Chapter 16: Argent Artistry and the Gathering Tempest
The multitude averted their gazes, anticipating the sanguine spectacle of Xu Ling's cranium yielding to Zhou Dawei's fulminous strike.
This colossus of sinew and malice—a titan nearing two metres—swung with force sufficient to fracture ancestral tombstones. Yet Xu Ling's cranium inclined a hair's breadth rearward, his digits maintaining quicksilver needles with monastic exactitude.
A susurrus of awe permeated the throng.
"Celestial phantasm! The youth dodges like an inkbrush, avoiding flawed parchment!"
"More apt to say the oafish physician flails like an inebriated water buffalo!" mocked an impudent stripling, blind to Zhou Dawei's homicidal ocular tempest.
Transformed into a maelstrom of pugilistic fury, Zhou Dawei's hammer-fists carved air into splintered fragments. Xu Ling evaded with the weightless grace of cherry blossoms adrift, ultimately consulting his chronometer before settling like a sage heron beside the recumbent academic.
"You carrion beetle! My brethren shall pulverize your ossified remains into funerary incense!" Zhou Dawei screeched, summoning reinforcements via trembling digits.
As vitriol echoed, Xu Ling traced confectionary patterns across his luminescent screen, aureate sunlight transmuting his insouciance into gilded sculpture.
"Flee, child of misfortune," croaked a betel-nut-chewing crone. "That rabid hound disembowels songbirds for nocturnal sport!"
"Futile endeavour," countered a squid vendor. "The Zhou tendrils strangle this prefecture's beating heart."
Through the seething mass glided Xie Yuxuan, her nephrite orbs widening at the grotesque tableau. Zhou Dawei's apoplexy dissolved into oleaginous obsequiousness.
"Yuxuan-jade! Your presence illuminates—"
"Merely studying flies drawn to carrion," she interposed icily, though dread's centipede crawled through her viscera.
Xu Ling's solar brilliance fractured the tension. "Lady Xie! How fortuitous to encounter Persephone's handmaiden at Thanatos' threshold!"
Zhou Dawei's jugular pulsated like an enraged amphisbaena. "You... acknowledge this gutter-born lichen?"
"A transient patron of our apothecary," she disassembled through moonstone dentition, observing obsidian vans encroaching like scarab battalions.
The multitude dispersed—autumn foliage before sirocco—as twenty knuckle-draggers emerged, their metallic talons gleaming like Andromeda's baleful progeny.
The Ambulance Confrontation
"Dawei, what imbecile dared cross you this time? The brethren shall settle this!"
A figure emerged from the lead van, his sinewy arm adorned with a coiling azure serpent tattoo. Approaching Liu Dawei, he delivered a palm strike akin to a willow frond whip across the younger man's shoulder—a brutish salutation long endured. Liu Dawei's ocular fixations upon Xu Ling now mirrored the glacial detachment reserved for cadavers.
"Annihilate that wretch!"
Xie Yuxuan's pulse faltered as Zhou Dawei's lethal intent crystallized. "Zhou Dawei! Such brazen lawlessness under heaven's gaze? This transcends all bounds!"
Observing her knitted brows, Zhou Dawei theatrically smote his forehead. "Your censure is warranted. A mere thrashing shall suffice." His arm snaked toward Xie Yuxuan's shoulders in counterfeit camaraderie, ocular commands silently marshalling his legion.
Xu Ling's gaze swept across the phalanx of brawny henchmen, then flickered to his chronometer. "Ninety seconds remain before extraction. Assail me en masse—temporal efficiency demands it."
His cervical vertebrae emitted firecracker detonations as he rotated his scapulae. With chronometric precision, Xu Ling became projectile incarnate, hurtling toward the nearest colossus.
Bystanders recoiling in fear found themselves rooted mid-retreat, mesmerized by this audacious youth's contempt for mortal peril. From incipience to culmination, his hubris defied containment—now came the crucible to test such vainglory against a score of human battering rams.
Xu Ling materialized as an ectoplasmic entity, his kinetics dissolving into palimpsestic traces.
"Dawei, this quarry proves sterner than forged steel!" The tattooed chieftain's epiphany coincided with mandibular devastation—an inhuman force catapulted him skyward, limbs flailing like a marionette severed from its strings.
Zhou Dawei, still clutching Xie Yuxuan's wrist, scarcely registered the girl's serpentine twist from his grasp.
"Does your heart incline toward this cur, Miss Xie?" Xu Ling's inquiry sliced the air.
Her cranium shook in negation. Before the gesture's completion, Xu Ling's instep became a ballistic arc. Zhou Dawei described a parabola through the atmosphere, tripartite dentition glinting rubescent amidst their aerial exodus.
*Thunderous impact!
*Cataclysmic collision!
The fraternal duo consecutively met terra firma, their corpulent masses seismically disturbing the asphalt.
Xie Yuxuan stood petrified, labial aperture agape in mute stupefaction. Xu Ling required no visual confirmation to apprehend the tsunami of incredulity emanating from her being.
