Dual Cultivation System: My Cultivation Was Crippled, So I Rely on Intimacy to Level Up

Chapter 251: Joining Forces to Seize Blood and Split Divine Light

Zhou Kai’s Cicada Garment clone was already beginning to destabilize, its physical structure turning dangerously translucent under the crushing Aura Pressure of the room.

Down in the pool, the colossal demon heart violently contracted.

Pfft!

A hyper-compressed arrow of dark red blood fired from the ventricle. The raw, demonic density of the fluid was terrifying.

The clone didn’t flinch. It thrust the black jar forward. The mouth of the artifact flared with dark light, acting like a localized black hole that swallowed the blood arrow entirely, not letting a single drop spill.

But the secondary shockwave from the heart’s contraction slammed into the clone. Its structural integrity plummeted, and deep, glowing fissures spider-webbed across its entire body.

Through their shared neural link, Zhou Kai felt the agonizing, high-pitched scream of his clone’s impending disintegration.

Suspended near the ceiling, Zhou Kai’s towering Five Emperors True Body let out a thunderous roar that shook the cavern.

“The clone can only survive three more extractions!”

Down on the floor, Li Youci heard the call. Engaged in brutal, close-quarters combat with the demon horde, she pushed her dual forms to the absolute limit. The freezing Soulfire of her ghost body surged, while the apocalyptic Netherfire of her True Body incinerated a pack of lunging demons into falling ash.

“I can hold the line!” she screamed back over the roar of combat. “How long can you bench-press that laser?!”

The crushing demonic environment was absolute hell, but ironically, the sheer density of Yin and Death energy actively resonated with her unique constitution and her dual flames, pushing her battle-lust into overdrive.

“Twenty breaths!” Zhou Kai roared.

“That’s enough!”

Zhou Kai’s massive, glowing eyes swept past the churning meat grinder below, locking onto Du Chuyao, who was systematically executing targets with cold, aristocratic precision.

“Fairy Du!” Zhou Kai bellowed. “Scan the horde! If you spot any high-tier demons with elite Potential, capture them alive! I need test subjects!”

Du Chuyao’s mind raced, processing the tactical request instantly. Above her head, the white jade seal remained an immovable fortress, continuously projecting a waterfall of defensive light while simultaneously deploying hundreds of razor-sharp jade blades that violently shredded any demon stupid enough to enter her kill zone.

She didn’t ask questions. She simply raised a pale hand, her voice ringing clear over the chaos.

“Understood!”

Her Jade Soul Golden Pupils flared with blinding intensity, rapidly scanning the physiological data of the horde. She instantly isolated two massive fiendish demons that possessed significantly denser musculature and the faint, sparking beginnings of actual combat intelligence.

She pointed two fingers. Two thick beams of golden-jade light shot from her Dantian, perfectly enveloping the targets. The light instantly hardened into two physical, golden cages. The massive demons roared, throwing their entire weight against the bars, but the constructs didn’t even vibrate.

Flawless execution. Zhou Kai noted, mentally upgrading his threat assessment of the Jade Flower Palace’s Senior Sister.

The heart contracted again.

The Cicada Garment clone stepped into the firing line, angling the black jar to catch the second spray of pure demon blood. The kinetic force of the impact sheared the clone’s left arm completely off. It dissolved into light particles before it even hit the floor.

Another beat.

The clone, now missing an arm and half its torso, desperately braced the jar against its chest to absorb the third blood arrow. Its physical form was failing rapidly, reduced to a flickering, heavily glitched silhouette.

When the heart contracted for the fourth time, the Cicada Garment clone burned the absolute last dregs of its structural energy. It violently shoved the black jar directly into the trajectory of the incoming blood. The exact microsecond the blood cleared the rim, the clone’s matrix collapsed. It detonated silently, dissolving into a cloud of harmless light particles.

“I have it!”

Li Youci let out a piercing shout. She violently flared her Divine Sense, weaving her Netherfire and Soulfire into a dense, layered thermal shield to blunt the kinetic shockwave of the heartbeat.

In a terrifying display of localized reality-bending, her True Body and her ghost body violently collapsed into each other. The fusion triggered a blinding flash of black-and-white light. Ignoring the crushing gravity, she tore through the demon horde like a railgun slug, materializing directly beside the falling black jar. She snatched it out of the air.

She didn’t even pause to check the payload. Securing her grip on the jar, she transformed back into a streak of light and launched herself directly at the beating heart!

Once. Twice. Thrice.

Timing her dives perfectly with the heart’s rhythm, she skimmed the surface of the organ, manually scooping the pure blood before the divine light could irradiate it.

The physical toll was catastrophic. Her beautiful face drained of all color, turning the shade of old parchment. Cold sweat plastered her hair to her temples, and the fused flames cloaking her body began to violently stutter and fail.

