"Having a physical, perverted reaction to the sight of your own Master taking a bath?! What’s wrong with you?! Are you a cut-sleeve for the elderly?!"

Ji’an snapped out of her fantasy, instantly realizing what had happened.

She slapped her hands over her nose, her face burning so hot it could have boiled water.

"NO!" Ji’an shrieked, frantically wiping the blood from her chin, panicking beyond rational thought. "No! It’s not what it looks like! I swear to the Heavens, Old Man, I am not attracted to you! You are basically like my grandfather! I was thinking of someone else!"

"You barged into my bathhouse, stared at my chest, and started bleeding from the nose while muttering ’so wide’ under your breath!" Jiu Zui roared, his face flushing with righteous, indignant fury.

He didn’t grab her ear this time.

He raised his hand, channeling a harmless but incredibly painful burst of compressed Qi.

SMACK!!!

He delivered a textbook, booming slap directly to the back of Ji’an’s head, sending her stumbling forward into the bamboo.

"Ow!" Ji’an wailed, clutching the back of her head, completely humiliated. "I told you! I was thinking of a puddle! A very muddy puddle!"

"You are sick in the head! Go to the kitchens and chop fifty pounds of garlic to purify your dirty mind!" Jiu Zui barked, pointing a furious, trembling finger toward the manor. "And don’t come back until you have wiped that filthy, perverted expression off your face! I am locking the bathhouse wards!"

"Come on, Old Man! I hate it here too!" Ji’an yelled, turning and sprinting toward the safety of her outdoor kitchen, holding her bloody nose, the Nekomata clinging to her shoulder for dear life.

«You are, without a doubt, the most embarrassing mortal to ever walk the earth,» the kitten projected into her mind, sounding deeply regretful of the soul-tether.

"Shut up, fluffball!" Ji’an mentally screamed back, her face burning with the heat of a thousand suns. "I am just a poor little victim of my own imagination!"

As Ji’an fled into the kitchen to aggressively chop garlic and deal with her catastrophic, hormonal gay panic, Master Jiu Zui stood in the courtyard, shaking his head.

The old man sighed, a faint, hidden smile touching his lips as he tightened his robe.

He knew she was a girl.

He had known since the day she stepped onto the peak.

And while her reaction had been utterly ridiculous, seeing the life and vibrant chaos return to his mountain was exactly what he had been waiting for.

"She is finally back," Jiu Zui murmured to the wind, reaching for his wine gourd. "The sect is about to get very, very loud."

And somewhere, deep within the freezing, sealed caverns of the Eternal Cloud Peak, Xie Wangchen sneezed, entirely unaware that he was the sole cause of the Drunken Peak’s newest, most humiliating scandal.

***

The immediate aftermath of the catastrophic hot-spring incident on the Drunken Peak required a level of diplomatic maneuvering that Lin Ji’an usually reserved for extorting Black Market syndicates.

She had fled the courtyard with a bleeding nose, locking herself in her kitchen to aggressively chop garlic until her hands smelled strongly enough to mask the scent of her own humiliation.

But she knew she couldn’t hide forever.

Master Jiu Zui held her leash, and more importantly, he held the keys to the peak’s protective arrays.

It took three jars of Abyssal Pearl-Plum Wine, a legendary, thousand-year-aged vintage she had looted from the Nekomata’s ancestral hoard, to secure her pardon.

When she cautiously slid the glowing, amethyst-colored jars across the wooden table of the main manor, avoiding eye contact at all costs, the old Sovereign had merely grunted.

He popped the cork, took a long, evaluating sniff, and visibly melted into his chair.

"You are incredibly fortunate that your culinary talent drastically outweighs your severe lack of moral decency, brat," Jiu Zui had grumbled, pointedly pulling his heavy purple robes tighter across his chest. "I will overlook your degenerate episode. But if you ever kick my door down while I am bathing again, I will hang you by your ankles from the highest peach tree."

"It was a misunderstanding! A momentary lapse in visual processing!" Ji’an had shrieked in her own defense, her face burning. "I thought you were a wrinkly old man! You have no right to be that shredded! It’s false advertising!"

Jiu Zui had merely thrown an empty wine cup at her head, laughing a deep, booming laugh that signaled the end of the crisis.

But while the crisis with her Master had been narrowly averted through the sheer power of premium alcohol, a far more terrifying, insurmountable crisis loomed on the horizon.

Xie Wangchen.

’I can’t see him,’ Ji’an concluded, pacing the length of her outdoor kitchen, aggressively stress-kneading a massive lump of dough. ’I absolutely, under no circumstances, can look at Xie Wangchen’s face right now!’

The mental image she had conjured in the courtyard, the vision of a fully mature, dripping-wet, heavily muscled Ice Demon looking at her with dark eyes, had completely hijacked her neural pathways.

If she saw him right now, if he looked at her with his usual, intense, unblinking stare, her brain was going to superimpose that horrific, glorious fantasy directly onto his aristocratic features. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

She would get another nosebleed.

And Wangchen, being the overly protective, borderline-psychotic best friend that he was, would probably think she was dying and attempt to freeze the entire sect to preserve her body.

’No. Absolutely not. Avoidance is the only reasonable option I have in hand,’ she reasoned, aggressively punching the dough. ’He told me he was at a bottleneck anyway. He is in deep seclusion. He won’t even know I’m back until he breaks through. And when he does, Elder Qin Changxu will definitely be there to supervise his exit. I will just wait for the official sect announcement. Surrounded by elders and witnesses, I will be forced to behave like a normal, functioning human being instead of a hormonal degenerate.’