Within ocular palpitations' span, scores of grown warriors lay prostrate, appendages clutched to sundered anatomies, their lamentations composing a dolorous symphony.
"By what arcana...?" Her vocal cords vibrated with reverential tremor.
Xu Ling's lips curved in wan amusement. "A master's tutelage imprints indelible lessons."
Pedagogical attribution—the panacea for all mystification.
Reattending to his patient with chronographic exactitude, his digits became argent blurries extracting filigreed needles. A fresh stylus pierced each digital extremity, ebony vitae yielding to vermilion torrents under his calculated pressure. Twenty digital purgations completed, perspiration glistened upon his brow as he slumped against the gurney's edge.
The purr of a luxury engine sundered the post-bellum silence. A sable Bentley coalesced beside the ambulance, its obsidian carapace gleaming with raptorial intensity.
The Alchemist's Debt
The luxury vehicle disgorged two matriarchal figures, their arms cradling a cherubic child as they hastened toward the medical trolley with staccato urgency. "Where does the physician reside? To discard my progenitor, thus—this outrage demands explication!"
The Chanel-clad matron—her couture elegance undermined by distress—turned an incandescent glare upon the trembling nursing staff. "Madam Liu, this... practitioner demanded treatment rights. Resistance proved futile!" A nurse's faltering explanation trailed into silence as Zhou Yao's attention alighted upon the youth reclining against the gurney.
Recognition sparked aurally across her features. "Divine Healer Xu! Zhou Yao—we shared discourse at the autumn philanthropic soirée?" Her jewelled hand fluttered like a captive songbird as the septuagenarian patient erupted in phlegmatic coughs, milky eyes flickering open.
Zhou Yao surged forward, anxiety dissipating like ink in water. "Father! Celestial mercy—your cognisance returns!"
Xu Ling elevated the patriarch with practiced motions, his diagnosis delivered in clinical cadence: "Dawn's indulgence provoked this crisis—crustacean consumption, I deduce?"
"Verbatim!" Zhou Yao affirmed. "Last evening's natal celebrations featured oceanic delicacies."
The elder's quavering interjection followed: "But two crabs beyond measure... surely no venom lurked?"
"Not toxicity but antagonism," Xu Ling rectified, adopting a scholastic inflection. "Persimmon and crustacean conspire as chemical adversaries—breeding enteric revolt. Today's golden fruit excess breached equilibrium."
Comprehension dawning, the patriarch rose with marionette stiffness, arthritic claws reaching for scattered globular treasures. "Ailing Grove's gilded persimmons... nectar no mortal might resist..." His asthmatic mirth accompanied the fruit-gathering ritual, each specimen handled like a sacred reliquary.
Zhou Yao kneaded her temples at this senescent antics. "Divine Healer, our familial indebtedness surpasses celestial measurements. What tribute might appease this cosmic ledger?"
Xu Ling's gesture encompassed the convalescent. "Mark his Hall of Affliction—those astral meridians pulse with nephrite vitality. This house is sanctified by chronos-defying blessings."
"You decipher celestial cartography, too?" Zhou Yao's veneration deepened.
"When one imbibes from the fountain of erudition," Xu Ling intoned, "discipular duty forbids intellectual parsimony."
Xie Yuxuan materialized amidst their colloquy, bearing testament. "Yao, your sire tread the Bifrost to Hades' court. This Asclepius wrenched him from Charon's skiff."
Their dialogue fractured as an alabaster Bentley mirrored its onyx counterpart's arrival. Liu Yan emerged, his Brioni armour creasing as tension ebbed at the sight of his rejuvenated patriarch proffering forbidden fruits.
"Beloved", Zhou Yao proclaimed, anchoring her spouse's arm, "this deliverance commands princely recompense."
Liu Yan's obeisance carried generational gravitas. "Divine Healer, twice you've consecrated my lineage's continuity. Proclaim your desire—the Liu dominion's coffers kneel at your discretion."
A susurrus swept the crowd—twin automotive heraldries broadcasting dynastic puissance. None could misapprehend this tableau: here stood Liu Yan, primogenitor of Yunshan's tripartite hegemony, his mercantile fiefdom etched into the province's very bedrock.
The Gilded Summons
The monochromatic Bentley duo gleamed as marital totems, their customized frames immortalizing Liu Yan and Zhou Yao's nuptial spectacle that once electrified Yunshan County's collective consciousness.
"Divine Healer, our dynasty arose from surgical steel and sterilization," Liu Yan proclaimed, his consort's couture silhouette radiating spousal solidarity. "Let our armoury of medical innovations become your apothecary."
Xu Ling masked his disquiet. To find himself inexplicably entwined with the Liu dynasty—architects of Yunshan's medical-industrial complex—defied his bucolic origins' humblest aspirations.
A matte-black card materialized between Liu Yan's Carrara-marble fingers. "Five million units of currency—paltry recompense for breathing divinity into my lineage."
The physician's protestations dissolved beneath patrician persistence. "In counterbalance," Xu Ling unveiled vermilion parchment scrolled with cinnabar calligraphy, "decoct this at matins and vespers. Its...conjugal tonic properties shall wax with the crescent moon."
