Jingwei blinked.

The ash was still settling. Fine gray powder, drifting in lazy spirals across her exposed collarbones, catching in the loose strands of her dark hair. The cold mountain air moved through the torn silk of her ’dudou’, goosebumps rising sharp across the generous swell of her chest, her stiffened peaks pressing visibly against the white fabric.

She blinked again.

The forest was quiet.

’They are gone,’ her mind supplied, slowly, like a man climbing stairs in the dark. ’The three of them are simply — gone.’

Then the rest of it arrived.

All at once, with the blunt, ugly force of something that had been waiting politely in the anteroom of her shock while the immediate emergency occupied the front of her awareness.

Meiren. Liufen. Fenxu. The others. The last sound she had heard from behind her before she ran — that particular silence that was not peaceful but empty, the silence that meant the screaming had stopped for a reason.

Her throat closed.

"My — my sisters —"

She scrambled upright, her thick thighs pushing her off the dirt, one hand reflexively clutching the torn front of her ’dudou’ closed over her heavy chest. Her eyes swept the tree line, frantic, the pupils blown wide.

"They were — we were together and then the demons — the attack came from nowhere and I ran, I should not have run, I should have —" Her voice broke. "MEIREN! FENXU — SISTER LIU —"

Her voice carried into the pines and came back empty.

The forest gave her nothing.

Her legs buckled. She caught herself on her knees in the pine needles, the damp earth soaking immediately through the thin fabric of her remaining skirt. Her shoulders shook. One hand pressed flat to the ground. The other still clutched her torn ’dudou’, her knuckles white.

’They were behind me. They were right behind me and I ran and I —’

The pressure hit her before she consciously registered its source.

It arrived the way high altitude arrives — not as a single sensation but as a total atmospheric shift, the air itself changing density, spiritual energy compressing and reorganizing around a single point the way iron filings reorganize around a magnet. Every cultivated meridian in her body responded at once, the Plum Blossom sect’s foundational technique activating involuntarily, pulling her spiritual core inward in a protective reflex that was as automatic as blinking.

She looked up.

He was descending.

Unhurried. The afternoon light settling over him in the way light settles over a mountain — not illuminating it, just acknowledging that it was already there. His bare feet drifted downward through the broken canopy with the serenity of a man who had never once needed to hurry toward anything, his hands clasped loosely at the small of his back, the dense, carved architecture of his chest and abdomen catching the gold of the late sun.

And below the deep V of his lower abdomen, hanging with the same unremarkable, self-assured weight as the rest of him —

Jingwei’s face went red from the chin upward in a single, continuous wave.

She had seen men before. She was a cultivation disciple of a reputable sect, not a sheltered inner-court jewel. She knew the general shape of things. But the proportions currently descending toward her with the calm inevitability of a celestial body following its ordained trajectory were a different category of information entirely, and her brain was processing that information with a lag time she found deeply embarrassing.

His golden-crimson eyes settled on her.

Her legs folded.

She did not decide to kowtow. Her body simply made the decision on behalf of her knees, which had already been communicating their intentions clearly, and her forehead met the cold earth with a sound that was more complete and total than she had planned.

"Supreme — Supreme Immortal —" The words came out muffled against the pine needles. "This lowly disciple Jingwei of Mount Hua’s Plum Blossom sect begs your divine attention!"

Her shoulders shook. Not entirely from deference. Her fingers dug into the earth.

"The demons — they attacked our group — my sisters, my senior brothers, they — I do not know if any survived and I — this lowly one has nothing to offer in return but her life and her sect’s gratitude, and her sect’s gratitude is worth very little at this particular moment, but —" Her voice cracked entirely. "Please. If there is any mercy in your divine heart. Please help me find them. Please help me kill that demon."

She pressed her forehead harder into the ground.

"Please."

The word came out stripped of everything except the raw center of it. No technique, no cultivation grace. Just a woman with dirt on her face and a torn ’dudou’ and the specific devastation of someone who ran when her sisters screamed, begging the sky for something she had no leverage to ask for.

Silence.

Then his feet touched the earth.

She felt it through the ground — not a physical impact but a shift, the spiritual pressure adjusting around his point of contact with the soil the way water adjusts around a stone dropped into it.

Tianlong stood before her and looked down.

His golden-crimson eyes, which had seen empires reduce themselves to cautionary tales, moved across her bowed form with the particular attention of a man in possession of the ’Horny God Physique’ — a cultivation constitution that did not merely appreciate feminine energy but ’read’ it, dissected it, catalogued it with the involuntary thoroughness of a scholar confronted with primary source material.

What he read was interesting.

The Plum Blossom sect’s foundational technique had a signature like pressed flowers held in old books — delicate on the surface, but with a deep structural density underneath that took decades of consistent cultivation to build. Jingwei’s energy moved through her meridians in long, unhurried spirals, warm-toned and rich, pooling heaviest in her lower core and her chest, which was consistent with the sect’s particular emphasis on —

He stopped that analysis before it became a thesis.

His gaze moved sideways.

To the small black dog sitting at the edge of the clearing, which had been following at a respectful, terrified distance since the conversation under the log, and which was currently sitting with its head bowed in an attitude of deep, meditative shame.

Tianlong looked at it.

He looked at it with the specific attention of a man whose ’Horny God Physique’ did not restrict itself to human subjects when it came to reading spiritual-energy signatures, and what he read from the dog’s small, compressed body was —

He blinked.

He looked again.

’Mixed on the surface layer of that creature’s spiritual field, threading through its fur like embedded dye, was the unmistakable resonance signature of the Plum Blossom sect’s foundational technique — warm-toned, lower-core-heavy, rich with the particular frequency that only manifested when that technique was activated under extreme physical duress — mixed, with obscene intimacy, with a demonic cultivator’s seed-releasing spiritual signature.’

Tianlong stared at the dog for a long, quiet moment. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

The dog stared at its own paws.

Its ears were flat. Its tail had not moved since the forest. A thin line of something that might have been residual energy — or might have been something significantly less dignified — still clung to the fur of its underside, catching the afternoon light in a way that the dog was clearly hoping no one with divine-level spiritual perception would notice.

’I did not expect,’ Tianlong thought with genuine philosophical resignation, ’to arrive in a new world and immediately encounter a horny dog.’