The matriarch of the Su Fox Clan, one of the most powerful cultivators on the plane of Last Ascension, and undoubtedly the most dreaded one, was so flabbergasted she could not believe her eyes.
As a Harmonious Heaven 3rd Realm powerhouse with a cultivation base at both the Eternal Dominion Spirit Qi Cultivation and Eternal Incarnation Origin Qi Cultivation realms, she had seen many kinds of people on her journey to the apex.
Smart people, crazy people, ambitious people, and foolish people.
But none, not even the harbingers of the void she had killed and devils she had devoured, was as idiotic and so absolutely unhinged as her own foolish, spoiled princess of a daughter.
“Y-You idiot!” Her incarnation in the astral passages pointed a trembling finger at Su Nanya, “Why are you like this? Why must you always be so breathtakingly silly, crude, and self-sabotaging?” She wanted to pull her own hair out in frustration but barely mustered up the willpower to refrain. And to restrain her palms gilded in the rivers of the underworld from spanking her rebellious daughter's buttocks until they were red and sore. “Did the clan not raise you right? Tell me, Yaya, what manner of nonsense they teach you in my absence?”
“We are all-knowing, our plans all-encompassing. Of course, we have learnt the most scholarly of ways to manipulate the hearts of foolish men until they do our bidding,” Su Nanya’s own incarnation replied smugly.
How dare this stupid airhead be so smug!
The matriarch raged, “He is going to hate you. Your little lover boy is going to detest you with the very core of his being; the promise you have broken might have been implicit, but both you and he are not blind enough to deny its existence. You toyed with his heart. W-Why, daughter. This is not how you keep a husband!”
“… Mother dearest. Were you not against him? And he is not my lover!”
“I am, but I am fair to you and to all our subjects. He was supposed to have a right chance at changing my mind, then fail spectacularly, with his limited lifespan and frail mortality. I had planned out the words I would use to refuse him when he begged me for my daughter’s hand, and then I would have to stop your father from obliterating his very soul for daring even to try. It was all scripted; how many nights I have stayed up to write it! Yet now he is going to break your heart, and rightly so.”
“We feel as though your priorities are not in the right places.” Nanya’s astral incarnation frowned.
“I feel like you have also split your brain and intellect when you split your soul. How frightening the ancient arts of our ancestors are, to reduce my smart little girl to such a… a… a peasant of no foresight!”
“How dare you!” Nanya seethed. Her aura leaked out in the material plane, and a pulse of essence qi radiated out of her half-beast form. Every enemy man it touched, it ignited their yang into a blaze if they were too weak to resist it. Every enemy woman it hit, it would forcefully feed the yin qi in their body into an out-of-control positive feedback loop until their core, their dantian, would explode into a shower of flesh and blood.
The cultists surrounding her daughter fled in panic and regrouped.
“Scatter, my compatriots, and keep the corrupted grace at bay from afar. For I shall deal with her myself,” said the little abomination of void once named Youjin, fear, and spirit qi coalescing into puny weapons on his claws with the help of this little group of cultists.
He dared to attack her daughter directly, bearing down the full extent of his pathetic power at the Imperfect Heaven 3rd Realm. The link he had with the void lords hiding in their lost plane intensified, and the metaphysical space around the cavern trembled.
It would take a far stronger impact to sever the astral passage, however. But it was barely enough to disrupt part of the connection between the Revival Crown on top of her daughter’s head and the Revival Sword Tower many millions of miles to the south.
One of Su Nanya’s legs was sliced apart by a sword made of razor-sharp silk. If it were the usual case, it would regenerate back in less than a breath. But with the lost plane encroaching upon the cavern, and the authority of the Revival Sword Tower dwindling with the weakened Revival Crown, it took ten times longer, by the end of which, Su Nanya had sustained even more injuries.
Even if the Su were impervious to the feeble ways of mortality, they were only granted the full extent of that right where the Planar Consciousness, using the Revival Sword Tower and the Revival Crown as a proxy, could peer into unobstructed.
“… Daughter, at least can you tell me why you are doing this?” The Matriarch asked. Ever since her daughter failed her tribulation, and after her fiancé had returned from the Coiling Zenith Continent, she has not been the same.
Su Yafeng’s reports were periodic, and the Matriarch had always assumed they were exaggerated, her niece having a strange sadistic tendency to bully Su Nanya ever since they were children. But now it was apparent to the Matriarch that Su Yafeng had, in fact, never lied!
