The violent, icy winds that had swept across the ruined Blood-Eagle Mountain Range slowly died into a suffocating, unnatural stillness.
Where the grand mountain fortress of the Blood-Shadow Sect had stood for three thousand years, there was now only a vast, silent abyss filled with miles-thick, pale-blue volcanic ice and microscopic frost-dust. The sky above remained a swirling vortex of pitch-black atmospheric vacuum—a permanent mark carved into the clouds by the partial unsheathing of the Pitch-Black Heavy Blade.
At the absolute edge of the frozen crater, standing on a narrow, polished basalt ledge overlooking the empty abyss, was Li-Wen.
He stood like a solitary, iron monolith rooted into the frozen core of the earth. His dark traveler's coat was stiff with thick, sapphire-tinted frost, and his broad back was square, unyielding, and silent. His short hair, now heavily streaked with pure white at the roots, fluttered faintly in the lingering draft.
In his broad, calloused arms, he held little Xiao-Yue.
Her small body was feather-light against his broad chest. She looked as though she had simply fallen into a deep, peaceful sleep after a long day of walking—her pale, delicate face calm, her dark eyelashes resting softly against her cheeks. But there was no warmth beneath her sheepskin coat. Her small, gloved hands were ice-cold, resting limply against Li-Wen's charcoal tunic.
In his inner coat pocket, right over his heart, the cracked pink lotus lantern remained still. Its once-vibrant ruby light was completely extinguished, its silver frame bent and cold, resting against the tiny, dried droplets of her blood.
Li-Wen did not weep. Not a single tear fell from his pitch-black, abyssal eyes.
To a man whose body possessed the primordial mass of an ancient cold star, grief did not manifest as water or cries. It condensed inward, solidifying his bone marrow into an absolute, ruthless glacier that sealed away every remaining drop of human warmth.
He slowly knelt down on one knee upon the clean, frozen basalt.
He gently placed Xiao-Yue onto a smooth bed of pale-blue ice crystals he had formed with a gentle touch of his palm. He pulled her white sheepskin coat neatly around her small shoulders, dusting away a few stray specks of grey volcanic ash from her dark hair.
"The wind here is too loud, Xiao-Yue," Li-Wen murmured, his raspy voice flat, steady, and terrifyingly calm. "I will quiet the rest of the continent for you."
He reached out his broad index finger, lightly tracing the small, wooden flower hairpin in her hair.
As his finger touched the cold wood, a microscopic, infinite shell of Absolute-Zero Sapphire Ice—thinner than a hair's breath, yet infinitely denser than the crust of a hundred world domains—bloomed instantly around her small body.
HUMMMMM—!
The sapphire ice did not obscure her face. It formed a crystal-clear, indestructible physical vault around her, permanently preserving her small form in absolute stasis. Neither time, nor spatial decay, nor the fires of a thousand mountain-cleaving arrays could ever touch a single strand of her hair again.
Li-Wen slowly stood up.
He reached behind his back and adjusted the dark leather strap of the Pitch-Black Heavy Blade. The massive weapon rested against his broad spine, its iron surface silent, waiting for the dark hand that would draw it once more.
He did not look back at the ice vault. He turned his face toward the vast, open horizon of the Central Western Province—where the ruling capitals, the imperial sects, and the grand coalitions of the Western Continent sat in their golden palaces, entirely unaware of the storm that was descending upon them.
Sixty miles away, atop the highest observation tower of Winter-Frost City, three figures stood frozen in absolute horror.
The City Governor, the Grand Commander of the Guard Brigade, and Lady Mu-Qing stood looking toward the western sky.
From their vantage point, they had witnessed the terrifying, black-and-sapphire pillar of kinetic energy tear through the upper atmosphere sixty miles away. They had felt the sudden, unnatural three-hundred-degree drop in temperature that had instantly frozen the city's underground steam conduits and turned the boiling mountain springs into solid blocks of ice.
Through a high-grade spiritual spyglass, the City Governor's hands trembled so violently that he nearly dropped the gold-encased glass onto the stone floor.
