Refining Drip-Flame ore was, for most practitioners, an ordeal measured in months per piece.

Getting it to liquid gold state was the ceiling for the majority of heavenly realm cultivators. Pushing it further — all the way to crystal gold, every grain purified to absolute perfection — was considered a practical impossibility.

For Yueyang, with Nirvana Flames at his command, it barely counted as work. On his personal difficulty scale, refining the ore was G-rank: trivial, dealt with in passing. The Black-Flame Soul Crystal — an energy crystallization carrying thousands of years of will and soul-imprint — was marginally more interesting, maybe D-rank. But the Ground-origin Yin Flame was something else entirely. Capturing and refining that particular variety of heavenly fire — temperamentally tranquil right until the moment its equilibrium broke, at which point it would unleash a cataclysm — rated at least AAA. Only a hair below S-rank, which was where he placed the Fire God Soul-Tempering Herb itself. And the difference between them was significant: if the herb resisted absorption, you simply failed and tried again. If the Yin Flame destabilized during refinement, the resulting explosion would level everything within range.

Attempting this in the Tianra Palace laboratory was out of the question. An explosion would flatten the palace — everything outside the mirage-barrier would be reduced to ash without exception.

But Yueyang hadn’t gone to the trouble of capturing the thing just to keep it as a decoration.

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady suggested the ruins on Sky Stairway Floor Five — already wrecked when the Night Empress invaded, so if it got a little more wrecked, no one would mourn.

“Catie, you should stay back,” Yueyang told her, more than once. “If I fail, I can handle it. You don’t need to be here.”

She refused. Her reasoning was straightforward: “I’m staying because then you won’t fail. Think of it as motivation. And you might remember that in Black-Flame Canyon, a certain someone told me it would take at least half an hour — scared me half to death — and I had a breakthrough specifically because of that pressure. So.”

“That’s completely different. I have a rational, measured approach to these things. I’m not going to panic and do something reckless the way you — what I mean is, the way someone with, ah, certain impulsive tendencies might—”

“So you’re saying if I’m in the blast radius it doesn’t matter.”

“Catie, please, you’re being needlessly dramatic—”

“…”

The day did not go well.

By evening, Yueyang had failed three times. Each failure left him blasted black from head to toe, only the whites of his eyes and a row of teeth visible through the char. He collapsed into the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady’s arms and lay there breathing.

Under other circumstances, he would have had considerable thoughts about lying in such proximity to such a generous chest. At the moment he was too exhausted to twitch a finger, let alone pursue them. It was a tremendous waste.

Every attempt, he’d come so close. The balance point was right there, just out of reach, and then it wasn’t.

The real problem was that with her nearby, he couldn’t simply absorb the blast and let it throw him. He had to shield her first, which meant taking the full force. Hence the particular thoroughness of his scorching.

“You’re not dead?” she asked, looking down at him.

“Give it a moment.”

He exhaled slowly. Honestly, if this was where it ended, cushioned in warmth and softness, there were worse ways to go.

She scooped him up, slung him over one shoulder with matter-of-fact efficiency, produced a transit scroll, and stepped through the portal to Floor One’s cottage garden. The girls were all deep in cultivation at the World Tree; the garden had been empty for some time, maintained by the occasional servant who came through to sweep away cobwebs.

She didn’t take him inside.

Instead she flew to the small lake nearby, waded in, and set him down in the water.

Then, with the quiet focus of someone who had made up their mind about something, she began washing the soot from him — gentle, careful, like a wife tending to a husband returned from somewhere difficult.

It took him a moment to realize what she was doing. When he’d recovered enough to move, he caught her hand. It was trembling slightly. “Catie. What are you doing?”

She kept her eyes down. The words came out barely above a whisper: “I know what I’m doing. You need help, and right now I’m the only one here, so I’m the one doing it.”

“You said you weren’t ready.”

She stood up.

“I’m ready now.”

And she did something he had not anticipated — standing before him in the clear lake water, she reached up and removed her clothing, piece by piece, until there was nothing between her and the light.

Then she turned his head to the side.

“Don’t look. Or I’ll change my mind.”

“Catie.” His voice had gone quiet — genuinely quiet, without any of the usual comedy in it. “You don’t have to do this for any reason. We can, but only because we want to. Not for anything else.”

“I know that.” She straightened his wandering gaze for the third time, her voice shaky but certain. “I’m not doing it for anything else.”

“Are you sure?”

