I didn't have time to get bored in my cell. The crafty milf visited me every day so I could "clean out her pipes." And yes, naturally, I couldn't resist saying exactly that to her, for which I got hit so hard I spent a couple of days recovering.
Was I sad about it? Not in the slightest. In just a few days, I'd gained more affinity with ice than I already had with lightning.
And I'd worked so hard in the wasteland, putting myself in harm's way so many times. Turns out it wasn't actually all that much.
I asked for someone besides my dear milf to start visiting me too.
"Be patient for a little while. Soon your information will be confirmed, and we can calmly begin cleansing the important members of the Palace."
"Time is exactly what I'm short on, darling."
And smack! Roughly the sound I made when I hit the wall after "darling." If she hits you, she loves you. Besides, every blow carried her icy profound energy. Which only worked in my favor.
"What problem? And address me with respect."
"Of course, my love. Forgive me for forgetting my place. But I don't have time. This is critically important for my development."
"Why do you need to absorb so much icy energy? Do you really think it will help you break through?"
"Let's leave that conversation until after the wedding..."
And smack again. And no, she wasn't just letting herself get handsy. She simply knew her energy only benefited me. And the more injured I was, the better the Rage God's inheritance worked.
"I mean, until I officially become the maste— All right, all right, disciple. I meant disciple of the Palace."
"As you wish."
"Time is critical for me. Ideally, I'd cleanse your daughter and all Seven Fairies of Frozen Cloud."
"Do you actually enjoy pain?"
"Not in the slightest. But there are things worse than pain, and my potential depends on this. You do want your husband to be strong, don't you?"
"ARGH! No one—no one—has ever managed to work against our Ice Heart Art this effectively."
"Did I melt your little heart with my beauty? That's normal, my love, no need to be embarrassed. So, what about the fairies?"
"You want to grope all my fairies?"
"Of course. Could you maybe not tell them that they don't actually have to undress for the procedure? Pleeease?"
"You're a pervert!"
"All men are perverts. A lot of them are just good at hiding it. And then there are sodomites."
"I'll order Gong Yuxian and the fairies to visit you. But if you allow yourself anything improper..."
"Then stay in the room during the procedure too."
"So you can lower my authority in front of my disciples even further? Besides, your technique would work worse that way."
"Deal. Send me your girls. I'll 'clean out their pipes.'"
Instead of answering, she slammed me into the wall a little harder, not forgetting to generously pack the blow with icy profound energy first.
And the next day, the fashion show began. Beauties. Every fairy was a beauty. Not that I immediately ran over and threw myself at their feet. Not at all. I didn't even flirt with them.
Actually, if I'd put my hand on their bare backs, the technique would've worked faster than through the palm. But I didn't. I had to preserve some decency for the sake of my beloved milf.
And yes, every joke contains a grain of truth. I really had decided to make this clever woman mine. And if, after capturing the Great Mistress, the rest of the Palace turned into my harem, well, whose fault would that be? Definitely not mine.
This is where I'm supposed to give an evil villain laugh, but I'm incapable of that. Too handsome. It just wouldn't work.
Seriously, though, having many wives is a blessing only in fairy tales. From a purely pragmatic point of view, of course, getting that much virgin Yin energy wouldn't be bad. It would help me enormously.
But I wouldn't make any moves for that reason alone. Although something told me my clever woman would try to bind me to the Palace by every method available. And the most important thing here wasn't that I could cleanse them, or that I could tell them about the future.
All that was bullshit. The important thing was that this woman had conducted her own investigation. She'd gone to my village and asked people about me. And while the blockheads in our clan hadn't noticed a thing, my clever woman immediately picked up on all my oddities.
There was only one thing she didn't know. And I wasn't in any hurry to share it with her. She thought I still couldn't break through, and that I needed icy energy to fight the Phoenix flame. I didn't tell her I was suppressing my breakthrough through sheer force of will.
But two weeks later, I finally failed to hold it back and I shit my— I mean, I broke through.
I was cleansing Fairy Mu Lanyi's veins when the explosion happened. The poor fairy was smashed into the wall. She definitely hadn't expected that much energy from an Elementary Profound Realm practitioner. As for me, I moaned so loudly it was probably heard throughout the entire Blue Wind Empire, or at least throughout the whole Palace.
Naturally, every fairy, together with the Palace Mistress, rushed into my room and saw a strange picture. A battered Fairy Mu lay on the floor, her clothes torn in places and exposing clean skin, while I lay there completely naked with an expression of ecstasy on my face.
