At his feet lay the massive, shattered corpse of a Three-Headed Venomous Basilisk, a peak Foundation Establishment beast that had terrorised the southern quadrant for a decade.

The Beast Lord didn’t use a sword.

He didn’t use elegant arrays either.

Instead, he had torn the creature’s central head off with his bare, clawed hands.

Yanlie reached into the gaping, smoking chest cavity of the beast.

He bypassed the venom sacs and closed his fist around the glowing, pulsing core of the creature.

He ripped it free, the dark purple spiritual energy illuminating his feral, glowing amber eyes.

Without hesitation, Yanlie brought the raw, pulsating core to his mouth and bit down.

The bitter, chaotic energy exploded on his tongue, a surge of raw power that his demonic beast-blood greedily absorbed, forcing it through his meridians to forcefully expand his cultivation base.

It was truly a brutal method of progression.

But it was also how the beasts survived.

But as the bitter, coppery taste of the raw core slid down his throat, a feeling of disgust washed over him.

He spat the remaining fragments into the dirt, coughing roughly.

’Yuck! It tastes like ash,’ Yanlie growled internally, his amber eyes narrowing into dark, frustrated slits. ’It’s raw and unrefined. It lacks... heat.’

His mind, entirely unbidden, flashed back to the Celestial Sword Sect.

He remembered the smell of roasting spices cutting through the crisp mountain air.

He remembered the taste of the fiery, perfectly glazed Spirit-Boar skewers a certain arrogant guy had shoved into his hands.

He remembered the boy.

Lin Ji’an.

The name echoed in the Beast Lord’s mind, triggering an immediate physical reaction.

Yanlie’s heart rate skyrocketed, a deep, primal thrumming in his chest that had absolutely nothing to do with combat adrenaline.

His beast blood was boiling.

To Hu Yanlie, the world was simple.

There were predators, and there was prey.

But Ji’an defied the natural order.

He was small, fragile, and possessed a cultivation base that he could crush between two fingers.

Yet, he looked at him with the fierce, unyielding eyes of an apex predator.

He didn’t cower. He didn’t submit.

And more than that... there was a scent.

Yanlie closed his eyes, inhaling the damp forest air, but his enhanced olfactory senses were chasing a phantom.

Beneath the smell of garlic, soy sauce, and woodsmoke, his beast soul had picked up a faint, intoxicating trace of something else on Ji’an.

It was a sweet, pure Yin energy that completely bypassed his logical mind and struck directly at the deepest, most primal mating instincts of his demonic lineage.

’He is a man,’ Yanlie’s human consciousness reasoned, a growl tearing from his throat as he paced the bloody clearing.

’He is a boy of the orthodox sects. The beast kings do not take males to their dens. It yields no heirs. It defies the pride of the beast lords like us...’

But the beast within him roared in violent, deafening protest.

’I don’t care!’ The primal, feral side of his soul violently overrode his logic.

’Look at the fire in his eyes! Feel the heat of his blood! He is a mate worthy of a king! I want to drag him into the dark. I want to pin those arrogant shoulders to the earth and mark him until he smells of nothing but me!’

The staggering intensity of the possessive urge was suffocating.

The desire he felt for the boy was heterosexual biologically, a perfect, magnetic alignment of his raging Yang seeking its ultimate Yin counterpart.

Because his brain believed Ji’an was a male, the resulting cognitive dissonance was driving him to the brink of madness.

Yanlie threw his head back, letting out a deafening, earth-shaking roar that silenced every living creature within ten miles.

He didn’t care about the taboo.

He didn’t care about the laws of the mortal realm.

When he returned from this forest, he was going to find the cook.

And he was going to take what his beast soul demanded, orthodox rules be damned!

.

.

.

On the highest peak of the Celestial Sword Sect, the wind howled like a choir of banshees, carrying shards of ice that could cut through mortal steel.

Lu Jianheng, the undisputed genius of the Sword Peak, stood shirtless in the centre of the training plateau.

Despite the freezing temperature, his perfectly sculpted torso was slick with a heavy sheen of sweat, his muscles trembling with the strain of physical exertion.

Nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight...

Lu Jianheng raised his heavy, training broadsword high above his head, the muscles in his back bunching like coiled steel.

Nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine...

He brought the blade down in a flawless, textbook vertical cleave, the kinetic force of the swing parting the blizzard around him.

Ten thousand!!!

He completed the final swing of his daily regimen.

A regimen designed to exhaust the body, clear the mind, and sever the practitioner from the distracting, impure desires of the mortal realm.

The path of the Sword required absolute and unyielding focus.

A sword had no heart; therefore, the swordsman must forge his heart into steel.

Jianheng lowered the blade, his chest heaving, his breath pluming in white clouds.

He closed his eyes, seeking the empty silence of the Sword Dao.

Instead, he saw a cast-iron spatula.

He saw the smug, infuriating, devastatingly arrogant smirk of a sixteen-year-old boy in a white tunic.

He saw the way the boy’s Jate black hair, which was falling across his sweaty forehead during their brief clashes.

He heard the sarcastic, biting insults that had completely shattered Jianheng’s composure.

"Damn it," Jianheng hissed through clenched teeth, his eyes snapping open.

He violently drove the tip of his training sword into the solid granite of the plateau, the stone cracking into spiderweb fractures beneath the blade.

He couldn’t stop thinking about him, no matter how much he tried.

Ever since Lin Ji’an had boldly declared her entrance into the Official Sect Martial Ranking, Lu Jianheng’s mind had been consumed by the chef.