Ultimate Villain's Return as a Doctor in the Cultivation World-Chapter 145- Woman’s duty is her Man

"Yes," Cang said. He looked at Liang with the flat, unhurried attention of someone examining something they have already assessed and are confirming the prior conclusion. "He has an immortal advisor. Which means he has a patron. Which means if he acts, we get the patron’s response eventually."

"So we address it now," Chen Yun said.

"Or," Cang said, "we leave him with the specific knowledge that addressing it would be inadvisable."

Wei Lingyue looked at him.

"You want him to be ’afraid’ of us specifically," she said. "Not just aware of our cultivation."

"Fear is a better deterrent than destruction," he said. "Destruction generates investigation. Fear generates avoidance." He paused. "Also it costs less energy."

Chen Yun looked at Liang across the plateau with the demon sword loose in her hand and the awakened field pressing outward from the blade—and then she released approximately ten percent of her Nascent Soul Early cultivation output as an ambient pressure wave, unformed, untargeted, simply ’present’ in the plateau air.

The temperature dropped two degrees.

Several of the already-bowing cultivators pressed closer to the ground.

Liang’s half-completed bow finished itself. His spine bent the rest of the way with the specific involuntary quality of a body receiving a direct instruction from its survival instincts that overrides the conscious refusal.

His jaw was pressed together so tightly that the muscles at his temple were visible.

Cang walked to him.

He stopped approximately three feet away—the specific distance of someone who is not concerned about the proximity but is choosing it deliberately—and looked down at the bent spine of Young Master Liang with the expression of a physician examining a patient whose prognosis he has already determined.

"Young Master," he said.

Liang’s head came up.

The eyes—the eyes of a man who had stood outside the Princess’s tent on three occasions and had wanted things and had made plans involving an immortal advisor’s formation intelligence—met his.

"You’re alive," Cang said. "The Trial was statistically unlikely to produce that outcome given your party’s composition." He paused. "You should treat this as information about the available alternatives and act accordingly."

Liang’s jaw worked.

"The Princess—" he started.

"Is Nascent Soul Early Stage," Cang said. "As of approximately eight hours ago." He looked at Liang’s qi signature. "You’re Core Formation Peak. The gap between those two stages is not a gap that closes with an immortal advisor’s instruction manual." He paused. "Not in your lifetime."

The silence on the plateau was the silence of thirty cultivators who were absolutely not listening and were absorbing every word.

Wei Lingyue had arrived at Cang’s left. She looked at Liang from beside him with the grey eyes that the crown had sharpened and said nothing, which was more complete than anything she could have said.

Liang looked at her.

His expression performed something that was not suppressed and was not expressed and was simply—there, visible to anyone looking—the specific expression of a man who has wanted something and has received the full, clear information that wanting it has no bearing on the universe’s organizational principles.

His hands were fists at his sides.

"I understand," he said. The voice of a man who understands nothing except that the available options are what they are.

"Good," Cang said.

He walked past him. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

Both women followed.

Behind them, the plateau held thirty bent spines and one standing man with white knuckles and a jaw like a locked gate, watching three Nascent Soul cultivators walk toward the Trial’s outer exit like they owned the mountain.

Which they did, effectively.

[Evil Points: +47 (Rival humiliation — public venue — cultivation dominance display — target: Core Formation Peak)]

’He’s going to be very useful eventually,’ Cang thought. ’Angry people with patrons are the most reliable form of external plot generation.’

The ship was enormous.

Not a sect vessel—a private commission, the kind that a Nascent Soul Mid Stage cultivator with a spatial ring full of two-thousand-year-old elixirs could arrange through the cultivation world’s commercial infrastructure with minimal negotiation. Ninety feet of formation-inscribed teak and spirit-steel, the hull running with navigation arrays, the main deck wide enough for a cultivation ground. It was waiting at the Trial mountain’s transportation platform with the patient specificity of something that had been summoned and had arrived.

Chen Yun looked at it.

Then at Cang.

"Why," she said.

"Why what."

"Why a ship. We are Nascent Soul Early Stage and you are Nascent Soul Mid Stage. I can reach our destination in three days of sustained flight. Lingyue can do it in four. You could—" She stopped. Revised. "You could probably do it in two."

"Yes," he said.

"So why a—"

"Come aboard," he said.

He walked up the boarding ramp with his hands behind his back and the shadow sword at his back and the particular gait of someone who has decided that the question has been answered sufficiently and further elaboration is not in the itinerary.

Wei Lingyue followed him, her expression the corner-of-the-mouth version of finding something exactly as expected. The crown caught the afternoon light as she moved up the ramp.

Chen Yun stood at the platform’s edge for three additional seconds, looking at the ship, looking at the departed backs of both of them, and then followed with the flat expression of someone who has decided that the question will resolve itself.

The ship’s formation arrays activated as the boarding ramp retracted. The hull inscriptions ran gold. The navigation mechanism oriented—southeast, the general direction of the cave area, three days at the ship’s formation-assisted speed.

The deck was warm. The wind was clean. The cultivation world’s middle elevation spread in every direction below them as the ship lifted with the smooth, hydraulic certainty of a vessel that knew its business.

Chen Yun looked at the horizon.

"Tell me why—" she started.

"Kneel," Cang said.

She turned.

He was standing in the center of the main deck with the expression of a man who has been patient for approximately five minutes and has allocated exactly that amount of patience to the preamble.

"Excuse me," she said.

His hand moved.

It found her hair—the dark fall of it, the specific grip he had developed familiarity with over thirty-three hours—and his other hand found Wei Lingyue’s at the same moment, both women caught at the same instant, and he drew them down with the steady, unhurried authority of someone who knows the weight he is working with and has made peace with the physics.

Both women’s knees hit the deck.

Their eyes came up—wide, the specific wideness not of alarm but of the expression that arrives when a body recognizes a context its nervous system has been indexed to—looking up at him with the afternoon light behind him.

He looked down at them.

"The ship," he said, "is because I wanted a flat surface and enough altitude that no one would hear."

Wei Lingyue’s grey eyes were doing the thing they did when they had stopped calculating.

Chen Yun’s dark eyes had the expression of a woman who has received an answer to a question and is filing it in the category of ’correct, if infuriating.’

"Focus," he said, "on pleasing your man, Ladies."