Chapter 5
Chapter 5: Lucky Break
“Consider yourself lucky. This Scorching Sun Blaze is a newborn flame. Its light is like the sunrise—warm and gentle, not harsh at all. It’s perfect for refining your eyes.”
Juan Bu was practically glowing with pride. “Once your eyes are refined, your vision will broaden. You’ll be able to pierce illusions. Demons, devils, ghosts—nothing will be able to hide from you.”
Hu Qing couldn’t help thinking: Am I in Journey to the West? Am I about to grow Fiery Golden Eyes?
“It doesn’t work like that,” Juan Bu said, as if reading her mind. “To reach the level I’m talking about, you need to build it up day after day and keep at it for years. For now, just moisten your eyes and clear the blockages inside.”
He continued briskly, as if he were assigning simple chores. “And while this Spiritfire is perfectly pure and yang, use it to shine through your sea of consciousness too. Stabilize your soul.”
It sounded simple. Doing it was another story.
Just forcing open the meridians around her eyes nearly killed her.
It hurt too much.
Her past cultivation—goldfire secret method, spring god art, even her body-refining technique—had always expanded meridians far from anything delicate. None of those methods demanded anything from the eye region. Eyes only had to see, ears only had to hear, mouths only had to speak.
Cultivation raised your level. The rest didn’t matter. Right?
Only now did Hu Qing realize she’d left untouched wastelands inside her body. And clearing them out hurt like hell—so much she couldn’t stop trembling.
Worse, the method required her to guide light energy, thread by thread, along a precise route with her own spiritual energy. She had both gold and fire energy, naturally compatible with light. Even her Thunder Dragon Arm lent its strength—thunder and light both came from the heavens, after all.
With three forces pulling at it, the light energy still acted like a stubborn princess being forced into marriage. It sat in a phoenix carriage and cried that it refused to move while a whole line of embroidered-uniform guards hacked and shoved from the front.
Inside Hu Qing’s eye sockets, it felt like knives were stabbing, twisting, digging, carving. Tears poured down her face—and somehow made it worse, like salt ground into fresh wounds.
She didn’t stop. She couldn’t.
If she was going to suffer like this, she was getting paid for it. And if it hurt this much, then the benefit had better be enormous.
Juan Bu liked that about her. When she was scared, she was genuinely scared—but when she had to be fierce, she went all in.
At last, the delicate princess stepped down from the carriage. A tiny jeweled foot landed at the threshold—
Boom.
Blood and tears spilled.
A second step. The tears dried. Blood took their place.
A third step, and the blood wouldn’t stop.
Hu Qing sobbed, shaking head to toe, while Juan Bu tried to soothe her. “It’s not blinding anymore, right?”
Like hell. All she saw was blazing red, bright enough to stab. She never wanted to see that color again.
“Good. While you’ve got the momentum, break through the barrier to your sea of consciousness in one go.”
He meant the barrier between her upper dantian and her sea of consciousness.
Hu Qing nearly spat blood. Break through? She hadn’t even properly developed her upper dantian. This was like launching from a mud hut straight into a palace tower.
“Shut up,” she snapped under her breath. “I’ll do it myself.”
She cut him off and gathered every shred of focus back into her eyes.
Juan Bu fell silent, but worry churned inside him. Scorching Sun Blaze ranked among the rarest fires in the entire Immortal Realm. If anyone discovered Hu Qing had it, she’d be hunted to the ends of heaven.
Why did the heavens insist on handing her something that screamed disaster?
Juan Bu made his decision then and there. He’d always sneered at Hu Qing for being overly cautious, but once they reached the Immortal Realm, she would have to keep her head down. Not a whisper of Scorching Sun Blaze could leak.
After she subdued Spiritfire, he’d have to warn her properly. She couldn’t tell anyone—no, not even Hu Nuan. Hu Nuan might be trustworthy, but the whole brood at zhaohua sect couldn’t be guaranteed.
While he was turning plans over and over, Hu Qing finally forced the meridians around her eyes fully open. Bloody curtains hung beneath both eyes. Her lashes clumped together, soaked and crooked.
Spiritual energy and light energy churned through those fine pathways, pushing and pulling like a grand internal shift. Once the light energy found its rhythm, it grew bold enough to shove her spiritual energy aside and run on its own.
Heat circled in that dense web again and again, rumbling like thunder as it surged toward the center.
She lost count of the times it crashed.
Then—bang.
The last barrier shattered. The two streams connected.
At the same instant, blood burst from both nostrils as if her body had finally given up pretending.
Her dantian roared, spiritual energy surging wildly, forcing her blood to replenish itself. Deep inside, her life-bound artifact Bai Wen and the thunder dragon—one young snake, one young dragon—shielded her tiny sleeping nascent soul inside the dantian vortex.
They dodged, they bobbed, and then, as if this were all a game, they began to play.
Hu Qing, meanwhile, felt heat pour through her eye regions—painful, yes, but strangely exhilarating.
The sun’s power tore through impurities and dead cells like a storm ripping down rotten walls. And the moment it destroyed, it built—newer, stronger cells growing in its wake. It was demolition and construction at the same time.
A palace rose behind the ruins.
Her eyes felt like they’d been carried to the cleanest snowfield atop a high mountain, and a crystal hall had been built there from pure sunlight. Cool and hot at once. Almost sweet, like the scent of snow.
Juan Bu’s voice came through steady and urgent. “Good. The method is running smoothly now. Slowly draw the light energy down into your dantian. Fuse it with your spiritual energy. Run a full great circulation—then strike your sea of consciousness.”
Hu Qing did as he said.
From both eye regions, she split off fine threads of light energy, guiding them down in parallel into her dantian. They turned once inside, then flowed out from the other end.
Bai Wen and the thunder dragon watched the brilliant threads enter, watched them leave, and both of them—shamelessly—started drooling. It looked delicious.
The mixed energy completed a cycle and returned to her eyes. Hu Qing tightened her focus, guiding it into the second circulation—
And something went wrong.
All the light energy in both eye regions surged upward at once.
Boom—like a thousand troops charging over Yan Mountain.
The shock and the strange sensation above hit Hu Qing so hard she threw her head back and went flying.
She’d never had a chance to look around this small space after entering—she’d been forced to turn away from the blinding light. Juan Bu had been watching her cultivation and hadn’t paid attention either.
Now he glanced up—and his face changed.
The entire space was condensed solar power, gold shading into white, filling everything her eyes could reach. And deep within it, a single patch of red glimmered—soft, almost watery.
That was Scorching Sun Blaze’s true body.
It had just been born. Its power hadn’t matured, which was why its flame looked so gentle.
Hu Qing, however, was flying straight toward it.
Even the smallest Spiritfire was still fire—let alone fire born from the sun.
If she slammed into it, she’d be ash before she could scream.
The proper way was to lure it slowly: draw in light energy bit by bit, let it grow familiar with Hu Qing’s spiritual energy, coax it toward her—
But there was no time.
Juan Bu lunged. His body stretched and transformed into a thin, wide veil that wrapped Hu Qing from head to toe.
He was immortal-grade. He could block at least a little.
Hu Qing, thrown backward and dizzy, finally understood the danger and exploded in fury. “What are you doing?! Are you trying to kill me?”