Ye Luoxue looked at him.
Di Yusheng felt it before he saw it — that particular pressure of being watched by someone who was deciding something. He opened his eyes. Luoxue was sitting across from him in the cell, her back against the wall, her gaze steady and unfamiliar.
He'd seen her look at him a thousand different ways over ten years. Amused. Irritated. Patient. Cold. The way you look at something you're studying. The way you look at something you're responsible for. He knew all of those looks. This was not one of them.
Something in it made the hair on his arms rise.
He didn't ask. He closed his eyes and returned to his cultivation. His Qihai was full — dense, compressed, vibrating at the edge of something. Golden core was close. He could feel it the way you feel the lip of a cliff beneath your foot. One more step. He focused on his breathing. Drew the Qi tighter. Compressed. Held.
"Di Yusheng."
Her voice cut through his concentration like a blade through silk. Clean. No hesitation.
He kept his eyes closed. "Must you say what you want to say right now?"
"Yes." No pause. No uncertainty. "I must. Because what I want to say can change later. I want you to know now."
He opened his eyes.
Luoxue hadn't moved. Same position. Same wall. Same steady gaze. But her expression had shifted — not softer, not harder. Settled. Like someone who had finished a long calculation and was reading the result.
"At first, when I met you, you were the most interesting thing." She said it simply. Not flattering. Not warm. A statement of fact from ten years ago. "Then you became a brat who didn't listen to my instructions. And after that — you changed. You became the boy I felt guilty for."
She let the words sit. Yusheng didn't respond. His Qihai hummed. The edge of golden core waited.
"I've stayed with you ten years now." Luoxue's voice didn't waver. "And I'm sure of what I feel about you."
A beat.
"Di Yusheng, I find you boring."
The word dropped into the silence of the cell like a stone into still water.
"I waited ten years for something interesting." She stood up. Slowly. The movement casual, as if she were stretching after a long sit. "But now I really don't want to wait anymore." She brushed dust from her robes. "I'm leaving. I'll be at Zhuming Sect if you need me."
She reached into her robe and took out a pill.
Yusheng recognized it. Breakthrough pill — the kind that forced a golden core formation. He'd seen her with it before. He'd asked her about it once, years ago. She'd said not yet. He'd assumed she was saving it for the right moment — the right conditions, the right preparation, the right plan.
She put it in her mouth and swallowed.
The sky above the Ye Clan estate cracked open.
Tribulation lightning — not a single bolt but a wall of white fire that split the heavens from end to end. The clouds came from nowhere, fast and black and wrong, boiling across a clear sky. The air turned to iron. Every cultivator on the estate felt their Qihai shudder. Qi Refining disciples staggered. Foundation Building cultivators dropped to one knee. The pressure was immense — not the pressure of a golden core breakthrough but something heavier, denser, as if the sky itself was angry.
In the cell, Luoxue's body blazed. Golden light erupted from her skin — not gentle, not gradual. Violent. Her Qihai tore open and reformed in the space of a breath. The Qi that had been compressed inside her for eight years — held back since the second year of her imprisonment, bottled up through a thousand days of patience — detonated outward.
The cell shook. The walls cracked. The seal on the door splintered.
Golden core.
Top grade.
The tribulation lightning struck. Luoxue didn't dodge. She didn't defend. She stood in the cell with her arms at her sides and took the bolt full in the chest. The light consumed her. The earth around her turned to glass. The lightning blasted the cell door off .
When the light faded, Luoxue was standing. Her robes were torn. Her hair was loose. Her skin was luminous — not with Qi but with something else, something that had nothing to do with cultivation and everything to do with what she actually was.
But no one could sense it. No one would ever sense it. That was the point.
She rose into the air and flew out of the cell.
Ye Zhenghe was in the ancestral hall when the sky broke.
He felt the tribulation before he heard it . He moved. Nascent soul speed — through the ancestral hall, across the courtyard, past disciples who were still on their knees from the pressure. The wind of his passage knocked a servant off her feet. He didn't stop.
He reached the cell in seconds. The door was gone. The walls were cracked. And Luoxue was rising — golden light trailing from her body like embers from a fire, ascending through the shattered ceiling, through the earth, into the open sky above the estate.
"Luoxue!" His voice carried. Nascent soul projection — the words hit the air like a physical force. "You can't leave!"
She looked down at him.
For a moment — just a moment — he saw something in her eyes that wasn't anger. Wasn't resentment. Wasn't the cold calculation he'd expected. It was simpler than all of those. It was the look of someone who had already decided and was merely confirming.
She back slapped him.
One clean hit. Golden core against nascent soul. The impact shouldn't have existed. The gap between the two realms was absolute — a golden core couldn't damage a nascent soul. Everyone knew that. The patriarch was nascent soul. The strongest force on the estate. Unmovable.
He moved.
The slap caught him in the left cheek and sent him backward — not stumbling, not sliding. Flying. His body left the ground and traveled. Through the courtyard wall. Through the garden. Through the outer fence. He hit the ground sixty meters from where he'd been standing and carved a trench in the earth before he stopped.
The estate went silent.
Every disciple who had been watching — and every one of them was watching — stood frozen. A nascent soul elder. Sent flying. By a golden core. A girl who had been underground for ten years and who no one had seen since she was a child.
Nobody moved to stop her.
Luoxue rose higher. The golden light faded. The tribulation clouds dispersed. The sky cleared. And she flew — south, toward Zhuming Sect territory — without looking back.
The estate watched her go. A speck of gold against blue sky, growing smaller, then gone.
Ye Zhenghe pulled himself from the trench.
His robes were torn. His chest ached — not his Qihai, not his meridians. His ribs. Physical pain. A golden core had broken his ribs. He stood in the ruined garden and stared at the sky where his granddaughter had been.
Around him, the estate was chaos. Disciples whispering. Elders gathering. Servants hiding. Questions forming on every lip — who was that, what happened, why was she underground, why was she so strong, why couldn't the patriarch stop her.
He had no answers he could give.
He was still standing there when the second tribulation came.
Ten minutes. That was all the gap. The sky split again — not as wide, not as violent, but unmistakable. Golden core tribulation. Underground. The same cell.
Hope flickered in Ye Zhenghe's chest. Someone else. Another breakthrough. If it was done properly — if this cultivator formed their core and stayed, acknowledged the clan, showed respect — then the morning's humiliation could be softened. A double golden core day. Two cultivators breaking through. That was an omen. A blessing. He could frame it. He could work with it.
The tribulation lightning built. The clouds gathered. The pressure rolled across the estate — lighter than Luoxue's but real, heavy, golden. Disciples braced themselves. Elders watched the sky.
The lightning struck.
The clouds settled.
And then — nothing. No golden light. No rising figure. No announcement. The tribulation ended and the sky cleared and the estate was left with silence.
Ye Zhenghe stared at the underground cell.
A voice came from below. Quiet. Not projected. Not amplified. Just a voice, carrying through cracked stone and shattered earth with the natural clarity of a golden core who didn't need to raise his volume to be heard.
"Do you also find me boring?"