The temperature in the cell instantly dropped below zero. The fairies froze like ice statues, their gazes capable of chipping granite, not a single muscle twitching on their faces—the Ice Heart Art suppressed every hint of maidenly embarrassment and turned it into absolute contempt.
Gong Yuxian, on the other hand, nearly started ringing with rage. Her palm became wrapped in such a dense layer of frosty energy that the cell walls covered with rime. The current Palace Mistress was clearly ready to kill me on the spot for defiling her disciples' eyes, and only Feng Qianhui's commanding gesture stopped her from landing a lethal blow.
The Great Mistress stepped forward and swept an utterly calm, even bored gaze over my outstanding "relief," as though there were a log lying in front of her rather than a naked man. This could've turned into a wonderfully awkward misunderstanding, but my sexy clever woman didn't let the situation develop.
"You broke through."
"Yep. Couldn't suppress myself any longer."
"What? You were suppressing yourself all this time?"
"Let's talk about that later. Right now I need to stabilize myself."
I was given two days to put myself in order. And the results were more than encouraging.
Around thirty percent of the surface of my veins had turned the pale blue color of ice. That was my compatibility with the element, and it was very good. There would never again be such an easy way to level up compatibility. That train had left the station. From now on, even with my cheat code, I'd only be able to increase compatibility through hard work and understanding.
That was exactly where I kept spinning my wheels and couldn't find any logical explanation. The so-called Dao. Though this world didn't use that term.
The better you understand, the stronger you become. How do you increase that understanding? What does it depend on? Definitely not IQ.
Two days later, Feng Qianhui entered my room-cell and ordered me to follow her. When we reached the throne hall, it turned out all the fairies and senior disciples were already there, and new directives were being announced to the masses.
The Great Mistress of Frozen Cloud had found a young man with rare talent and couldn't pass him by. I was now her personal disciple. Just don't tell anyone. For now, it was a secret of the Palace.
Of course, people would learn I existed the moment I stepped outside. And naturally, I had no intention of staying here forever.
The personal-disciple trick was unexpected. Apparently, my clever woman thought Gong Yuxian would kill me, same as any of the fairies. Poor thing didn't understand that I behaved this shamelessly only with her.
There was a thought-out strategy behind it. The most important thing was to provoke emotion. They had that damned Ice Heart Art, after all. First, I needed to get through that barrier. Then I could start working. Love and hate are one step apart; irritation and affection are about ten kilometers apart. Of course, I had no illusions: the Ice Heart Art wasn't the same as the whims of girls back on Earth. Their feelings were literally sealed and frozen by cultivation. A frontal assault wouldn't melt that ice. But I knew the loophole in this technique perfectly well: push the emotions to a critical peak and the barrier simply can't withstand the pressure and cracks. So let her get angry—strong irritation and rage would cut the first breaches into her icy armor. I was ready to patiently walk that road.
So, before they taught me the Palace's technique, we had another conversation.
"Why did you cripple your future?"
"Cripple?"
"Do you think you're the only clever person in the world? Yes, your veins became much tougher and wider, but now you'll also need to gather ten times as much energy for every breakthrough."
"And?"
"Don't you understand? People on this continent fight for every single percent of cultivation speed, and you slowed yourself down this much."
"It doesn't matter. You're forgetting that I have Phoenix flame inside me."
"So what?" Feng Qianhui narrowed her eyes arrogantly. "Phoenix flame doesn't grant advantages like that, or the Divine Phoenix Empire would've ruled the entire continent long ago."
"It does. It's just hellishly painful, and very few people can endure it. My technique lets me use the cleansing heat without burning my veins to ash."
"Madman." Icy surprise flickered through the Great Mistress's voice. "Risking your life to widen your channels... That makes your situation easier, but you've still slowed your development. Yes, you'll be able to fight opponents an entire realm above you, but that's all. Is it worth it?"
"I know all the downsides. But without this, I wouldn't even have ended up in the Palace. Originally, I had no predisposition to the water element at all."
"So you've been holding yourself back all this time to raise your predisposition?"
"Exactly. And since I'm part of this Palace now, I'll tell you a secret. In my opinion, that was your biggest mistake."
"What do you mean?"
"Your disciples. You first raise them to the Nascent Profound Realm and only then accept them into the Palace, right?"
"Naturally. Otherwise they wouldn't survive."