Their synchronized inhalation betrayed decades of unfulfilled parental yearning—this pharmacopoeia transcending herbalism, becoming dynastic sacrament.
Amidst fractured pavement, Zhou Dawei's consciousness resurfaced through neural fog. His mandible resembling crackled celadon, he observed through ocular slits as his nemesis bartered salvation for aristocratic favour.
"Strategic retreat, brother-cousin," the tattooed tactician hissed, restraining inflamed vengeance. "Jade requires millennia of pressure to transmute—we'll entomb this upstart in geological time."
Nursing staff clustered like starlings, their whispers weaving speculative tapestries. "That profile belongs on silver screens," breathed a paediatric specialist, adjusting her Florence Nightingale cap at a coquettish angle. "Hippocratic oath meets Jianghu codex..."
Their symposium fractured as the rejuvenated patriarch brandished his cane like a sceptre. "Why incarcerate this reborn phoenix in germicidal cages?" The nonagenarian's laughter boomed. "My resurrection demands persimmon libations!"
Liu Yan's Patek Philippe thrummed—corporate titans awaiting audience in glass-and-steel coliseums. "Honoured physician," he proffered vermeil-edged vellum, "tonight's symposium convenes Yunshan's pantheon. Let their obeisance christen your ascension."
The invitation's gilded serifs shimmered with transformative potential. Xu Ling's village clinic now seemed a chrysalid phase—a larval stage preceding iridescent metamorphosis.
As the Bentley cortege dissolved into smog-veiled horizons, Zhou Dawei's van peeled asphalt with tire-shrieking allegretto. His rearview reflection burned not with defeat, but the smouldering gaze of deferred retribution. Nursing staff dispersing like unrequited muses sighed into the diesel-scented twilight.
Beneath waning ambulance lights, the patriarch's dentures sank into contraband persimmon flesh, saccharine nectar dissolving memory of mortality's bitter kiss.
Celestial Masquerade
The vacuum left by Liu Yan's exit became saturated with Yu Mengna's constellatory admiration. "Xiao Ling, your prowess transcends mortal comprehension!"
Xu Ling's lips quirked in Delphic amusement. "Na-jie has merely glimpsed dawn's first light. Tonight's lunar revelries shall unveil the full solar spectrum of my capacities." His oracular cadence ignited synaptic fireworks beneath her executive composure. *Had he decrypted the cryptographic yearnings encrypted in her boardroom demeanour?
Zhao Yuxuan observed this cosmic dance through fractured glass, acidulated envy corroding her professional veneer. "The dispensary... requires my oversight," she prevaricated, her farewell smile cracking like Ming porcelain. Her retreating silhouette cast elongated shadows across the parking lot—a Eurydice condemned to corporate underworlds.
Yu Mengna's epidermal capillaries performed chromatic alchemy, transmuting ivory to peony. "Might the evening's... proceedings extend to my private domicile?" she ventured, syllables tripping over themselves like debutantes at their first cotillion.
Xu Ling executed tactical recoil. "B-better to convene in neutral territories! Hotels specialize in... transactional conveniences."
Her metacarpals collided with his sternum—a mock assault oscillating between boardroom dominance and coquettish pantomime. The cognitive dissonance of witnessing this Valkyrie reduced to schoolgirl theatrics propelled him toward fruit-laden sanctuaries, desperate to quarantine himself from romantic crossfire.
Yu Mengna's stiletto carved hieroglyphics of frustration into asphalt. Yet anticipation's golden filaments soon wove through her irritation. *Nocturnal metamorphosis awaits.* Her mirror reflected infinite inadequacies—a hair follicle misaligned, cuticle irregularities. Three hours later, emerging from Yunshan's most exclusive beauty atelier, she rivalled jade carvings in the Forbidden City.
As chronometric digits aligned at the sixth zenith, Xu Ling abandoned crystalline vitis clusters to commune with vibrating technology. " Xiao Ling," Yu Mengna's contralto reverberated through quantum networks, "Li Chuang shall orchestrate your sartorial apotheosis. Expect his arrival at bi-minute intervals."
Beyond glass partitions, Li Chuang stood sentinel beside a vermilion BMW M8 Gran Coupe—an automotive dragon guarding treasure. "Honoured Benefactor," his bow calibrated to courtier precision, "your ascension chariot materializes."
Through tinted glass panoramas, Li Chuang's physiognomy revealed cosmic blueprints: a frontal eminence glowing with joss stick luminosity and labial cushions whispering of unshakeable fealty. Xu Ling's prognosis materialized as Delphic verse: "Consult Na-jie regarding emporium affairs. The Fates spin unexpected silken threads." The chauffeur's Bazi chart, Xu Ling discerned, would soon blaze with wealth's supernova.
Yu Mengna's carmine lips curved like Venusian crescents. Tonight's celestial ball promised more than networking—it portended reality's rewiring, destinies reforged in champagne flutes' golden crucibles.
