The valley burned with light and fury. Explosions cracked, ice-shards screamed, and the air stank of blood and smoke. The first waves of the beast tide had been torn apart—yet still the flood surged forward, endless and unrelenting.
Snow trembled as wolves leapt pits filled with their fallen kin. Boars smashed through Crystal Vein barriers, tusks shattering wards like brittle glass. Serpents slithered through illusions, their glazed eyes immune to tricks of the mind.
And still the roar pressed closer.
Glacial Mist disciples signaled desperately as their pits filled too quickly. Beasts piled atop one another, their dead forming bridges for the living to charge across.
"Reset the arrays!" an elder shouted—too late. A pack of frost bears barreled through, crushing scouts beneath their claws.
Winter Gale's wind traps sputtered, talismans flaring weakly as the sheer weight of the tide pressed past them. Silver Ice talismans flickered and went dark.
"Hold the ridges!" Sect Master Yinxue's voice cut sharp as steel. But already, the ridges shook under the impact of countless claws.
The beasts would not be slowed.
"Throw!" Moon Lotus disciples hurled the last of Haotian's jade bottles. The valley erupted once more, fire and frost tearing gaps in the tide. For an instant, hope flared—until the crates lay empty.
"We're out!" one disciple gasped, staring at trembling hands.
The smoke cleared. Hundreds of beasts lay dead. But behind them, thousands still pressed forward, their roars shaking the valley walls.
The disciples' faces paled.
The first clash came like thunder.
A wave of wolves leapt past the broken pits, fangs snapping. Blades flashed, spears thrust, talismans ignited. Screams filled the air as disciples were dragged down, blood spraying on snow.
Frozen Tide disciples bellowed as they met the charge head-on, halberds swinging in wide arcs. Frost boars crashed into their line, bones crunching beneath tusks.
Crystal Vein elders raised barriers, but serpents coiled around them, scales grinding against crystal until cracks spidered across their defenses.
Snow Shadow illusions wove through the fray, only for beasts to plow through, heedless of deception.
Even Frostpeak Monastery monks staggered as frost lions clawed at their unyielding flesh, tearing bloody streaks through their iron bodies.
The line buckled.
Cries rose from every sect."Too many!""We can't hold them!""They're breaking through!"
Sect masters barked commands, their voices nearly drowned in the din. Elders leapt into the fray, their auras blazing as they cut swaths through the tide—yet even their might seemed drops in an endless sea.
In the chaos, Moon Lotus disciples clustered, eyes darting toward the ridge where Haotian still stood, spear across his knees, watching.
"Why hasn't he moved?" one whispered, voice trembling."Is he waiting? For what?""…If he doesn't fight, we'll…"
The words were drowned by the screech of another explosion—this time not from a pill, but from a collapsing barrier as beasts tore through.
The line shattered.
Haotian rose slowly. His robes rippled in the icy wind, his hand closing around the Fenglong Spear. His gaze swept the battlefield once, calm amid the chaos.
The disciples' desperation, the elders' struggle, the beasts' endless surge—all of it burned in his sight.
The tide was no longer a test of traps. It was war.
He stepped forward. The spear hummed in his grip, as if eager.
And the valley seemed to still for one breath, as if the storm itself waited for him to move.
The line was breaking. Wolves tore disciples down in snarls of blood. Boars gored through halberds and blades. Serpents coiled, crushing defenders in their icy grip.
And then Haotian moved.
One breath—he was still on the ridge.The next—his figure blurred.
Haotian descended like mist breaking apart on wind. His steps were weightless, his body sliding through chaos as if the battlefield bent to him. Frost wolves lunged, claws flashing—but his afterimage remained where he had stood. Their jaws snapped empty air.
He flowed between them, every step precise, untouchable. The Cloudveil Steps were not speed alone—they were inevitability.
A frost boar charged, tusks like spears of ice. Haotian's spear whirled in his hands, faster, faster—until the air hummed like a storm. The rotating spear became a vortex, wind pulling snow and blood into its spiral.
When the boar struck, the storm of steel swallowed it whole. Its skull split, body hurled aside as though the earth itself had rejected it.