As she forced herself through the crushing gravity to secure the fifth harvest, her internal pathways ruptured. She staggered mid-air, violently vomiting a mouthful of blood.

She didn’t hesitate. Utilizing the outward kinetic shockwave of the heartbeat, she rode the blast backward, transforming into a streak of light to violently eject herself from the stone hall.

Waiting in the corridor, Shen Hanyi moved instantly. A ribbon of soft sword light whipped out, gently wrapping around Li Youci and arresting her momentum before she could smash into the wall.

Inside the hall, the demon tide had been largely exterminated.

Du Chuyao remained perfectly stationary. The white jade seal hovered above her, its light flowing over her like liquid armor, ensuring she hadn’t taken a single scratch. With a casual flick of her wrist, she telekinetically hurled the two golden cages containing the captured demons out into the corridor.

She tilted her head up. Her Jade Soul Golden Pupils locked directly onto Zhou Kai’s titanic, straining face. Her voice echoed clearly through the cavern.

“Fellow Daoist Zhou. A Fated Chance of this magnitude must be shared. Hoarding the board is considered exceedingly poor etiquette.”

Zhou Kai looked down. He saw the black jar safely in Li Youci’s hands. He saw she was alive.

Mission accomplished.

The massive head of the titan gave a slow, deliberate nod. “Agreed.”

His twenty-five-zhang tall Five Emperors True Body immediately began to rapidly decompress. The suffocating, sky-propping Aura Pressure evaporated as the titan’s mass condensed, seamlessly shrinking back down into Zhou Kai’s standard, athletic frame.

BOOM!

Without his physical mass acting as an eclipse, the severed seven-colored laser from the ceiling violently reconnected. The pillar of divine light slammed into the demon heart with the force of an orbital strike.

Hummm—

The instant the Pure World Lamp’s light re-engaged, the apocalyptic pressure inside the stone hall vanished.

The hyper-dense ghost, demon, and evil qi clinging to the heart began to violently sizzle and evaporate, reacting like snow dropped onto a superheated skillet. The boiling, churning blood pool instantly went completely still, neutralizing the spawning matrix. No more demons crawled from the sludge.

The few surviving minor ghosts caught in the ambient glare of the divine light shrieked in agony as they were instantly sterilized, dissolving into wisps of harmless green smoke.

Zhou Kai landed lightly on the floor, retracting his combat aura. He exchanged a brief, calculating look with Du Chuyao. Without speaking, both of them slowly walked toward the edge of the divine laser. Neither of them retreated.

They didn’t step directly into the core of the beam—that was suicide. But they stood exactly on the perimeter, allowing the ambient, scattered radiation of the seven-colored light to wash over them.

The sensation was incredible. It felt like drinking ice-cold spring water after a week in the desert.

The light wasn’t just energy; it was a highly concentrated, hyper-pure stream of Spirit Qi laced with a profound, cleansing Dao Rhyme. It physically washed through their flesh, bones, and Qi pathways.

Du Chuyao’s golden eyes flared with shock. Turning her vision inward, she analyzed her Dao Foundation—the supposedly flawless, rock-solid bedrock of her cultivation. Under the microscopic scrutiny of the light, she spotted several infinitesimal, microscopic stress fractures and impurities she had never known existed. And right before her eyes, the divine radiation was gently, methodically repairing them.

The Pure World Lamp… she thought, her mind reeling. It actually possesses reality-correcting properties!

Zhou Kai’s realization was even more visceral. He had just spent twenty seconds using his True Body to literally bench-press the core of the beam!

Standing in the afterglow, his Qi and Vitality felt impossibly dense and hyper-refined. But more importantly, he felt a distinct, physical sensation of an invisible “ceiling” within his body cracking open.

He immediately opened the System Panel.

When his eyes dropped to his Cultivation and Body Cultivation trackers, his pupils shrank to pinpricks.

[Cultivation: Golden Core First Layer (/287,000)]

[Vitality: Viscera Refining First Layer (5366/267,000)]

His heart hammered against his ribs. The numbers didn’t lie! Before he stepped into this room, his magic ceiling was 290,000, and his physical ceiling was 270,000!

Merely tanking the divine laser for twenty seconds had permanently deleted three thousand points off his breakthrough thresholds!

This light… Zhou Kai’s mind raced, realizing the catastrophic implications. It functions exactly like Spirit Rhyme! It actively lowers the hard-coded limits for cultivation breakthroughs! This isn’t just a healing lamp; it’s a genetic restructuring engine that permanently upgrades a cultivator’s innate Potential!

Du Chuyao’s voice broke his stunned silence.

“Fellow Daoist Zhou. Why exactly did you need two live demons?”

Zhou Kai forced his system interface closed and nodded to her. “Your concept of crafting a synchronized, multi-part Dharma Treasure sparked an idea. I want to see if I can physically forge live, high-tier demons directly into a weapon’s architecture.”