Metamorphosis Under Neon
Xu Ling dispensed this karmic boon with regal indifference. Li Chuang's countenance erupted in vernal effervescence. "Oracle of Commerce! May celestial ledgers validate your augury!"
The honorific "Laoban" scraped against Xu Ling's egalitarian sensibilities—a coronation premature for one scarcely beyond Saturn's first return. "Elder Brother Li, let feudal formalities perish. Xu Ling suffices."
"Acknowledged, Xu Ling Laoban."
Surrendering to lexical inertia, Xu Ling permitted the linguistic pantomime. The luxury sedan devoured urban arteries, disgorging them before a ziggurat of capitalism within circadian minutes. Artificial constellations bathed glittering acolytes of consumerism, resurrecting spectres of adolescent mortification—a scarecrow youth in Salvation Army castoffs, deemed unworthy even to polish these very tiles.
Li Chuang's ceremonial door choreography fractured nostalgia's veil. "Xu Lao... Lingzi, our transfiguration summons."
Xu Ling descended, his soil-caked trainers desecrating Carrara purity. "These vestments served orchard labourers admirably," he proffered, intercepting Li Chuang's sartorial audit. Custodial sentinels tracked his progress with unvarnished scorn, oblivious to the half-million-yuan leviathan nesting in his threadbare bastion.
Jawline angled like deposed royalty reclaiming birthright, Xu Ling breached the glass palisades. Their odyssey ascended via a luminous helix to the tertiary sanctum where follicular alchemy commanded tributes exceeding peasant monthly wages.
"Grandmaster Tony anticipates our visitation," Li Chuang declared to a peroxide hierophant whose ocular dissection catalogued their sartorial heresies.
"The Maestro is otherwise engaged." Her nasal sneer crescendoed as she undulated toward a truffle-scented plutocrat.
Li Chuang's labour-cured digits fretted counterfeit lapels. "Yet our covenant..." His protest asphyxiated beneath prismatic luminescence illuminating acolytes swathed in clandestine atelier garments.
"Chronos mocks my preparations!" A constellated-face matron's shriek sundered the ambiance. "Shall I greet destiny resembling some provincial stepsibling?"
This Dionysian outburst electrified Li Chuang. Time's scythe hovered—failure meant confronting Yu Mengna's gorgonian wrath. He advanced toward the obsidian altar, vertebrae calcifying with purpose. "Our blood oath with Grandmaster Tony—does the ledger of appointments hold no sanctity?"
Unobserved by mortal perception, Xu Ling's thumb caressed the platinum talisman's engraved sigils. Tonight's metamorphosis transcended mere appearance—it whispered of chrysalid revolutions and caste-system demolitions.
Ascendance of the Vermilion Dragon
Li Chuang's sycophantic posture inadvertently nourished the receptionist's wounded pride—her spirit still smarting from earlier genuflections before oligarchs. She appraised his sartorial heresies with ophidian contempt. "Maestro Tony apprenticed under Alexandre de Paris! His calendar overflows with county magistrates and tycoons. You? A gutter urchin aspiring to his chair?"
Xu Ling noted Li Chuang's Atlas-curved spine—the universal semaphore of caste-induced debasement. His digits caressed the platinum talisman's guilloche patterns as he advanced toward the onyx altar.
At a tercet pace, a bergamot-scented avalanche breached his personal space. "Faugh! Peasant miasma befouls the atmosphere!" A constellated-face matron scoured her forearm with operatic exaggeration, as though proletarian cooties required ritual purification.
"Madame," Xu Ling's diction carried permafrost clarity, "no ablution cleanses spiritual putrescence."
The woman's astral-map complexion darkened into supernova rage. "Insolent cur! I'll have your hide flayed for sandals!"
"Precisely!" Her coiffeur—a strutting mandarin duck in spray-on denim—hissed. "Cerberus! Remove this drainpipe denizen!"
Li Chuang's intervention died stillborn beneath Xu Ling's imperceptible cranial negation. Let serpents' posture—their venom would soon autointoxicate.
"Pauperism demands proletarian tonsures!" The cosmic-faced crone preened before Versailles mirrors. "This sanctum exists for celestial patronage!"
"Abominable!" Her acolyte wrinkled rhinoplastied nostrils. "His effluvium violates our rarefied ether!"
The maître d' manifested a morpho butterfly in Tom Ford Twilight. "Monsieur," he cooed with aspic-coated courtesy, "our atelier services discerning palates. Permit me to recommend an...alleyway establishment matching your fiscal constellation."
Xu Ling's ocular glaciers remained unthawed. "Concluded your aria?"
"Scarcely! Your clodhopper's clay profanes our statuario..."
The platinum sigil struck marble with imperial resonance. "Five million celestial coins. For your membership archives."
Derisive cacophony erupted like swamp gases. "Dementia's marionette!" The maître d' clutched phantom strands of Mikimoto. "Shall I summon Bedlam's wardens? Their absconded patient wears your visage!"
Unseen by the jeering bacchanalia, Xu Ling's thumb awakened the card's latent heraldry—a holographic qilin materializing above the payment terminal. Mockery petrified mid-cadence, transmuting into the leaden silence of courtiers witnessing a mendicant's transformation into vermilion-robed nobility.
