Shen Yu encounters Meng Yan, the Golden Core Matriarch of the Jin Clan, on the Old Trade Road. Recognizing her severe Lunar Fire Stagnation through the Primordial Yin-Yang Scripture, he plays the role of a saintly, clinical physician to perfection. He lures her into a carriage ride, using her desperation to establish physical contact. By executing a series of intimate massages with a customized Crimson Nectar oil, he forces her to expel her stagnant Yin Fire in a series of violent climaxes. While she faints from the sheer sensory overload, Shen Yu sits in the lotus position and absorbs her expelled Golden Core Yin Qi. This single session repairs his broken meridians from seventeen percent to fifty-one percent. He also extracts a promise for the Astral Mending Herb, which he will use as a public alibi to hide his demonic cultivation method. This strategic victory leaves Meng Yan spiritually addicted and highly dependent, but the sudden jump in his power demands even denser energy to complete his healing. He must return to his estate and face his fiancée, whose sharp senses are already waiting in the dark to sniff out the scent of another woman on his skin. When he steps through the gates of the Tang Estate, the cool night air does nothing to soothe the tension. Lixue is practicing her swordplay in the courtyard, her white robes clinging to her damp skin. The moment she approaches him, her sharp senses detect the heavy, cloyingly sweet musk of Meng Yan lingering on his collar. Her eyes darken with a sudden, intense storm of possessive rage. She grabs his robes and smashes her lips against his, demanding to know every detail of how he touched the Matriarch. This jealousy is the exact catalyst Shen Yu needs to unleash the next phase of his cultivation, setting up a confrontation where devotion and envy will collide on the marriage bed.

Shen Yu masterfully weaponizes Lixue's intense jealousy, explaining that her pure Yin Qi is the only mortar that can bind his shattered foundation together. When they couple, her desperate need to overwrite the Matriarch's scent supercharges her Yin Qi, turning her essence into a highly concentrated alchemical fuel. This explosive energy surges through Shen Yu, repairing his remaining meridians to one hundred percent. However, the sudden restoration of his physical vessel triggers a violent internal war between his dormant Celestial Fox bloodline and the Primordial Yin-Yang physique. To prevent his body from detonating under the strain, he forces the energy back through Lixue, using the friction of their continuous intercourse to fuse the two forces into the Heaven-Seducing Primordial Bloodline. This platinum shockwave resonates with Lixue, violently awakening her dormant Ancient Sword Sovereign bloodline and locking her loyalty at an unbreakable maximum. The next morning, the system interface materializes in his vision, confirming his breakthrough to the seventh stage of Qi Condensation and quantifying Lixue's absolute devotion. But their celebration is abruptly cut short by the arrival of the arrogant Peng Clan, who demand Lixue's hand in marriage and threaten to economically suffocate the Tang Estate within a week. Peng Bo and his uncle Peng Tai leave a chilling ultimatum, giving the family seven days to surrender Lixue or face total ruin. Instead of reacting with hot-headed violence, Shen Yu's four-hundred-year-old mind begins to spin a deadly web. He realizes that to crush a local hegemon, he must first control the city's market. He must accelerate his conquest of Meng Yan to secure the Jin Clan's vast distribution network, turning the upcoming trade dispute into a trap that will bait the Peng Clan into their own destruction.

To counter the Peng Clan's economic blockade, Shen Yu orchestrates a devastating commercial war. Armed with the Jin Clan's distribution network and his aunt Mei Yilan's alchemical skills, he launches the high-purity Pure Flow and Iron-Blood pills, capturing eighty percent of the local market. In a desperate bid to survive, Patriarch Peng Kai slashes his prices and forces his alchemists to produce cheap, rushed imitations. This reckless production leaves heavy metallic impurities in their pills, resulting in the catastrophic Grey-Eye Plague. Cultivators across Thousand Waves City collapse as their meridians are coated in a leaden, grey sludge. Seizing the chaos, Shen Yu steps onto the balcony of the Jade Spring Hall as a benevolent savior, offering his custom Impurity Purging Pill to the desperate masses. This brilliant face-slapping maneuver completely destroys the Peng Clan's reputation and transfers their entire wealth directly into his hands. The citizens now worship him as the Golden Paragon, but a cornered beast is at its most dangerous. Left with no treasury and no public support, the Peng Clan decides to abandon the rules of commerce entirely, turning to the shadows to hire the notorious Thousand-Ghost Syndicate to assassinate the Tang lineage in their sleep. The air grows cold as night falls over the estate, and the silence is broken only by the subtle distortion of the protective arrays. Five elite enforcers, led by the Peak Golden Core master Wraith-043, slip past the outer defenses with their poison-coated daggers drawn. They believe they are hunting a crippled boy and a defenseless alchemist, completely unaware that they are walking straight into the jaws of a sleeping dragoness who has hidden her true power for decades.

The night ambush by the Thousand-Ghost Syndicate backfires spectacularly when Mei Yilan reveals her hidden identity as the legendary Crimson Sword Master. Her fists radiate a chaotic, elemental fire that warps the air, easily shattering the poison-coated daggers of the two first-stage Golden Core assassins. Wraith-043, the peak Golden Core leader of the assault, is paralyzed with terror as her hair bleeds into a molten red and she steps forward like an approaching cataclysm. While Yilan dominates the center, Lixue and Shen Yu hunt the remaining enforcers in the dark hallways of the estate. Shen Yu lunges forward, his spear trailing a wake of dark-gold light, driving the spearhead through an assassin's forehead with surgical precision. Lixue unleashes her newly awakened Sword Sovereign aura, her white light slicing the attackers to ribbons. With the assassins completely erased, the failed strike provides the perfect moral justification for a public counterattack. Shen Yu gathers a righteous mob of cured commoners, leading them to the Peng Estate under the guise of delivering justice for the poisoning and the ambush. The blacksmiths and rogue cultivators, fueled by blind hatred, storm the compound and slaughter the remaining Peng elders. Shen Yu steps into the burning ruins, calling for peace only after his rivals have been thoroughly extinguished. This calculated purge leaves the Tang-Jin alliance as the undisputed rulers of Thousand Waves City, but the destruction of a prominent merchant house will inevitably draw the attention of the Imperial Court and the distant sects, setting the stage for a much larger conflict on the national stage. With his foundation restored to fifty-one percent from Meng Yan and completed by Lixue, his eyes now turn toward the wider Crimson Lotus Empire, where even greater resources and peerless beauties await his conquest.