Chapter 167 | Stripping the Authority*

Chapter 167: 167 | Stripping the Authority*

The thirty-second taste was already fading.

For thirty seconds, her chest had burned clean and warm — whole, for the first time in months. Now that wholeness was sinking, and the rot was clawing back into her heart meridian, patient and eager. A faint, diseased glow was creeping up the line of her throat.

Elder Liu clutched her chest, breathing ragged, her eyes half-veiled with need. "Yes... give it to me. I need the fire..."

"You want more."

His voice was a low, vibrating baritone that echoed off the runic walls.

"Your outer robes are gone, Elder." His gaze swept her trembling frame, unhurried. "But your Dao-Heart still clings to its arrogance. You still hide behind that last piece of silk, trying to salvage a fraction of your Core Formation dignity."

"This is a transaction. I do not deal with women who hold back."

He pointed a single finger straight at her sternum.

"Take off the rest. Strip completely."

Shock pierced through the haze.

Elder Liu’s eyes went wide, and the deeply buried ego in her flared.

"What—" Her breath caught. "You want me completely bare? I am a four-star alchemist! I have already knelt before a junior! Do not push your luck!"

She gritted her teeth and forced a circuit of Verdant Flame Qi.

She tried to stand tall, to crush his insolence with the sheer spiritual pressure of a Matriarch. It was the last instinct of a woman who had never in 135 years answered to a junior.

Her foundation was rotting from the inside out.

The moment she commanded the energy, the stagnant, toxic residue in her Dantian violently rebelled. A vicious, needle-like spike of corroded fire tore straight through her central pathways.

It was not the clean pain of the Phantom Burns. It was the deep, grinding wrongness of a fire that had forgotten how to be fire.

"Nngh— ahh!"

She doubled over, a dark thread of corrupted blood slipping past her bruised lips. Her legs gave out, and she dropped heavily back onto her knees, the ice biting at her bare skin.

And in the void of her collapsing defenses, his heavy, intoxicating aura rushed in to fill it, pressing against her skin like a hand she did not know she was welcoming.

"Your titles mean nothing to the poison eating your veins," Lin Tian stated, without a shred of pity. "You are not an Elder in this room. You are a woman begging for a taste of my heat."

"Take it off — or the rot takes back what the fire just gave."

He did not move.

He simply let the weight of his presence press down on her.

The terror of facing another midnight backlash alone — and beneath it, the raw, animal addiction her body had already formed for his scent — broke her last resistance.

Her years of towering dignity came apart, shard by shard.

Pride had no currency in this chamber. Only survival did. Every instinct of the alchemist in her — the part that had outlived ten thousand poisons — had already priced the cost, and paid.

With shaking, delicate fingers, she reached for the hem of the last thin silk.

The collar of the garment caught at her throat, and her fingers fumbled with it. Each second that passed without his heat sent another throb of aching through her chest.

Humiliation burned behind her eyes as she pulled it over her head. The ruined fabric dropped to the jade floor, and her final shield was gone.

In the dim array-light, her bare, mature body shivered as the cool air bit at her heated skin. Her chest rose and fell in quick, uneven gasps, and a fine slick glisten traced the line of her hips.

She did not look at him.

She would not give him that.

"Turn around," Lin Tian commanded. "Hands on the slab. Lean over."

No praise. No pity. Just the order. She swallowed the metallic taste of blood in her mouth, and she obeyed.

She turned her back to him, pressed her bare palms flat against the freezing profound-ice, and bent forward, her spine forming a breathtaking, elegant arch. The ice numbed her hands almost at once, but she did not let go.

Lin Tian stepped up behind her.

He didn’t touch her. He simply stood close enough for the furnace-heat of his body to press against her bare, shivering back.

"Ah—"

A soft, trembling moan slipped from her, just from the proximity.

"You are already dripping for a junior."

His voice was a dark purr, vibrating directly against her sensitive earlobe.

[Insight Eye]

The toxic blockages running along her spine and lower Dantian, and the exact elemental dosage needed to shatter her mental defenses — without curing the physical root — presented itself.

He placed his large, calloused hand flat against her bare lower back, his palm settling directly over her central spinal node.

