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

Chapter 252: Jie Sanxing: You Are the Worst Batch!

Zhou Kai held the warm, soft weight of Wu Hongxiao in his arms, feeling equal parts exasperated and amused.

He stepped back over the threshold of the stone hall, setting her down gently. She immediately began rubbing her bruised sternum, her face a mask of indignant frustration.

“Alright, that’s enough pouting,” Zhou Kai chuckled, reaching out to lightly tap the tip of her nose. “My Universe Qi Unification Return to Truth Mysterious Canon and the Creation Qi it produces are easily on par with that seven-colored divine light. Once you officially marry into the family, the benefits will flow like a river. I guarantee you won’t be left wanting.”

The sheer, unapologetic possessiveness of his words hit Wu Hongxiao like a physical blow. Her chest burned, and the heat whooshed upward, painting her cheeks and the tips of her ears a vivid, furious crimson.

She wasn’t about to surrender verbally. She shoved him squarely in the chest. “Who said I was marrying you?! In your dreams!”

But the shove lacked any real force. As her eyes darted away, the raw, unmistakable joy and anticipation bubbling in her gaze completely betrayed her tough-girl act.

Zhou Kai let out a booming, thoroughly satisfied laugh.

He shifted his focus back to the interior of the hall, where Du Chuyao stood quietly in the fading afterglow. “Fairy Du, are you certain the divine light has lost its efficacy for you?”

Du Chuyao offered a slow, graceful shake of her head.

“The returns are already negligible. All things in this world, no matter how miraculous, possess a ceiling.”

“If that’s the case, we should head back to the surface and investigate the actual Demon Suppression Platform,” Zhou Kai suggested, eager to keep moving. “If they buried a Fated Chance of this magnitude under the floorboards, who knows what they left sitting on the roof.”

Du Chuyao shook her head again, taking a deliberate step toward the exit corridor.

“You may proceed without me,” she stated, her voice returning to its usual, cool aristocratic cadence. “I have secured enough capital from this subterranean venture. Greed beyond one’s capacity invites disaster.”

She paused, her golden eyes locking onto Zhou Kai with profound intensity.

“I am not a vanguard combatant. Furthermore… my instincts are screaming that the tactical situation above ground is rapidly deteriorating. A major kinetic event is imminent. It is strategically sound for my faction to evacuate the operational zone immediately.”

She’s sharp, Zhou Kai mused silently. She’s already deduced that I’m going to use the surface chaos to set an ambush for Dong Cheng, and she has absolutely zero intention of getting caught in the crossfire.

Du Chuyao turned to Wu Hongxiao. “Junior Sister. We are leaving.”

Wu Hongxiao jogged after her Senior Sister for a few paces, but she couldn’t help dragging her feet. She threw a final, desperately reluctant look over her shoulder at Zhou Kai.

Seeing her drag her heels, Zhou Kai felt a genuine pang of affection. He drove a thread of Divine Sense directly into her mind. Relax. The Senior Sister of the Jade Flower Palace has given her word. Her authority on this matter is absolute.

The telepathic reassurance worked like a charm. Wu Hongxiao’s posture instantly corrected. She puffed out her chest, tilted her chin up arrogantly, and shouted down the tunnel.

“Zhou Kai! If you dare try to insult me by sending a betrothal gift of one or two measly Spirit Stones, I swear to the heavens I will hunt you down!”

With her final threat delivered, she spun around and marched after Du Chuyao, her steps noticeably lighter. Though, to the casual observer, her rapid exit looked suspiciously like a tactical retreat to hide her burning blush.

Only after the two women vanished around the bend in the tunnel did Zhou Kai withdraw his gaze. He turned back to Li Youci and Shen Hanyi.

Li Youci’s complexion was still pale as chalk, but her breathing had stabilized into a long, rhythmic cadence. The critical danger had passed.

Shen Hanyi stood as still as a lightless abyss. The suffocating, razor-sharp sword intent that usually bled from her pores was completely retracted. She felt less like a person and more like a peerless, world-ending weapon that had finally been sheathed. Her Aura had grown impossibly deep.

“Status report,” Zhou Kai requested.

“I’m functional,” Li Youci replied, her eyes snapping open, clear and sharp as cracked ice.

