"Will you endure for us?"
She didn't understand why he would ask such a question.
Hasn't she been enduring all this time?
Yet he had no trace of his usual playfulness now. Only solemnity.
She didn't understand. Yet…
"I will. I trust you."
As innocent and immature as she was, she had understood what they had done previously.
Both of them were open to each other.
Although they had their clothes on, both of them knew about each other's bodies than they did about themselves.
Such is the consequence of being completely transparent with one's internal space.
Hearing her response, Riven smiled.
Although both had dried skin and blood mixed with smelling impurities on their faces, neither thought the other was 'ugly'.
Riven closed his eyes again and willed it.
'Accept reward'.
Crack
"Argh!"
BOOOM bzzzzzzttttt
His mind buzzed with a weird sound.
A strange tremor shot through his spine. From within the bones, an energy was sprouting.
Rays of golden light burst from his back, almost like a slumbering dragon about to awaken and take flight.
Pain exploded through his body without warning.
"AAARRRGGHH!!"
Crack Crack Crack
His spinal bones cracked as the energy within them violently erupted. Golden light seeped through the fractures.
His skin lit up golden.
His eyes turned completely golden, spraying golden light like a bulb.
The spine, regarded as a fundamental pillar of human strength, was undergoing a forceful transformation under the influence of a superior power, thereby reshaping its very essence.
The intensity of this experience was akin to molten iron being poured directly into the very core of his bones.
Every nerve screamed like hell under the pressure.
Unimaginable pain.
And it wasn't just him.
......…
"Weyalnd, stop!" A cold voice sounded.
A gleaming silver sheath swung onto the front breastplate of a beautiful woman in silver braids.
The woman flinched and, while her foot was still raised, caught the sheath in her right hand.
"Caldor… Something's happening! Can't you fucking see?" The woman turned towards the man, stopping her. Clearly agitated.
The man, however, narrowed his eyes in cold light.
"Weyland," he said in a calmer tone. "Who are we?"
Weyland: "....."
Caldor repeated himself: "Who are we, Weyland?"
There was a brief silence, punctuated only by the rustling of leaves from the surrounding trees.
The wind began to pick up, almost as if it wanted to celebrate a remarkable creation in this space.
"..... Soldiers," the woman answered in a defeated tone.
With a moment of hesitation, she gently pulled back the foot she had just stepped forward with.
"That's right," he said.
"We have a lord now. And our orders are to stay on guard. Not to help and protect our lord." Caldor's eyes gained the usual warmth again.
He turned to look at the young couple.
One burning golden. Lit up like the summer sun.
And the other…. Ice?
"Either way…. Something tells me, our lord is much more complex than we thought…"
.........….
In the next moment, a tidal wave of pure yang divine energy overwhelmingly superior to the energy they had both familiarized themselves with earlier, surged from Riven's body, pouring straight into Selene Virelyn.
She gasped sharply, her brows tightly knitted in agony.
She, too, couldn't hold back the scream.
The energy was too much, too wild, too brutal.
Her delicate meridians couldn't handle it. They cracked, tore, and rebuilt themselves all at once, over and over, each time stronger than before.
At least for Riven, who faced the maws of death, such pain felt like 'pain'.
For this little girl who has been taken care of like a delicate vase since childhood, she didn't even know what this sensation was!
Her body convulsed.
The sheer pain almost made her black out.
But as if their bodies understood... neither of them let go.
Even with their bodies trembling from the agony, they still trusted each other.
Somehow, in the shared pain, they instinctively understood that this was a breakthrough neither could survive alone.
If they stopped halfway, both would definitely die.
......…..
The intricacies of the Sunflower Manual roared to life within them.
The once-dense energy now spun furiously through their meridians, which are expanding, weaving their life forces tighter and tighter together.
It wasn't merely about cultivation; it had evolved into a horrifyingly beautiful transformation.
Gradually, something strange began to happen inside Selene.
A freezing cold was rising deep within her bones, colder than the deepest depths of the sea.
While Riven blazed like a sun inside, Selene turned into a glacial moon.
And that was the tipping point.
One vertebra in her spine cracked as something inside burst out.
The bone then crystallized into a gleaming shard of translucent ice—pure, perfect, untouched even before the age of the gods.
A Pure Yin Divine Bone.
......…..
In the martial world, only in rare legends had such divine bones ever been mentioned.
A person born with a divine bone... was destined to be unmatched among mortals.
Such individuals were protected in sects and Imperial academies as if they were the rarest of gems.
......…
As Selene's transformation was completed, a surge of pure yin energy exploded back into Riven.
The fractured spinal bones and torn meridians mended beneath this overwhelming icy energy.
What others might view as a chilling danger was, for Riven, merely the coziest of beds.
The two energies—the pure yang from him and the pure yin from her—came together like two rivers joyfully colliding, swirling and dancing back and forth between them.
The world, as if responding and accepting this union, trembled.
Pure swaths of heaven and earth energy rushed madly from all directions to the Exile's garden state.
Amidst all this, a heavenly manifestation took shape into a perfect Yin-Yang diagram that spread beneath them with them as the center.
However, something was different.
It was not black and white.
It was Golden and Glacial Blue.
BOOM. Crackle. Rumble.
It was like heaven itself cracked open.
The pressure shook the entire pavilion. Then the Duke's mansion. Then everything around.
The terrible pressure extended even to the nearby Sundawn commercial city.
Riven's old home.
The clouds stretched over the lands and even covered a little of the Great Lake, causing it to churn violently.
The once calm waters slammed against the shore with furious waves.
Tree branches snapped in the wind.
The Heaven and Earth energy twisted into thick spirals, rushing toward the Exile's garden, then the two figures locked together inside the pavilion, pouring into their bodies like a raging river from the heavens.
Inside them, tendons, bones, flesh, and marrow all refined again. And again.
And again.
And... AGAIN.
Their postnatal mortal inner strength, built up so carefully before, condensed down, shattered, and started reforming into Innate essence.
In one breath.
Both Riven Ashvale and Selene Virelyn stepped across the impossible threshold.
However... they had not yet become innate lifeforms.
This transformation was a gradual change, unlike how it would happen to others.
They are beneath Innate because they have not been recognized by Heaven and Earth as her children yet.
But that was Heaven and Earth...
Someone else embraced them with open arms at this moment.
Mother nature.