In that alchemical suspension, societal chrysalis shattered. The dragon ascendant emerged.
The Monarch's Adjudication
The manager's theatrics elicited sycophantic titters from the assembled bourgeoisie. Xu Ling advanced toward the alabaster transaction altar, his platinum sigil gleaming like Arthurian steel. "Authentication mechanisms exist, do they not? Initiate fiscal verification." His equanimity mirrored seasoned plutocracy, though Li Chuang's discreet sleeve-tugging betrayed unease.
"This masquerade warrants no fiscal martyrdom," Li Chuang whispered through motionless lips.
Xu Ling's smirk channelled kitsune mischief. "Let us savour their commedia dell'arte until Na-jie's triumphant ingress."
"Only cerebrally impoverished simpletons would credit his talisman's alleged potency!" The astral-faced matron's derision harmonized with crystal chandelier vibrations.
A portal hissed—cobalt stilettos emerged first, followed by alabaster limbs that petrified the atmosphere. The congregation stilled as Qu Xiao materialized, her glacial countenance suspending chronometric flow.
"Xiao-jie!" The manager's grin mutated into grotesque obsequiousness. "Your luminosity eclipses the celestial spheres!"
Qu Xiao's polar gaze swept the atelier. Patrons rose in vassal-like genuflection, their salutations dismissed. Even the star-speckled Meizi produced a tremulous "Xiao-jie" through veneered dentition.
"Decipher this dissonance," Qu Xiao commanded, each syllable lowering the salon's ambient temperature.
"An... indigent interloper," the manager faltered. "Protective services are en route—"
Her quicksilver optics locked onto Xu Ling. Recognition sparked—a single ebony eyebrow ascended in regal inquiry. "Indigent?"
The manager's sudoriferous glands activated emergency protocols. "A... distinguished patron requiring Maestro Tony's attention! Chronographic incompatibilities..."
Qu Xiao's vermilion-tipped digit flicked. An obsidian-clad sentinel's palm intersected the manager's cheekbone with seismic resonance. "Vision precedes service. Xu Ling operates under my aegis."
Her glacial focus transfixed Meizi. "Recite your earlier libretto."
"B-baseless prattle, Xiao-jie!" Meizi's vocal cords vibrated like overstrung Stradivarius strings.
"Prevarication desecrates ancestral honour," Qu Xiao intoned. "Prostrate. Immediately."
The constellation-faced supplicant collapsed, forehead impacting Carrara in penitential percussion. "Clemenza! My unworthy tongue defiles generations!"
Xu Ling observed this feudal tableau with tectonic calm. The forgotten platinum sigil upon the altar now pulsed with esoteric significance. Qu Xiao's carmine lips curved—a snow leopard recognizing its mirrored cunning.
"Prepare the Chrysanthemum Suite," she proclaimed. "Maestro Tony shall personally oversee the phoenix's apotheosis."
The Oracle's Decree
The atelier's atmosphere congealed under Qu Xiao's cryogenic sovereignty. Meizi pivoted toward Xu Ling with pantomimed penitence, her erstwhile hauteur dissolving into histrionic self-flagellation. "Celestial Master! This lowly worm's blasphemous tongue warrants eternal censure!"
The overseer witnessed this metamorphosis with escalating trepidation, his distended cheek pulsating in syncopated agony. Xu Ling's stoic mien now radiated sibylline detachment rather than plebeian resignation—a dormant volcano's deceptive calm.
Castigating pride like soiled vestments, the overseer inched forward, perspiration cascading like ambrosial libations. "Eminence! My vulpine vision obscured your nephrite essence!" His palm cannonaded against his visage, saline trails charting cartographies of shame. "A myriad crucifixions couldn't purify—"
"Orphaned during the Year of the Metal Dragon," Xu Ling interposed, his diction cleaving theatricality like Damascus steel. "Ward of the Harbin Foundling Sanctuary. Closeted desires buried beneath corporate mummery. Thirty-seven cycles orbiting solitude's event horizon."
A collective inhalation vacuumed the salon's oxygen. The overseer crumpled like Tang dynasty parchment, childhood spectres materialising behind blown pupils. "By what arcana...?"
"A twin flame", Xu Ling continued, relentless as sirocco winds. "Severed at Wuhu's crossroads. Adopted into Nantong's mercantile echelons. Now matriarch of Gemini heirs."
The overseer's complexion achieved a cadaverous pallor. These sepulchre-sealed truths—exhumed by a mendicant sage in proletarian guise—shook his ontological foundations.
"Trinity moons' expiation in the Alley of Shears," Xu Ling ordained. "Thereafter, seek audience at Persimmon Grove."
As the overseer prostrated with Benedictine devotion, Meizi's psyche underwent supernova collapse. Xu Ling's prior indictment—*"No loofah scourges spiritual gangrene"*—reverberated through her haunted psyche.
"Oracle!" She clawed at Xu Ling's hem with harpy desperation. "Phantom breath on midnight glass...crimson hieroglyphs materializing...demand any tribute for purification!"
