"Don't worry," Xiao Se said. "I know how to handle it. My plan is to tell her the truth together — her and Dong'er both — at the Soul Master Competition finals."
Qian Renxue considered this, then gave a small nod. "Alright." She turned and made her way to the reception hall.
Half an hour passed.
Then came the sound of quick footsteps in the corridor — purposeful, slightly hurried — and Qian Renxue came through the door, closed it behind her, removed her headgear, and deactivated the disguise component of her Angel Soul Bone. Xue Qinghe dissolved, and she was simply herself again.
"She's gone?" Xiao Se asked.
"Yes. I told her you'd be traveling to Spirit City to watch the finals." Qian Renxue settled into a chair with a smoothness that suggested the conversation in the reception hall had been managed well enough.
"Then I'll head back. I'll come see you again before the finals." Xiao Se stood. There were nearly two months before the Soul Master Competition's final rounds — enough time to return to the Dou Qi Continent, take the Royal Extreme Pill, push through to the Dou Huang peak, and begin cultivating the Five Wheels of Fire Technique properly.
Qian Renxue's expression shifted immediately. The composure of the last several hours — the Crown Prince, the gracious hostess, the measured young woman navigating public spaces — dropped away, and what was underneath it was considerably more direct.
"Dad." The word came out with feeling. "You just got here. You're leaving already?" She moved before he'd formulated a response, looping both arms around his shoulder with the determined affection of someone who has decided that pleading is a legitimate strategy. "I don't care. You have to stay tonight. You've never once stayed with me since I was little. Just this once."
Xiao Se's face went through several things rapidly.
Stay the night. He looked at Qian Renxue — the face that was her mother's face, a beauty that stood alongside Bibi Dong's own as something that stopped people in hallways. Under any other circumstances, any other context, before any of the complications that had accumulated around this particular relationship—
He moved firmly past this line of thinking.
"Men and women shouldn't share a bed," he said, with the resolute air of someone citing principle rather than admitting to being flustered. "Let's just not."
"I don't care," Qian Renxue said, which was her entire counterargument, deployed with complete conviction.
She turned to the shimmer at Xiao Se's right hand, where the Demon Sword Pattern pulsed faintly. "Aunt Long Kui — please help me convince him."
Long Kui drifted out of the Demon Sword Space with the particular ease of someone who has been listening and has already made up her mind. She reached out and patted Qian Renxue's head with a warmth that was entirely unambiguous about where her sympathies lay.
"Brother." Her voice was mild and absolute. "Rest here tonight."
Xiao Se's lips twitched. He looked at Long Kui. Long Kui looked back at him with the expression of someone who has rendered her verdict and is not taking appeals.
"…Alright," he said.
That night, Xiao Se stayed at the Crown Prince's residence.
As he had anticipated — with the resigned certainty of a man who understood the trajectory of events — Qian Renxue appeared in his room in the middle of the night in women's clothing, with the matter-of-fact confidence of someone exercising a right rather than testing a boundary.
Long Kui settled in on his other side with the satisfied calm of a woman who has been wanting exactly this for some time.
Xiao Se lay between them in a state of comprehensive immobility, acutely aware of the geometry of the situation, maintaining a posture of careful stillness in the manner of someone defusing something that could go wrong in multiple directions. He did not move. He breathed deliberately. He experienced, in equal and simultaneous measure, something that could be described as contentment and something that could be described as ongoing mild distress.
It was, all things considered, a night.
The next morning, Xiao Se returned to the Dou Qi Continent.
The Medusa Temple.
The throne room was grand in the way of spaces built to project authority — vaulted ceilings, stone columns, the particular quality of silence that comes from rooms designed to amplify the presence of whoever sits at their center.
Medusa currently occupied the throne in the precise way it was meant to be occupied.
She was draped rather than seated — long legs crossed at the knee, the sweep of a deep red gown covering her figure from throat to floor while somehow managing to communicate all the relevant information anyway. The dazzling fabric shimmered with the restless light of embedded gemstones. Her phoenix eyes — warm-toned, slightly heavy-lidded, the specific category of beautiful that doesn't announce itself — found him the moment he stepped through the entrance, and her lips curved into something that was more acknowledgment than smile.
"You're back."
"Yes." Xiao Se crossed the distance between them with the unhurried ease of someone who knows exactly where he's going. He touched down lightly beside the throne, went to one knee, and pressed his ear gently to the side of her abdomen.
The hall was very quiet.
"It's been barely a month," Medusa said, her cheeks warming, her voice somewhere between fond and exasperated. "What do you expect to hear?"
"Practice," Xiao Se said pleasantly, rising. He settled himself onto the arm of the throne — not the most formally correct position relative to the chair of power, but Medusa did not appear to object. "How's Die? Still in seclusion?"
"Still inside. The Medusa inheritance takes at minimum two months, and she's only been in for half of that." Medusa shook her head. "But when she emerges, her cultivation will be at the Dou Huang peak directly."
"That's significant." Xiao Se turned something over in his mind. "A question — what is Die's companion soul?"
Medusa looked at him with the slight angle of someone gauging where this is going. "Earthly Nether Python. Why?"
