It took Li Xun a second to realize what those words meant. And when he did, a rush of emotion erupted from the pit of his stomach and took over his entire head.

His thoughts buzzed. Every nerve felt wired. He was drunk on the feeling, overwhelmed by how good it felt to stand over her like this. He wanted to laugh, to sing.

He noticed his hands shaking. Actually, not just his hands, his whole body was trembling. And the foot where Yin Wanderer’s face still rested... even his toes were twitching.

And she was trembling too.

The sight hit him like cold water. And his head cleared right up.

He had never truly let his guard down around Yin Wanderer. And yet, he couldn’t deny it... time and again, she had proven just how dangerous her presence could be.

Now, somehow, he was beginning to feel he couldn’t do without her. Only his lingering caution kept him from giving in completely to that growing dependence.

When a woman who was this beautiful, mature, clever, and impossibly deep crawls to you trembling like a helpless dog, swallowing her pride and begging at your feet... could you really resist her?

And after that temptation, what comes next?

A spark of fire flared in Li Xun’s eyes.

He growled, grabbed her arm, and pulled her to her feet before dragging her into the shadow of a nearby glacier.

Yin Wanderer flinched at his sudden roughness, but she quickly understood what he meant to do.

This time, she wasn’t the hesitant like before. She let out a soft sigh, lifted her graceful neck slightly, and allowed Li Xun’s lips to find hers. He kissed her, first gently, then more insistently, tugging at the buttons of her robe as he went.

She moaned softly, looping her arms around him and letting her fingers rest gently on the back of his head. Her body leaned into the ice wall behind her, quivering as his growing intensity moved her. Then she whispered, and if you heard her, it was the same desperate words from before: “Help me… please, help me.”

Li Xun lowered his head, his palm sliding forward until it rested against her neck. His fingers closed lightly around it.

She got the message. Her lips quivered a few times before she finally stopped and sighed. As her arms began to lower, her neck suddenly tightened, and for a brief moment, she even caught the weird sound of skin and cartilage rubbing together.

Her cry caught in her throat. The world spun violently, and with a heavy thud, Li Xun threw her down into the snow.

His hand was still clamped around her neck, but what truly crushed her wasn’t his grip; it was the storm of mental force flooding through the Nether Vein, pressing down on her like a collapsing sky. Under that weight, her fragile spiritual consciousness flame flickered like a candle in the wind, on the verge of going out.

Then she looked into his eyes. And saw the cold, ghostly fire burning there. It was a flame that felt as if it could scorch straight through to her soul.

Being yanked so abruptly out of her despair, the sudden shift in the air left Yin Sanren frozen. But she quickly realized what was happening. Li Xun was playing her emotions like strings, holding her heart in his hands.

At last she understood. Li Xun, that tiny little nobody she’d once dismissed, had her completely in his hands.

If he wanted, he could snuff out her newly-restored consciousness at any moment, throw her back into that formless void. Worse yet, he could erase the Nethermyst Mark that tied her to this world, wiping out the last thing she relied on to exist.

Sixty years had turned the tables. Now she was the insect, and he held all the power.

Her body reacted like any living creature’s would, betraying everything she felt: color draining from her skin, heartbeat racing, pupils tightening, sweat beading even in air cold enough to freeze water. The faint sheen only made her half-exposed chest gleam all the more.

She just couldn’t figure it out... what triggered that sudden surge of emotion? As far as she knew, she hadn’t let anything slip…

Li Xun leaned in. He lowered his head until their faces were only inches apart.

In the frozen wasteland around them, every exhale curled into white mist. Their breaths came faster now, and the drifting haze blurred their features, softening the edges of their faces until both looked half-lost in the cold air.

Even so, Yin Wanderer couldn’t escape his eyes. They were dark and mysterious. It felt like her soul was trembling beneath that gaze.

It was new. Strange. And absolutely nothing she ever wanted to feel again.

Then, in a quiet voice, Li Xun spoke:

“You say you did it all for your sister, hm? Nice reason. So tell me, what exactly have you ever done for her?”

He didn’t wait for her to say anything and went on, listing everything out one by one.

“You helped me get into the inner circle of the Yin-Yang Sect, good. You saved my life and taught me how to purge the danger in my body, I'm grateful. And now, your suggestion? That was brilliant. Really. I’ve got no complaints there.

“So yes, by all accounts, I should help you. I should go and get that Soul-Stabilizing Blue Star for you. But…” He leaned back slightly, eyes narrowing. “I don’t trust you. Not even a little. And do you know why?”

Yin Wanderer shook her head without thinking. An obedient movement that was completely unlike her usual self.

