The Citadel of the Black Dragon did not measure time by the common passage of sun and moon. Within its fortified heart, time was a currency spent at the whim of its master. For Chu Ling, the new maid, the first week was a blur of servitude that felt both like an instant and an eternity.
Her days were a structured humiliation. She served tea, her hands trembling as she placed the cup before the boy-shaped Ancestor, the golden character on her back burning under her robes as if aware of his gaze. She cleaned his chambers, her every movement a reminder of the silver brand on her hip, a intimate secret that chafed against the fine silk of her servant's uniform. She was taught protocols by the severe stewardess—how to walk three paces behind him, how to keep her eyes lowered unless spoken to, how to exist as an extension of his will.
But the nights… the nights were a different kind of eternity.
Her seventh evening of captivity began like the others. She had just finished preparing his evening ablutions when his voice, light and conversational, stopped her at the door.
"Remain."
A single word that froze her blood. She turned, keeping her eyes dutifully on the floor.
"The formalities are established," the Ancestor said, rising from his meditation mat. "The brand is set. Now, the vessel must be prepared to receive its purpose."
He approached her, and the air in the chamber grew thick, charged with an energy that was both terrifying and intoxicating. The Many Births, Many Blessings System hummed in the space between them, a palpable force of cosmic intent.
"Your body houses potential," he stated, his finger tracing a line in the air before her, making her skin prickle. "The Innate Yin Spirit Veins are a pristine canal. But canals must be dredged, widened, fortified to bear a mighty river. Your cultivation is a puddle. It must become an ocean to nurture the divinity I will plant within you."
This was not to be an act of passion, but of alchemy. Of cultivation.
He did not lead her to a bed, but to the center of the room where a complex formation of condensed moonlight and shadow-qi flared to life on the floor. He guided her to its center. The air within the formation was heavy, sweet with the scent of spirit blooms and ozone.
"Your resistance is a flaw in the material," he murmured, his hands not touching her, yet guiding the energies of the formation to unravel her robes, leaving her exposed not to lust, but to assessment. "It must be purged."
The formation activated. It was not pain. It was a sensation of being unmade. The energy, a fusion of his immense Soul Transformation power and the System's breeding directive, flooded into her meridians. It was a tidal wave scouring a riverbed, obliterating the delicate structures of her Qi Condensation cultivation. She felt her own power dissolving, not stolen, but erased to make room for something greater. A soundless scream built in her throat as her spiritual foundation was systematically dismantled.
Then, the rebuilding began. His energy, cold and vast yet meticulously controlled, began to flow into the newly cleared pathways. It was an invasive, profound violation, every inch of her spiritual and physical being being mapped, claimed, and reforged. He was not cultivating her; he was cultivating the vessel that would carry his offspring.
The process stretched on, beyond the track of hours. The formation sustained them, drawing qi from the leylines beneath the citadel. He worked with the focus of a master artificer crafting a divine instrument. He expanded her dantian, tempered her veins with strands of his own netherworld qi, and etched minute stabilizing formations into the very marrow of her bones.
Throughout it all, his gaze was analytical, noting every fluctuation, every shiver, every silent tear that traced down her cheek. He was observing the properties of his material.
When the spiritual forging was complete, the purpose of the preparation became terrifyingly clear. The System's energy, now thrumming in harmony with her reshaped core, shifted in intent. The metaphorical became devastatingly literal.
The energy that had been a cold, expanding force now became a wave of overwhelming, forced sensation. It was not desire; it was a biological imperative triggered by cosmic mandate. Her body, perfectly prepared and utterly helpless, responded against her will. A warmth spread from the silver brand on her hip, a deep, throbbing pulse that echoed the rhythm of the formation's light.
The Ancestor finally entered the formation. The act that followed was a continuation of the ceremony on the plateau. It was the planting of the seed in the meticulously tilled and fertilized field. It was a transaction of power, a silent, relentless merging where her rebuilt body accepted the primal energy he offered—the Seed of Many Offspring.
She lost all sense of time. The formation glowed, cycling through phases of light and darkness. What felt like a single night of unbearable, shameful intensity stretched into three full days and nights. The chamber became a world unto itself, a crucible where a new woman was being forged in the fires of enforced creation. When the formation finally dimmed, and the Ancestor stepped away, Chu Ling collapsed, not into unconsciousness, but into a state of profound, awestruck horror. Her body hummed with a power she could scarcely comprehend, a foundation far greater than her previous cultivation, now entirely built to serve one function. She had been prepared, planted, and now she was to be incubated.