The vortex collapsed, leaving Haotian standing, eyes cold, spear steady.
The wolves came next, a pack of nine, leaping in perfect unison. Haotian inhaled—then his spear blurred.
One thrust. Then another. Then another.
Nine thrusts, nine echoes, faster than the eye could follow. Each tip pierced precisely into a heart, a skull, a core. Nine beasts fell as one, collapsing in silence before their blood even touched the snow.
Disciples gasped. Elders froze.
The battlefield roared on, but around Haotian, silence reigned.
A serpent reared, its maw yawning wide, frost qi swirling. Its scales shimmered, harder than steel, harder than the wards it had already shattered.
Haotian exhaled.
The spear in his hands no longer moved with muscle alone—it pulsed with intent. The Heart of the Spear radiated outward, the will of piercing, of breaking all barriers.
The serpent lunged. Haotian's spear struck.
Scales split like paper. The thrust pierced through skull, qi, and spirit alike. The beast collapsed, its body thrashing once before lying still.
The intent lingered, pressing down on beasts and men alike, chilling marrow and freezing blood. Even disciples holding swords felt their grips tremble. The spear's heart was not a weapon—it was a truth.
Gasps spread through the chaos."Did you see—?""Those thrusts—impossible!""The intent… it felt like my own chest was pierced!"
Elders, even sect masters, glanced his way, their battles stuttering as their eyes locked on the violet figure carving through the tide.
For the first time, the beast horde faltered—not because of traps, not because of pills, but because one man walked forward with a spear that denied them passage.
Snow swirled around him, blood steaming on white ground. His robes fluttered, untouched, violet amid the storm of red and white.
Haotian did not shout. He did not roar. He simply stepped again, spear ready.
And the line—once shattered—began to hold.
The air over Frozen Valley trembled with the last echoes of battle—low thunder fading into a hush so complete that even the wind seemed to hold its breath. Steam bled from dozens of bestial carcasses where rune-lit wounds hissed against the snow. Splintered ice ridges leaned at crooked angles. Smoldering runic lines flared and dimmed along the ground like veins of cooling lightning. The scent was a hard mix of iron and bitter frost; every breath tasted of smoke.
At the center of the ruin stood Haotian.
The spear in his hand no longer screamed. Its glow had guttered to a steady pulse along the inlaid runes, the haft dark with gore that the frost could not cling to. He held it as one might cradle a truth already decided. His chest rose and fell in an even cadence, no outward sign of strain betraying what the valley had just witnessed—the moment when one figure carved straight through a breaking line and turned a dying night back from the brink.
For several heartbeats nothing moved. Then, like snow releasing from a ledge, the disciples' restraint gave way.
"Senior Brother Haotian!" a voice burst, raw with relief.
"Haotian!"
"Did you see—did you see how he moved? It wasn't human—no, it was—"
"—the spear cut like wind in a bottle—"
"—he stopped them—by himself he—"
Words tumbled over one another, awe thrown into the open as if the sky itself demanded it. Outer disciples staggered toward him with faces streaked black by ash and tears, the whites of their eyes too bright. Inner disciples—those who had stood in their positions with jaws clenched and fear buried behind duty—found themselves standing straighter, shame and admiration mixing into something fierce. A boy not yet twenty bled from a ragged cut along his scalp; he pressed his fist to his heart and bowed from the waist until the world swam, refusing to sway. Beside him, a senior sister with half her braid hacked away lifted her sword in salute, blade trembling in the cold as she held it vertical before her brow.
They did not speak like men and women who had been saved by chance. They spoke as if witnessing a page being turned in the valley's fate.
Haotian said nothing at first. He let the noise wash, let it find its level. He looked past the faces, past the hands that reached to steady one another, past the swirling frost. He listened—to the grinding in the ice, to the subterranean echo of footsteps too many to count, to the valley's pulse as it reset around their brief reprieve. In the long gap between one roar and the next, the world held still.
Around the disciples, elders gathered their breath in low murmurs that never quite became open speech. The old did not clap. They watched.
"That was not the Rotating Spear we teach," one elder hissed to another, the words almost swallowed by his scarf. "Did you see the turn in his wrists? He reversed the torque mid-arc without losing line. That is—what realm allows that?"