Shen Hanyi was characteristically blunt. “The divine radiation touched me, but it caused no structural damage. It did purge a fraction of my Sword Embryo’s demonic nature, but the sheer volume of hyper-pure demon blood I absorbed aggressively refined my Return to Ruins Sword Intent. The net positive is massive. The operation was a success.”

She tilted her head, analyzing him. “And your status?”

Zhou Kai let out a heavy, exasperated sigh, spreading his hands. “I took some minor internal damage. The real casualty is the Cicada Garment clone. It’s completely destroyed. It was constructed purely from Qi; it simply couldn’t handle the localized pressure of the demon heart. Re-condensing the matrix is going to take me at least a month or two of dedicated effort.”

Before he even finished the sentence, Li Youci let out a soft, highly condescending hum. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, practically radiating aristocratic superiority.

“Zhou Kai. When it comes to the specific operational formulas of the ‘Cicada Song’ chapter within the Delusional Dao Cicada Scripture, my technical mastery vastly eclipses yours.”

She looked him up and down, arching a single, perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “It’s genuinely baffling. You possess a monstrous, almost sickening level of combat comprehension. So why is your execution of the Delusional Dao Cicada Scripture so pathetic?”

Zhou Kai offered a dry, completely hollow laugh. He didn’t take the bait.

What was he supposed to say?

That his entire progression in the Cicada Scripture was essentially on autopilot, hard-carried by the Lawless No Word Heavenly Scripture? That he hadn’t spent a single hour actually sitting down and diligently meditating on the core texts because he was too busy aggressively expanding his Dual Cultivation empire?

If he actually admitted that out loud, she would probably try to stab him.

Shen Hanyi’s combat intuition was terrifyingly sharp. She had already caught the subtle, highly loaded micro-expressions passing between the two of them.

Her glacial gaze flicked from Zhou Kai to Li Youci. “Why are you two suddenly discussing the technical flaws of the Cicada Garment? What exactly are you plotting?”

Zhou Kai and Li Youci exchanged a look. In perfect, terrifying synchronization, identical, highly predatory smirks spread across their faces.

“Nothing major,” Zhou Kai grinned, flashing entirely too many teeth. “We were just brainstorming the most efficient way… to put Dong Cheng in the ground.”

…

Far above, at the terminus of a dark, upward-sloping tunnel, blinding daylight finally pierced the gloom.

The absolute microsecond Wu Hongxiao stepped out of the subterranean network and breathed fresh air, she let out a massive, shuddering sigh of relief.

“I know the surface of Tongming Valley is supposed to be a cursed, haunted wasteland, but compared to that absolute nightmare down below, this place is a paradise!”

Before she could take her second breath, reality shattered.

Without a single warning fluctuation of Qi, the physical world—the dead trees, the gray sky, the jagged rocks—violently fractured like a mirror. In the span of a single heartbeat, the environment reconstructed itself into something entirely alien.

The earth vanished. The sky was gone.

Du Chuyao and Wu Hongxiao were violently ejected from the physical plane, plummeting into a dead, silent, infinite expanse of deep space.

There was no gravity. No atmosphere. Just an absolute, light-devouring void. Directly above them, massive, freezing stars hung so close it felt as though they could reach out and cut their hands on the celestial bodies.

Galaxies of stardust drifted silently through the black. An ancient, primordial, and terrifyingly cold Aura washed over them, carrying a chill so absolute it threatened to freeze their very souls into shattered glass.

Suspended in the infinite dark, the two women felt as insignificant as atomic dust.

Wu Hongxiao was paralyzed with absolute, primal terror. All the blood drained from her face. Pure survival instinct took over; she violently detonated her Body-Protecting Qi and white-knuckled her spear, desperately scanning the void for threats.

Du Chuyao managed to maintain a fraction of her composure. She snapped her head up, driving maximum Qi into her Jade Soul Golden Pupils, desperately sweeping the stars in an attempt to isolate the geometric anchor points of the Formation they were trapped in.

But her Golden Pupils found nothing. There were no runes. No Spirit Qi tethers.

This wasn’t an illusion. To her eyes, the terrifying, infinite expanse of deep space was absolutely, mathematically real.

From the depths of a silent galaxy, a single figure slowly strolled forward. His footsteps fell upon the vacuum of space without making a sound.

