Crystal sat in her rocking chair outside in the courtyard, her body moving in a gentle rhythm as she looked up at the stars scattered across the night sky. The moon was starting to rise, casting pale silver light across the Asura estate's grounds.
She looked around at her immediate surroundings. There on the ground beside her chair lay her blade—the blood-red katana she'd taken from the weapons vault in her grandfather's courtyard. The weapon gleamed in the moonlight, still beautiful despite the violence it had witnessed.
Scattered all around the courtyard were wooden pieces. Training dummies that had once stood upright and whole were now reduced to splinters and fragments. Some had been cut cleanly through. Others showed signs of repeated strikes, their surfaces marked with countless blade impacts before they'd finally collapsed.
Crystal looked down at her hands. They were bleeding from hours of practice, the skin torn and raw where she'd gripped the sword too tightly or for too long. Blood dripped slowly from her palms, leaving dark spots on her robes and the stones beneath the rocking chair.
She looked away from the damage, her expression distant and contemplative.
Just then, Mari entered the courtyard from the main house. She stopped when she saw her lady sitting there surrounded by destroyed training equipment, bleeding hands visible even from a distance.
Mari wanted to speak. Wanted to ask—no, beg—Crystal to stop this self-destructive training regimen. She'd protect her lady, would stand between Crystal and any threat, would use her Master Phase cultivation to ensure nothing harmed the young miss.
But when she'd said exactly that earlier today, Crystal had refused. Had looked at Mari with those cold, determined eyes and said simply: "No. I need to do this myself."
Mari had tried to change her mind, tried to explain the dangers of what Crystal was attempting. Because what her lady was doing could seriously harm her body in ways that might never heal properly.
Crystal's Chaos World was sealed. That meant she couldn't cultivate through normal methods, couldn't channel qi through her meridians and dantian to strengthen her body and expand her internal realm.
But there was a cultivation technique that didn't require a functioning Chaos World. A method so different, so difficult and brutal that most cultivators would never consider it even if they knew it existed.
It involved absorbing pure, unfiltered chaos energy directly into the physical body. Not processing it through the dantian first, not refining it into usable qi. Just raw power forced into flesh and bone and muscle.
The technique used the Mind Sea to direct this process. The cultivator's mental cultivation level would enhance their senses and movement speed, allowing them to perceive and react faster than their body's physical capabilities alone would permit.
Depending on the Mind Sea's development, this method could theoretically make someone as powerful as a Mortal Phase expert despite having no accessible Chaos World. But the depth of that power, the actual combat effectiveness, would be entirely determined by the Mind Sea's realm and stability.
For a normal cultivator, the process was straightforward: use the dantian to absorb chaos energy from the world, process it through established pathways, store it safely in the Chaos World's landscape.
But what Crystal was attempting was fundamentally different and exponentially more dangerous. She wanted to use her Mind Sea to will the energy directly into her body, bypassing all the safety mechanisms that prevented cultivators from being torn apart by unrefined power.
The Mind Sea's realm would determine how much raw energy her body could handle before it broke down. Too much too fast, and her organs would rupture. Her bones would splinter. Her nervous system would overload and burn out.
This was what Crystal had been trying to accomplish for the past three days. Hour after hour of meditation and visualization, attempting to open channels that weren't meant to exist, forcing her body to accept power it wasn't designed to contain.
Mari stood in the courtyard looking at her lady with worry and helplessness warring in her expression.
Just then, a maid entered the courtyard from a different entrance. She approached carefully, clearly hesitant to interrupt whatever Crystal was doing.
Crystal, still lost in contemplation of the stars while rocking gently in her chair, looked down from the sky and smiled at the approaching maid.
The maid was a bit startled by the smile—it wasn't the cold, calculating expression Crystal usually wore lately, but something softer, more approachable. The maid smiled back uncertainly.
"My lady, you have a visitor," the maid said with a respectful bow.
Crystal looked at the maid with interest, her rocking chair slowing to a stop. "Oh? Who has come calling at this hour?"
It was quite late, well past the time when social visits would normally occur. Anyone arriving now either had urgent business or was being deliberately unconventional.