"His qi did not scatter at all," another said, voice thin. "The Heart of the Spear—he touched it fully. He's… how old? Eighteen? Nineteen?"
"Twenty," came a third, eyes narrowed into the storm, as if age could be measured at that distance. "And if he is twenty, then someone lied to the heavens about the time it takes to master a path."
They were not whispers of joy. They were calculations. They were the sound of men used to balancing ledgers of strength, trying to reckon with a figure that wouldn't fit on their page. Fear hid itself behind technical observation. The elders' fingers tightened inside sleeves, joints popping softly in the cold as they grasped the implications: that a junior had crossed some boundary no one had given him permission to find.
On a higher shelf of ice, where the banners of other sects clung to poles driven between blue cracks, rival gazes smoldered. The Cold River Sect's young prodigy—robes a purer white than the snow itself—watched with lips pressed thin until all color left them. His elder leaned near, voice like a knife edge: "Mask your face."
"I am masking it," the prodigy said, not moving his mouth.
Cloudveil spirit robes rippled at another vantage point. A senior sister from the Cloudveil Spirit Sect stood with hands folded beneath her sleeves, silver eyes reflecting the ruin below. "So that is the one everyone whispers about," she said softly, not to be heard and yet somehow always heard. "All that thunder in a boy's frame." The junior at her side flinched when she smiled. It was not a kind look. "Admiration is a luxury I cannot afford," she added, almost to herself. "Not while our banner has yet to touch the highest winds."
Between sects, courtesy held. Envy breathed behind it like heat behind a sealed door.
Closer to the ground, awe grew legs and ran. Disciples pushed closer to Haotian until the ground at his feet was stamped smooth by too many boots. He turned his head and countless bodies followed the motion, as if the valley had been strung like a puppet. "Senior Brother," one said, voice wobbling with exhaustion and adoration. "If you had not stepped in—" He swallowed hard. "If you had not—"
"Live," Haotian said, finally letting a word fall. It struck the frost like a pebble dropped into a well. "Live well enough to hold your own line."
The boy's shoulders shook. He bowed so fast the motion looked like falling, then caught himself on his sword and laughed once, breath steaming. That single word—live—spread out as if it had been something larger. It passed from mouth to mouth, became a chant under the breath: live, live, live.
Haotian's gaze lifted. An outer disciple with chapped lips and a broken wrist stared back at him, trying to hide the way her hand shook. He reached without thinking, shifted his spear to his left, and with his free hand set her wrist straight with a firm click. She grunted, sucked air between her teeth, and then, to her own surprise, laughed. "Thank you," she said, voice thick, eyes too bright.
"Line Three," he told her, nodding toward the inner ridge. "Take the injured. Swap the heavy satchels with the light. No one runs alone."
"Yes!" She spun, yelling as she went, her voice suddenly big enough to command a dozen. Orders leapt fence to fence. The valley stirred.
A cold wind slid through the ravine then, sinuous as a serpent. The banners above shivered. A crust of loose ice tinkled down from the overhangs like soft rain. Somewhere in the white distance something roared—not the massed chorus of a tide, but a deep note that seemed to roll under the skin and press against the bone.
The elders' murmurs thinned into silence.
"That wasn't one of the pack," Elder Bai said quietly from Haotian's right. The old master's breath fogged in a straight line; he had steadied himself. Snow clung to the hem of his robe where he'd knelt moments before to bind a wounded man's thigh. His eyes never left the valley's mouth. "Listen to the ground. They're still coming. More of them. Heavier."
Haotian listened. Behind the cheers and the calling of orders, behind the hiss of cooling wounds and the clatter of reshaped formation poles, he found it: a slow, gathering thunder deeper than the last wave's frantic crashing. Not one stampede but layers of them, as if the earth stacked its own heartbeats. The valley floor thrummed beneath his boots.
Morale surged like a fire catching, then guttered when the wind carried a second roar and the crust over the river cracked in three places at once.
The disciples heard it. Their faces changed.
"Positions!" someone shouted, voice cracking high.
"Reset the second ring—no, the third—gods, the third! Move! Move!"