“You are showing the man you now love the cruelest part of yourself. You force him to witness as his friends and acquaintances die one by one, with you barely lifting a finger to protect them. You implicitly promise to protect those two maidens, but both are now corpses on the ground. It didn’t have to be like this, not with your power.”
“We don’t love him—”
“Oh, not this again—”
“And we have not broken our promise,” Nanya replied with a huff, averting her eyes. “We asked our boyfriend to trust in us, and he promised he would. We merely wish to ascertain if he was truthful before taking the ultimate step towards womanhood.”
“Womanhood?”
“We mean essence qi exchange partner-hood.”
“Partnership. It is partnership! Never mind. Indeed. You have not broken your promise. You have not… however! It is the principle of the matter that counts here. Because Ziyou Yung does not know you haven’t broken your promise.”
“We cannot possibly tell him, not with the restrictions of the clan and the Revival Crown. The Planar Consciousness would smite our many souls if we dared.”
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“I see. You thought you were being clever.”
“We are!” Nanya preened, not seeming to mind losing half her head.
The matriarch’s lips twitched. “Thus, you came up with this little plan. Yes, with his intellect, he can perhaps figure out your powers, abilities, current situation, and intentions. But was there not a better way to do it?”
“… We were being efficient!” Nanya said, but her voice was no longer as confident. She continued, “Yes, not only do we open up our secret to him with our intellect unbound, we take the chance to glean his truest of hearts towards us, too. He was hurt that our lov—we mean–our fond feelings for him were conditional, which they were not. But since he dared to doubt, is it not our right too to know if his love for us is conditional as well?”
“As well?”
Nanya glared at her defiantly. The matriarch shook her head in disappointment, “Listen, foolish daughter of mine. Your father and I have been married for millennia. It was not easy for us either; we have been separated for centuries at times. But it was only with honest communication and a grand lack of trickery that we have protected our marriage.”
“And a heavenly vow.” Nanya retorted.
“That came later!” The matriarch was speechless, “My point is, even a heavenly vow cannot protect a marriage if you disrespect its unwritten rules so blatantly. You are forcefully pushing your lover—”
“Boyfriend!”
“—into a corner here. You are making him choose between common sense and love. If he had full knowledge of your abilities, then sure, it would not even be a choice. But the horror on his face is real, as is the disbelief. His daydreams show how utterly disappointed he is with you. Can you not see his love turning into hatred at this betrayal of trust?”
Nanya flinched. In the material plane, she roared for the first time in pain and shapeshifted into her giant vixen form again. Her essence qi rained out in a storm, and her wounds healed in seconds despite the blockade from the Lost Plane.
“A proper relationship is where you make staying in love easier. You remove barriers preemptively; you make it so that common sense and love work together, hand in hand. Yet here you are, intentionally putting barriers in your relationship in some vain effort to make him prove his love. ‘If he were really in love with me, then he would love me even if I caused his friends to die!’ By what madness of the heavens did you get such a strange idea… ugh. Just… go back to Little Sun, will you not? He will still accept you with open arms. Because Ziyou Yung most definitely will not!”
“You don’t know that,” Nanya said. “You know nothing about him!”
“Little Sun is my sworn sister’s child. I know more about him than—”
“We meant our boyfriend Yung!”
“I know Ziyou Yung is smart. And you are most certainly not.”
“Then were we supposed to coddle him until he died of old age? Accept whatever future it is that you so unfairly assume for us? No, he must grow stronger. Even if… even if we have to put our mutual fond feelings on the line. For if he dies before us, what use is this ‘love’ you keep speaking of? We have to remind you once more, however, that we are fond of him, not in love with him, okay?”
“Daughter… why do you keep denying that you love him after all this time?”
“We are the Jade Empress, and the first lady of the heavens cannot bear to admit her true feelings for a mere peasant, a mere mortal soul that is not her husband. Some words can be admitted to one’s soul, but not said aloud.”
“I suppose that is so. I ought to have thought of that. Then the reason why you must show him your pitiful figure teetering at death’s door is to also get around the restrictions of the Revival Crown? Orchestrating all these deaths, the demise of these pitiful villagers who trusted you, just to prove a single point to your lover boy friend?”
“Just boyfriend.”