"Ten seconds," he whispered.

FWOOSH!

A heavy, concentrated surge of pure Yang fire poured directly into her.

"AHHHH!"

Her back arched violently off the ice, a high, broken cry tearing from her throat.

The collision was instantaneous and absolute. The Primordial Yang struck her like a river of liquid fire, violently suppressing the rot in her upper meridians. The excruciating, suffocating pressure in her chest vanished in a single instant.

Ten...

Nine...

He counted aloud, maintaining the heavy, concentrated flow.

The heat of his palm blazed through the skin of her spine like a branding mark. The ice beneath her hands had already stopped mattering; there was only his hand, and the fire behind it.

Her body went dead still under the intensity of the pleasure. Her legs buckled, and the only thing keeping her from the floor was his firm, burning hand on her spine.

"Haa... so hot..." she sobbed, delirious.

Eight...

Seven...

The relief was so overwhelmingly euphoric that her inner walls fluttered, weeping uncontrollably, a heavy, slick flood soaking her inner thighs and dripping onto the stone.

Six...

Five...

The raw heat of their meeting sent her entire frame taut. Her hips pushed back into the empty air, shamelessly seeking contact, her mind blanked by the heavenly sensation of his pure fire.

Four...

Somewhere above the flood of sensation, the alchemist’s mind noted the measure of the fire was exact — enough to condition, not to cure.

Three....

Her fingernails scratched frantically against the profound-ice.

"More... please."

The strict, untouchable Alchemist was gone, replaced by a desperate, writhing addict consumed by his heat. Her mouth opened in a silent scream as the golden warmth flooded her rotting meridians, clearing the blockages with terrifying, majestic ease.

Two... One...

Lin Tian pulled his hand away. The flow of Yang Qi was severed clean.

"No!"

Her legs gave out entirely. She collapsed onto the floor, her hands slipping off the slab and hitting the hard stone with a dull thud. The cold bit straight through her bare skin.

The sudden, brutal absence of his fire was a whiplash.

Within a single second, the crushing, rotting heat of the Pill Toxicity crashed back down upon her fragile meridians, rushing eagerly to reclaim its lost territory.

She tried once to push herself up, on nothing but pride. Her arms gave out halfway, and she dropped back to the stone.

"Come back! Please— give me more!"

She twisted on the floor, tears of pure desperation streaming down her flushed cheeks. She reached up, trembling fingers grasping frantically at the hem of his obsidian robes.

"I’m still empty! please coming back— !"

Fully exposed, kneeling on the cold stone, begging a junior for one more touch.

The realization of her own pathetic dependency cracked the last pillar of her Dao-Heart.

The cold air of the chamber did not comfort her. It only made the absence of his heat sharper.

Lin Tian adjusted the cuffs of his pristine robes and looked down with calculated indifference.

He did not step back. He did not move toward the shadows. He remained exactly where he stood, his towering figure casting a heavy, dominant shadow over her kneeling form.

The ethereal blue interface flickered into his vision.

[Devotion: 25% → 35% (Addicted & Humiliated)]

"You have tasted the fire, Elder." His voice carried cold, untouchable authority. "You know exactly what your body needs to survive. But your pathways are brittle. They cannot absorb the full essence of the Pure Yang Lotus yet."

Elder Liu looked up at him, her chest heaving.

"Then how? How do I condition them?" Her voice broke on the plea. "Please, Lin Tian... tell me what to do."

Lin Tian’s golden eyes gleamed with dark, absolute dominance.

"You gave up your robes, Elder. But when I touched you, your ego was still standing. You expected to simply stand there, take the fire, and be done with it."

He stepped half a pace closer, until his boots brushed her bare, trembling legs.

"That ends now."

"To condition your pathways, you must actively draw the Qi out yourself."

Her eyes widened.

The implication slowly pierced through her lust-addled mind, and her gaze fell — landing directly upon the center of his obsidian robes.

She tried to form a protest. It came out as a whisper. "You... you wouldn’t..."

Lin Tian’s voice dropped a single shade colder.

"Stay exactly where you are. If you want the fire to return, you will not just stand there and receive it."

"You will take it from me."

"Show me how greedy your toxicity truly is. Earn your cure."