He gestured toward the walls. “The Evil Soul Crystals in this room are flawless. I intend to use them as the primary chassis. These two demons possess excellent baseline Potential. If I lobotomize them using a specific secret art, temper them with the pure demon blood we just harvested, and fuse them into the crystal matrix… the resulting Dharma Treasure will be a weapon of mass destruction.”

Du Chuyao stared at him quietly, processing the horrifying, brilliant logic of the design. After a long moment, she offered a soft, validating nod.

“The methodology is sound.”

With a thought, she channeled her Dantian. The space directly in front of her warped.

A massive, jagged slab of pitch-black Evil Soul Crystal—taller than a grown man—materialized and crashed onto the floor in front of Zhou Kai. Deep within the obsidian glass, highly concentrated evil qi churned, and ghostly faces silently screamed.

“This is the largest, purest geode in the chamber,” Du Chuyao stated. Her tone was completely flat, but deep within her golden eyes, a microscopic ripple of intense emotion flashed and vanished. “I will… I will dedicate my full focus to nurturing this specific crystal for you. With my constitution, it will halve your forging time.”

Before he could respond, she turned her face away, staring intently at the pillar of light, effectively ending the conversation.

…

Time ceased to matter in the subterranean dark. Over ten days vanished in a blink.

The seven-colored laser continued to pour from the ceiling, but the profound, cleansing Dao Rhyme eventually hit a point of diminishing returns. Their bodies had absorbed all the genetic restructuring they could handle for now.

During the ten-day stretch, Li Youci forced her way into the chamber two more times.

It was a highly coordinated, suicidal dance. She timed the exact intervals between the heart’s beats. Zhou Kai would violently deploy his Five Emperors True Body to act as a physical blast-shield, eclipsing the laser for a fraction of a second, while Li Youci darted in with the black jar to scoop the un-irradiated demon blood. Her movements were blindingly fast, but the ambient toxicity was severe. By the end of the second run, her beautiful face was the color of chalk.

Zhou Kai tried to order her to stop once. She rewarded him with an icy, devastating glare.

“I am doing this because I want to. You don’t get to control me.”

She turned on her heel and marched out of the room, leaving him staring at her stubborn back. He completely missed the faint, highly satisfied smile that curled the corner of her lips once she was out of his sight.

Shen Hanyi chose a much more direct, violent method of upgrading.

Standing safely in the corridor, the dark red vortexes in her eyes slowly began to spin.

Hummm!

Her Suppress Demon Return to Ruins Sword Embryo slid from its sheath. The blade was a magnificent, crystalline gold-red. It hovered over the stagnant blood pool, emitting a low, vibrating hum of absolute predatory hunger.

Shen Hanyi formed a sequence of sword seals. The blade trembled eagerly before dipping its very tip into the viscous sludge below.

Sizzle—

A hyper-dense, incredibly toxic strand of demonic evil qi was rapidly siphoned up the blade. The pristine golden-white aura of the sword instantly blackened. A flash of eerie, corrupted blood-red stained the steel, attempting to hijack the weapon, but it was immediately crushed by a blinding surge of golden sword light from within the core.

Shen Hanyi let out a tight, pained grunt. A thin trickle of blood ran down her chin.

The demonic qi was insanely aggressive. It rampaged violently through her Sword Embryo, frantically trying to permanently corrupt the spiritual architecture of the blade.

But deep within the core of the Embryo, the innate Suppress Demon Dao Rhyme fought back. Blinding golden light erupted, violently isolating, crushing, and forcefully refining the invading corruption.

It was a brutal, internal war of attrition. Demonic qi invaded; sword rhyme suppressed; the power of Return to Ruins repeatedly purged and tempered the steel. She was suffering severe internal backlash from the psychic feedback, but with every cycle, the sword light burning in her eyes grew more terrifyingly pure and lethally sharp.

Wu Hongxiao, naturally, decided she wanted in on the action.

Lacking any subtlety, she let out a fierce battle cry and launched herself directly toward the dome, intending to use the raw radiation of the seven-colored laser to physically temper her muscles and bones.

The absolute microsecond she crossed the threshold of the stone hall, the heart beat.

THUMP!

Wu Hongxiao felt like she had been hit in the chest by a speeding freight train. Her entire cardiovascular system seized. Her Body-Protecting Qi shattered like cheap glass, and she was violently launched backward out of the room.

She tumbled end-over-end through the air, bracing for a bone-breaking impact against the cavern wall, but was suddenly caught mid-air by a pair of strong, familiar arms.

“Damn it!” she cursed, rubbing her bruised sternum and glaring at the heart. “That stupid piece of meat is dead, and it’s still an arrogant bastard! You all got massive upgrades, and I didn’t get a damn thing!”