"The... the Blood-Eagle Mountain Range..." The Governor gasped, his voice choking on pure, unadulterated terror. "It's gone... The mountain... the entire Blood-Shadow Sect... erased from the world map in a single second!"
Commander Lei-Gong's successor, a Stage-5 High Sovereign, fell to his knees on the cold observation deck, his face as pale as a corpse. "The Stage-6 Grand Patriarch Blood-Shadow... the forty elders... three thousand elite assassins... all dead?! Who... what kind of cosmic demon did we provoke in the Western Province?!"
Standing slightly behind them, Lady Mu-Qing looked at the frozen western horizon with wide, grief-stricken violet eyes.
She held her white jade pestle tightly against her chest. As a Stage-5 High Alchemist, she had felt the exact moment the pink lotus artifact's life-link had severed. She knew what had happened. She knew why the Northern Sovereign had unleashed that apocalyptic, world-ending physical rage.
"It was not a demon," Mu-Qing whispered softly, a single tear slipping down her pale, porcelain cheek. "It was a brother who lost his world."
She looked down at the dark iron scroll Li-Wen had left her—the Nine-Frost Sovereign-Pill Recipe—and bowed her silver-haired head deeply toward the western sky.
"The Western Continent..." Mu-Qing murmured, her voice filled with deep, trembling sorrow, "is about to burn in absolute zero."
The ancient highway connecting the Western Province to the Central Imperial Capital was known as the Iron-Glacier Pass.
It was a wide, thousand-year-old stone road built along the ridge of a towering mountain range, flanked by thousands of heavily fortified guard outposts, iron watchtowers, and toll gates operated by the joint coalition of the Three Great Western Sects: the Golden-Eagle Sect, the Blood-Shadow Sect, and the Iron-Mountain Palace.
At the third major toll gate—a massive, ninety-foot-high fortress forged from reinforced ironstone—over eight hundred elite coalition guards and three Stage-5 High Sovereigns were on high alert.
News of the destruction of the Grand Iron-Vault in Winter-Frost City and the sudden blackout of the Blood-Shadow Sect's ancestral mountain had sent shockwaves of panic through the defensive line. The massive manganese-steel gate was locked, and the fortress's heavy defensive runes were flared to maximum intensity.
"Keep the thermal arrays burning!" A Stage-5 High Sovereign commander roared from the top of the battlements, his heavy iron spear crackling with red fire. "No one enters or leaves the Iron-Glacier Pass without the Grand Patriarch's seal! Report any suspicious activity immediately!"
"Commander!" A guard on the watchtower suddenly screamed, pointing a trembling iron lance down the long, empty stone highway. "S-Someone is walking up the ridge!"
The Stage-5 Commander leaped to the edge of the battlements, narrowing his eyes as he looked down the stone road.
Through the lingering mountain fog, a solitary figure was walking with slow, steady, unhurried strides.
He wore a dark traveler's coat covered in pale-blue frost, unbuttoned at the chest. His short hair was streaked with pure, snow-white roots, fluttering gently in the icy wind. Across his broad back rested a massive, pitch-black heavy blade in an unadorned iron scabbard.
He walked alone. There was no small girl skipping beside his boots. There was no warm lotus lantern illuminating his path.
Only a terrifying, absolute, bone-snapping coldness preceded him—a physical atmospheric pressure so dense that the stone road beneath his leather boots groaned and cracked into millions of spiderweb fractures with every single step he took!
CRUNCH... CRUNCH... CRUNCH...
The steady, rhythmic cadence of his boots sounded like the heartbeat of a descending death god echoing through the mountains!
"HALT!" The Stage-5 Commander screamed from the wall, his voice shaking uncontrollably as he recognized that broad frame from the border bulletins! "NORTHERN SOVEREIGN! THIS IS THE TERRITORY OF THE THREE GREAT SECTS! STEP ONE FOOT CLOSER AND WE WILL ACTIVATE THE MOUNTAIN-CLEARING CANNONS!"
