Cultivator God, Thanks to Beautiful CEO

Chapter 3

"So this... is my true lineage..." Melvin murmured, staring at his radiant, qi-infused palms in quiet stillness.

Beside him, Evelyn let out a pained gasp as the toxin approached a critical threshold.

Without hesitation, Melvin leaned forward. Channeling his celestial qi into his fingertips, he condensed the raw energy into sharp, invisible needles of pure light. With effortless precision, he struck her vital acupoints—her forehead, her throat, and her upper chest.

Swish!

A cool, harmonizing wave of pure celestial energy flowed directly from Melvin’s hands into Evelyn’s turbulent meridians. The volatile heat-toxin was neutralized on impact, dissolving into harmless vapor that evaporated through her pores.

Evelyn’s strained breathing steadily evened out. The deep crimson flush across her cheeks softened into a healthy glow, and her frantic restlessness succumbed to a deep, restorative sleep.

Carefully pulling a soft blanket over her shoulders, Melvin stood up and adjusted his jacket. He looked down at his palms, a sharp, cold light glinting in the depths of his eyes.

The broke, powerless intern who could be shoved to the floor by a pampered young master had died somewhere on the drive to Westridge Hill. What walked out of that estate was the sole heir to the Sovereign Astral Meridian!

"Gavin Vance... Victor Vance..." Melvin whispered into the quiet room, his voice carrying quiet, absolute authority. "Tomorrow, the debt begins."

Melvin's Astral Sight caught the label before his eyes did. Pharmaceutical-grade oxycodone, hospital dispensary batch coding, the Apex Medical Center seal stamped along the base of the vial. His vision drifted upward and read the rest straight out of Gavin's bloodstream — opioid saturation running four times therapeutic, liver enzymes already climbing.

Stolen. From the controlled-substance cabinet on the fourth floor.

Gavin looked up.

"You've got some nerve." He swung his legs down and stood, tightening the belt of the robe. "This is my place now, dog. Vanessa's asleep. Come back at a decent hour and maybe I'll let you collect your socks."

"I paid the deposit on this apartment," Melvin said. "Sixty months of rent. Every utility bill. You have been living inside it for one night."

"And yet here we are."

Melvin walked past him toward the bedroom door.

The change in Gavin's face came fast — the smirk fell away, replaced by something uglier. He had spent yesterday putting this man on the floor with a single shove, and men who go down that easily are supposed to stay frightened.

"Hey." Gavin's hand shot out and caught Melvin's shoulder. "I said—"

Melvin did not turn around. "Take your hand off me."

"Or what?"

Gavin dropped his weight, twisted from the hip, and drove a trained roundhouse straight at Melvin's ribs. Six years of competition sparring behind it. The kind of strike that had put three men in the hospital during his university tournaments.

Under the divine perception of the Sovereign Astral Meridian, the leg travelled through the air like a stone sinking through honey.

Melvin turned inside the arc. He caught the ankle mid-flight in one hand, let the momentum die against his palm, and set the foot back down on the carpet with something close to gentleness.

Gavin stared at his own leg.

"What—"

Melvin's right palm came up and settled flat against Gavin's lower abdomen, three inches below the navel.

Then he pushed.

No wind-up. No visible force. A single condensed pulse of celestial qi crossed the gap between skin and skin and detonated inside the sacral nerve plexus.

Gavin's mouth opened. Nothing came out of it.

He folded straight down onto the carpet, both hands scrabbling at his own hip, and when he tried to push himself up, his right leg failed to answer. It lay there against the floor like something that belonged to another body entirely. A thin string of blood ran from the corner of his lip.

"My leg." His voice climbed into a register Melvin had never heard from him. "My leg — I can't feel my leg —"

"Sacral plexus." Melvin crouched down beside him. "Motor pathway on the right side is severed. Permanently. Every surgeon in this province will tell you the same thing, and every one of them will be correct."

"You—" Gavin's face had gone the colour of paper. "Do you have any idea who my father is?"

"Vice Director Victor Vance." Melvin picked up the amber vial from the coffee table, turned it once so the batch code caught the light, and slipped it into his coat pocket. "I know exactly who he is. I have known for six months, which is roughly how long he has been forging my evaluation records to clear a path for you."

The bedroom door banged open.

Vanessa came out barefoot, hair loose, and stopped dead at the sight of Gavin on the floor.

"What did you do?" She dropped beside him, hands hovering uselessly over his hip. "What did you do to him?"

Melvin was already at the door.

"Melvin! He needs an ambulance! Do something! You're a doctor!"

"I was an intern, you reminded me of that last night, at some length."

Out in the stairwell, he took out his phone, photographed the vial's batch code against the wall, and sent the image to himself. Then he descended six flights and stepped out into the wet grey morning. 

Within the master suite of the Westridge estate, Evelyn Cross opened her eyes. The suffocating fever that had threatened to fracture her mind the previous evening had vanished entirely, replaced by an extraordinary, lingering clarity.

Sitting up on the velvet sofa, her breath caught as her memory returned. Start from the corporate banquet, the tainted wine, her frantic escape into the storm, and the calm, steady young driver who had carried her across her threshold.

Glancing toward the adjacent marble table, her gaze caught a neatly folded sheet of heavy stationery. Beside it rested a silver fountain pen.

Unfolding the paper, Evelyn scanned the confident, precise calligraphy.

It contained a formulation of six common botanical herbs paired with exact decoction timings—a quiet, ingenious restorative tonic engineered to flush the lingering toxic chemical residue from her liver. Beneath the prescription, rendered in a single disciplined stroke, sat a short note:

‘The substance was a localized neuro-toxin, administered through your glass. Replenish your stamina before addressing the board.’

"Who were you?" Evelyn whispered, her fingertips tracing the sharp edges of the ink.

As Executive Director of Apex Medical Center, she was intimately familiar with the handwriting of every senior chief of medicine across the province, yet this formula exhibited an architectural balance that eclipsed standard modern pharmacology.

Reaching for her encrypted phone on the nightstand, she dialed her chief of staff. "Trace the rideshare dispatch routed to the Grand Plaza side exit last night. I want the driver's full personnel profile on my desk within the hour."

Thirty minutes later, across the district, the grand auditorium of Apex Medical Center hummed with dense, expectant murmurs.

Attending physicians, department heads, and dozens of young medical interns filled the tiered mahogany benches. Elevated upon the central stage stood Dr. Victor Vance, Vice Director of the hospital, his posture rigid and unyielding.

The chair beside him sat empty. Forty minutes earlier, Victor Vance had taken a phone call from the emergency ward and learned that his son would spend the rest of his life dragging a dead right leg behind him. The folder under his hand had been assembled in the ninety minutes since, and it showed.

Near the front row, Vanessa sat with folded arms, draped in an expensive designer dress, her eyes anchored to the double doors with cold, expectant hunger.

At the head of the room, the executive director's chair stood conspicuously vacant.

Seventy floors across the river, Evelyn Cross had walked into an emergency session of the Cross Consortium board eleven minutes after waking, and Julian had already tabled Resolution 402. She would spend the next four hours locked behind those doors, unable to take a single call.