I'll make you the furnace and the cauldron, so you can refine Yin and Yang and prove the Great

Shen Yun's back pressed against the damp stone wall, her eyes surging with a panic she had rarely experienced in her life. She opened her mouth, her voice much lower than usual, as if squeezed from a tight throat: "You...you're going to take liberties with me again?"

Li Hanshan stood before her, his eyes appearing remarkably calm in the twilight and the faint glow of the array. He neither retreated nor approached, but remained rooted to the spot, his voice neither loud nor soft: "You've been stuck at the peak of the Nascent Soul stage for over a hundred years. The spiritual energy in your meridians has long since reached its limit, yet you've consistently failed to cross that threshold. The reason lies not in your cultivation level, but in the spiritual energy itself."

Shen Yun's breath hitched slightly. She wanted to retort, but found that every word he said precisely hit the point of confusion she had vaguely sensed but could never quite articulate during her years of cultivation.

Her spiritual power was indeed already fully stored, her meridians were wide and unobstructed, and the pressure of her primordial spirit was also heavy enough. However, the threshold leading to the Void Refinement stage was like an iron wall that had been repeatedly reinforced. Every impact would be bounced back to the original position, as if something on the other side of the threshold was forcibly pushing her spiritual power back.

"The spiritual energy within you is pure lightning, extremely powerful and fierce," Li Hanshan continued. "But the threshold of Void Refinement doesn't require a more violent impact; rather, it requires the spiritual energy to reach a state of yin-yang harmony the moment it crosses the bottleneck. No matter how fiercely pure, extremely powerful spiritual energy rushes in, it will only result in a clash of hardness against hardness, causing mutual damage. You need someone to soften the edges of that fierce spiritual energy from within, allowing it to seep into the cracks of the iron wall."

Shen Yun's fingers tightened slightly. She understood. Every word he said was like a precise key, inserting into the lock that had been hovering in her heart for hundreds of years.

"What's your idea?" she asked.

Li Hanshan said, "I am a Pure Yang Saint Body. Yang generates Yin, and Yin generates Yang. Only by nurturing a trace of Yin within extreme Yang can true balance be achieved. The reason why the barrier in your body has always been unable to be broken through is that it lacks that trace of Yin-Yang harmonizing power."

He paused for a moment, then said, "After I help you break through the bottleneck, your spiritual power will automatically complete the remaining part at the moment of breakthrough. This is just opening a door; the rest of the journey is up to you."

=

Shen Yun stood before the stone wall, feeling the air in the cave become exceptionally quiet due to the isolation created by the array; even the sound of the sea breeze was filtered into a distant and indistinct sob. Her fingertips repeatedly rubbed the edge of her sleeve, as if making some kind of final struggle. After a moment, she turned her back to him, her voice so low it was almost drowned out by the dripping water deep within the cave: "Turn around."

Li Hanshan turned around as instructed. Behind him came the faint sound of fabric slipping off, which was particularly clear in the quiet cave, like leaves brushing against the stone surface in the wind.

When Shen Yun's voice came from behind, it had regained its sect leader-like composure, but the extremely brief pause at the end of her sentence still betrayed that she was not as calm as she appeared: "Last time... I was out of my mind by the aphrodisiac mist. Today is different. If you have even the slightest thought of taking advantage of me in this vulnerable state, I will not let you off easily."

"I won't take advantage of you in the slightest." Li Hanshan didn't turn around. "After you break through, you'll be in charge of everything."

Shen Yun remained silent. After a moment, she said softly, "You can turn around now."

Li Hanshan turned around and saw her standing on the edge of the flat stone surface, her deep purple dress carefully folded and placed on the stone platform beside her.

Her body glowed with a warm luster in the interplay of the array's dim light and the twilight. She turned slightly to the side, her gaze fixed on a spot on the cave wall, as if counting the fine stone patterns to avoid eye contact with him. She could feel his gaze on her, and the feeling of being watched made her already tense breathing even more rapid, but she didn't urge him or say anything to stop him.

When Li Hanshan walked up to her, her body instinctively tensed up, then trembled slightly from the heat of his palm against her lower back.

At the same time, the two felt that familiar electric current spreading from the point of contact. The pure yang energy and the fierce spiritual power of the lightning attribute were like two fuses that were lit at the same time, slowly and steadily seeping into the depths of each other's meridians under the guidance of his technique.

She could feel that warm aura slowly seeping into the hardest part of her spiritual power, like a carefully controlled warm current, softening the edges of the lightning power that had been repeatedly compressed for hundreds of years.

The feeling was completely different from when she was breaking through the bottleneck alone—it was no longer a head-on collision, but a key being inserted deep into the lock, slowly but irreversibly turning the iron wall open from the inside.

Shen Yun's breathing became increasingly rapid as the pure yang energy continued to penetrate deeper. Her fingers gripped the fabric of his clothes on his shoulder, sometimes tight, sometimes loose, like a leaf caught in a whirlpool, repeatedly tug-of-war between struggle and resignation.

She bit her lip, suppressing all the sounds that were about to spill out into the depths of her throat, only occasionally letting out a faint breath when her spiritual energy circulation reached its deepest point.

She could feel fine golden patterns emerging on the surface of the primordial spirit in her dantian. These patterns slowly extended along the path of spiritual energy circulation, like the first crack appearing on the surface of ice after being moistened by spring water.

The barrier that had stood for hundreds of years was loosening layer by layer in a way she had never experienced before, like city bricks being repeatedly pried open and falling off one by one.