CHAPTER 311: CULTIVATION BOUND FORMATION

They continued cultivating without pause, the minutes stretching into hours as the chamber became a whirlpool of clashing, intertwining energies. The air trembled from the force of their combined efforts, and the spiritual pressure rising from the circle grew so intense that even the reinforced palace walls creaked softly in protest.

Lucas remained at the centre...every breath he drew absorbing the Yin energy pouring into him from the four women. His body trembled repeatedly as he wrestled with the boundary of the grandmaster realm. The ascendant threshold was notoriously difficult for anyone to breach. Even prodigies could spend years attempting it. But Lucas wasn’t relying on talent alone...he was drawing on an enormous reservoir of Yin that the bound women willingly fed him.

The pressure inside him built rapidly, raw and violent.

His meridians pulsed, swelling and shrinking as waves of energy battered them. His dantian burned like a miniature sun ready to explode.

Lira was the first to gasp as her own cultivation surged. Her Expert rank foundation trembled, flickering wildly between instability and breakthrough.

"Master... I’m trying," she whispered, sweat tracing a line down her temple as she pushed herself to absorb his Yang energy as fast as her body permitted.

Selene’s eyes remained tightly shut, her red pupils glowing beneath her lids. She clutched her knees, her breathing shallow and fast.

"I can’t fall behind," she said under her breath, her Master rank aura flaring with determination as she forced herself toward the next barrier.

Nyx looked calmest of them all, though the frost curling around her fingers and shoulders betrayed the extreme pressure she was under. Her cultivation at the second stage of the Master rank wavered repeatedly, shards of frozen light crackling around her.

"It is within reach," she murmured, her voice soft and cool. "I can feel the next rank calling to me."

Henrietta, however, was entirely different from the others.

She did not shake.

She did not waver.

Her cultivation surged with a terrifying stability, the glow around her body like a clear flame in the darkness. Being at the second stage of the ascendant rank already placed her far above the others, and the Yang energy Lucas fed into her only accelerated her progress.

She lifted her chin slightly, eyes still closed, her aura expanding sharply.

"Sage rank..." she whispered. "The barrier is thin. I can feel it thinning."

The chamber trembled.

The vortex intensified.

The floor beneath them glowed from the pressure of five different cultivation paths merging into one synchronized cycle.

Lucas tightened his jaw as the breakthrough pressure seized him again. His entire body felt like it was splitting open. The grandmaster realm tried to hold him back, to trap him, to keep him grounded. But his stolen, absorbed, intertwined Yin energy no longer whispered at the edges of his core...it stormed through him like a raging sea.

He couldn’t hold back his grunt of pain.

Nyx instantly sensed the spike in his struggle.

"He is close," she said, opening her eyes briefly as frost spiraled upward from her hands. "He is very close."

Lira’s aura flared as she steadied herself.

"We must keep the flow steady," she said urgently. "If he loses balance during this, the backlash..."

Selene cut in sharply, "He won’t. Xavier doesn’t fall back. He never does."

Henrietta pressed her palm to the ground, stabilizing the energy flow for everyone.

"Focus. All of you," she commanded softly. "His ascendant breakthrough will shake all of us. We must stay linked."

Lucas drew another breath...and then another...

Every inhale dragged in more Yin.

Every exhale pushed him closer to the edge.

He could feel it...

The realm barrier cracking.

The restriction shattering.

The grandmaster limit breaking under sheer force.

He growled as a final surge of Yin crashed through him.

The vortex exploded upward, filling the entire chamber with blinding light.

The women held on, refusing to break the link as Lucas tore through the final layer of resistance...

On the cusp of the ascendant realm.

The pressure inside Lucas reached a point where it no longer felt like energy. It felt like his bones were snapping and reforming, like his blood was turning into molten metal, like his entire body was being crushed by invisible mountains and pulled apart by raging storms at the same time. His vision trembled violently. His breath escaped him in short ragged bursts as the final layer of the grandmaster realm clung stubbornly to him like chains refusing to break.

Then the world tilted.

His dantian contracted sharply, the swirling Qi compressing into a brilliant needle of light before exploding outward.

The pain hit him like an executioner’s swing.

Lucas’ head snapped back and his entire body arched as a scream tore itself out of him, raw and agonizing. It reverberated through the chamber like a shockwave, thick with the force of a breakthrough that refused to happen gently. His voice cracked under the pressure, his breath shuddering against the immense strain of ascendance. The sound was so filled with pain that any ordinary cultivator would have instinctively withdrawn or broken the formation out of fear that he was being destroyed by the force of his own cultivation.

But not these women.

None of them moved.

None of them even considered breaking the link.

Lira’s hands trembled where they rested on her lap, her fingers digging into her legs as she fought to keep her spiritual flow steady. She could feel the violent waves of Lucas’ rising power slamming into her meridians, but she clenched her teeth and held her ground because she knew this was the most crucial moment.

Nyx pressed her eyes shut as icy Qi rippled around her body in violent spirals. The frost beneath her feet spread outward with each surge of Lucas’ breakthrough, but she kept channeling her Yin energy into him with unwavering focus. She whispered to herself again and again that she must not falter, that Lucas needed them anchored.

Selene wiped the sweat dripping from her chin without opening her eyes. Her cultivation was shaking wildly between stability and collapse, but she refused to give up. She whispered encouragements under her breath, not to herself but to Lucas, even though she was not sure he could hear her through the storm of energy. She reminded him that he had never failed and he would not start now.

Henrietta was the strongest among them, yet even she was breathing unevenly, her aura flickering like a flame in a windstorm. She placed her palms firmly on the floor to stabilize the circulation pattern. She whispered a steady stream of cultivation mantras, binding her energy rhythm to Lucas’ surging Yang so none of them would lose synchronization. Her hair lifted slightly as the rising ascendant power washed over her, making her feel as though she were sitting beside a newly awakened volcano.

Lucas’ scream did not stop.

It deepened, turning harsher, almost feral, as the barrier around his cultivation shattered in massive waves. His body trembled uncontrollably, his chest rising and falling in desperate heaves. Every part of him felt like it was being torn open only to be reforged anew with each pulse of ascending energy.

The chamber itself began to shake under the force of his breakthrough, dust falling from the ceiling, the air vibrating so intensely that the candles around them extinguished one after another. Ripples of wild spiritual force lashed out and struck the walls, leaving faint cracks spiderwebbing across the stone surface.

Yet the women held their ground.

They accepted each wave, absorbed each backlash, endured each pulse of burning Yang in hopes of seizing their own breakthroughs. None dared disrupt the formation because Lucas’ rising power was pushing them forward as well. If they broke the chain now, the loss of that ascending momentum could ruin everything for all of them.

Then...With a final, monstrous surge, Lucas’ scream broke into silence as a blast of light erupted from his core. The grandmaster realm shattered completely and a clean, powerful ascendant aura burst outward, replacing the chaos with a deep resonant hum that filled every inch of the chamber.

Lucas had broken through to the ascendant realm.

And the women still remained seated, unwilling to disrupt a single breath of the surging energy that now began fueling their own breakthroughs as well.