Xu Ling's focus remained tethered to Qu Xiao, their silent colloquy transcending lexical constraints. The salon's infinity mirrors reflected countless permutations of this triptych—the augur, the suppliant, and the snow queen whose permafrost demeanour now fissured, revealing fleeting glimpses of perilous fascination.
Unobserved, the platinum sigil upon the onyx altar commenced vibrational harmonics—the subsonic prelude to karmic reconfiguration.
The Sanctum Revelation
"Xiao-jie."
Qu Xiao acknowledged with a glacial nod. "Lingzi, follow me." She swept into her private sanctuary, its azure door sealing behind them like a vault guarding state secrets.
The chamber resembled an arctic grotto—cerulean chaise upholstered in Icelandic wool, minimalist divan floating on polished basalt. "My meditative retreat," she offered, though the air thrummed with unsaid entreaties.
Xu Ling settled onto the frozen-hue furniture, a patient panther awaiting the huntress's move. Let the Snow Queen of Yunshan direct this waltz—he recognized the desperation beneath her permafrost poise.
Three precisely calibrated minutes passed before Qu Xiao ruptured the silence. "Your pharmacopoeia works minor miracles." Her voice betrayed the faintest fissure. "These nights... I've slept like a temple guardian undisturbed for centuries."
Xu Ling inclined his head, clinical detachment intact. "Schisandra and ziziphus synergize with lunar cycles."
The ambient temperature plunged as Qu Xiao's lacquered nails scored the brocade. The unvoiced plea—*repair my fractured fertility*—vibrated between them like a plucked guqin string. Xu Ling studied imaginary tea leaves, allowing urgency to distil into potency.
Beyond the soundproofed walls, chaos reigned supreme.
"He breached the Cerulean Sanctum!" A platinum-blond stylist dropped her golden scissors, the *clang* echoing through the petrified salon.
The receptionist's tremor carried across marble floors. "Sovereign Black Card verified! Balance: five hundred thousand!"
Cosmetic brushes froze mid-air. Even Meizi's constellation of blemishes seemed to dim. Of the three Sovereign Cards in Yunshan County—emblems of generational oligarchy—none had ever graced this establishment's ledger.
Li Chuang's mind somersaulted. Yu Mengna's commercial empire couldn't secure such a totem. What shadowy alliances had this rural sage forged?
"Fourth-generation heir slumming for tabloid fodder," hissed a socialite clutching a Himalayan Birkin.
"Central Committee progeny conducting anti-corruption surveillance," her companion countered, adjusting her diamond choker.
Li Chuang bit through his lingual frenulum, iron-rich blood flooding his palate. Yu Mengna's maxim reverberated—*"Become mist when dragons dance."*
Within the sanctum, Qu Xiao's composure fractured like Song dynasty celadon. "Must I kneel?" The words escaped like caged songbirds.
Xu Ling's smile held the warmth of winter solstice dawn. "Healing begins when armours crumble, Xiao-jie."
Unobserved, the Sovereign Card's embedded microchip pulsed rhythmically, encrypted data streaming to Liechtensteiner servers. The chessboard expanded; kings and pawns alike would soon learn their ordained roles.
The Epiphany of Restoration
Amidst the salon's churning undertow of whispers, Xu Ling grappled with an insidious nasal prickle. A seismic sneeze ruptured the sanctum's taut atmosphere.
Massaging his rebellious olfactory nerve, the young healer capitulated to pragmatism. "Xiao-jie, twilight beckons us toward tonight's revelry. Shall we initiate the remedial rites?"
Qu Xiao's exhale carried glacial relief. "Proceed."
"Kindly disencumber yourself of vestments—my gaze shall remain averted." Xu Ling pivoted toward the lapis lazuli walls, though his mind's canvas bloomed with visions of whispered silk descending like cherry petals. The ensuing susurration of fabric might have resonated as monsoon torrents upon rice paper.
"Completion." Her utterance quivered like a guqin string brushed by autumn winds.
Xu Ling turned and confronted Aphrodite, emerging from digital waves. Recumbent upon the cerulean chaise, Qu Xiao's form embodied the marriage of Alpine conquest and Spartan discipline. Delicate lingerie traced cartography worthy of Ming-era pillow books, her abdominal ridges whispering of forbidden martial arts mastery.
A primal surge of yang energy breached Xu Ling's nasal ramparts. Vermilion tributaries cascaded over the precipice of his philtrum.
A carillon of laughter fractured the sanctum's solemnity. "Does the fair s*x's topography still ignite such sanguinary tributes, young sage?"
"A...a dozen anatomical studies at minimum!" Xu Ling parried, damming the crimson flow with his sleeve. "All paled before Xiao-jie's terracotta perfection."
The snow queen's pallor warmed to peony-blush. "Silver-tongued alchemist! This fading chrysalis demands ceaseless preservation."
"Three-and-twenty summers at most," Xu Ling countered, the diagnostician's eye appraising her collarbone's topography. "Dermal luminosity betrays monthly sturgeon egg applications and polar plunges."
