Yueyang had known the Black Void Seal was fearsome. He hadn’t known it was this fearsome.

Wuxia and Qianqian watched with their hearts in their throats.

The plan was to use the Creation Domain as the guiding force, the Summoning Grimoire as the foundation, with the World held in reserve as support. What Yueyang hadn’t anticipated was that the moment he channeled even a thread of minor law-force to draw out the Black Void’s influence, the space around it simply ceased to exist.

The ice mountain that Qianqian’s full-force strike with the Prison Emperor’s divine sword hadn’t managed to scratch — within the range where Yueyang had drawn forth the Black Void Seal, it vanished in an instant. Like a cake with a savage bite taken out of it. The void consumed everything it touched without distinction.

The one saving grace was that the Black Void’s manifestation stayed within the bounds of Yueyang’s domain and didn’t spread beyond his control. The moment he withdrew the minor law-force, the entrance sealed itself and disappeared.

Wuxia and Qianqian had been standing a full kilometer back.

They had gone white.

Even after Yueyang stopped and the void closed and there was nothing left to be afraid of, their hands would not stop shaking.

“That was terrifying.” Qianqian, who feared nothing in the world except Yueyang being unreasonable, had tears in her eyes. When he walked over she locked both arms around him and held on as though releasing him would let the void take him. “She’s been in that? This whole time?”

“Vivienne is…” Wuxia searched for words. “She’s beyond what I can imagine.”

Any ordinary person confined to that space for any length of time would have broken. Not died — broken. Gone somewhere inside themselves that couldn’t come back.

Only when they had checked Yueyang over thoroughly and confirmed he was completely unharmed did either of them fully exhale.

Terrifying as it had been, the demonstration proved one thing clearly: the plan was viable. The only question was endurance — how long could Yueyang sustain it? He would need to hold himself at the Sovereign threshold, continuously channeling minor law-force to direct the Black Void’s influence, for however long the process required. The Black Void itself posed him no direct harm, but maintaining that level of output without rest was a meaningful burden even for him.

After considerable argument, Wuxia and Qianqian won the debate for the first time.

They would stand with him. They would help.

The question of whether the Black Void Seal might harm them had worried Yueyang, but both women had thought it through. As long as they maintained the soul-resonance of lovers’ dual cultivation with him, the seal would register all three as a single entity — the same way it recognized Yueyang — and leave them untouched. The seal was the crystallized will and divine power of an ancient master, terrifying in its scope but not possessed of intelligence. It couldn’t reason, couldn’t adapt, couldn’t revise its parameters. It only executed the law its creator had defined, and that law had not accounted for this.

“Even if we end up sealed inside,” Qianqian said, with rather more composure than the situation probably warranted, “we’d just be in there with Vivienne. I’m not worried. She’ll be out soon enough anyway.” Then she looked at Wuxia, looked at Yueyang, and the composure gave way slightly to color rising in her cheeks. She moved around behind him. Standing in front while holding him felt too likely to involve accidental contact with certain things, and she was not going to lose her focus mid-resonance over something like that.

“We should still be careful.” Wuxia summoned Storm Valkyrie to stand watch, just in case.

Qianqian took her position at his back, arms around his waist.

Wuxia stepped close in front, face to face, her arms circling his neck, lips meeting his. She moved into the resonance quickly and cleanly. Qianqian, a beat behind and somewhat more flustered, followed her in.

Three-way cultivation wasn’t new to any of them. Yueyang had done this with various combinations before — Wuxia, Qianqian, Luohua, Wuhen. The coordination was familiar enough to be comfortable.

The inevitable awkwardness of three souls in direct contact — the inability to fully conceal one’s private thoughts — was the same as always. Wuxia’s mental state during cultivation was nearly still water, minimal fluctuation, close to perfect serenity. From Qianqian’s perspective, this made her the ideal partner for this kind of practice. Some of the others, if she thought about it, had a tendency to let their feelings accelerate in the resonance until the cultivation quietly became something else entirely, which was its own variety of awkward.

Qianqian gathered her wandering thoughts firmly.

Yueyang had begun condensing the minor law-force.

The Black Void manifested again.

Under the slow guidance of his will, the minor law-force within the Creation Domain shifted through configurations — and the Black Void responded to each shift with a different form of consumption, chasing and devouring every shape the law-force took, allowing nothing to escape.

That consumption was not the goal. The goal was control — using the Creation Domain’s transformations within a hundred-meter range to steer the Black Void’s movement, direct its appetite, make it eat exactly what Yueyang wanted it to eat.

The ice mountain that no blade could scratch dissolved wherever the Black Void touched it.

Every fragment of that ice had been compressed over millions upon millions of years. Even a chip the size of a fingernail contained enough stored energy to raze a city. The Black Void consumed hundred-meter blocks of it without a ripple on its surface, like stones dropped into a bottomless sea.

Ten minutes later, when Yueyang and both women reached their limit and stopped to rest, the three of them looked back at what they had done.

More than a kilometer of the ice mountain was simply gone.

And the Black Void showed no sign whatsoever of being any fuller than before.

It was possible to look at it and feel, irrationally but persistently, that nothing would ever fill it — that everything entering it simply ceased to exist in any meaningful sense, converted to permanent absence.

