Moyou scoffed. “Unacceptable. Freezing my soul for a prophecy is inefficient. My past self was prone to dramatic flair, but I prefer an elegant solution.” She tilted her head, inspecting the sub-zero sphere, then flicked her gaze to Wuyuan, who grinned while raw, uncontrolled power seeped from his frame despite his missing arm.
“Wuyuan,” she said without inflection, “your self-destructive mania emits a phenomenal thermal signature. A boundless, turbulent heat source, fueled by your appetite for trauma.”
Wuyuan’s grin broadened, a feral spark lighting his remaining eye. “Is that an assessment, or an invitation, apathy queen?” He flexed his intact arm, blood weeping from his mangled shoulder, steam hissing where gore met wild Qi.
Moyou ignored the insinuation, calculating vector trajectories in her head. “It is arithmetic. I can balance the harmonic anchor with a paradoxical thermal array, but it requires an active conduit. You fit the parameters.”
She gripped the collar of his blood-soaked tunic, hauling him forward until their noses nearly brushed. Wuyuan went rigid, his demonic aura flaring while turbulent winds churned the abyss beneath them. His solitary eye locked onto hers with hungry expectation. He braced for a kiss, an order, or a blow.
Instead, Moyou drove two fingers against the carotid pulse throbbing in his neck. A grid of frost-pale script etched outward from her fingertips, sinking through skin straight into his meridians. The technique was cold and surgical.
A shuddering rasp tore from Wuyuan’s throat. His spine arched in perverse rapture as his boiling demonic life-force drained outward, funneled into the matrix Moyou wove. It was a brutal, merciless extraction, a violation of his core being, yet it fueled a transcendent high he’d never imagined.
“A thermal battery,” Moyou murmured, watching the transfer without blinking. “Your resilience makes you an ideal fuel cell. Agony generates heat, balancing the frost. Remarkably efficient.”
His muscles locked, a guttural purr rumbling in his chest. “Drain it,” Wuyuan rasped. “Burn me to ash.” He was a supernova of feeling, agony and bliss intertwining into a single, overwhelming sensation.
The dark expanse flared blinding white. Overhead, the clockwork pupil of the Heavenly Tribulation contracted, focusing its mass. A column of pale luminescence thick as an ironwood peak surged downward, aimed square at the nascent Hexagram core.
“Hundun, vomit!” Moyou shouted, keeping her fingers locked against the siphon.
The three-story badger opened its maw and unleashed a subterranean retch. Out cascaded a glittering avalanche of rejected suitor blades, enchanted lutes, war chariots, and jade talismans it had swallowed over the months. The flying armory slammed together mid-air, locking into a dense scrap-metal bulkhead directly beneath the descending pillar.
The sky-lance struck the improvised barricade with an ear-splitting crack. Discarded broadswords and flying rings shattered, scattering blinding refraction across the abyss. The scrap heap buckled under the kinetic press, but held long enough for Moyou to anchor her final glyph.
“Core stability achieved,” Moyou said, wrenching her hand away. Wuyuan slumped against the cold orb, trembling, spent but grinning stupidly. The black sphere hummed with a faint crimson resonance.
Moyou slammed the corrected Abyssal Hexagram into the surface of the humming core. The etched lines of her past self’s design flared to life, not with brilliant light, but with an implosion of silence, a shockwave of anti-magic that rippled outwards. It wasn’t a destructive force, but an erasing one, an anti-pattern that unwove the very fabric of the heavens’ influence.
Above them, the celestial mechanism recoiled. A soundless shockwave tore through the sky as the bronze cogs ground backward, screeching in mechanical agony. With a violent shudder, the teeth jammed. The iris, cut off from its discharge, began swelling with furious, trapped radiance that sucked the surrounding fog inward.
The celestial apparatus began an immediate overload sequence, threatening to blast the void trench and the floating continent above into fine dust.