"Explosive satchels to the gaps! If you can't lift it, drag it!"
"Where's the rope team—where—"
Order battled with fear. The lines that had started to drift inward toward Haotian spread back out, unwilling legs forced into motion by habit and shouted names. Footing slipped on blackened ice. Gloves fumbled at the mouths of heavy packs for cold metal rings. A chain of juniors passed barrels hand to hand with the frantic rhythm of a bucket line at a burning warehouse.
"Hold fast!" Elder Bai boomed, old voice filling the space better than a trumpet. "This valley isn't a grave unless you decide to lie down in it!"
Cold River Sect's standard snapped once high on the ridge. Their elder lifted a hand and his disciples pivoted in disciplined tandem, a bridge of bright steel forming beneath their banner. Even envy yields to survival. Cloudveil's contingent unspooled silk cords along the ice, securing the second pier line. A trio from Frost Gale Hall slammed formation stakes into cracks bleeding blue light, then flattened their palms to the frozen ground to feed qi into the web. All nine sects moved, gears gritting but meshing.
Haotian's eyes combed the field. Faces and positions flickered across his awareness, the way the world looked through the Eyes of the Universe when he let the lids of his reason slip. He did not open the eyes fully—there was no need to strip the valley naked—but he let them taste the surface: weak hollows in the formation net, a flank where the runes burned a shade too dim, weight distribution wrong on the snow bridge over the eastern rift. Information slid into place as fast as breath.
"Line Five is light," he said, not raising his voice and yet finding the ears that needed to hear it. "Two steps forward, staggered. Leave a gap for the spill. Rope team, to the eastern rift. Brace the bridge. If it drops, pull in—not out."
Orders became motion. The rope team vaulted to the rift, anchors biting, bodies dropping to dug-in skids as if gravity had been trained to serve. Line Five breathed as one, boots thudding through powder as they advanced exactly as far as he had marked, no more. That was how a tide breaks—on an edge it does not see and cannot understand.
A young woman in Moon Lotus colors took her station near the inner bend where the river iced over into a smooth, treacherous curve. Yin Shuyue's hair was pulled back in a plain knot that had frayed under battle; frost glittered along the loose strands like ground diamonds. Her spear was shorter than Haotian's Fenglong but held with the same economy—no waste, the promise of precise violence at a breath's notice. She glanced once across the formation to where he stood and then fixed her eyes on the shadows seething beyond the icefall. It was a glance full of things she did not say. There would be time for the unsaid later or there would not. For now, she watched.
"Haotian," Elder Bai said, not quite under his breath.
He answered without looking. "I know."
The next wave hit before the valley had time to draw a single satisfied breath.
It came first as a wall of sound, then teeth. Frost wolves poured over the bodies of their dead like gray water, fur tipped with ice needles that flashed in the glow of the runes. Behind them came shag-bodied shardbacks that crashed headfirst into the rebuilt stakes, plates cracking, plates holding. Ice-borer lizards by the dozens hissed and sluiced through fractures under the surface, the river ice bowing as if some colossal finger pressed down from above.
"Now," Elder Bai snarled.
Explosives woke the snow.
The first chain detonated along the outer arc with a strobe of white fire, the shockwave slamming outward in a ring that turned wolves into tumbling silhouettes. A second wave ripped upward from underneath where the lizards had gathered in the faults, blowing them against the underside of the river like fish hitting a glass ceiling. Shards of ice erupted and scythed across the front line. A boy from Frost Gale Hall screamed as a chunk struck his shoulder; he shut his mouth on the second cry and kept his place, the blade of his knife clenched backward in a grip that signaled he meant to hold even if it broke his arm again.
"Brace! Brace!" came the shouts. "Let the blast pass through—knees! Knees!"
The disciples held. The line shuddered but did not fold. Smoke rolled back low, pushed by the valley's wind, and clung around boots and shins. Wolves hit that smoke out of it, jaws wide, eyes red with a cold fever that belonged to no living thing and everything to the winter that had made them.
