The Discipline Hall was a fortress of cold iron, but Deacon Shen's private estate was a gilded cage.
Dver was dragged from the blood-stained stone of the interrogation rooms to a sprawling manor perched on the inner slopes of the mountain. Here, the air was unnaturally sweet, perfumed by expensive lotuses and premium mountain tea. To a slave, this fragrance was more lethal than the scent of rot in the Pit; it was the smell of wealth built on a foundation of crushed bones.
"So, this is the 'Lucky Rat' I've heard the servants whispering about?"
A woman in flowing, crimson silks stood on the elevated jade terrace, fanning herself with a jade-ribbed fan. This was Madam Shen. Her beauty was sharp and synthetic, like a glass blade, and her Foundation Establishment aura pressed down on the courtyard like a physical weight.
Beside her stood two girls, perhaps seventeen and eighteen. Mei and Ran. They looked at Dver with the same clinical detachment one might use for a piece of furniture that had arrived slightly stained.
"He looks... pathetic, Mother," Mei, the elder, sneered. She stepped down the marble stairs, her silk slippers clicking. "Father said he reached Rank-9. He doesn't look like he could reach for a bowl of rice without collapsing."
"He is a cracked cauldron," Madam Shen laughed, her voice like wind chimes in a graveyard. "A joke of the heavens. But he has a sturdy frame. Ran, didn't you say your training dummy was splintering?"
The younger daughter, Ran, smiled. It was a sharp, predatory expression. "I did. The wooden ones don't provide the correct resistance when I strike the pressure points."
Dver stood in the center of the courtyard, his head bowed, his eyes fixed on the dirt. The Soul-Binding Shackle around his neck hummed with a low, agonizing vibration, intended to suppress his Qi and turn his Asura muscles into lead.
"P-please, Ladies..." Dver stammered, his voice a perfect, trembling reed. "I am just a humble servant... I only wish to serve the Great Master..."
WHACK.
Ran's jade-encrusted whip lashed out, catching Dver across the cheek. A thin line of blood welled up, dripping onto his black servant's tunic.
"You do not speak unless a question is directed at you, dog," Ran chirped. "Now, stand over there by the archery target. I want to see if I can imbue my needles with frost-Qi without stopping your heart instantly."
For the next four hours, Dver was a tool for their amusement.
Madam Shen used him as a footstool while she sipped her tea, her heels digging into his back. Mei practiced her 'Palm of the Withered Leaf' on his chest, delighting in the way he gasped for air and rolled in the dirt. And Ran... Ran used him as a pincushion for poisoned needles, measuring how long it took for a Rank-9 body to neutralize the toxins.
Inside Dver's mind, the Void God was silent. It was a deep, abyssal stillness that signaled absolute, predatory intent.
"Their life-essence is refined," it finally observed, its voice like the shifting of tectonic plates. "The mother first. We should begin by removing the tongue."
No, Dver thought, his mind razor-sharp even as Mei kicked him in the ribs again. The mother is Foundation Establishment. The Deacon is within earshot. We are a slave. Slaves are part of the scenery. And the scenery can go anywhere.
"He's boring," Mei complained, wiping her hands on a silk cloth after striking Dver's face. "He just shakes and cries. He doesn't even attempt to resist."
"That's because he understands the cost of resistance," Madam Shen said, rising from her chair. "Ran, stop with the needles. If he dies, your father will be inconvenienced. He requires this one to carry his palanquin to the Jade Summit tomorrow."
She looked down at Dver, who was curled in a pathetic ball on the grass, "weeping" silently into the dirt.
"Take him to the The Lower Cells," Madam Shen ordered a guard. "Give him a cup of stagnant water and some stale bread. We wouldn't want the new toy to break before the Jade Summit "
The Lower Cells.
Dver was thrown into a damp, lightless room beneath the manor. The heavy iron door slammed shut, and the bolt slid home with a heavy thud.
The moment the lock turned, the "pain" vanished instantly.
Dver sat up, his movements fluid and predatory, lacking any of the clumsiness he had displayed all day. He reached up to his cheek, wiping away the blood; the skin was already knitting back together. He pulled the poisoned needles from his arms one by one, watching as the black venom was neutralized and absorbed by the dark Qi in his veins.
He looked at the iron collar around his neck.
"A Jade Summit ," Dver whispered.
"The Great Sect Jade Summit ," the Void God resonated. "Every Elder. Every high-ranking disciple. The Saintess. The Grand Elder. A concentrated mass of high-grade Qi, all in one room, distracted by the vanity of wine and music."
Dver closed his eyes, feeling the layout of the manor through the vibrations in the stone floor. He wasn't just a slave. He was a living curse that had just been hand-delivered into the heart of the host.
"Let them play," Dver said, a slow, dark smile spreading across his face in the pitch black.
To look into Dver's eyes in that moment was not like looking at a person; it was like peering over the edge of a cliff at midnight.
They were dead. There was no spark of humanity, no flicker of feigned terror, and no reflection of the world. They were a flat, matte charcoal that seemed to absorb the torchlight of the cell rather than reflect it. They looked like the eyes of a corpse—milky, hollow, and utterly still.
But beneath that surface of graveyard stillness, there was a pull.
The pupils didn't just seem dark; they seemed to warp the space around them. It was a visual gravity so profound it felt like a physical weight on the viewer's soul. It was the crushing, infinite density of a black hole compressed into two small orbs of flesh. He didn't just "see" the world; he looked at existence as a fleeting mistake waiting to be corrected.
