A master of both medicine and martial arts, he picked up a beautiful CEO as his wife.

The crisp sound came from a medicine jar.

When Ye Feng pushed open the door, Jiang Wenqing was squatting on the ground, frantically cleaning up the broken porcelain. Seeing Ye Feng come out, he hurriedly stood up, his face flushed red.

"Uncle Ye, I... my hand slipped."

Which can?

"The black energy that was forced out last night, you told me to keep it and put it in this jar..." Jiang Wenqing said with her head down, "I was carrying it to the alchemy room when I tripped."

Ye Feng walked over and squatted down. Broken porcelain shards were scattered all over the ground. The little bit that had been sealed in the jar had long since dissipated into the air, leaving only a very faint smell.

Ye Feng rubbed one of the broken pieces of porcelain between two fingers. It was still slightly cool to the touch.

"It's alright." He stood up, clapped his hands, and said, "Sweep it up, don't use your hands, use a shovel."

"Yes!" Jiang Wenqing felt as if he had been granted a pardon and turned to get his tools.

Ye Feng stood there, watching the boy's retreating figure for a couple of breaths. Just two breaths.

Last night, this young man ran around doing chores, bringing water and medicine; he really put in a lot of effort. It's rather coincidental that such a jar of medicine broke so easily.

Accidental slips of the hand are nothing new. Ye Feng suppressed that thought for the time being. He still had a lot of things to do.

The quiet room behind the alchemy room was where Master used to seclude himself to refine elixirs, but Cen Heming has now cleared it out. The stone walls are thick, and so is the door; when the door is closed, you can't even hear the mountain breeze.

Ye Feng sat cross-legged on a futon, palms facing upwards. Lin Yuqing sat opposite him, a foot apart.

"That's it?" she asked uncertainly. "Last time in Dongyang, wasn't it supposed to be..."

"Last time it was about pressure," Ye Feng said. "This time it's about practice."

He placed the half of the jade slip on the ground between the two of them.

"Master, the first half of this book is all nonsense, teaching you how to control your Qi and how to return to your origin. The real stuff can be summed up in just four words."

Which four?

"Attract them, do not reject them."

Lin Yuqing blinked.

"I understand half of it," she said honestly. "Last night, when you were expelling the dark energy from those people, on the thirteenth attempt, you yourself couldn't take it anymore. Then you took a half step back and closed your eyes—was that what you were doing then?"

Ye Feng smiled. He had always known how this woman had risen to prominence in the business world. She remembered every detail and only ever asked about the most important things.

"Yes," he said. "I used to treat that deathly energy as an enemy. I would block it, obstruct it, and burn it with the blazing sun. The harder I burned it, the more fiercely it rebounded. My master said that I shouldn't block it. I should guide it."

He stretched out his hand, palm up.

"Pass over a wisp of your energy. Just a wisp."

Lin Yuqing obeyed, placing her hand on his palm. That wisp of Yin energy flowed over along the invisible line of the He Mai meridian.

Ye Feng closed his eyes.

All his previous meridian combinations followed the same path: her yin energy entered, merged with his yang energy, condensed into one, and together they suppressed that death energy.

This time, he did the opposite. He first loosened the band around his heart meridian, releasing a sliver of death energy. Cold. That familiar coldness crept up his meridians.

Immediately afterwards, he spread the extreme yin energy that Lin Yuqing had brought in front of the death energy—not to block it, but to create a path. The death energy followed this path.

It moved extremely fast, like a snake that had smelled blood. But with each step it took, the layer of yin energy in front of it grew thicker; with each thicker layer of yin energy, it slowed down. By the third cycle, its domineering and ferocious power had been worn down to pieces.

The fifth cycle had begun. A change had occurred. Ye Feng's entire body jolted.

The death energy circled to the end of the empty meridian that had been prepared in his body, then suddenly turned and, as he wished, drilled into his palm.

It wasn't dissipated. It wasn't consumed. It was brought there by him. Ye Feng slowly opened his eyes and looked down at his palm.

There, a small clump of something clung to him. Tiny. Like a grain of snow dusted with ash. It hung half an inch above his palm, neither falling nor dispersing, rising and falling slightly with his breath.

That was the deathly aura within him that had claimed his life for six years. Now, it lay quietly in his palm.

"This..." Lin Yuqing's eyes widened.

"Don't touch it," Ye Feng said.

He clasped his hands together. The single "snowflake" vanished silently. The quiet room remained silent for a long time.

"For the past six months," Ye Feng began, his voice a little hoarse, "the first thing I did every morning when I woke up was to count the accounts."

"What accounts are you counting?"

"Let's see how many cycles I can control." He stared at his palm. "When it was around ten, I felt okay. When it got to five or six, I started having trouble sleeping at night. On the day it got to two or three, I was on the mountaintop, fighting Shang Zhi while thinking to myself—what would you do if I died here?"

Lin Yuqing's hand clenched tightly.

"And now?"

"There are eight now." Ye Feng looked up, grinned, and said, "And for the first time, I realized that this thing isn't just for dying. It can also be used."

At that moment, Lin Yuqing saw something in his eyes that she had never seen before. It wasn't ruthlessness, hatred, or that nonchalant, roguish demeanor.

For the first time, someone who had been pinned against a wall for six years removed their hand from the wall.

"Again," she said, placing her hand back on top of it. "Didn't you say my breath grows quickly in the mountains? Let's strike while the iron is hot."

Aren't you tired?

"I have six meetings a day in Dongyang," she glanced at him, "What's so special about that?"

The second cycle, the third… and so on until the seventh cycle, a strange phenomenon occurred. The thin layer of air between their clasped hands lit up.

It wasn't luminescence. It was as if someone had splashed a small bowl of moonlight into that tiny gap. In the clear light, there was a thin, red-hot thread.

One cold, one hot; one soft, one hard—they intertwined into one. In the courtyard outside the meditation room, a group of disciples who were sweeping the floor all stopped.

"What's that smell?" someone sniffed.

It's not fragrance, nor medicine. It's that stuffy, fresh smell in the air when a thunderstorm is about to hit but isn't.

Cen Heming stood under the pillars of the corridor, looking up at the direction of the quiet room, his brows furrowing little by little.

"Uncle-Master?"

"Shut up," the old man waved his hand.

He closed his eyes and probed that direction with his divine sense—the next instant, his expression changed drastically. The two streams of energy had twisted into one within them.

He had only heard of something once in his life from his senior brother's drunken ramblings. — Two thousand years ago, it was this very energy that pressed that thing down from underground.

Cen Heming opened his eyes, stared at the heavy stone door, and his Adam's apple bobbed.

"Senior brother," he murmured, "during those six months, were you really sending him down the mountain to find medicinal ingredients...?"

"Should we send him away to go down the mountain and get married?"