Li Xun smiled. “I only just realized it. You never gave me a title. Never once. It’s always just ‘you’ and ‘me’ between us. Even earlier, when you were wagging your tail like a dog.”

He chuckled to himself for a moment, then his tone shifted, growing calm but chilling. “I can call you ‘Aunt-Master.’ I can call you ‘Master.’ Or anything else you like. But you? What do you call me? It tells me you don’t respect me at all. Let's be honest, you still look down on me. You still can’t accept your place now. And from where I’m standing… you haven’t changed in the slightest.

“So of course I doubt your attitude. And your intentions. It’s simple, really. Like this…”

He leaned in again until their faces touched. Yin Wanderer felt the light brush of his lips against her cheek, then his breath against her ear. And then:

“Yin Chonghua,” he whispered.

And the name crashed through her fragile spiritual consciousness like a falling mountain.

A searing pain shot through her, spreading to every part of her body. She convulsed violently, and it felt like every ounce of her vital qi had been drained in a heartbeat. The weakness was so overwhelming that she instinctively gasped for air.

Li Xun suddenly tightened his grip, his fingers digging in so hard she couldn’t draw in the smallest thread of energy from the outside world.

A rough, choking sound rattled in her throat. And her vision began to blur as her mind slipped toward darkness.

In that haze, she felt as if a great, shadowy hand had closed around her spiritual consciousness flame. It squeezed cruelly, trying to force out every secret she held. Instinct told her to fight back, but nothing she did mattered.

She felt utterly weak, all the way from her body to the deepest corners of her mind.

She couldn’t stop anything anymore. The helplessness rose so sharply she wanted to scream, and she actually did. But at some point Li Xun had already pulled his hand away. Still, the sound that came out was thinner than the bleat of a dying lamb, swallowed instantly by the roaring wind.

She heard Li Xun say: “Interesting.”

Then a stream of deep, resonant notes rolled into her. First in her ears, then straight into her heart, like thunder crashing across the sky again and again. The sound didn’t just hit her body; it struck her mind, battering both at once.

“Yin Chonghua, what are you trying to do? What’s your plan? What did you do? You… you… you…”

She couldn’t answer. Not that he needed her to. A puppet doesn’t get to hide anything from its master. It’s like being a glass vessel covered by a thin black cloth. At a glance, it might look opaque, but lift that cloth even a little, and everything inside is exposed.

And at first, Li Xun hadn’t known how to lift it. But now that he did, every secret she had was about to stop being a secret forever.

At first, the questions came like countless black hands, snatching and clawing through her consciousness, ripping answers out of her with greedy force.

But soon, it grew into something far worse. Like a storm a hundred times fiercer than any hurricane, tearing through everything inside her. Or like a brutal thug kicking her again and again in the gut, trying to spill out her insides just to see what she was made of.

Every thought she’d ever stored in her mind was dragged out. Memories from childhood, scenes of life outside Songjing City, and the long, fog-shrouded decades she’d spent as a puppet, recording everything despite the numbness and confusion.

Centuries of joy, pain, bitterness, and longing rose up all at once. Only to be ripped away in the next breath. The sheer emptiness of it, the feeling of someone scooping her soul clean out, left her able to make only one raw cry before her strength collapsed. She crumpled to the ground, eyes going dull.

Her spiritual consciousness flame flickered once, then guttered, rapidly fading.

Right as the last spark was about to go out, a thunderous boom echoed deep inside her heart. Her life seemed to rewind and play again, a torrent of half-familiar, half-forgotten scenes flooding into her, merging seamlessly with her spiritual consciousness.

But she felt that behind the slow-moving scenes, there was a huge shadow, watching alongside her.

Watching her worst pain, her most shameful moments, her most hidden thoughts.

In the space of a heartbeat, she had no secrets left from him. None at all.

She was a little clearer in her mind than before, but for a moment, her eyes went out of focus. The man in front of her seemed to grow and shrink in size. By the time all her senses came back, she realized she was completely naked, lying on the cold snow, with Li Xun pressed on top of her.

She still remembered reading in the sect’s old texts when she was little: “Lose yourself in worldly temptations, and you bare your heart to danger. Value appearances over your inner self, and you’re already on the path to ruin.”

So now… what did that make her?

Her body was assaulted, centuries of emotions crashing down at once, and the terror of having every secret laid bare... everything was hitting her at once. It was like she’d been shot through with an arrow, screaming as she plummeted straight into a bottomless pit.

Chong Yu… so this is the feeling you know best, isn’t it?

Warm tears slipped from the corner of her eyes, gliding down her hair and falling onto the snow.