Haotian moved again, not forward this time, but through: between one breath and the next he existed in three spots along Line Three, knocking aside a wolf that had cleared the chain and would have taken a throat, shifting a shield to turn a plate-backed charge, planting the butt of Fenglong with a hard, hollow crack that rattled the teeth of the borer beneath his feet and made it choose a different path. When he stopped moving he was where he had started, the space around him full of breath that wasn't his and the knowledge of three more lives continuing that perhaps would not have.
"On your left," he said to the junior whose shield he'd set straight. The boy found his left as if he'd been given a compass. "Thank you, Senior!" he barked, despite the blood in his mouth.
Across the river, Cold River's prodigy moved with a speed that would have drawn praise on any night that was not this one. He saw Haotian only when he had to, and looking was an injury he bore with teeth gritted. Cloudveil's senior sister stepped once into the open and drew a long ribbon of silver light through the air that stitched two charging wolves together at the throat. She did not look toward center field at all. Her disciples did and then looked away quickly, as if their eyes would be read.
A shardback struck the eastern rift bridge. The rope team bellowed and sank their heels, cords singing. "Pull in—not out!" one of them howled, and they obeyed; the bridge rose and then fell true again, the shardback tumbling past the mouth of the rift to smash into the river ice below. It screamed. The sound was like metal breaking.
The tide thickened.
Not more wolves now, but heavier bodies shouldering the smaller aside. Frost-horned ur-elk like walking battering rams; bear-things with patches of armor fused to their hides as if their skin had remembered the shape of stone. The valley narrowed their numbers, but pressure is its own kind of blade. The front line bowed. Explosive satchels flared and died. The smell of burned hair and frozen meat built until it coated the tongue.
"Hold the second ring," Elder Bai barked, but his eyes slid sideways without meaning to, toward Haotian. It wasn't dependence. It was the habit of looking for the strongest point in a wall.
Haotian met that glance for the space of a blink and looked away first. The burden balanced itself; it was an art. He could not carry them if they forgot how to stand.
"Back two paces," he called, and Line Five did, steps measured, not panic. "Now set your feet. Let them spend themselves. Let the weight pass through you." He could feel it—the moment when the tide's rhythm wanted to make their rhythm. "Not yet," he said softly, as if to the valley itself. His hands on the spear remembered the last clash and the thousand drills beneath it. He let the memory settle into his bones.
He could feel the disciples' eyes on him still, even as they watched their own fronts. Idolization has a heat all its own. It blazed across his skin like sunlight in winter—sweet, dangerous. If he held it, it would burn him hollow. If he denied it, it would turn to smoke and choke them all. So he did not hold and he did not deny. He let it pass through him the way he had told Line Five to let weight pass through. You could be a pillar without becoming a crutch.
He saw Yin Shuyue again near the inner bend. Frost had settled along the line of her lashes like white kohl. When the next wave hit her segment, she moved with clean economy—no flourish, no cry. Her spear drove a wolf's chest into the ice and pinned it there, then flicked sideways to parry a second bite she had already read, feet sliding just enough to steal the beast's balance. The junior to her left stumbled; her shoulder took the weight without complaint and shoved him back into place like a wall growing a hand.
Elder Bai breathed out slow. "They're learning," he said. "Yours are learning fastest."
"They're ours," Haotian said.
A horn call cut that brief exchange in half. It was not one of the sects'. The sound clawed at the ear, sour and old. The banners quivered. Men who had never feared a horn before flinched at it, without knowing why.
The ground under the ice drew a deeper breath.
The tide pressed harder, as if the horn had turned a key in their chests. The wolves' eyes bled a deeper red. The shardbacks struck without pause, ignoring shattered plates, and the ur-elk came in such a solid wave that the second ring's stakes hopped in their holes.
"Reinforce the middle!" Cloudveil's voice knifed across the white like a line of silver. "If the hinge breaks—"
"—both doors fall," Cold River finished grimly, and they moved.
Elder Bai lifted his palm and sent a pressure wave rolling low along the ground that stole the first inches of speed from the elk. The animals bellowed in enraged confusion. The disciples who had idolized a moment ago found their teeth again. Idolization became something better shaped: discipline made hot.
Haotian tasted the air. His lungs burned, but not from effort—there was a different heat in the valley now. A memory, not his, brushed against the back of his mind: the Saints' courtyard under a summer storm when he had been younger and smaller and rushes in the pond hissed as the first fat drops hit. The storm was not here yet. But it was coming.