"But elemental predisposition is decided precisely in the Elementary Profound Realm. Mu Bingyun wasn't stupid enough to leave you an openly defective technique as her legacy. She surely did it this way herself, and her disciples had far fewer problems."
"But disciples at the Elementary Profound Realm wouldn't survive in the Palace."
"Then she had some way to make sure they did. Maybe there are special rooms where the cold isn't as strong?"
"I'll need to think about what you've said."
"When are you going to pass the Frozen Cloud Art to me? By the way, I've heard there's an alternative method of transmitting the technique. A more pleasant one. Maybe we could use it?"
Smack! This time the blow was very strong, and a couple of bones crumbled. But I couldn't help myself. Canon in this world stated it very clearly: if a girl from Frozen Cloud Palace lost her virginity, her partner received not only the art itself, but also her elemental predisposition. Sigh. Such a wonderful shortcut, and they wouldn't let me take it...
My vision darkened and blood sprayed from my mouth. If I'd been an ordinary Elementary Profound Realm practitioner, that strike would've crippled me. But the Rage God's inheritance raging inside me worked exactly as intended. It greedily absorbed the foreign icy energy and used it for emergency welding on my ribs. The pain was wild, I was shaking, but my veins were being saturated with cold in overdrive. Once I'd more or less recovered, my future wife walked over and touched my forehead with one little finger, directly uploading information about the technique into my brain.
Another incomprehensible piece of cultivation bullshit. How do cultivators load that much information into their profound energy? Why doesn't that energy damage the receiving brain? So many questions where ordinary logic just grinds to a halt.
"I hope you won't regret your stupidity and at least reach the Sky Profound Realm in a hundred years."
"You'll be surprised."
"I hope so." And with that, she left me, while I began taking apart the so-called cultivation manual.
And now things became much more interesting and technical, but at the same time much more mysterious.
The trash manuals I'd bought from the Black Moon Merchant Guild were things I understood just by looking at them. Here, though, I was helpless at first. It had everything: the correct circulation of profound energy, correct breathing, correct mindset, and worst of all—understanding.
I'm not some local idiot. What the hell is "understanding ice"? Ice is a phase of water: a crystal lattice, slowed molecular motion. My Earth-born brain, accustomed to strict physics, simply refused to accept the local arrogant nonsense about the "will of frost" and the "intent of cold." I tried to calculate the technique through thermodynamics, but profound energy didn't give a damn about Newton's laws. My own education had trapped me in a mental cage. To take the first step in the Frozen Cloud Art, I somehow had to make my rational mind shut the fuck up. Probably for the first time in this life, I was genuinely stuck.
Interlude: Under the Weight of an Ancient Prophecy
The Great Mistress of Frozen Cloud allowed herself a heavy sigh. Scanning the snow-covered territory once more with her spiritual sense, she again sank into thought. It had long since become a habit—Feng Qianhui always worried about all her daughters. She considered the disciples her children, even the current Palace Mistress, who, despite the Ice Heart, could be rather hot-tempered.
The burden of the prophecy left by the Founder hung over her head like the sword of Damocles. But in the darkness of despair, a ray of hope had appeared. The young man—either a genius or a madman—could become either their salvation or their doom.
At first, she had taken him for a desperate youth determined to overcome the Phoenix God's curse. An ambitious undertaking that defied Heaven—the Great Mistress liked that. But the boy had brought more than information. Cleansing her profound veins had given Qianhui a real chance at breaking through soon. At first, she paid no attention to the boy's foolish flirting and his jokes about her being a "milf," writing it all off as humor. Then she realized he was completely serious. Funny. And somewhere deep down, beneath the thick layer of ice over her heart... even pleasant.
Qianhui was favorably disposed toward him, which didn't stop her from pragmatically making use of the young man. Even the body-tempering survivors from the Phoenix village, whom Qianhui had personally examined, had failed to reproduce his mysterious technique. That made the boy far too valuable. He needed to be bound to this home more securely. A search of his personal belongings revealed that his spatial ring contained a dual-cultivation manual covered in notes written in an unknown language. Surely she wasn't supposed to flirt with the young man herself? Nonsense. But finding a couple of prettier, sharper-witted disciples—that was an excellent plan.
The boy intrigued her more and more. And today's insane breakthrough, whose energy outburst eclipsed even the Earth Profound Realm of her fairies, merely confirmed it: this unbearable child was the very "profit" foretold by the prophecy. And the Great Mistress had no intention of letting that profit slip away.