“For if you were to truly die, the heavenly vow with the Planar Consciousness will not restrict you from using your full power. If your cardinal body cultivating Essence Qi were to truly ‘die’ here, you would lose another occultic foxball, and with it, another part of your soul in this unknown lost plane. That is antithetical to the Planar Consciousness’s plans; it will set it back by centuries once more.”
Nanya only grumbled in response.
“If the clan elders could see you right now, they would spit blood,” the Matriarch said.
“Mother, we would give our all to our boyfriend Yung, but our souls hesitate still. Even you said you would not approve of him so easily, the terms you set are no better than suicide. What other method was left for us to appease our fractured soul that he is our one true boyfriend? How else do we be one with him without dying, our ordinal soul finally willing to accept his seed into our womb?”
“It feels strange to hear my daughter talk about her carnal frustrations so openly,” the matriarch was scandalized.
“Fine then, be a fake maiden. We admit honestly that our body aches to accept him every single night regardless of time and place, his pungent smell and tart taste. We feel like dying every time we have to stop our qi exchange mid-track, blocked at the very final step by the Jade Empress. But what choice do we have? One mere moment of pleasure is not reward enough for us to commit suicide,” Su Nanya said with a frustrated whimper.
She sounded so pitiful that even the matriarch had to admit it. A sexually frustrated maiden could indeed be so ruthless!
“You really cannot expect me to believe that all this heartache you are causing your boyfriend stems from your... angst?”
“Not angst! You are so unbelievably rude, you know that?” Nanya’s astral self angrily stomped her tail as her material body clawed through three cultists, “Tell me, Mother Rudest, suppose our plans weren’t to tackle our nightly conundrums but to gain your approval of him. Is there another method left to appease you so swiftly than to prove his undying love for us at death’s door? If you are so worried about future heartbreak, then why not suggest a better idea that will kill as many snakes with one stone's throw as our grand schemes? Go on, tell us, how can we sharpen his will not to fear death, to lay bare his soul for us, to have him deduce our powers and circumstances, and help him achieve his own manifold goals with but one dive into temporary despair?”
“Okay, I get your point. But hear this. Even if I approved of him, what will that change?” the matriarch said, “We, the Su, do not die before our time. Even if Ziyou Yung sharpens his will, look at his pathetic spirit root. It can barely handle a hundredth of the worship he is receiving. Do you truly believe he can reach the Harmonious Heaven Realm with such paltry talents? And you, even if you ruin your Jade Empress Nine by Nine Yin Meridians Physique due to this tantrum, you can still reach the 3rd realm of Harmonious Heaven in all three cultivation paths. My advice still stands, though we may have lost the right to give it to you after leaving you alone for so long… be with Ziyou Yung while he lives, then dedicate yourself to immortality when he dies. That is the most painless path for you.”
“So if he does make the correct choice here, you will approve of him?” Nanya smiled, looking straight into her mother’s eyes.
“Why is that the part you must dwell on,” the matriarch covered her face in annoyance, “Fine. If he does, we shall approve of him.”
Her daughter laughed, “We have exchanged sweet kisses many a time. He will return our trust infinitely!”
“He hates you now, fool!”
“He loves us,” Nanya laughed even as her body cracked under the qi attacks of seventeen Imperfect Heaven 2nd Realmer cultists. Her occultic foxball was visible through her wounded flesh. “He trusts us. He is smart, you said it. He will have no choice but to deduce that no matter what may occur—”
“Then, just in case, what if he runs? Will you hate him then?” the matriarch interrupted.
“It matters not. He has already given us far more than we can ever hope to repay; how can we ever bear to hate his lovely, crooked nose? We shall merely decide to protect our chastity a while longer. We shall test him again, and again, and again until our breath runs cold. Until he finally makes the correct deductions!”
“Fine, fine. Lovestruck fool.”
“We do not love him!”
“Alright, it is my error. Schizophrenic girl.”
“We have a fractured soul. What do you expect?”
The matriarch was speechless. She turned her gaze towards the man, the ‘boyfriend’ her daughter was so hopelessly in love with. The very boy her daughter did not hesitate to throw into a pit of despair just to actuate her own twisted visions of love.
All the matriarch could do was sigh.
“Now then, little man ensnared in my foolish daughter’s trap. What will you do?” Despite her misgivings, she really wanted to know. In fact, she needed to know. For although her daughter was a useless fool when it came to matters of the heart, the matriarch could not deny the cruel efficiency of Su Nanya’s methods.