Chapter 18: Mid-Stage Nascent Soul Realm

The water in the pool turned into half-frozen slush, crystalline frost spreading rapidly along the stone banks and freezing the weeping willow branches into pale jade sculptures.

Sitting just two feet away, I watched the scene in utter fascination.

Under the cold, luminous moonlight, her pale porcelain skin was bathed in a shimmering, azure-white aura. Droplets of frozen mist gathered along her dark, sweeping eyelashes, highlighting the breathtaking majesty of her features. Her soaked black hair drifted across the churning water like ink, while her sculpted, voluptuous curves seemed to pulse with a terrifying, celestial divinity that blurred the line between mortal flesh and primordial law.

She was devastatingly beautiful, and completely deadly.

As the vortex of ambient qi was aggressively devoured into her spiritual channels, the spiritual pressure surrounding her grew denser, heavier, and impossibly suffocating.

CRACK!

A sound like an ancient glacial sheet splitting in half detonated within her soul. The phantom cry of a celestial frost phoenix echoed silently across the sea of clouds, sending a shockwave that shattered the surface ice of the thermal pool into millions of glistening crystals.

The suffocating barrier that had held her at the Early Nascent Soul stage for the past three years shattered into dust. Her spiritual avatar solidified, expanding outward with immense, sovereign majesty as she officially broke through to the Mid-Stage Nascent Soul Realm.

Seeing my Senior Sister break through directly into the Mid-Stage Nascent Soul Realm didn’t surprise me in the slightest. She was, after all, a genuine prodigy whose talent had stunned the entire eastern Wilderness when we were younger.

In the cultivation world, reaching the Nascent Soul Realm before the age of forty was a feat achieved by maybe one in a million geniuses, and she had pulled it off at the absurdly young age of thirty-three. Over the past three years, I had assumed her lack of progress was simply because the Nascent Soul Realm was far more treacherous and profound to navigate than anything that came before it.

Now, sitting in the half-frozen spring beside her, I finally understood the truth. The technique wasn’t holding her back, her own heart had been shackling her all this time.

She had spent every waking hour shouldering the sect’s burdens and burning herself out to shield my desolate peak from the Elders’ Council. That deep-seated worry for my future had turned into an invisible mental knot, stalling her Dao Heart.

The second she saw that I had broken my bottleneck and finally taken a disciple to share my life with, that crushing weight evaporated into thin air.

She had broken through on the spot purely because her mind was finally free. A wave of warmth and genuine guilt tightened in my chest. To think that my years of stagnant, lazy cultivation had held back the person who cared about me most in this world.

I remained quiet, letting the chilled water lap against me while she slowly stabilized her surging spiritual channels.

After a dozen breaths, the swirling vortex of ambient qi dispersed into the moonlight. Su Wan’er’s long, dark eyelashes fluttered open, revealing almond eyes that glowed with a crystalline, azure radiance before settling back into their familiar, sharp brilliance. The suffocating spiritual pressure receded neatly into her body, but the faint, sovereign majesty lingering around her body was undeniable.

I leaned back against the submerged stone bench and flashed her a wide, heartfelt grin. "Congratulations on the breakthrough, Senior Sister. Truly worthy of our Master’s favorite prodigy."

With this advancement, she was undoubtedly the strongest cultivator in the entire Mystic Cloud Sect. In fact, unless some decrepit, thousand-year-old monster crawled out of an ancient tomb, she was easily one of the top powerhouses across the entire Heavenly Cloud Mountain Range. Considering her immense combat talent and terrifying frost technique, fighting opponents an entire stage above her wasn’t even a challenge for her.

"It was thanks to you, you brat," Wan’er murmured softly, her cheeks still carrying a faint post-meditation glow.

She let out a long, misty breath and stood up from the pool. Water cascaded off her porcelain shoulders, tracing down the intoxicating curve of her waist and thighs as she stepped up onto the stone deck without a single stitch of clothing on her magnificent body.

"The commotion from my breakthrough has probably rattled the entire mountain," she said, looking down the path toward the outer peaks. "The Elders’ Council will already be scrambling to find out what happened. I should go down and deliver the good news before Zhao Cang starts spreading rumors about an enemy attack."

As usual, she didn’t even bother asking if I wanted to accompany her to meet the Council. She knew me far too well; dragging me to a stuffy assembly hall full of scheming old men was like trying to pull teeth from a live dragon.

Standing in the water, I shamelessly let my eyes sweep from her slender ankles all the way up to her rounded hips and bare chest.

"Senior Sister," I whistled softly, shaking my head in pure admiration. "I have to say, you really do have a spectacular body."

WHOOSH-CLANG!

A razor-sharp, translucent ice blade materialized out of thin air, whistling past my cheek and embedding itself three inches deep into the stone tiles right beside my ear. A freezing chill grazed the side of my neck.

I blinked, slowly turning my head to look up.

Wan’er stood on the wooden deck, hands on her hips, glaring down at me with blazing cheeks and narrowed phoenix eyes. "Lu Chen! You have seen quite enough for one lifetime! Close your lecherous eyes before I freeze your pupils into marbles."

"Alright, alright, fair enough," I said with a chuckle, raising both hands in surrender. "I admit I’ve seen enough for today."

Grinning shamelessly, I stood up from the thermal pool. I was not someone who shyed away from showing off my body. I worked hard on it for decades, after all. And I was also proud of my little dragon down below, so I didn’t care if she saw me or my dragon.