For six long months, I was a ghost in my own body, my consciousness a solitary island adrift on a raging, internal sea of liquefied Qi. The seclusion chamber, with its humming jade walls, ceased to be a physical place. It was my tomb, my crucible, the entire cosmos contained within the fragile vessel of my flesh.

My Dantian was a pool of terrifying, absolute purity. The liquefied Frost Qi within me was a vast, placid ocean, so refined, so free of the world's dross, that it had become almost alien to my own body. For my entire life, I had cultivated within the sterile perfection of the Imperial Palace's formations, shielded from the abrasive taint of the outside world. The two days I spent after the banquet, purging the last lingering echoes of that disgusting Frontier's Breath, had only heightened this state of unnatural flawlessness.

Now, I wrestled with a different kind of demon. My will was a fragile ship on ocean that was so perfectly still and cold it threatened to freeze my very soul. Every attempt to guide the flow, to introduce the motion necessary for crystallization, was met with an immense, unyielding inertia. It was like trying to sculpt a glacier with my bare hands. For weeks, perhaps months — time had lost all meaning in that silent, luminous jade prison — this was my reality. A constant, soul-crushing battle against the perfect stasis of my own foundation, a desperate struggle that yielded only exhaustion and the bitter taste of impending failure.

Fortunately, I had the proper Gifts to keep trying.

The talent-boosting elixir, Jiang's Dew.

And the catalyst, the Heart of the Frost Crystal.

The elixir was not a simple boost of power; it was a key, a moment of profound, almost divine clarification. Jiang Li had claimed it could permanently enhance one's spirit root quality, and the boast, I discovered, had not been an empty one. As the cool, fragrant liquid spread through my meridians, it did not add to the raging blizzard of my Qi. Instead, it granted me an impossible, exquisite degree of control over it. The Iceberg within my Dantian, that deathly still ocean of pure but untamable energy, suddenly became... manageable, as if my mind had expanded. My senses sharpened to a point where I could perceive every single current, every eddy, every individual droplet in that vast, internal sea. The inertia that had resisted my every attempt at guidance… dissolved.

With this newfound control, I finally introduced the catalyst. The Frost Crystal became the anchor of my soul: a single, perfect point of absolute order that I could now command my placid ocean of Qi to rally around. It was a seed, a gravitational center around which a new reality could form.

And the great work, now guided by an enhanced Will, began.

The implosion was not a single event, but a million-million tiny surrenders. The vast, swirling sea of Frost Qi began to condense, to fall in on itself, drawn inexorably towards the perfect, unwavering center that was the crystal's heart. It was the birth of a great glacier from condensing waters, the formation of a perfect diamond under the weight of a dying mountain. The pressure was unimaginable, an agony so profound it transcended mere pain, becoming a state of pure, ecstatic transformation. My very soul felt as if it were being ground into a fine, luminous dust: every doubt, every mortal frailty being systematically, mercilessly annihilated.

And from that dust, a new Golden Core was born.

A single, perfect, incandescent pearl of power materialized in the void of my Dantian 1where my sea of Qi had once been. It was not a mere sphere of light; it was a living, breathing entity, a miniature world unto itself, formed from a thousand-thousand unique parts — each a distinct, crystalline mote of Qi, different from its neighbors as one snowflake is from another — and yet, they had all fit together in an impossible, perfect harmony. Within its flawless, crystalline depths, I could see the faint, swirling continents of a nascent Dao, the shimmering oceans of a power that were — now and, hopefully, forever — my own.

A Golden Core.

And I suddenly knew with a certainty felt deeply in my bones, a certainty that was both exhilarating and terrifying, that my Golden Core far surpassed even the Supreme-Grade I had once dreamed of as the pinnacle of my ambition.

…

The world returned in layers.

First came sensation — the cool, smooth surface of delicate Frost-aspected spirit jade beneath her palms, its faint pulse thrumming in time with something vast and ancient that lived in the bones of the mountain it was mined from.

Then came awareness — a profound, crystalline perception of her own new state. It is said by the Sages that the Golden Core is a point at which a cultivator ceases to be bound by the whims of the flesh and becomes a truly supernatural being. For instance, it is no longer necessary to sleep, eat, or even breathe. The body will remain perfectly healthy for as long as the Golden Core itself remains intact and qi is circulated through the meridians. In fact, even if most of the body were destroyed, a Golden Core expert would be able to recover as long as said Core, the seat of their power -- and, according to scholarly consensus, the seat of their soul as well -- was intact. In short, if a Qi Gathering novice could be thought of as a strong mortal playing at being a supernatural being, then it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that a Golden Core expert is instead a supernatural being playing at being human.

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And now, having just achieved that crucial breakthrough, Princess Long Xueyue could confidently say that the lore scrolls were not exaggerating. She was kneeling, a posture she had held for what must have been weeks, yet her limbs felt not numb, but filled with a quiet, potent energy, each muscle and sinew in a state of perfect, effortless equilibrium. The sweat that had once drenched her silk robes during the agonizing compression of her breakthrough was now gone entirely — evaporated without a trace by the effortless, perfect regulation of her body's internal temperature. Her skin was cool and flawless; the fine silk of her robes resting against it as a light, almost imperceptible whisper of fabric.