He was an old man, dressed in a coarse, unadorned robe. His face was weathered and ancient. But his eyes… his eyes were not human. They were twin, swirling vortexes of genuine, deep-space galaxies. They were so fathomlessly deep that a single glance made Du Chuyao feel as though her soul was actively being sucked out of her skull.

The mental shock nearly rendered her unconscious. She didn’t dare hold eye contact for a microsecond longer. She violently deactivated her Golden Pupils and dropped into a deep, trembling bow.

“Du Chuyao of the Jade Flower Palace… pays her deepest respects to the Senior.”

Seeing her famously stoic and arrogant Senior Sister fold instantly, Wu Hongxiao didn’t hesitate. She vanished her spear and dropped into an identical, terrified bow. “Wu Hongxiao of the Jade Flower Palace… pays her respects to the Senior.”

Jie Sanxing’s galactic eyes drifted over them. His voice was completely flat, devoid of any mortal inflection. “Dispense with the formalities.”

As the words left his mouth, he casually flicked his index finger.

Two small, perfectly spherical Pills, no larger than a dragon’s eye, materialized out of the vacuum of space and hovered directly in front of the two women.

“These are Forgetful Dust Pills,” Jie Sanxing stated, his tone carrying the absolute cold of the void. “Consume them. Erase all memory of the subterranean demon heart, and you will be permitted to leave this space alive.”

Du Chuyao and Wu Hongxiao slowly turned their heads, exchanging a look of absolute, unadulterated horror.

This entity… he knows exactly what we found down there. He saw everything.

When faced with an existence that could casually rewrite reality and manifest deep space, hesitation was suicide. They snatched the Pills from the air and swallowed them instantly.

A wave of absolute, freezing liquid nitrogen shot straight into their brains.

Inside their minds, the encrypted memories—the colossal stone hall, the crushing pressure, the beating heart, the blinding seven-colored divine light—began to rapidly desaturate. The images blurred and ran together, exactly like wet ink dropped into a rushing river, before finally washing away into absolute, pristine white static.

Jie Sanxing watched them with an expressionless mask. He waited patiently until the sharp clarity of their terror was completely replaced by a dull, glassy-eyed confusion.

Satisfied, he casually waved his hand.

The infinite, starry expanse of deep space instantly shattered like a dropped teacup.

Du Chuyao and Wu Hongxiao blinked violently, their vision swimming. When their focus returned, they were standing exactly where they had been—at the base of the steep, dead cliff face in Tongming Valley.

The terrifying, infinite void felt exactly like a half-remembered fever dream.

They looked at each other, their eyes swimming with profound confusion. A heavy, hollow ache gnawed at their chests. They knew, with absolute certainty, that they had just forgotten something of apocalyptic importance. But no matter how hard they clawed at the inside of their own minds, they found nothing but blank static.

“Senior Sister… I…” Wu Hongxiao rubbed her chest, a deep frown on her face. “Why does my sternum feel like it got hit with a sledgehammer? I don’t remember taking a hit…”

“…We need to evacuate,” Du Chuyao interrupted, her delicate brows pinching together. Her analytical mind was spinning its wheels, but finding zero traction. Unable to solve the missing variable, she ruthlessly buried the terrifying sense of wrongness deep in her subconscious.

They didn’t waste another second. They detonated their spiritual light, transforming into two long rainbows that shot across the gray sky, desperate to put as much distance between themselves and the valley as possible.

The air at the base of the cliff rippled. Jie Sanxing materialized from the ether.

He watched the two Jade Flower Palace disciples flee toward the horizon. His ancient brows twitched in a microscopic frown.

He clasped his hands behind his back, standing alone amidst the dead trees. He let out a soft, incredibly tired sigh that sounded like a man talking to himself. His voice was heavy with profound disappointment.

“With the sole exception of little Youci… not a single one of the juniors in my Calamity Abyss Valley is worth a damn.”

He gestured vaguely at the massive, ruined architecture of the valley. “An entire, colossal Demon Suppression Platform constructed from Spirit Attracting Stone Pillars is sitting right out in the open… and not a single one of them had the basic intellectual curiosity to dig a hole and see what was buried underneath it? What a gaggle of absolute, irredeemable idiots!”

He slowly shook his head. For a fraction of a second, the swirling galaxies in his eyes seemed to dim.

“Truly… not a single one of them possesses even a fraction of the sheer, unmitigated audacity I had in my youth.”