The echo of the Guardian's words—destined companions—reverberated in the sanctuary's silence, not as a sound, but as an inescapable truth that rewrote the very foundations of their worlds. Lin Feng, the fertilizer specialist, the survivor from the scrap heap, looked at Xiao Lan, the goddess of fire, the unattainable genius, and for the first time, he didn't see the infinite chasm that separated them, but a terrifying and dizzying bridge forged by fate.
Xiao Lan, for her part, felt her Dao, built on the logic of self-sufficiency and solitary ambition, fracture before a variable she had never calculated: interdependence.
The Guardian's ancestral voice resonated in their minds again, correcting their understanding with the patience of a star watching a planet's birth.
"Your perception is limited, children of chance and necessity," the entity communicated, its form a whirlwind of contained galaxies. "What you experienced on the ice bridge was a crude echo, a temporary amplification born of panic. The true power of a Harmonic Bond is not a momentary impulse; it is a permanent fusion of essences, a grafting of the other's Dao onto your own soul. Open your being to one another, allowing chaos and order to mix and create something new, something whole. It is the ultimate display of trust, for in that union, each of you is completely defenseless before the other. A single treacherous intention, a single thought of greed, and you would both be annihilated."
The implication chilled Lin Feng's blood. This wasn't a simple alliance. It was a mutual surrender of their lives, a pact where betrayal was synonymous with self-destruction.
To demonstrate its lesson, the Guardian gestured with an appendage of starlight. Space bent, and from the icy darkness where it once rested, the Thousand-Year Frost Lotus appeared, floating between them. Its glow was a symphony of power: the moon-frost petals radiated a pure and absolute Yin, while the golden stamen in its heart pulsed with the warmth of a trapped sun.
"This treasure," the Guardian continued, "which to you, Fire Phoenix, was a balanced poison, will now become the crucible for your first, true harmonization."
"Take each other's hands," the ancestral voice commanded.
The command, simple and profound, hung in the air thick with primordial energy. Lin Feng felt a knot of panic in his stomach. Absolute vulnerability. Those words echoed in his mind, a warning drum. He looked at Xiao Lan, expecting to see disdain in her eyes, the refusal to be chained to "scrap" like him.
But what he found in her jade eyes was not contempt. He saw the same whirlwind he felt inside: fear, yes, but also a burning ambition, a scientific curiosity that surpassed terror, and a solemn acknowledgment that their paths, however strange, could no longer be separated. Their gazes met and held in the eternal silence of the sanctuary, and in that instant, they made a wordless decision.
With ritualistic slowness, as if sealing a treaty that could remake or destroy worlds, they raised their hands. Lin Feng's, calloused and marked by years of servile labor, met hers, slender, pale, and perfect as jade. The contact was neither warm nor cold. It was a resonance. A tuning fork finding its perfect note in the void.
"Begin," the Guardian instructed. "Fire Phoenix, channel your Dao. Bearer, be the forge."
Xiao Lan closed her eyes. A stream of white-gold light flowed from her body, her Purifying Fire in its purest, most controlled form. The power flowed down her arm and into Lin Feng. He braced for the pain, for the violent reaction of his Chaotic Heart, but none came.
His inner chaos, the storm that always threatened to consume him, did not fight against Xiao Lan's energy. It welcomed it. Like a black hole drawing in light, his dantian absorbed the Purifying Fire. Inside that abyssal forge, the fire was not extinguished; it was stripped of its intent, of its "law," and imbued with the very essence of primordial chaos. A power that was neither creation nor destruction, but the possibility of both.
"Now, return it," the Guardian's voice boomed.
With an effort that left him in a cold sweat, Lin Feng guided the newly fused energy back to Xiao Lan. She let out a choked gasp as she felt it. It was her own power, but transformed, amplified, imbued with a terrifying potentiality. It was the purple and black flame they had created by accident, but now stable, controlled, flowing between them.
With this energy as her weapon, Xiao Lan turned to the Frost Lotus. She cast a thread of the fused flame, and it touched one of the frozen petals. There was no clash of Yin and Yang. The lotus's energy, wild and pure, was conceptually broken down; its Yin and Yang essence separated and absorbed by Xiao Lan at a dizzying rate. In turn, a portion of that already tamed energy, now catalyzed by Lin Feng's chaos, flowed back to him—not to increase his cultivation, but to temper his body, to forge his meridians with the strength of a celestial treasure.