"Earthly Nether Python." He said it slowly, pulling up what he knew. "The Earthly Nether Python carries a trace of Nine Nether Earthly Python bloodline. And the Nine Nether Earthly Python is itself a descendant of the Ancient Celestial Serpent." He paused, watching her face. "Do you think it would be possible — using your clan's secret refinement technique — to help Die's bloodline evolve? First to Nine Nether Earthly Python. Then, if things go well, possibly further — toward the Ancient Celestial Serpent itself."
"No."
Medusa said it before he had fully finished the sentence. No deliberation. No pause for consideration. The word arrived with the certainty of something that had been decided long before the question was asked.
She looked at him steadily, and her expression was not unkind, but it was completely immovable.
In her life, there were three people she would not subject to unnecessary risk under any circumstances: Xiao Se, the child growing in her womb, and Die. She would give everything she had to protect any one of them without a second thought. She knew what the secret refinement technique cost. She had lived it. She had survived it only because of the Soul-Protecting Pill Xiao Se had prepared, and only barely — the memory of how close she had come to being extinguished entirely was not one she had softened with time.
Die could grow stronger through safer means. The Breakthrough Pill existed. Die had time. The risk was not worth the ceiling.
"Sasha." Xiao Se's voice was patient. "Let me finish. Hear the complete picture, and then decide. Can you do that?"
A beat of silence. "Speak," she said.
"You know Long Kui and I cultivated a soul cultivation technique together," he began.
"The Returning Origin Soul Technique. Yes. Back when you were still a Battle Master, almost no one could detect your cultivation level just by looking at you." Her eyes were attentive now, following where this was going.
He nodded, rose, and settled himself properly on the throne beside her — or rather, settled her against his side in the comfortable way of people who have stopped negotiating the geometry of shared spaces. His left hand moved once, two fingers extended, and a stream of soul information flowed directly into her consciousness.
"This is the technique. Practice it — it communicates with heaven and earth energy to refine soul power directly, it creates interference against soul detection and soul attacks, and most importantly, it has a protective function specifically designed to shield the soul during high-risk cultivation events."
Medusa absorbed the information with the focused intensity of a practitioner assessing a new tool. She ran through the basics, felt the soul power shift, tested the detection-resistance and the soul-shield components in sequence.
After a while, she shook her head. "Even with your Returning Origin Soul Technique, the Soul Protecting Pill, and the Blood Lotus Pill combined—" She looked at him directly. "The success rate is forty percent."
"What if we replace the Soul Protecting Pill and Blood Lotus Pill," Xiao Se said, his tone taking on the particular quality of someone moving through a prepared argument, "with a seventh-grade Heavenly Soul Protecting Pill and a sixth-grade Earth Spirit Pill?"
Medusa went still.
Something shifted in her eyes — the controlled, queen's stillness giving way fractionally to the expression of someone doing mathematics and liking the results more than expected. "Seventh-grade and sixth-grade." She calculated. "The success rate rises to sixty percent."
"And there's a factor you haven't included yet." He met her eyes. "The Strange Flame is completely refined now. I control it — which means I can modulate it specifically to minimize any risk of soul damage during the process. And before we attempt this, I'll be in seclusion cultivating the Five Wheels of Fire Technique from the Heavenly Flame Elder. My precision with fire control will improve substantially." A pause. "If both of us are present during the lightning tribulation, actively working to support her through it — what does the success rate become?"
Medusa was quiet for a long moment.
"Above eighty percent," she said, finally. There was something in her voice that was not quite capitulation and not quite willingness, but was moving toward both.
"Nothing in this world guarantees a certain outcome," Xiao Se said, and his voice had softened into something more honest. "But consider Die's path forward without this. Her bloodline, as it stands, sets a ceiling. Dou Zong is not impossible, but it is extremely difficult — the gap between where she is and where that ceiling sits is not a comfortable one." He looked out toward the corridor that led, at its far end, to where Die was currently in seclusion. "With the evolution, she has the potential to reach Dou Sheng. The same level you can reach." A brief pause. "I'll ask Die herself. Whatever she decides, I'll respect it. And if the worst happens — if something goes wrong — I can preserve her soul. I can reconstruct her body later. It would not be the end."
Medusa leaned back against him slowly.
"Thank you," she said, quietly. "For thinking about her like this."
"She's my wife's sister. That makes her family." He said it without ceremony, as though it were simply a fact and not something worth making more of. "No thanks required between family."
Medusa was quiet for a moment. Then: "Even so." She sat up slightly and gave him a look that had a specific quality to it — warm and alert and carrying the pointed focus of someone who has thought about something and arrived at a conclusion. "You still cannot have any designs on her, Xiao Se."
"I—"
"When Die emerges from her evolution successfully," Medusa continued, in the tone of someone establishing terms before they are tested, "the first soul her companion soul imprints on must be me. Not you." The look she leveled at him was calm and entirely certain. "I know you."
A brief silence.
"…Understood," Xiao Se said.
It seems she saw through that rather quickly, something in his mind observed, with the philosophical equanimity of a man accepting a fair outcome.
(End of Chapter)
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