When he looked at a person, he wasn't looking at their face—he was mapping the Qi in their veins and the vibration of their soul, measuring the exact structural flaw needed to unravel them into absolute nothingness.
The morning light that finally pierced the grated window of the The Lightless Cell brought no warmth, only the sharp, hissing crackle of the sealing runes fading from the stone door.
Instantly, the abyssal, terrifying stillness in Dver's eyes vanished. It was replaced by the watery, desperate glaze of a broken dog. He forcefully slumped his shoulders, burying the density of his Qi deep within his marrow and forcing a violent tremor into his hands as Madam Shen's Enforcers dragged him out into the courtyard.
Today was the Jade Summit .
For three grueling hours, Dver carried the rear pole of Deacon Shen's massive, ironwood palanquin up the thousands of polished jade steps toward the Grand Peak. The heavy carriage was a ridiculous display of wealth, designed to crush the spine of whatever slave was forced to bear its weight. To Dver's Asura-tempered body, the wood felt as light as a hollow reed.
Still, he played his part with absolute, sociopathic perfection. He gasped for air, he stumbled over his own boots, and he let his knees buckle just enough to amuse the guards marching beside him, enduring their passing kicks with pathetic whimpers of gratitude.
When they finally breached the towering, gilded doors of the Grand Peak's central pavilion, the sheer density of high-grade Qi inside the room was suffocating. To a normal mortal slave, the combined auras of the Sect Elders would have crushed their lungs. To Dver, sweeping his gaze across the hall through his tear-filled eyes, it was simply a dense concentration of fragile architecture waiting to be violently dismantled.
Shen didn't leave his new slave with the other servants in the courtyard. The Deacon wanted to show off his prize. He dragged his "toy" directly into the light.
The Great Hall erupted in a chorus of cruel, arrogant laughter as Dver stumbled into the center of the polished jade floor. He looked entirely pathetic. His coarse servant's tunic was slightly oversized, purposefully chosen to make his dense, Rank-9 frame look gaunt and frail under the glowing spirit-lanterns.
"Look at him!" Ran giggled from Shen's table, pulling a handful of silver needles from her silk sleeve. "He can barely stand! Are you sure you actually condensed your Qi to the 9th Rank, or did you just gorge yourself on stolen spirit-rice, dog?"
"P-please, Young Mistress," Dver stammered, his knees violently knocking together. He looked around the massive hall with a gaze of wide-eyed, desperate terror. "The lights... the aura of the Elders... it is too heavy... I—I'm just a servant..."
THWIP—CRACK.
A silver needle, threaded with stinging lightning-Qi, buried itself into Dver's shoulder. He let out a broken, pathetic wail and tripped over his own feet, sprawling hard onto the jade floor.
The gathered Elders roared with laughter. One high-ranking guest, draped in heavy python-silk, sneered over the rim of his jade wine cup. "Shen! Where did you unearth this pathetic creature? He has the cultivation base of a warrior and the soul of a beaten dog!"
"He is a specialty breed," Shen smirked, basking in the attention of his superiors. "The more you strike him, the more he weeps. Watch."
For twenty minutes, the Jade Summit became a theater of pure degradation. Ran and Mei took turns using Dver as a moving target. They didn't aim for fatal meridians; they aimed for the acupoints of pure humiliation—the earlobes, the palms, the backs of the knees. Dver spent the entire time rolling, flailing, and begging for a mercy that didn't exist in this sect. He "accidentally" smashed his own face into a carved pillar. He "clumsily" ripped his tunic while trying to crawl away from Ran's boots.
He was the perfect spectacle. The ultimate, humiliating destruction of a Rank-9 cultivator for the elite's amusement.
High above, seated on elevated jade platform, the Saintess Lyra watched with an expression of pristine frost. She looked at the blood smearing the flawless jade, then down at Dver's face.
For a moment, Dver's head snapped backward violently as he "fainted" from a particularly vicious strike to the collarbone.
His eyes met hers.
In that fraction of a second, the trembling slave vanished entirely. Those dead, abyssal eyes stared up into her soul with a cold, terrifying promise. They weren't crying. They weren't hurting.
They were simply counting.
Then, he blinked, and the broken dog was back, sobbing into the jade floorboards for his "Master."
The Grand Blood-Lotus Assembly finally concluded as the midnight bells echoed across the peak. The Elders dispersed, sated on high-grade spirit-wine and the humiliating spectacle of a shattered genius.
Deacon Shen, deeply intoxicated by the Grand Elder's rare praise, elected to remain at the upper pavilions to discuss sect politics and resource distribution. He tossed a heavy, blood-red control-jade to his wife.
"Take the beast back to the estate, my dear," Shen slurred, his face flushed with wine. "If he survives the night, I will use him to haul the heavy tribute chests to the Spirit-Spring tomorrow."
Madam Shen sneered, channeling a sharp spike of Qi into the jade token. The iron Shackle around Dver's neck violently constricted, burning the skin and bruising his throat.
"Walk, trash," she commanded, her voice dripping with disgust. "My daughters are not finished with you. Ran wishes to see if your Asura-tempered blood will turn black when mixed with Corpse-Weeping Venom."
Dver followed them down the long, moonlit mountain path. He limped with perfect, agonizing asymmetry. He whimpered at every step. He kept his head bowed so low his eyes traced the gold-spun defensive runes woven into the hems of their crimson silks as they glided a fraction of an inch above the moonlit jade.
The moment they crossed the threshold of the inner compound and the heavy bronze array-doors sealed shut with a resonant hum, the spiritual pressure in the air thickened. The Enforcers were dismissed to the outer courtyards. The manor was smothered in absolute, suffocating silence.