"My lady, it is Lady—"
Crystal interrupted before the name could be spoken. She held up one bleeding hand in a gesture that stopped the maid mid-sentence.
"Don't worry. I know what to do."
The maid blinked in confusion but smiled and nodded, trusting that her lady understood the situation better than she did. The maid bowed again and left to presumably return to her other duties.
Just then, Mari appeared beside Crystal's rocking chair. She'd moved with the enhanced speed of a Master Phase cultivator, covering the distance so quickly it seemed like teleportation to normal eyes.
Crystal looked at her trusted maid and bodyguard, then leaned close and whispered something into Mari's ear. Instructions too quiet for anyone else to potentially overhear, delivered in the tone of someone giving critical orders.
Mari's expression shifted slightly as she listened, then she nodded understanding and vanished. One moment she was there beside the rocking chair, the next she'd disappeared into the shadows of the estate, moving to carry out whatever task Crystal had assigned.
Crystal stood from her rocking chair, leaving the blood-red katana lying on the ground beside the destroyed training dummies. She walked back toward the main mansion, but instead of going to her own quarters, she headed toward her grandfather's courtyard.
She pushed through the door and entered the space. There, as expected, was Jacob. The assistant was apparently working late, managing clan business in the patriarch's absence.
Crystal looked at him with an evaluating gaze. "Where is what I asked for?"
Jacob emerged from her grandfather's study carrying several documents. His expression was troubled, caught between duty to follow orders and concern about what those orders might mean.
"My lady, so far we've identified several people we believe to be spies or compromised guards. But there are quite a lot of them scattered throughout the estate. We'll need more time to work on this investigation properly. If we move too quickly or obviously, we risk alerting whoever is running these infiltrators."
Crystal just smiled at this report. She nodded acknowledgment and turned to walk away.
But as she turned, as her back was to Jacob and he could no longer see her face, her smile changed. It transformed into something devilish, something that would have frightened him if he'd witnessed it. The expression of someone who'd just received confirmation of a suspicion and was already planning how to use that information.
Crystal made her way to her personal chambers. She opened the door and stepped inside, closing it behind her with a soft click.
There was a woman already in her room.
The visitor sat in one of Crystal's chairs, her face covered by a veil that concealed her features while still allowing her to see. She appeared lost in thought, her posture suggesting nervousness or uncertainty.
She wore a black robe that moved subtly with each small shift of her body. The garment was high-quality, expensive without being ostentatious, the kind of thing someone important would wear when trying to travel without drawing excessive attention.
Crystal's own appearance was striking as she entered. Her black outer robe flowed around her as she moved, her hair tied back into a neat ponytail that emphasized the elegant lines of her face and neck. She looked every inch the beautiful young lady of the Asura Clan, refined and composed despite the blood still drying on her hands.
As she entered and the door closed behind her, Crystal spoke. Her voice was apologetic but carried undertones of amusement.
"Sorry I was late. I had some business to handle that couldn't be postponed."
She moved further into the room, her eyes fixed on her veiled visitor with calculating interest.
"But I am a bit surprised as to why the female manager—Lady Lyra's second-in-command at the Enchanted Palace—would pay me a visit at this hour. And does Lady Lyra herself know you are here?"
The question hung in the air, seemingly casual but actually quite pointed.
The veiled woman shifted in her seat, clearly caught off-guard by how much Crystal already knew.
Crystal walked to her desk and began cleaning the blood from her hands with a cloth, seemingly unbothered by the tension in the room. She moved with deliberate casualness, as if receiving secret visitors in the middle of the night was a perfectly normal occurrence.
"Please, don't feel obligated to answer immediately," Crystal continued, her voice pleasant. "I imagine you've come here for a reason. And I suspect that reason is important enough to risk visiting the Asura estate unannounced after dark, which could be quite dangerous if discovered by the wrong people."
She finished cleaning her hands and turned to face her visitor directly, leaning against the desk in a relaxed pose that somehow still managed to convey complete control of the situation.
"So why don't you tell me what brought you here? And then we can discuss whether Lady Lyra needs to know about this conversation, or if it's better kept between just the two of us."