The universe shrank to two things: the infinite abyss breathing an icy breath from below, and Xiao Lan's hand, an anchor of steel and frost clamped onto his forearm. The echo of that impossible power, that fusion of fire and void, still hummed in the air, leaving a silence deeper and heavier than before.
With a pull that displayed a strength belying her slender frame, Xiao Lan hauled him up from the brink of death. Lin Feng stumbled over the icy ledge, landing gracelessly in a heap of trembling limbs and tattered dignity. The contact broke. The unnatural warmth and connection vanished, leaving only the biting cold of the mountain and a tension so thick he could have cut it with his shovel—if it weren't currently accelerating its journey toward the planet's core.
Instantly, Lin Feng's years-honed survival instinct took over. He scrambled to his knees, bowing his head in his already well-practiced kowtow of a repentant worm.
"Senior Sister Xiao Lan!" his voice came out hoarse, a mix of genuine terror and calculated humiliation. "This disciple's incompetence nearly cost us our lives! I deserve to be thrown into that chasm for my uselessness. I beg Senior Sister to punish me for my clumsiness!"
He expected a cold reprimand, a sharp command, perhaps even a Qi-infused slap for his failure. What he did not expect was the silence.
When he dared to look up, he saw that Xiao Lan wasn't looking at him. She didn't even seem to have registered his apology. She stood motionless, her back partially turned to him, staring at the same hand that had just saved him. The last sparks of purple-black energy died out from her fingertips, but the memory of its power remained.
"Your energy…" she said, her voice barely a whisper, not directed at him, but at the air, at herself. "It wasn't Qi. It wasn't demonic spiritual energy. It was nothing recorded in the annals. What… was… that?"
She turned slowly, and the look in her eyes sent a new kind of fear—far more visceral than that of falling into an abyss—seizing hold of Lin Feng. The impassive coldness was gone. In its place, her jade eyes burned with a feverish intensity, a light not of anger, but of a curiosity so profound and penetrating that he felt as if he were being dissected, body and soul, right there on the frozen ledge. It was the gaze of a scholar who had just witnessed a fundamental law of nature break and was now obsessed with understanding why.
"Senior Sister, I… it's an old affliction, an unstable energy in my dantian…" he began to recite his usual excuse, but she cut him off with a simple wave of her hand.
"No." The word was sharp, final. "An 'affliction' is a parasite. It's entropic, destructive. What I felt… wasn't that. Your energy didn't fight my Purifying Fire." She took a step toward him, and Lin Feng had to suppress the urge to scuttle backward. "It didn't try to corrupt it. It catalyzed it. My Purifying Fire didn't reject it. It… absorbed it. It craved it."
Oh, no, Lin Feng thought, panic seizing his mind. I've gone from being trash to being interesting trash. That's infinitely worse. Regular trash gets ignored. Interesting trash gets put under a microscope. And in this world, microscopes usually come in the shape of a sword.
"I don't know what you're talking about, Senior Sister," he lied, his voice sounding weak even to his own ears. "I'm just a useless first-stage cultivator…"
"Stop insulting my intelligence, Lin Feng," she said, and her tone, while not cruel, silenced any further protest. Her use of his full name was strangely intimate and alarming. "You have survived bullies, a trial stampede, the birth of… something," her gaze flickered for an instant to the pocket of his robe where Glob was hiding, trembling, "a Shadow-Devourer, and a collapsing bridge. Your 'uselessness' is the most elaborate facade I have ever seen. But this…" her gaze snapped back to his, burning, "…this is different. This isn't cunning. This is a fundamental anomaly. And I need to understand it."
Without waiting for a reply, she turned and started walking along the ledge.
"Follow me. We need a secure location. A laboratory."
'Laboratory?' the word echoed in Lin Feng's brain. 'Does she mean a cave where she can perform an undisturbed autopsy on me?' My Scrap-Heap Survivor's Manual doesn't have a section for 'How to Politely Decline Being the Test Subject of a Fire Goddess with Scientific Tendencies.'
They found shelter in a shallow cave, shielded from the howling wind. It was barely a recess in the ice wall, but for Xiao Lan, it was sufficient. She turned to him, the aura of a researcher on the verge of a historic breakthrough completely replacing that of an elite disciple.
"Hold out your hand," she ordered.
Lin Feng froze.
"Senior Sister?"
"Your hand," she repeated, her voice laced with impatience. "I am going to touch you. And you are going to channel the smallest sliver of that energy you can manage. I want to replicate the effect in a controlled environment."
Lin Feng's mind raced. The physical contact had been accidental, a desperate act. To do it deliberately felt like playing with a power that could erase them both from existence. It was a dangerous intimacy, a threshold he did not want to cross.
Seeing his hesitation, Xiao Lan's expression softened, just a fraction.
"I will not harm you," she said, and her tone was pragmatic, not emotional. "This is not a punishment. I need to understand. Lin Feng, what happened on that bridge was not normal. A power that can erase matter like that… it could change the rules. Not just for me. For everyone."
Her argument wasn't a plea; it was a statement of fact. And there was something in her passion, in her fierce desire for knowledge, that was strangely compelling. It wasn't just about power for power's sake; it was about unraveling one of the universe's mysteries. In spite of himself, Lin Feng felt a pang of his own curiosity.