The cycle began. A river of power flowed from her to him, was transformed, returned to her, refined the lotus, and finally, a part of that legacy strengthened him. It was a dance of absolute trust, a precarious balance on the edge of a cosmic razor.
As the cycle intensified, the connection deepened. It was no longer a simple transfer of energy. Their souls, their essences, opened to one another. And Lin Feng, whose being acted as the conduit, was swept into the current of her memories.
The vision struck him with the force of a tidal wave.
He saw a Xiao Lan he didn't know. A girl with bright eyes and a radiant smile, the adored princess of a prosperous clan whose symbol was a cinnabar phoenix. He saw the warmth of a towering father's embrace and the tenderness in the gaze of a gently beautiful mother. He saw laughter, life, a world of warmth that seemed like a relic from another time, a fantasy.
The scene shattered like a mirror.
Fire. Screams. The smell of blood and ash. He saw her clan, her family, being slaughtered by shadowy figures with corrupt auras. He saw her father and mother fighting with the fury of the desperate, dying back-to-back to create an opening, to hide their only daughter in a secret compartment beneath the ancestral hall's floor. He saw the final, heartbroken goodbye in her mother's eyes before the darkness claimed her.
He saw her, alone, huddled in the darkness for days, listening to the silence that replaced the screams. When she finally emerged, her home was a smoldering ruin and her joy, a ghost. He saw an elder from the Scarlet Cloud Sect, a distant scout, find her amidst the rubble. But the girl he took with him was no longer a princess. She was a specter with empty eyes, her hatred so deep and icy that it had frozen into a mask of perfect indifference.
The pain of the vision, her trauma, became his own. And in that moment, Xiao Lan felt his intrusion. It wasn't a hostile act, but the unavoidable consequence of their union. She felt her soul laid bare, her deepest wound touched by another being for the first time. The shock, the violation, shook her to her core. Her heart raced, her iron will wavered, and her concentration broke for a fraction of a second.
That fraction of a second was a catastrophe.
The cycle of power veered violently. A wave of the lotus's Yin energy, pure and frigid but not yet refined by the Purifying Fire, struck Lin Feng directly from within, bypassing the catalysis of his chaos. He felt his soul being torn apart. A white-hot, absolute pain bloomed in his chest.
"Argh!"
A mouthful of blood, dark and nearly frozen, burst from his lips, staining the obsidian floor.
Seeing him wounded, feeling his pain caused by her hesitation, something ignited within Xiao Lan: a pang of concern and a fierce, protective fury. She suppressed her emotional turmoil with the will of a goddess, crushing her own trauma beneath the weight of present necessity. With even more desperate and precise control, she re-established the cycle's rhythm and forced the runaway energy back into its channel.
Together, on the brink of the abyss, they managed to stabilize and finalize the refinement of half of the Frost Lotus.
The refined energy finally flooded their bodies, a reward earned through pain. They separated, panting, exhausted but irrevocably transformed. A new, uncomfortable intimacy hung between them; he had glimpsed her broken soul, and she knew that he knew.
In Xiao Lan's body, the dual energy of the lotus, perfectly balanced by Lin Feng's chaos, swirled. Her bottleneck to the Foundation Establishment Realm shattered. The energy didn't stop there. Her power condensed and formed a spinning core of golden light in her dantian. She had reached the Golden Core Realm. But the energy kept flowing, expanding and solidifying her core at an astonishing rate, pushing her directly to the mid-stage of the Golden Core Realm. A breakthrough that should have taken her decades of solitary meditation, achieved in a single, terrifying ritual.
Lin Feng, on the other hand, felt his cultivation realm remain anchored in the first stage of Qi Condensation. But the change in him was equally profound. His body had been reforged. His meridians, once like rusted pipes, were now wide and supple, tempered by celestial energy. His physical strength and mental acuity had taken a qualitative leap. He felt a power in his fists comparable to a cultivator in the mid-stage of the Meridian Opening Realm, the second great realm. He was thrilled, confused, and terrified by his anomalous progress.
The Guardian nodded, its form of stars twinkling with what seemed like satisfaction. "You have proven your worth and the strength of your bond, even through trauma and pain. You have endured the first trial."
The entity turned to Lin Feng, who was still wiping blood from his lips.
"Now, Bearer of Chaos, it is time for you to receive your true inheritance. The knowledge that will guide you and protect you from those who hunted your ancestors. Prepare to receive... the Primordial Library."
In the instant before the torrent of infinite knowledge began, before the universe itself poured into the mind of the young man who had only known manure, the sanctuary filled with an anticipation so dense it was, in itself, a form of power.