---
A week after the branding ceremony, the severe stewardess led a still-woozy Chu Ling to a sun-drenched solarium high in the citadel. The air here was warm and smelled of exotic, flowering spirit vines.
Another woman was already there, seated by a window, looking out at the misty peaks. It was Su Wan. She turned as they entered, and for a moment, the two women simply stared at each other.
Chu Ling saw the Mother of the Protagonist, the woman whose capture had started this nightmare. She looked… serene, but it was the serenity of a deep, still lake covering an abyss. There was a profound sadness in her eyes, but also a strange, unsettling acceptance. A faint, ethereal silver light seemed to emanate from her skin, the residual aura of the awakened Yin Phoenix now settled and bonded.
Su Wan saw a young girl, beautiful and broken, moving with the stiff grace of a puppet. She saw the ghost of her own shock and humiliation reflected back at her, fresher, rawer. And she saw the faint, golden glow of the character 有主 through the thin fabric of the girl's robe. A kinship of the damned.
The stewardess left them, standing in silence.
"You are… Chu Ling?" Su Wan finally asked, her voice soft.
The sound of her own name, spoken with a sliver of kindness, almost broke Chu Ling. She nodded, unable to speak, her eyes welling with tears.
"He… he prepares you," Su Wan stated, not a question. Her hand drifted unconsciously to her own abdomen, where the dragon-and-phoenix sigil was hidden. "He remakes you. The pain… the shame… it does not fade. But it… changes. It becomes the air you breathe."
"My… my cultivation," Chu Ling whispered, her voice raspy from disuse. "It's gone. But I feel… full. Like a cup about to overflow with something terrible and powerful."
Su Wan nodded. "He does not take. He replaces. What he builds inside you is his. Your body is no longer your own. It is a garden for his harvest." There was no anger in her tone, only a devastating, quiet truth. "Resist only if you wish to break. The only choice left is to survive the tending."
In that moment, Chu Ling understood. Su Wan was not a fellow prisoner; she was the first wife, the senior breeder, offering guidance to the new acquisition. Their shared bond was not of friendship, but of shared purpose under the same master. It was the most horrifying comfort imaginable.
---
Across the continent, in a modest compound within the Ye family estate, a young man sat in meditative silence in a sparse room. This was Ye Fan's Dao Clone, left behind to manage his affairs and continue low-level cultivation while his true self sought fortuitous encounters in a secret realm.
The clone's eyes were closed, its consciousness faintly linked to the whole. Suddenly, its placid expression twisted into a rictus of agony.
A messenger spirit-sparrow, one of a pair bonded to Chu Ling and himself, had finally broken through the Lu Clan's formidable barriers, its energy nearly spent. It did not carry a message. It carried a final, fragmented impression from its bonded partner at the moment of her ultimate violation.
The clone's mind was flooded with a sensory nightmare: The cold stone of the plateau against her forehead. The searing, final heat of the golden brand. The intimate, shameful sting of the silver needle. The overwhelming, alien presence of a power vast and ancient, claiming what was his. And worst of all, a glimpse—a boy with glowing green eyes, giggling.
The psychic backlash was instantaneous and catastrophic. The clone's carefully constructed Dao Heart, mirroring the true Ye Fan's, was built on defiance, on protecting his loved ones, on righteous fury. This was not a challenge to that heart; it was an absolute negation of it.
He had failed. Utterly. Completely.
The image of Chu Ling, his proud, beautiful Ling'er, forced to her knees, branded like livestock, her spirit broken… it was an abomination his soul could not process. The clone's qi, perfectly balanced a moment before, erupted into violent chaos. Meridians shattered under the strain of the emotional tsunami. Its core, unable to bear the weight of such absolute despair and helpless rage, cracked.
With a choked, silent gasp that echoed the scream of its true self a continent away, the Dao Clone of Ye Fan collapsed onto the floor. Its eyes rolled back into its head, its body convulsed once, and then fell still, descending into a deep, qi-devastated coma. The last coherent thought that echoed in the empty room was a name, not spoken, but wept from a breaking soul:
"Ling'er…"