The portal shimmered, and with it, the last of the fiends withered away, leaving only the fox-tailed woman standing before it, her heart pounding with anticipation, fear, and a promise of reunion.

On the other side was a hidden world, a pathway leading to the far reaches of the Last ascension mortal plane—to another continent where her beloved had been missing for over a century.

The woman, with jade white hair, foxy ears, and a moonlight tail as graceful as the celestial disc of the night, pondered with a scowl. It was thirty seconds over the promised time.

…No matter. She had waited two hundred years. What harm were a few more minutes, days, centuries?

The woman sensed another rip in the void a hundred miles west, but a thunder of life and darkness engulfed the newly spawned fiends before they could truly live. Her simulacrum had been hard at work for months, securing this morsel of land from the corrupted creatures. But the continent of madness was a never-ending cesspool of evil; voidfiends and chaosfiends alike popping out from thin air to have at each other.

The portal shimmered. The fox-tailed woman’s figure rose higher to meet the descending glows of light. At long last, her heart would be complete—

“Boring.” A childlike voice echoed. A lady voice.

The fox-tailed woman stopped in her tracks.

“You did come. I lost the bet.”

A pristine figure. Petite, no taller than a sapling, the top of her head barely at the fox-tailed woman's chest. She was as youthful and delicate as a fresh spring bloom. Yet so alluring, so bewitching. So innocent.

Lingqi, mired by the dao principles of space and time, danced around her innocently to aid her teleportation.

Three more spots of light coalesced behind the little girl. A yao maiden of the whaledragon clan, and a celestial darkness engulfing myriads of stars in the shape of a demure goddess. A living primordial.

And…

"Dare you not believe our champion once more?" The whaledragon maiden raised her chin triumphantly; the little girl huffed before stomping her feet. The primordial kept quiet, staring at the fox-tailed woman with starry eyes. Evaluating. Appraising.

The fox-tailed woman sensed a voidfiend skewer through the neck of one of her shell-shocked simulacrum.

The final figure came to be, and the portal closed with a crystal chime as though it announced the arrival of an emperor. Golden robes, sword brows, the gait of a hero. There was nothing but yang in sight as the tall man came forth on a course of fire and light and mist and vermilion, ablaze with the presence to subdue reality. He grinned, then flew down to the fox-tailed woman while his entourage of women looked on with interest, envy, and contempt.

"Zhen'er!" With shoulders broader than the heavens and an imperial grace that denied all challenge, the man embraced her in his touch. A touch so hot and electric, like lightning coursing through her body and liquefying her insides. The hug from her beloved melted all her ice. The heat from his body radiated on her so strongly that she imagined, just for a split second, the warm yang of his qi caressing her frigid yin, until the chilling reality set in again. She knew that the warmth was just an illusion.

The tall man ran his hands through her long, lustrous hair to the very end. It was a touch she dearly missed; so long ago had she last laid her eyes on his pure, loving countenance.

But the purity was gone. The chastity all but ruined, mired by the yin taints of others.

The fox-tailed woman dared not look at him. Aghast, she did not move, did not reciprocate. She almost did not believe her own eyes.

Her beloved did not come alone.