Chapter 487 Great Ascension

Then applied a surge of heat, melting the shard instantly without damaging the surrounding tissue, restoring blood flow to her heart.

"Her legs," Yan Zhaoge gasped, his amber eyes wide with horror as he assessed the damage. "Jiu Zui, the Seers... they broke her joints. The spiritual pathways are completely severed. She’s been crippled."

"HEAL HER!" Jiu Zui roared, his hands glowing with frantic, unstable Qi as he tried to pour his own life force into her shattered knees. "I DON’T CARE WHAT IT TAKES, ZHAOGE, HEAL HER RIGHT NOW!"

"I am trying! The cosmic residue is blocking the cellular regeneration!" Yan Zhaoge cursed viciously, his hands moving frantically over her legs, sweating as he fought the decay. "You bastards! You cowardly, bureaucratic bastards!"

The two most powerful men in the Azure Empire, the Sovereigns who could level mountains and boil oceans, were reduced to panicked messes on the floor of the room, desperately trying to stitch together the broken pieces of a girl the universe had just discarded.

But Lin Ji’an did not scream.

She did not cry.

She didn’t thrash in agony, and she didn’t curse the Heavens.

She lay on her side, her cheek resting against the cold glass.

The severed, glowing crimson cord of the Red Thread hung limply from her wrist, a tragic, bleeding reminder of a bond that had been amputated.

She stared blankly at the exact spot where the ascension pillar had vanished.

Her silver-flecked eyes were wide, dry, and completely devoid of life. There was no rage, no culinary spite, no tyrannical Vanguard Leader, and no vulnerable, traumatised girl.

It was as if the ice shard hadn’t just frozen her meridians; it had frozen her soul.

It was as if Wangchen’s cold, dead, unfamiliar gaze had reached inside her chest and simply turned off the lights.

She was a hollow, empty shell.

Jiu Zui pulled her upper body into his lap, cradling her head against his chest, rocking her back and forth, sobbing into her silver hair. "I’m here, brat. Master is here. We’re going to fix this. We’re going to get you home."

Yan Zhaoge gritted his teeth, his amber eyes burning with murderous fury, continuing to pour his Qi into her ruined legs.

But Ji’an did not respond to the warmth of her master’s embrace, nor to the healing of the Overtime Boss.

She just stared into the space.

The universe had finally served its last course.

And the Chef had nothing left to say.

***

The summit of the Drunken Peak had not seen this level of orchestrated, emotional devastation since the day its Sovereign had sworn off cheap rice wine for an entire afternoon.

Five years had passed since the apocalyptic incident at the Stargazing Tower.

Five years since Sovereign Jiu Zui and Sovereign Yan Zhaoge had descended from the heavens like avenging war gods, covered in ash and blood, carrying a paralysed, bleeding, unconscious girl between them.

The Azure Empire had never been the same.

The Celestial Sword Sect had never been the same.

And the Drunken Peak, once a chaotic, grease-stained haven for rogue culinary experiments and drunken brawls, had transformed into the most heavily fortified, fiercely protected sanctuary on the entire continent.

For half a decade, the name of the Sovereign of the Eternal Cloud Peak had been strictly forbidden.

If an outer disciple even accidentally uttered a syllable that sounded like that, they would find themselves suspended upside down over a boiling vat of chili oil by a deeply traumatised master.

But today, the suffocating tension that had gripped the mountain for five years had finally fractured, giving way to a bizarre, overwhelming mixture of grief, hysterical weeping, and victorious triumph.

It was Ascension Day.

The courtyard outside the main bamboo pavilion was packed to the absolute brim. Most of the senior disciples from the various peaks had gathered, forming a silent ring of respect. Some were weeping silently, dabbing at their eyes with crisp silk sleeves. Some were smiling with a fierce, trembling pride.

But it was the junior disciples, the absolute worst troublemakers, the brats who had spent the last five years being terrorized by a heavy cast-iron spatula, who were currently staging a complete, psychological collapse.

