Getting stuck to a bed for over a month was hard enough. To be wracked with random bouts of pain almost every day made the experience much worse. It started about a week into his comatose state and kept escalating ever since. Simon cursed all the realms as even moving sent a shock akin to being struck by a lightning strike every time he tried to move. He had thought his second soul ability would numb any physical torture but it was doing all but nothing right now. Staying still helped but not by much as it felt like he was being slowly cooked inside out.

What the man did not realize was that this sort of pain was part of the course for most cultivators and if it was anybody else this would have been shrugged off. It is not to say he suffered no tribulation, it was just that his super-powered soul allowed him to coast through them all with no significant effort on his part. All his tribulations till this point were related to his soul such as the time he fused two opposing cultivation techniques to make his unique one using half-baked knowledge from both worlds. His soul was so powerful that it would be a long time before his soul faced a true challenge. As such this was the first time he hit a point that most cultivators face very early on in life, a true roadblock.

His soul abilities were frantically overcoming this roadblock without even his direct input so great was their power that his first major block was being broken down without him even realizing, truly a power even the upper realms would envy. That, however, came at a cost.

Until this point, man did not train his body in the slightest or refine it using herbs or heavenly treasures. This made his body purely human, granted being so full of essence he was at the pinnacle of humanity. This was done on purpose because Simon believed that refining his body would add unneeded impurity which was the antitheses of his cultivation method. That was not the real reason. His soul ability combined with his absurd essence density would have purified any impurity much faster than it could become a problem. It was just that the first time he tried he got a taste of the pain most cultivators to go through on a regular and promptly made a reason as to why he did not need them and never looked back. That now came back to bite him severely.

Simon was pushed to the edge, there were times he just wished to end it all but a warm soft touch kept him from truly falling over. Bai Qing did not realize just how important her presence was in keeping him in check. It was not just her presence, due to their bond her essence often cycled into him and vice versa, her essence was like a soothing oasis in the middle of a boiling hot desert. Even though it caused severe agony, he would shift his arm to bring little Bai closer to him drawing support from her.

Unbeknownst to the master, 'little Bai' was having the time of her life. For the last month, she was in a state of constant bliss, she had not moved at all from his side and prevented anyone from meeting him barring that one time she had let Hope get close. Hope was to be her new sister so she thought it to be only natural she would join. Only, Hope became oddly distant after that encounter.

That only meant there was more for her. She would figure out the problems with her later, right then she was subjected to so much pleasure that she could not think straight. Days joined together in this haze of debauchery where she thought lived and breathed her young master.

Bai Qing was lost in it all that she joined with him constantly, forgetting he was in no condition to give consent or be much of anything other than a glorified sex toy. This joining however caused his essence to cycle instinctively based on his method. This was what gave him relief.

What it also did was slow the whole process down and prolonged the experience over a much longer period. But neither the master nor the servant realized the fact at the time and both basked in each other's one for comfort and the other for pleasure. This relationship was not healthy by any metric and even the base of it came from two very evil techniques fused into one to cancel the drawbacks each out. That did not change that it was an evil technique that messed with people's very souls. One could only imagine how this type of change affected Hope who was being transformed on a very fundamental level. Coming from the modern world brought certain biases that simply could not work in the cultivation world especially if brute forced like the way Simon had done.

One good came out of it though. As an 'artifact' his essence was refining Bai Qing and in her haze, she did not even realize that somewhere in the process she broke through to the Essence condensation realm. But that did not change the fact that her lord was stuck to a bed and he was a celebrity in the sect. Her answer to all and every summons was that her master was in closed cultivation and he would not be disturbed. If she was a bit more aware and noticed the changes Hope was going through maybe the calamity would have been avoided.

After all, it was on the night of Dragon's Eye as the event would come to be called when he opened his eyes, only they are not rounded but sharp slits.