"Haotian." Elder Bai's voice held the slightest roughness.
"Keep them together," he said. "Whatever's in that horn, it wants us to scatter."
"I know." The old master's mouth tugged at one corner: humor even here, or a piece of something like it. "You know who they'll credit when we don't."
"Credit is wind," Haotian said.
"Wind moves banners," Elder Bai answered. "Banners move men."
Another roar shouldered through the valley—farther this time and lower, big enough to make snow leap along the edges of the ice like frightened minnows. Nearby, a junior spat and crossed himself with his knife. "Heaven guard us."
Heaven did not answer. The valley did.
The beasts slammed them again. The second ring held and then creaked. Hands slipped in gloves and found purchase anyway. A girl whose name Haotian did not yet know bared her teeth and drove her sword home with a sound like tearing cloth; when the blade stuck she put her boot on the dead thing's ribs and wrenched. When it came free she laughed once, hard and surprised, as if the sound had snuck out of her and been startled to find itself alive.
"Up!" Haotian called. The front line rose as one from their braced stance. The ur-elk hit on that breath and lost the advantage of their lowered heads. Bodies crashed. The stakes groaned. The line flexed and did not split.
On the high shelf, rival elders who had intended to seethe found themselves forced to reassess. Some envy cooled into a shape that looked, if one were not careful, like respect. Others hardened their jaws and filed the shape of this night away in a ledger of debts.
And still the disciples' eyes strayed to Haotian between motions. Idolization is not a thing one chooses. It grows where a field has already been plowed by despair and watered by terror, and a single figure plants a seed. The disciples did not understand the mechanics of their own hearts. They only knew that when he moved, a space opened in front of them, and when he stood still, their backs straightened more easily.
He felt all of it. It pressed against the ribs the way the next roar pressed against the valley. He let it pass through. The spear rested in his palms as if it had been born there: weight, length, the memory of a thousand turns cataloged in tendons and bone. He rolled his right wrist and felt the motion travel up his forearm to his shoulder and down through his hips into his feet, a running dog of heat that left behind understanding rather than fire. He would need that understanding soon, not for this wave but for the shape of the one that would come after. The horn did not summon common beasts.
For a brief span of heartbeats, the pressure eased. Not relief—no one honest mistook it for that—but the particular slack in a rope when something heavy shifts its grip before pulling again. The valley drew a frost-lined breath. The elders turned their heads as if to avoid hearing what would come next and thereby call it sooner. The disciples looked to the dark mouth between the icefalls and then back to Haotian, as if mapping the space between the two would change what the dark chose to send.
Yin Shuyue adjusted her hand half an inch along her spear's shaft. The wind flicked a loose strand of hair across her cheek. She did not brush it back. Her eyes never left the shadows.
"Hold your lines," Haotian said, voice level, as if he were naming the color of the sky. It moved through the valley and bolted itself into spines. "No one runs forward. No one runs back without a name attached to the order. Breathe."
Cold River's prodigy breathed when told, despite himself.
Cloudveil's senior sister never broke the line of her mouth, but the corner of one eye tightened in a way that admitted something without confessing it.
Elder Bai's shoulders lowered the smallest degree. "It hears you when you talk like that," he said, just for Haotian.
"I'm talking to them," Haotian said.
"You always are," the old man replied.
The wind shifted. Somewhere upstream, the ice groaned. The horn sounded again, closer now, and the valley answered with its third thunder, deeper than the last two and full of weight. The beasts in front of them stiffened as if receiving a second mind, then threw themselves forward with a unity that was not natural.
The disciples braced.
The elders set their feet.
Haotian lifted Fenglong, the spear's runes exhaling the faintest light like an ember agreeing to be a flame again.
Beyond the icefall, something moved that the eye could not yet name.
The tide pressed harder. The line held.
And under the avalanche of praise, fear, envy, and hope, he took the weight of it all and turned his grip until it sat where it belonged—balanced, steady, not his to hoard and not theirs to carry alone—while the valley drew back its curtain to show them what the horn had called.