humiliated, and intoxicated by the shadow of a man who was not even in the room.
Gradually, the tremors subsided. Mèng Lián lay sprawled on her back, her chest heaving, sweat plastering her red hair to her face smeared with tears and makeup.
She rolled slowly on the plush floor, stretching her pale and trembling hand until she seized the encrypted order scroll that Lín Jié had thrown. She pressed the paper against her heart, as though it were a sacred object. The self-revulsion was no longer an anchor — it had transformed into the fuel of an absolute and devoted fanaticism.
Mèng Lián pressed her sweaty forehead to the cold floor, her glazed eyes gleaming with somber hope, fixed on the wood.
"One day..." the whisper scratched the dust, feverish and laden with promise. "One day he will burn me until nothing of the old Mèng Lián remains. And then I will be reborn for him alone."