The Inner Demon, feeding off his deepest, most repressed confusions and taboo desires, warped the hallucination with a sickening, sudden jolt of altered reality.

Beneath his hand, the flat, masculine lines of her chest abruptly dissolved.

The thick, restrictive binding locket vanished as the illusion shattered.

In its place, his hand met the soft, undeniable, and incredibly generous swell of a woman’s breast.

Wangchen froze.

His entire body went rigid, paralyzingly stiff, his breath caught in his throat.

He slowly lifted his head from her neck, his eyes wide, staring down at the figure pinned beneath him.

The boy he had sworn brotherhood with, the boy he had spent months agonising over, terrifying himself with the implications of his "cut-sleeve" obsession, was gone.

The sharp, slightly arrogant jawline had softened into an elegant, breathtakingly feminine curve. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

The Adam’s apple had vanished, leaving a smooth, slender throat.

The broad, boyish shoulders had narrowed, and the hips beneath his bracketing legs felt curved.

The face was still Lin Ji’an’s. The silver-flecked eyes, the stubborn pout of her lips, the dark, messy hair. It was unmistakably her.

But it was a ’her’.

A woman. A devastatingly beautiful, soft, undeniably feminine woman, writhing beneath him in the crimson silk, looking up at him with heavy, lust-clouded eyes.

The shock of the transformation was absolute. It hit Wangchen’s consciousness with the force of a hard strike to the temple.

The sheer cognitive dissonance, the violent collision between his deeply ingrained belief that she was a male companion, and the sudden, vivid, incredibly tactile hallucination of a female form, acted as a bucket of liquid nitrogen poured directly over his blazing lust.

The Inner Demon had overplayed its hand. The illusion was too jarring, too fundamentally reality-breaking.

Crack!

The golden bars of the cage splintered. The heavy crimson silk turned to ash. The suffocating heat evaporated into nothingness.

With a violent, shattering explosion of spiritual energy, the dream collapsed entirely.

Wangchen’s eyes flew open.

He gasped, a harsh, jagged intake of breath that tore at his lungs.

He lunged forward, throwing his weight off the invisible figure he had been pinning, his hands slamming into the solid, freezing, ten-thousand-year-old stone of the Glacial Marrow slab.

He was back in the absolute darkness of the seclusion cavern.

The temperature was a staggering absolute zero, and the silence was deafening.

Wangchen collapsed onto his hands and knees on the ice, his chest heaving violently.

Sweat poured down his face, freezing the instant it touched the air, turning into tiny, glittering diamonds of frost against his pale skin.

His physical body was in a state of absolute, undeniable, agonizing arousal.

His heart was hammering a frantic, terrifying rhythm against his ribs, refusing to return to the slow, measured pace of the Heartless Dao.

His lips still tingled with the phantom taste of her skin.

His right hand trembled violently, the ghost-sensation of the soft, feminine curve he had touched burning against his palm like a brand.

He curled into himself, bringing his trembling hands up to grip his dark hair, pulling hard enough to cause pain, desperately trying to anchor himself back to the real world.

"What..." Wangchen rasped, his voice echoing hollowly in the dark tomb. "What was that?"

He squeezed his eyes shut, but the image was seared into his retinas. Lin Ji’an.

A woman.

The realization sent a wave of profound, terrifying confusion crashing over him.

Why had his Inner Demon conjured that image? The tribulation was supposed to manifest his deepest, darkest desires.

’Is that what I want?’ Wangchen thought, his mind spiraling in the freezing dark, his breath pluming in white clouds before him. ’Did my subconscious transform him into a woman because I am a coward? Because my Dao is too fragile to accept that I covet a man? Did I alter his very nature in my mind simply so I could justify these vulgar, depraved things I want to do to him without the stain of the taboo?’

The thought filled him with a sudden, intense wave of self-loathing.

He was the Flawless Ice Root, prodigy disciple of the Eternal Ice Peak. He was supposed to be above the mundane, petty moralities of the mortal realm.

He didn’t care about societal rules, nor did he care about sect laws.

He would slaughter the entire Imperial Court if they tried to take Ji’an away from him.

So why did the dream make him into a girl?

Wangchen lowered his hands, staring blankly into the pitch-black cavern.

He traced the memory of the dream, pushing past the shock of the transformation, focusing on the core emotion.

The desperate, clawing hunger. The need to consume, to possess, to lock away.

’No,’ Wangchen realized, a slow, terrifying clarity settling over his fractured mind. ’It doesn’t matter.’

Boy, girl, immortal, mortal, demon, or ghost. It made absolutely no difference to the monster that lived beneath the ice.

He didn’t yearn for a female Lin Ji’an to absolve his guilt.

The Inner Demon had simply tried to offer him a reality where there were no obstacles, no societal friction, just a fantasy of pure, unadulterated consumption.

But Wangchen didn’t want a fantasy.

He wanted the foul-mouthed, soot-stained, arrogant, terrifyingly violent chef who had hit the Second Prince with a carriage door.

He wanted the boy who smelled of garlic and bravery.

And yet... the memory of that softness, the sudden, undeniable rightness of how she had felt beneath him in the dream, lingered.

It was a tantalizing, infuriating puzzle that he lacked the context to solve.

Before he could spiral further into his own psychological labyrinth, a sudden, sharp, burning sensation flared against his right wrist.

Wangchen flinched, pulling his arm up.

In the absolute darkness, a single, microscopic thread of midnight-blue spirit-silk glowed with a faint, pulsing light.

It was the tether. The wisp of his own soul that he had secretly woven into the Frost-Silk Pulse Guard he had tied around Ji’an’s wrist before entering seclusion.