Li-Wen did not stop. He did not look up at the battlements. His dark, void-like eyes—burning with pitch-black abyssal fire—stared straight ahead at the ninety-foot manganese-steel gate.
"FIRE! FIRE EVERYTHING!" The Commander shrieked in sheer, hysterical panic!
BOOOM—! BOOOM—! BOOOM—!
Forty heavy, steam-powered mountain-clearing cannons mounted along the battlements fired simultaneously! Forty colossal, three-hundred-pound iron cannonballs encased in explosive fire-runes tore through the air, descending upon Li-Wen like a rain of burning meteors!
Li-Wen did not dodge. He did not raise his hand. He did not even blink.
He simply kept walking forward.
BOOOOM—!
The forty explosive iron cannonballs struck his broad chest and shoulders dead-center!
CRACKLE—! SHATTER—!
The microsecond the explosive iron cannonballs touched the kinetic physical layer surrounding his dark coat, they did not explode! The fire-runes were instantly snap-froze into inert ice, and the three-hundred-pound iron balls shattered into fine, pale-blue dust that drifted harmlessly into his footprints!
"WHAT?! THE CANNONBALLS SHATTERED ON HIS COAT?!"
"HE DIDN'T EVEN USE HIS HANDS! MY GOD! HE IS NOT HUMAN!"
The eight hundred elite guards on the battlements completely lost their sanity! Dozens of men threw down their weapons, screaming in terror as they tried to scramble down the rear stairs of the fortress!
Li-Wen reached the heavy manganese-steel gate.
He stopped three inches away from the ten-foot-thick solid iron doors.
He did not draw his heavy blade. He pulled his right hand out from his coat pocket and extended a single, broad index finger forward.
He lightly tapped the ten-foot-thick manganese-steel gate with the tip of his finger.
TAP.
A single, microscopic ripple of absolute-zero sapphire cold transferred from his fingertip onto the manganese steel.
CRACKLE—! CRUNCH—! REPRESS—!
In less than a microsecond, the ninety-foot-high ironstone fortress, the ten-foot manganese-steel gate, the forty mountain-clearing cannons, and the three Stage-5 High Sovereigns standing on the battlements were completely snap-froze into solid, pale-blue ice!
CRUMB.
Li-Wen took another step forward.
His leather boot lightly brushed against the frozen gate.
The entire ninety-foot fortress—millions of tons of iron, stone, and three Stage-5 Sovereigns—collapsed silently into a massive, three-hundred-yard heap of sparkling frost-dust that swept down the mountain ridge!
The Iron-Glacier Pass, the impenetrable gateway to the Central Western Province, was erased with a single tap of his index finger.
Li-Wen walked through the fine frost-dust, his dark traveler's coat fluttering in the cold mountain draft.
He stopped at the crest of the mountain ridge overlooking the vast, fertile plains of the Central Western Province.
In the far distance, glowing under the afternoon sun, sat the colossal, golden-roofed metropolis of the Central Imperial Capital—Gold-Sovereign City—where the supreme patriarchs of the Three Great Sects, the Imperial Alchemist Association, and the Western Overlord sat upon their thrones of gold and power.
They were the ones who had issued the bounty. They were the ones who had sent the assassins. They were the ones who had created the world where a little girl holding a pink lotus lantern could not walk safely down a mountain road.
Li-Wen slowly pulled his right hand out from his coat pocket once more.
He reached into his inner tunic, his fingers lightly touching the cracked glass surface of the pink lotus lantern resting over his heart.
A cold, flat, unyielding voice—stripped of all human emotion, carrying the weight of an absolute, cosmic physical oath—rang out across the empty mountain ridge:
"I promised you honey oat cakes, Xiao-Yue," Li-Wen murmured softly to the cold lantern in his coat.
He raised his dark, abyssal eyes toward the golden city forty miles away.
"I will pave the road to their imperial city with their frozen bones."
With a single, calm step, the solitary Northern Sovereign stepped off the mountain ridge, heading down into the central plains—a calamity of absolute zero descending upon the heart of the Western Continent.
See you in next chapter...