Slowly, with the feeling of a condemned man offering his neck to the executioner's axe, he held out his right hand. It was trembling.
Xiao Lan stepped forward and placed her palm against his. Her skin was cool, smooth, and the contact sent an electric jolt through Lin Feng's body. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling. It was a resonance, like a bell finding its matching frequency.
"Now," she whispered, her eyes fixed on their joined hands. "Just a thread. The smallest you can conceive. Don't force it. Let it flow to me."
Lin Feng closed his eyes. He focused on the sea of chaos within his dantian. Usually, he fought to contain it, to suppress it. Now, for the first time, he had to do the opposite: willingly release a part of it. It felt like opening a hungry tiger's cage by just an inch.
He isolated an infinitesimal thread of that dark, cold energy and, with a mental effort that left him slick with cold sweat, guided it down his arm and into his palm.
He felt the precise instant the energy left him and entered her. Through their connection, he sensed Xiao Lan's shock, followed by a choked gasp. He felt her Purifying Fire rise, not to fight, but to welcome the thread of chaos, enveloping it, merging with it in a dance of perfect opposites.
"Open your eyes," Xiao Lan commanded, her voice taut with concentration.
Lin Feng obeyed.
Xiao Lan had raised her other hand. From her palm bloomed a single flame. It was the size of a lotus, and it was the most terrifying and beautiful thing Lin Feng had ever seen. The base of the flame burned with the familiar pure, holy gold and white of her power. But as it rose, the colors transformed, swirling into a vibrant violet and then, at the very tips, a black so deep it seemed to drink the light from the cave. It did not flicker. It produced no smoke. It was a stable manifestation of pure, conceptual power.
"Incredible…" Xiao Lan breathed, her voice filled with awe.
'Incredible' is one word for it, Lin Feng thought. 'Harbinger of my untimely demise' is another. I'm a battery. I've gone from being a fertilizer specialist to a Walking Spirit Battery, Lin Feng Model.
"Now, the test," Xiao Lan said.
Her gaze fixed on a massive icicle on the other side of the small cave, as thick as an ancient tree trunk. With a fluid motion, she pushed the flame forward.
There was no roaring explosion. There was no hiss of steam. The purple-black flame touched the icicle, and it simply… vanished. The section the flame touched was gone to nothingness, leaving no trace of water, dust, or residual energy. It was a silent, perfect, and absolute annihilation.
The rest of the icicle collapsed with a thunderous crack of shattering ice, filling the cave with its echo.
Xiao Lan cut the flow of energy, and they broke contact. They both gasped, as if they had been holding their breath. Lin Feng staggered, feeling incredibly drained. That tiny thread of energy had cost him more than the entire fight against the bullies.
Xiao Lan, however, looked… revitalized. Her cheeks held a faint flush, and her eyes shone with an exultant triumph. And then, she did something Lin Feng never thought he would see.
She smiled.
It wasn't his own wry smirk or the sadistic grin of a bully. It was a genuine smile that completely transformed her face. It was not an expression of warmth, but of pure, unbridled intellectual wonder. The smile of someone who has glimpsed the face of fundamental truth and found it fascinating.
"The consumption of my own spiritual energy was almost zero," she said, her voice full of a wonder she made no attempt to hide. "Your energy acted as a conceptual amplifier. It multiplied my power's effect by a factor of ten, perhaps more, while the cost remained the same. Do you understand what that means?"
Lin Feng understood perfectly. It meant his value to her had just skyrocketed from "useful" to "absolutely indispensable." And in the world of cultivation, being indispensable to someone powerful was both the greatest armor and the most secure cage.
He straightened up, his mind already whirring, adapting to the new reality. His role had fundamentally changed.
Xiao Lan looked at him, her expression turning serious again, but the old distance was gone. There was a connection now, a shared purpose.
"Your task has changed, Lin Feng," she said, her tone formal but weighted with new meaning. "Carrying my gear and standing watch are still part of your duties. But your primary function, from now on, is… to assist me. You will be my cultivation partner. We will study this energy of yours together. We will discover its limits."
She paused, letting the weight of her words sink in.
"In return," she continued, "I will guarantee your safety. No one in the sect will touch you again. I will share a portion of the spirit pills and resources we obtain. And I will teach you. I cannot teach you how to control that, but I can teach you how to fight, how to channel normal Qi, how to strengthen your body and mind so you do not crumble under the strain of your own power."
It was a contract. An offer so monumental Lin Feng's mind could barely process it. Protection, resources, tutelage… from the sect's number one genius. The price was simple: become the living key to her power, a guinea pig in the world's most dangerous experiment.
"I accept, Senior Sister," he said, and this time, there was no falsehood in his voice.
It was a pact with a goddess, a deal forged on the edge of an abyss. Dangerous, unpredictable, and the greatest opportunity he had ever had.
Glob pulsed curiously from his pocket, as if it, too, understood that the rules of the game had just drastically changed.
Well, Scrap-Heap Survivor's Manual, Lin Feng thought, a slow, wry smile finally returning to his lips. Time to add a new chapter: "Chronicles of the Chaotic Battery and the Divine Fire Scientist."