“Do you want me to put my clothes back on?”

“No—”

Later, when they were lying together, she surfaced from her own thoughts long enough to murmur: “We skipped a lot of steps, didn’t we? Shouldn’t there have been more… romance, before this?”

Yueyang barely avoided a full collapse. You’re asking me this now?

“This isn’t fast,” he managed. “Fast is the first meeting. We’re well past that. And anyway — there’s no rule against falling in love after the fact. We can romance each other going forward.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then, in a tone that was trying very hard to sound composed: “Here’s the situation. You’ve seen everything. I’ve seen everything. We’re reasonably acquainted. Given all that — what comes next? You have more experience, so you should have a plan. But I want final say over any decisions, and I’ll be the one to determine when things stop. If it hurts, everything stops immediately.”

“You can have final say,” he agreed, “but execution is a different question, because you have no idea what you’re doing—”

“That’s a warning,” she said, with a faint tremor that was not quite composure. “Advisory rights only. Any overreach will be penalized severely.” The fact that she hadn’t moved away from his hands while saying this somewhat undermined the threat.

“This doesn’t need a plan. You just do what feels right.”

“Then what do I do?”

“Try the chest-crushing torture.”

“…”

After about ten minutes of tentative exploration, during which she concluded things were not, on the whole, as frightening as she’d imagined, she found herself willing to follow most of his suggestions. She could not quite manage one of them — not for the reason she admitted aloud, which was that she was worried her technique was poor, but more precisely that she was afraid of appearing unskilled in front of him.

It was a reasonable concern. She had some dignity left.

She held it, which was already a significant personal milestone. She simply declined the full performance.

Then, emboldened, she made a proposal: “You’re exhausted anyway. You should lie there. I’ll manage this part.”

He concealed his amusement with considerable effort. “You sure? I can handle it. Regardless of how tired I am, I’m prepared to give my all—”

“Don’t underestimate me.” She was annoyed. “I have instincts. This can’t be that complicated. Stop moving, let me breathe, I need to focus — I’m going to be the one in charge here, and I intend to be the first woman in history to do it this way on her first time—”

He offered quiet strategic advice, delivered close to her ear.

It took three attempts. Two failures, one of which produced tears. The third, after she’d turned herself around and tried a different angle, worked.

For approximately one full minute she was unable to speak.

When she finally caught her breath, the first thing she said was: “Could you not make that thing any smaller?”

“I only know how to make it bigger…”

Remaining in that position indefinitely was clearly not viable, so after a while she asked, with determined practicality: “What comes next?”

“Are you still in pain?”

“Yes, but I didn’t want to stay still in case that caused problems. Someone told me not moving was bad for you.”

“Who told you — never mind. Here, let me come up, and Catie — there’s quite a lot left for you to learn. Let me teach you properly.”

“Oh, I see, it’s like — oh, this is straightforward, I can do this — don’t be so rough, you’re like something that eats people whole, I’m going to die, please stop doing that, this is too much — how does Wuxia even survive you — I can’t, I really can’t, one more and I’ll — please, let me go back on top, if you keep this up I won’t survive—”

“We’re barely into the warm-up.”

“This is warming up? I’m going to die. Let me rest. My whole body nearly exploded just now—”

“Bodies don’t explode from—” He leaned close and explained, in a voice too low to be transcribed, something that is not found in any textbook.

She dove into his chest and hit him repeatedly with both fists. “That did not happen. I refuse. That was discomfort, purely discomfort, nothing else—”

The night was long.

When she finally opened her eyes, she was lying on his chest, and the sun had been up for some time. She lay there for a moment taking inventory of the situation.

This man was an absolute glutton. There was no other word for it.

She considered hitting him. Decided against it. Leaned down after a moment’s hesitation and kissed him — somewhat more emphatically than she’d intended — which woke him up immediately, whereupon he pulled her in for something long and rather breathless.

She was still slightly dazed when she pulled back and suddenly went wide-eyed.

“The dual cultivation! I completely forgot about the dual cultivation — I remembered at the start, and then — that was all your fault—”

Yueyang laughed. “It’s fine. We can supplement it now.”

She thought about this for a moment. Then the full picture assembled itself in her head, and she went scarlet.

They were essentially married at this point. Was she genuinely worried that a little romantic dual cultivation was going to be insufficient?

She gave him a look that contained many feelings, none of which she was willing to name. “You’re trying to take advantage. No. Last night doesn’t count. This time I’m going on top—”