Chapter 191: Cultivation Time
Damon led the group out of the Black Pyramid as the desert wind swept across the cracked stone entrance.
The pyramid rumbled behind them, sinking back into the sand like a beast retreating into slumber.
Ariel, Mio, Mia, and Seraphina stood beside him, their robes dust-covered but their eyes bright with anticipation.
Damon turned to face the four of them, his golden eyes sweeping across their faces with calm, unhurried certainty.
"We’re going to focus on cultivation now."
The effect was immediate. Ariel’s pale cheeks flooded with colour, a deep, rosy warmth spreading all the way to the tips of her ears.
She pressed her lips together and dropped her gaze to the sand, dark blue hair falling forward like a curtain to hide her expression.
She knew precisely what that meant — she had come to know it well.
Mio dragged her lower lip slowly between her teeth, her long ponytail swishing behind her as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
Her bright purple eyes had already taken on that familiar, hazy quality at the edges, the breezy confidence of the outgoing big sister giving way to something altogether warmer beneath the surface.
Mia said nothing, as was her way, but the quiet reserve she normally wore like armour had already begun to dissolve.
Her deep purple eyes glazed over with that unmistakable, half-lidded hunger she could never quite conceal, no matter how hard her shy nature tried.
Seraphina, standing slightly apart from the other three, tilted her head to one side with an expression of genuine, unhurried puzzlement.
Her calm gaze moved from face to face, finding nothing that made immediate sense to her.
"Cultivation?" she asked, her tone perfectly level.
"Shouldn’t we explore more of the realm first? There may be resources worth identifying before we settle anywhere."
A small, helpless sound escaped Ariel — something between a laugh and a scandalized gasp — and she clapped both hands firmly over her mouth, her blue eyes bright and mortified above her fingers.
"Oh, we’ll be cultivating, all right," Mio said, her voice rich and slow, each word carefully weighted with meaning she made no effort to disguise.
"Very intensely," Mia added in barely more than a murmur, her eyes still cast downward, a deep blush colouring her pale cheeks.
Seraphina looked between the three of them in turn — at the flushed faces and the barely-suppressed smiles and the way none of them would meet her eyes — and her brow drew together in quiet, earnest confusion.
"Why are you all blushing?"
"Don’t worry about it," Damon said simply, the ghost of a smile pulling at one corner of his mouth as he turned away. "You’ll understand soon enough."
He activated his Incubus Celestial Eyes and scanned the surrounding terrain.
The realm stretched out before him in waves of spiritual energy, some areas dense, others thin.
He spotted a cave roughly two kilometres to the east, its mouth tucked discreetly into the base of a sheer cliff face as though the stone itself had swallowed an opening and forgotten to close it.
The spiritual energy radiating from that direction was extraordinary — thick and almost liquid in its concentration, pressing against his Celestial Eyes like a slow current.
Compared to Qi drifting across the rest of the realm, the difference was stark.
Perfect.
"Follow me," he said, and turned without waiting for a response.
He led them east across the open expanse of the desert floor, their footsteps crunching softly over pale sand and cracked earth.
The cliff face, when they finally reached it, rose sheer and imposing, its dark stone streaked with veins of luminous mineral that pulsed faintly in rhythm with the ambient Qi.
The cave entrance was narrow — barely wide enough for two people to pass through shoulder to shoulder — and half-concealed behind a natural shelf of overhanging rock.
Easy to miss entirely if one weren’t looking.
But beyond the narrow mouth, the cave opened.
The chamber inside was spacious and cathedral-like, its smooth stone walls curving upward in a natural vault overhead.
High above, a fissure in the rock formed a long, irregular skylight that admitted a column of pale blue ambient light — the kind that existed only in spiritual realms, cold and luminous and faintly alive.
The floor was level and clean, worn smooth over untold years. And the spiritual energy here was so extraordinarily dense that it had condensed into a faint, low-lying mist that clung to the ground and drifted in slow, lazy eddies around their ankles, carrying the faint mineral scent of concentrated Qi.
Damon stepped fully inside, let his gaze travel the length of the chamber, and gave a single measured nod.
"This will work."
He opened the Lust Store.
[Lust store]
[Lust points: 27,569,000]
He found that his lust point increasing after sex with Mio.
He thinking about spend it later and save some, it’s not good to hoard the point.
He pick on Miscellaneous and found what he was looking for and confirmed the purchase.
A massive bed materialized in the center of the cave.
It was made of dark wood with silk sheets and plush pillows, easily large enough for all five of them.
The girls stared at it.
"You... bought a bed?" Ariel asked.
"But storage rings have limited space," Mio said. "Why would you waste space on a bed?"
"Because comfort matters."
Mia shook her head.
"I’ve never thought of putting a bed in my ring."
"Neither have I," Mio said.
"Most cultivators don’t," Ariel said. "We carry weapons, pills, formation materials. Not a furniture."
Damon walked to the bed and sat on the edge.
The mattress was soft, the silk cool against his skin.
"Then you’ve all been missing out."
The girls exchanged glances.
Seraphina still looked confused, but the other three were blushing again, their eyes fixed on Damon.
He looked at them, a slow smile spreading across his face.
"So," he said. "Who’s going to be first?"
The cave fell silent.
Ariel stepped forward first.
She always did.
"I’ll go first," she said, her voice soft but steady.
She walked to the bed and climbed onto it, kneeling in front of Damon.