"I will ensure that every single breath you take for the rest of your unnaturally long life is a symphony of agony."

Mad Dog paused, blinking his single good eye. The voice didn’t match the dress. The absolute, freezing authority radiating from the "woman" didn’t match the situation.

"Feisty," Mad Dog laughed nervously, entirely misinterpreting the sociopathic death threat as aggressive foreplay. He set the goblets down on a bedside table. "I like that. A woman with a deep voice and a sharp tongue. Don’t worry, big girl. I’ll loosen you up."

As Mad Dog reached for the buckle of his belt, Xiao Yichen closed his eyes, his long, elegant fingers twitching against the Null-Stone cuffs.

’Lin Ji’an,’ Yichen thought, the resentment in his heart warring violently with a sudden, overwhelming surge of dark, possessive anticipation. ’You put me in this dress. You padded my chest. You threw me to this mongrel. If you do not survive your own infiltration to witness my vengeance... I will drag your soul back from the underworld just to punish you myself.’

While the Prince sat in the dark, plotting the most gruesome, creatively horrific execution in the history of the Azure Empire, Lin Ji’an was facing a nightmare of her own.

***

The gilded door of the preparation chamber swung open on silent, oiled hinges.

Lin Ji’an stepped through, her Black Iron Spatula strapped securely out of sight against her calf beneath the wide leg of her muddy trousers.

The heavy Null-Stone cuffs clanked softly against her wrists, a constant, terrifying reminder that she possessed zero spiritual power.

The master bedchamber of Blood-Hand Tu was a grotesque monument to predatory wealth.

The room was vast, draped entirely in layers of heavy, blood-red, and obsidian silk.

The floor was covered in plush, imported carpets that swallowed the sound of her footsteps.

In the center of the room, elevated on a circular stone dais, rested a bed the size of a small carriage, framed by towering obsidian pillars and draped in sheer, translucent curtains.

The air was thick, heavy, and cloying. A dozen ornate brass censers burned a potent, sweet-smelling incense that immediately made Ji’an’s head swim.

’Aphrodisiacs,’ her culinary senses identified instantly, analyzing the chemical composition of the smoke. ’Crushed Dream-Lotus, powdered rhino horn, and synthetic musk. The atmosphere itself is a weapon.’

Ji’an bit the inside of her cheek hard, using the sharp spike of pain to clear the rising fog from her mind.

She looked past the incense smoke, toward the massive bed.

"Let me go! When my father finds you, he will mount your head on the city gates!"

The voice was young, high-pitched, and trembling with a mixture of absolute terror and desperate, aristocratic defiance.

Tethered to one of the obsidian bedposts by a set of glowing, magical Qi-ropes was Lin Xuan.

The thirteen-year-old heir to the General’s Estate was thrashing violently, his fine silk clothes torn and dirtied, his silver-flecked eyes wide with panic.

Hovering over him, running a single, manicured finger down the boy’s trembling cheek, was Blood-Hand Tu.

The leader of the Syndicate was not the hulking, scarred brute Ji’an had expected. Tu was unnervingly elegant.

He looked to be a man in his late thirties, possessing sharp, refined features, pale skin, and long hair tied back with a crimson ribbon.

He wore loose, flowing robes of dark red silk that left his chest bare.

He didn’t look like a bandit. He looked like an aristocratic vampire.

"Such fire," Blood-Hand Tu murmured, his voice a soft, cultured purr that made Ji’an’s stomach churn with revulsion. "The Iron-Marrow Physique is always so vibrant. Your Yang essence is practically boiling beneath your skin, little lordling. It will make a sublime vintage."

Tu leaned closer, his dark eyes tracing the frantic pulse at Xuan’s throat. "Do not weep, little bird. The harvesting is painful, yes, but the euphoria that follows... it is a divine transcendence."

"Get away from me!" Xuan shrieked, kicking wildly, his boot connecting with Tu’s thigh.

Tu didn’t even flinch.

A faint, golden shimmer of a high-level Golden Core barrier rippled across his skin, completely absorbing the physical blow.

The bandit leader sighed, a look of mild disappointment crossing his elegant features.

"I prefer my tributes to be cooperative," Tu whispered, raising a hand that glowed with a sickly, crimson Qi, preparing to forcefully paralyze the boy.

’Right now, I have no Qi,’ Ji’an’s mind calculated with lightning speed as she stood frozen in the doorway. ’My spatula cannot pierce a Golden Core barrier. If I attack him now, he will snap my neck without even looking at me. I need him distracted, the barrier down, and take the cuffs off.’

There was only one way.

She had to play the part.

She had to swallow every single ounce of her pride, her arrogance, and her dignity, and she had to become the very thing she loathed.

Ji’an took a deep breath, inhaling the heavy, aphrodisiac incense. She didn’t fight the dizzying effects; she leaned into them.

She relaxed the tense, martial posture of her shoulders.

She allowed her body to slump slightly, adopting a pose of languid, exhausted fragility.

She let out a soft, deliberately breathy, trembling sigh.

"Is this... is this where I am supposed to be?"

The voice that left Ji’an’s lips was a masterpiece of auditory manipulation.

It was soft and pitched slightly higher than her usual confident baritone, dripping with a trembling, helpless vulnerability that sounded like a frightened dove cornered by a hawk.

Blood-Hand Tu’s hand froze mid-air.

He slowly turned his head away from Lin Xuan, his eyes locking onto the figure standing in the doorway.

His breath hitched.

The sentry at the gate had not exaggerated.

The boy standing in the doorway was breathtaking.

His white Inner Sect tunic was changed after bath, using the silk thin inner tunic the servants provided her with, which was slipping slightly off one pale, slender shoulder.

His dark hair was messy, clinging to his sweat-dampened neck.