Reason told Yueyang otherwise. The Black Void could be filled. It was only a question of volume. Perhaps a fraction of the mountain’s energy would be enough. Perhaps the entire unit world’s reserves wouldn’t reach one percent. Everything depended on the strength of the master who had created the seal in the first place — the stronger that ancient cultivator had been, the larger the Black Void’s hunger.

Back in the Grimoire World, Xiao Nu rushed to press water into Yueyang’s hands, her own movements hurried with worry as she watched him — mentally drained, spiritually overdrawn, fine sweat at his temples.

“You’ve worked so hard, Master. Please drink. You too, Mistresses—”

“This rate won’t do,” Qianqian said, thinking aloud. Ten minutes had already been their limit, and a kilometer of the mountain was less than a ten-thousandth of its full volume — with the Black Void’s total requirements beyond estimation. The approach was correct. The efficiency was not. They needed a way to accelerate it.

“We could take turns,” Wuxia said, “and — this is less controlled — I want to try something. Letting the Black Void exceed the bounds of the Creation Domain.”

“You mean deliberately let it expand outside my control?” Something sparked behind Yueyang’s eyes.

“Yes. During rest intervals, with nothing alive in this unit world to be harmed — we could let it run. If it extends its range on its own, the absorption rate would increase enormously.”

She had thought it through carefully before suggesting it.

“Let’s rest properly first, then try it.” Yueyang’s eyes were already closing. He was asleep before the sentence ended.

Xiao Nu, who had been rubbing his back, went still. Her eyes reddened. She didn’t cry, but it was close.

An hour later.

Wuxia and Qianqian had recovered. Yueyang had not yet woken — his body was fine, but the sustained minor law-force usage had left his mind in a deeper deficit, and it hadn’t fully restored itself yet. Xiao Nu stood at the bedside and wouldn’t move.

Even one more second of sleep for him was, in her mind, part of her duty.

Wuxia watched her and sighed quietly. She understood the feeling precisely.

But letting him wake on his own would mean missing the schedule they’d agreed on, and he would be annoyed about that.

“Perhaps I could help.” The voice came from within Xiao Nu — Pandora, surfacing from the quiet place she occupied inside their shared body, speaking through the heart-link.

“But it’s cold outside…” That soft, embarrassed response was Xiao Nu.

Wuxia and Qianqian both felt warmth rise in their faces. They understood exactly what Pandora meant — she was proposing the most direct possible method of restoring Yueyang’s spiritual reserves. With a former goddess of misfortune applying herself to the task, his recovery of both mental energy and law-force control would be significantly accelerated.

“We’ve never done it in an ice world before,” Pandora said, with audible enthusiasm, already moving their shared body toward Yueyang. “This will be interesting—”

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Xiao Nu’s voice said, from the same mouth, hands resisting their own movement. “We should let Master and the Mistresses rest a little longer.”

While visibly fighting herself, she turned large, damp eyes toward Wuxia and Qianqian, asking without words.

Qianqian coughed and found something extremely interesting to look at in the opposite direction.

Wuxia understood that Xiao Nu genuinely needed the permission. Pandora might override her physically, but Xiao Nu’s conscience would trouble her afterward if the Mistresses hadn’t agreed. So Wuxia smiled, quietly, and nodded.

Xiao Nu’s relief was immediate and profound. She bowed deeply, then covered her own scarlet face with both hands — her last autonomous response before she released her hold on the body and let Pandora take the reins entirely. Xiao Nu did want to help him. Seeing him exhausted always made her ache. Getting Wuxia’s blessing made the whole thing better and worse simultaneously.

She — or rather, Pandora in possession of their shared body — gathered Yueyang up and carried him out of the Grimoire World at speed.

“That man’s fortune with women is genuinely obscene,” Qianqian remarked, unable to fully suppress the envy in it.

“I agree,” Wuxia said. This was a sentence she almost never said in response to anything Qianqian said. Today she meant it entirely.

The two of them were heading back to their respective rooms to rest when the door burst open.

Xiao Nu came running back in — completely, entirely, comprehensively unclothed.

The effect was — significant. Even Qianqian and Wuxia, women themselves, couldn’t suppress a startled shriek at the entrance.

Xiao Nu didn’t notice her own state of dress at all. She was flushed from forehead to collarbone and vibrating with urgency: “Mistresses — Pandora says the ice mountain — she sensed something inside it — she thinks there may be a divine Martial Soul sealed within, one that’s lost consciousness—”

A second voice, from the same face, considerably more resigned: You absolute idiot. We could have finished and then told them. There was absolutely no reason to run back here this instant.

That was Pandora.

Then Xiao Nu registered the cold air on her skin.

She looked down.

The shriek she produced was genuinely impressive. She turned and fled through the doorway at full speed, caught her foot on the threshold, and went down with a magnificent crash.

“It’s fine, it doesn’t hurt, I’m fine, Mistresses please don’t come out, Master is still outside and unattended, I’m so irresponsible, I’m going, I’m going—”

She scrambled upright and disappeared.

Wuxia and Qianqian looked at each other.

Both of them shook their heads, slowly, in identical exasperation.

It was genuinely impossible to stay annoyed at someone that endearing.