Qu Xiao's brow arched like a drawn sabre. "Trifling investments—merely six celestial stems annually for temporal suspension."
Xu Ling's mental calculus faltered—a ploughman's generational fortune, heedlessly allocated to epidermal alchemy. Recentring, argent needles gleamed like starpoints in the sanctum's muted radiance. "Commencing celestial channel alignment. Let breath mirror tidal rhythms."
The inaugural filament penetrated her Crown Convergence meridian. Qu Xiao inhaled sharply as astral tides reconfigured her jingluo matrix.
"Gastric turbulence signifies meridianal convergence," Xu Ling intoned, manipulating the needle with seal-script precision. "The primordial pulse reasserts dominion."
Qu Xiao's alabaster knuckles blanched against azure brocade. The sanctum thickened with petrichor and unspoken histories. Beyond the sepulchral silence, the Sovereign Card's quantum core pulsed rhythmically—each oscillation harmonizing with Xu Ling's needlework, weaving invisible threads through Yunshan County's veiled tapestry of power.
The Convergence of Shadows
"Forgive the intrusion, Xiao-jie—the Celestial Prominence meridian demands unobstructed access." Xu Ling delicately elevated the diaphanous shroud veiling Qu Xiao's collarbone, revealing landscapes of moonlit marble where onyx lace cradled forbidden cartography.
"Silver-tongued alchemist," she murmured, her pallor warming to peony-blush. "Does this fading blossom still command such rapt scrutiny?"
Xu Ling averted his gaze, auroral hues flooding his helix. "Merely... charting the celestial crossroads."
Twenty Argentine needles later, the gauze pooled like melted frost at Qu Xiao's iliac crest. Xu Ling's digits pirouetted across quivering filaments, celestial energies cascading through her jingluo channels. The glacier queen's respiration deepened into tidal rhythms, limbs dissolving into post-nirvanic languor as primordial yang converged in her dantian crucible.
Her exhalation carried glacial purity—a stark counterpoint to Liu Shuxiang's opium-den cadences—igniting primal urges of dominion. Xu Ling's molars ground Taoist incantations into powder, quelling the rising dragon within.
When astral tides achieved self-sustaining vortices, the physician collapsed onto a jade-inlaid divan, ocular gates sealed against siren calls. Twenty zen heartbeats later, he rose to find Qu Xiao slumbering like a disarmed Valkyrie—unshielded, resplendent, myth made flesh.
Egressing the sanctum, Xu Ling confronted a pantheon of petrified observers. Meizi surged forth, talons embedding in his radial arteries.
"Spiritual sentinel! Demand any tribute!" Her irises mirrored caged songbirds' frenzy. "The umbral ones... their appetite knows no satiety!"
"Disclose the haunting's provenance," Xu Ling decreed, though her convulsive recoil preempted verbal confession.
"Repel them—SANCTUARY!" Meizi ascended his torso like kudzu vines, cephalopod limbs compromising thoracic expansion. The salon's ambiance curdled as her shrieks sundered the crystal constellations above. "THEY BREACH THE MERCURY GATES!"
Patrons recoiled from quicksilver surfaces. Even Li Chuang traced ancestral warding sigils—a pantomime learnt from forbidden cinematic scrolls—as Meizi's dread manifested corporeal miasma. Xu Ling wrestled with her preternatural vigour, discerning authentic spiritual desecration beneath lacquered talons.
The Masquerade of Shadows
Li Chuang, blind to Meizi's spectral torment, misinterpreted her frenzy as wanton audacity. Envy's serpent coiled in his chest as he witnessed the barely clad siren constrict Xu Ling like kudzu vines.
"Li Chuang! Sever this embrace!" Xu Ling rasped, his thoracic cage groaning under preternatural pressure. Where Liu Shuxiang's dalliances promised nectarous corruption or Yu Mengna's hinted at boardroom conquest, Meizi's grasp exuded eschatological horror.
Their tripartite struggle spanned five aeons until her consciousness abandoned its mortal vessel, limbs collapsing like marionettes with severed strings.
"Lingzi... could phantoms truly besiege her?" Li Chuang murmured, observing Meizi's petrified rictus of dread. His Cartesian certainties crumbled like desiccated parchment.
Xu Ling knelt upon veined Carrara, pulmonary furnaces blazing. "Maintain quarantine—this stench speaks of Yin corruption."
Silence enshrouded the salon like a necropolis' pall until stiletto staccato shattered the stasis. Yu Mengna manifested in blush-chiffon couture, her silhouette a paean to Praxitelean perfection. The gown's crystal-encrusted bodice transmuted her from corporate sovereign to Olympian deity.
"Must we present you at the masquerade as some feral bardling?" Her vermilion lips arced, though censure honed her gaze toward the tremulous clerk. "Where lurks your maestro? His schedule was purified for this metamorphosis!"
The receptionist's perspiration aureoles blossomed beneath her arms. "M-Maestro Tony meditates in the sanctum! Summoning celestial intervention!"