"I don’t want her to go!" wailed Little Ming, a junior cook who had once been forced to peel a thousand potatoes for slightly over-salting a broth. He was currently lying face-down in the dirt, pounding the earth with his fists. "Who is going to yell at me for my knife angles?! The new Head Chef is too nice! He just tells me to ’try my best’! I don’t want to try my best! I want the Iron Wok Demon to threaten my kneecaps!"

"We’ll never eat the Phoenix-Ember Braised Pork again!" another junior sobbed hysterically, blowing his nose into his sect-issued sash. "The Heavens are stealing our menu! It’s a culinary injustice!"

But the junior disciples’ wails were mere background noise compared to the catastrophic despair radiating from the front row of the Vanguard Retinue.

Gu Zhiwei, the Holy Son of the Azure Empire, was currently putting on a display of grief so spectacular that it was actively warping the ambient lighting.

The golden retriever was on his hands and knees. He was weeping so hard that his holy light was strobing like a faulty emergency beacon.

"Fairy Ji’an!" Zhiwei bellowed to the heavens, tears cascading down his perfectly sculpted face in thick, dramatic rivulets. "How can you leave us in this mortal dust?! The sun will never rise with the same warmth! My pectorals have lost their purpose! Who will I flex for when the demonic beasts attack?! Take me with you! I can fit in your luggage! I can serve as a highly reflective, muscular footstool!"

Lu Jianheng, standing rigidly beside the weeping golden retriever, looked disgusted, though his eyes were suspiciously red, and his jaw was clenched so tightly a vein throbbed in his temple.

"Control yourself, Zhiwei, you are embarrassing the Vanguard," Jianheng hissed, furiously polishing the hilt of Autumn Frost to hide his trembling hands. "The Commander is ascending to the Higher Realm. It is a moment of peerless martial glory. We must bid her farewell with dignity, not act like... like abandoned whelps!"

Jianheng immediately choked on the last word, letting out a highly undignified, tragic sniffle, turning his head away to aggressively blink back his own tears.

Away from the chaotic wailing of the courtyard, situated at the very edge of the mountain cliff, stood the oldest peach blossom tree on the Drunken Peak. Its gnarled branches stretched out over the sea of clouds, bursting with vibrant shades of pink and white, defying the natural seasons through concentrated spiritual density.

Sitting beneath the canopy of falling petals was Lin Ji’an.

The passage of five years had not diminished the Apex Anomaly. It had refined her.

It had taken the chaotic, explosive, spatula-wielding rage of a cornered transmigrator and crystallised it into something infinitely more dangerous, more beautiful, and terrifyingly serene.

She was twenty-two years old now. She had reached the absolute apex of mortal cultivation: the Great Ascension stage.

The glitching disguise artifact she had worn for years had shattered the day her spiritual pathways re-routed themselves around her pulverised knees. With her true cultivation stabilizing, the visual anomaly had corrected itself.

Her hair was no longer the luminescent, ethereal silver that had defined her youth. It had returned to its natural, original, inky black, a cascading waterfall of midnight silk that tumbled down her back, absorbing the sunlight rather than reflecting it.

Her silver-flecked eyes had settled into a deep, endless, abyssal black, radiating a calm, predatory intelligence that made even the most hardened sect elders avert their gaze. She had bloomed like a rare, lethal ice flower, her beauty maturing from a sharp, tomboyish charm into a devastating, untouchable, sovereign grace.

She sat in a wheelchair.

It was not a medical device.

It was a masterpiece of engineering, a throne forged from dark, petrified starmetal and reinforced with frost arrays. The wheels hovered exactly one inch off the ground, sustained by a kinetic repulsion field.

Ji’an did not look like a broken girl in a chair.

She looked like an empress holding court.

She was dressed in pristine, flowing white robes.

They were not the standard robes of the Celestial Sword Sect.

They were Sovereign-class garments, spun from the finest, heaviest frost-silk, embroidered with faint, shimmering silver clouds at the hems.