Immortal Ascension Through Marriage: Investing in My Wife Get Returns

Standing in the depths of the Xu Clan’s vault, Lin Yuan held his ultimate prize.

It was the Barrier Token.

To the untrained eye, it looked entirely unremarkable. It was just a simple grey jade slip, roughly the size of a palm, maybe larger, but devoid of any spiritual pressure. If one were to drop it in the mud of the outer-city slums, a passing beggar would not even bother to bend down and pick it up. Yet, this piece of jade was the absolute key to the starry domain—the artifact capable of allowing a cultivator to enter the fragmented Barrier Realm without their soul instantaneously collapsing under the pressure.

Lin Yuan stared at the grey jade slip resting in his palm. His eyes softened slightly as his thoughts drifted away from the area and back to his home.

Five years, Lin Yuan thought, his grip on the token tightening just a fraction.

In exactly five years, the spatial tear would manifest, dragging ancient inheritances from the far corners of the starry domain into its vortex. When that maelstrom opened, Lin Yuan would step into the void. Armed with this token, he would traverse that realm to find the solution to completely shatter the Soul Transformation restriction binding his wife’s ability to cultivate. He would restore Bai Qingyue’s cultivation, allowing her to stand beside him as a true immortal.

But as Lin Yuan prepared to store the grey jade slip into his spatial ring, he suddenly paused.

Wait.

A fluctuation had just rippled across the surface of the jade—so infinitesimally small that even a peak Nascent Soul expert normally wouldn’t have registered it.

Lin Yuan’s eyes narrowed. Without a moment’s hesitation, he channeled his divine sense and spread it directly into the token.

The moment his consciousness pierced the outer layer of the jade, the mundane facade was instantly stripped away, revealing a structure so unfathomably terrifying that it made Lin Yuan’s breath hitch in his throat.

The token was a containment vessel holding a massive quantity of pure Chaos Energy!

The sheer density and scale of the energy housed within this slip defied logic. It was a swirling storm of absolute force.

Under normal circumstances, even a seasoned Nascent Soul or Spirit Severing expert would simply register this as a highly volatile form of spiritual pressure. But Lin Yuan was different. The only reason he was able to instantly and accurately differentiate this specific energy from typical spiritual energy was because of his comprehension of the Ten Thousand Ways Return to One Heart Sutra.

When he he comprehended it, the sutra had allowed him to fundamentally understand the underlying differences between all the various types of energy that governed the universe.

Death Qi, Spiritual Qi, Celestial Qi, and Chaos Qi, and many more—they were all merely different branches stemming from the same source: Origin Qi.

Spiritual Qi was the refined breath of the world, easily absorbed by mortals to forge their cultivation. Death Qi was the natural decay, the exhausted exhaust of the cycle. Celestial Qi was the elevated resonance of the celestial clan of the upper realms.

But Chaos Qi? Chaos Qi had existed long before the universe had even cooled. It was the violent, untamed potential that permeated existence before the Heavenly Dao established the laws that governed all things. It was still derived from Origin Qi, yet in terms of its nature, it was even closer to the primordial source from which all creation had emerged.

A profound realization struck Lin Yuan’s mind like a bolt of thunder. So that is the secret of the Barrier Realm!

The only reason one could safely enter the barrier realm without having their soul collapsed by the spatial turbulence was because of the Chaos Energy contained within this jade slip. The token shielded the user by wrapping them in the very chaos that predated the spatial laws themselves, rendering the user temporarily immune to the it.

But as this mystery was solved, an even more terrifying question surfaced.

Who made these tokens? Lin Yuan wondered, a profound chill running down his spine.

To forge this jade slip, someone had to gather and cultivate an enormous amount of Chaos Qi, perfectly compressing it into a stable, and portable artifacts. Where does one even find raw Chaos Qi in a universe governed by order? Lin Yuan had absolutely no knowledge of that. The entity capable of manufacturing these tokens must exist on a plane of reality so unfathomably high that even the youthful monk in the painting might look up to them.

Drawn by the irresistible pull of this mystery, Lin Yuan pushed his divine sense even deeper into the jade slip.

The physical reality of the Xu Clan’s treasury completely faded away. Lin Yuan found his consciousness manifesting inside a boundless, black misty area. There were no stars here, no ground, no sky. There was only the swirling, suffocating fog of absolute Chaos Qi.

Then, the fog began to violently shift.

Directly in front of him, the black mist aggressively coalesced, rapidly compressing and shaping itself until a massive entity emerged from the void.

It was a dragon.

A colossal, black misty dragon made entirely of pure Chaos Qi! The dragon itself was the literal personification of the chaos contained within the token. Its eyes burned with the dark, empty void of the universe before the stars were born, and its scales shifted and boiled like dark matter.

Lin Yuan then did the unthinkable. He stretched out his arm to touch the Chaos Dragon.

The very moment his fingertips grazed the black misty body of the beast, absolute disaster struck.

BOOM!

Lin Yuan’s entire cultivation foundation violently shook as if it had been struck by a falling planet. The Nascent Soul sitting cross-legged within his dantian let out an agonizing shriek as the raw chaos violently invaded his meridians, attempting to instantly unmake the ordered laws of his body.

In the real world, inside the Xu Clan’s vault, Lin Yuan violently collapsed onto his knees.

Blargh!

A thick stream of blood ran down from the corner of his lips, sizzling as it hit the floor of the treasury.

Operating purely on survival instinct, Lin Yuan violently severed the connection, instantly withdrawing his divine sense from the jade slip and slamming the gates of his Sea of Consciousness shut.

He knelt on the floor, his chest heaving, his body drenched in sweat. His eyes were wide with genuine shock.

Such terrifying chaotic Qi! Lin Yuan panted, his hands trembling as he stared at the mundane grey slip still resting in his palm.

He ran a rapid check on his cultivation. He had barely survived. If he had maintained contact with the personification of that chaos for a single breath longer, his entire cultivation base would have been violently unraveled, dropping him instantly out of the Nascent Soul realm and permanently crippling his foundation.

The only reason Lin Yuan’s Nascent Soul wasn’t instantaneously damaged when he touched the dragon was entirely because of the soul foundation he had received from the Origin Soul Revival Pill! The heaven-defying pill had forged his soul with such a flawless purity that it acted as a temporary buffer, buying him the exact moment he needed to severe the connection before the chaos could have any meaningful effect.

”I am still far too weak to be contact with chaos energy,” Lin Yuan murmured, wiping the blood from his chin. It was a humbling, and deeply necessary lesson. He now possessed the key, but he was lightyears away from understanding the locksmith.

Taking a deep, and steadying breath to calm his cultivation, Lin Yuan securely placed the jade token into his spatial ring.

He stood up, his elegant black-and-white Daoist robes settling around his frame. His business here was finally concluded. The ultimate prize was secured, the clan’s treasury had been thoroughly examined, and the karma had been definitively settled.

Then, Lin Yuan simply took a single step and instantly teleported out of the area.

High above the plaza of the Xu Clan estate, the sky rippled, and Lin Yuan materialized there.

Down below, the thousands of clan members were still kneeling on the floor. Elder Xu Gan, now in the early Foundation Establishment realm, looked up with dread, fearing that Lin Yuan had returned to deliver a final, killing blow.

But Lin Yuan simply looked down at them, his eyes reflecting the morning sun.

”I am taking my leave,” Lin Yuan announced, his voice echoing across the estate, carrying the absolute finality of their new reality.

Elder Xu Gan quickly pressed his forehead firmly against the floor, his voice trembling but completely submissive. The thousands of disciples immediately followed his lead.

”We respectfully bid farewell to the Lord of the City!”