Then came the power.

Princess Xueyue drew in a breath, and the world responded. The air itself seemed to thicken around her, eager to serve, pressing against her skin like an attentive servant awaiting command. Suddenly, she could feel the small mountain of spirit jade that surrounded her seclusion chamber — five hundred thousand jin of some of the purest isolation formation materials in the Empire, carved from the heart of the Eternal Winter Peak over a century ago. She felt the stone's slow, patient heartbeat; the way it channeled and refined the ambient Qi of heaven and earth; the complex web of stabilizing, filtering, and isolation formations that had assisted her meditation over these past six months humming like a barely audible song at the edge of consciousness.

But that wasn't what stole the breath from her lungs.

Beyond the chamber, beyond the jade — and despite the isolation formations' best efforts — she could now feel the Imperial Palace itself! Thousands of souls moving through its corridors like fireflies in a moonless night — servants and guards, ministers and petitioners, each one a tiny spark of life and qi that registered against her new, impossibly expanded Divine Senses.

She could feel the ancient, great defensive formations that crisscrossed the Palace grounds, their intricate patterns of interlocking power so vast and complex they made her own breakthrough formation seem like a child's finger-painting in comparison.

She could feel — three li away — the Forbidden Garden where her father had planted spirit trees from every corner of the Empire, their roots drinking deeply from a hidden Qi-infused spring that had flowed since before the current Dynasty's founding.

And beyond even that, she could feel the Imperial Capital itself — Tianlóng Dū, the Dragon's Heart — a sprawling metropolis of twenty million souls whose collective spiritual pressure felt like a vast, distant roar like an ocean heard from the safety of a cliff's edge.

All of these new sensations were overwhelming. Intoxicating. Terrifying.

She had become something more, and the world would never feel the same again.

But the last thing that came, hot on the heels of that new cosmic awareness, was a wave of cold, rational terror so profound it momentarily eclipsed the joy of her ascension.

Princess Xueyue understood, with a clarity that was as sharp and unforgiving as a shard of winter ice, exactly what she had just become: a transgression against the established order of the Imperial Court. An affront to her elder brother's two-hundred-year legacy. A threat that could not be ignored, could not be negotiated with, could only be crowned — or eliminated.

The seclusion chamber's jade walls began to glow softly, responding to the shift in her spiritual pressure. Ancient formations activated automatically, their purpose long since etched into the stone: announcing that the cultivator within had successfully broken through. That they were stable. That they could safely emerge.

She had perhaps minutes before someone came to investigate.

Minutes to compose herself. To seal away this monstrous power. To become merely talented rather than threatening.

Xueyue rose to her feet with a fluid grace that was itself a testament to her transformation. Her body no longer felt like a clumsy collection of meat and bone but rather like a perfectly tuned instrument, every movement flowing with an effortless precision that would have taken decades of martial training to achieve through more mundane means. She was aware of herself in a way she had never been before — the perfect circulation of Qi through her meridians, the crystalline structure of her Golden Core rotating slowly in her Dantian, the way her spirit root had been refined by Jiang Li's miraculous elixir until it resonated with the Dao of Ice itself like a tuning fork struck against the cosmos.

Earth-Grade, at least she thought, and even in the privacy of her own mind, the classification felt like both a blessing and a curse. At twenty years old. The youngest in Imperial history.

The youngest. The most talented.

And therefore, the most threatening.

She would have laughed at the bitter irony if her throat hadn't been so dry.

The door to the antechamber slid open with a whisper-soft hiss of displaced air, and suddenly Wei Long stood there — a mountain of a man in simple grey robes, his presence a familiar, grounding anchor in the dizzying new reality of her senses. He did not speak. He simply looked at her, his ancient, deep-set eyes taking in the subtle changes that marked her transformation: the faint luminescence that clung to her skin like morning frost, the way the very air around her seemed to still and sharpen, the quality of the spiritual pressure that radiated from her Core.

His middle-aged looking face, which had remained impassive through a century of service to her family, shifted through a dozen emotions in the space of a single heartbeat.

Pride. Sorrow. Determination.

And finally, weary acceptance.

He knew.

Of course he knew. Wei Long had been at the Golden Core realm for over two hundred and seventy years, and had served as her attendant and guardian since she was old enough to walk. He was the one who had first taught her how to circulate Qi. He was the one who had protected her through a dozen assassination attempts both overt and subtle. He was always the one who had stood between her and the world with a loyalty that transcended mere duty.

He saw the truth of her breakthrough as clearly as if she had painted it across the heavens in letters of fire.

"It must be hidden," Xueyue said, and was startled by the sound of her own voice. It was calm. Steady. Betraying none of the frantic terror that hammered at the walls of her heart like a caged beast. This, too, was a skill she had learned in her twenty years as an Imperial Princess — the ability to speak with perfect composure even as the world crumbled around her.

Wei Long simply nodded, once, and began to move.

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