As the functionary fled, Xu Ling's gaze charted Yu Mengna's décolletage—cartography rivalling Qu Xiao's glacial splendour. Chronos accelerated: fifty minutes remained to transmute rural theurgists into gala aristocracy.
Tony emerged from the atelier's shadows, his shears glinting like Excalibur reborn. "Obsidian awaiting the lapidary's touch! Let us initiate the transfiguration!"
The salon's mercury pools reflected twin hourglasses—the gala's inexorable sands and Meizi's fibrillating form—a memento mori that darkness prowled beyond gilt cages.
The Alchemy of Appearances
Yu Mengna's dominion over Tony's creative realm permitted no dissent. "Xiao Wang! Xiao Huang! Marshal the chromatic legion!" The stylist's edict propelled his prismatic disciples into frenzied orbit around Xu Ling—human satellites attending a celestial body.
"Eminence, what sartorial revelation shall we conjure?" Tony entreated with saccharine deference, his spine curved in parabolic supplication before Qu Xiao's protégé.
"Austere refinement," Xu Ling breathed, ocular shutters descending against the salon's kaleidoscopic assault.
The artisans exchanged telegraphic glances—*simplicity* being the most mercurial of client decrees. Tony's shears trembled like divining rods above Xu Ling's untamed mane, ultimately capitulating to thermal artistry that carved tempestuous elegance from chaos.
Meanwhile, Yu Mengna's taloned gesture summoned the quaking clerk. "Retrieve the Bond Street raiment from the celestial vault. Invoke my sigil."
Thirty solar cycles later, Xu Ling materialized reborn. The midnight-hued vestment embraced his form like liquid shadow, bespoke oxfords reflecting eventide's abyss. His apothecary's aura now merged with patrician grace, arresting the salon's looking-glasses in silent veneration.
"An epidermis of sable silk," Xu Ling remarked, aligning platinum cufflinks.
Yu Mengna advanced, her vermilion claws engineering a necktie mandala. "Expedited metamorphosis commands usurious tribute." Their mirrored duality—yin and yang crystallized—provoked synaesthetic raptures among the chromatic acolytes.
"Celestial syzygy!" A cerulean-tressed disciple cried.
"Jade Monarch entwined with Lunar Consort!" Another ululated.
Even Li Chuang breached decorum: "Twin supernovae eclipsing mortal aesthetics!"
As the dyad processed through the parting sea of admirers, the salon's equilibrium dissolved—until Qu Xiao's sanctum portal hissed revelation. The frost queen's glacial mien fissured like Ming porcelain. "Xu Ling's locus?" Her query carried permafrost gales, crystallizing the celebratory miasma.
Looking glasses fogged with primal dread. Tony's styling wand clattered like a fallen icicle. Beyond the gilded menagerie, Meizi's catatonic form spasmed—a dissonant coda to this opus of transmutation.
Masquerade of Venomous Intent
Moore Manor's periphery blazed with constellations of suspended luminosity. A pantheon of automotive deities—Rolls-Royce Phantoms and Bugatti Titans—lined the gravel drive, their polished flanks mirroring the moon's argent gaze. Beneath silk-draped pavilions, human peacocks preened in Ermenegildo Zegna armour and Elie Saab plumage, crystal goblets glinting like captured stars as they stalked social quarry.
The crimson BMW's arrival elicited vulpine smirks. Xu Ling materialized first, his extended hand sculpted by Renaissance propriety.
"Cinematic gallantry," Yu Mengna murmured, her blush echoing the vehicle's vermilion lustre. "Method acting or innate talent?"
Xu Ling's auricular capillaries ignited. "Silver screen pedagogy".
Their procession—her hand ensconced in his elbow, mirth veiled behind satin gloves—rippled through the gathering. The vellum invitation's gilded filigree scarcely passed the majordomo's inspection when a burgundy-clad obstruction coalesced.
"Celestial nymph", Li Guangfei purred, digital percussion summoning a coupe of liquid rubies. "Might this unworthy supplicant drink from your radiance?" His ophidian gaze slithered toward Xu Ling. "And your...adjunct?"
Yu Mengna's clutch intensified, her décolletage imprinting a territorial claim upon Xu Ling's sleeve. "My consort abstains, as do I."
Li Guangfei's smile petrified. "My renown apparently precede me."
"Eminence requires no herald." Yu Mengna glided past, leaving the social carnivore pawing vacuum.
A servitor materialized at Li Guangfei's phalangeal twitch. "The customary dosage," he sibilated, pressing an alabaster lozenge into the attendant's palm alongside crimson-inked oblation. "Oblivion's wage."
Across topiary labyrinths, Liu Yan's champagne flute was arrested mid-arc. His consort Zhou Yao—a raven-plumed enchantress in noir faille—tracked Xu Ling's approach with pantherine intensity.
"Xu Ling!" Liu Yan's salutation cleaved the jasmine-scented air. "To kismet's caprices!"
The toast's reverberation merged with nocturnal cicadas. Beneath the gala's carillon laughter, venom seeped toward Yu Mengna's abandoned coupe—a basilisk infiltrating Eden's orchard.
To be continuous…