The days that followed blurred into a cold, efficient routine, a rhythm marked by the crunch of snow under boots and the sharp whistle of the wind. The strange partnership between the sect's goddess and her self-proclaimed "salvage collector" solidified into a functional silence, a coexistence that would have seemed like a fever dream to any other disciple. For Lin Feng, it was simply the next chapter in his absurd epic of survival.
His skill in gathering loot, which he had dubbed his "Dao of Treasure Hauling," was honed to perfection. He was no longer just a porter; he had become an efficient shadow. While Xiao Lan dispatched frozen beasts with a lethal grace that never failed to awe him, he would wait in the wings, his shovel in one hand and a skinning knife in the other. He learned to flay a Crystal Fox before the last vestiges of Xiao Lan's Purifying Fire faded from its wounds, to extract the fangs of an Ice Rat with a surgeon's precision, and to sort cores with an efficiency that would have earned him a promotion in the sect's logistics department, if such a thing existed for outer disciples.
Xiao Lan, for her part, had grown accustomed to his presence. At first, Lin Feng's existence was a mere necessary nuisance, an extra pair of hands for mundane tasks. But slowly, she began to notice details that didn't fit the profile of a "trash disciple." Lin Feng rarely spoke, but when he did, his words were often strangely perceptive.
"Senior Sister," he said one day, as they watched a herd of Icehorn Deer grazing in the distance, "the lead male has a slight limp in its left hind leg. It's barely perceptible, but it's there. He'll likely evade any frontal assault by favoring that flank. An attack from a high flank on the right would have more success."
Xiao Lan narrowed her eyes. From her position, the limp was nearly invisible. But trusting the strange acuity Lin Feng sometimes displayed—the same that had allowed him to warn her of a nest of Frost Serpents hidden beneath the snow—she modified her plan. Her attack was an arc of liquid white fire that descended exactly as he had suggested. The lead deer fell, unable to execute its usual escape maneuver.
She didn't praise him. She simply shot him a look that held a new layer of assessment before turning to collect the core. But Lin Feng noticed. Silent acceptance was, in his world, the highest of compliments. Glob, from the warmth of his robes, emitted a pulse of satisfaction, as if his "father's" victory was his own.
"It seems that years of watching bullies telegraph their punches has applications in high-level hunting," Lin Feng thought with his usual wry humor. "Who would have thought. My survival manual for scrubs is gaining new and prestigious chapters."
Their relationship was not one of friendship. It was that of a warrior queen and her unlikely squire. But beneath the cold, professional surface, something was shifting. Lin Feng no longer felt the paralyzing terror her aura had inspired in him at first; now it was like living next to a contained sun—a source of overwhelming heat and power that he had learned to respect and orbit at a safe distance. And Xiao Lan, though her face remained an icy mask, had stopped seeing him as a mere worm. He was her worm. A strangely useful and enigmatic worm.
It was during one of their explorations, as they ventured deeper into the frozen heart of the Umbral Range, that the routine was broken. The air grew denser, heavier, charged with a spiritual pressure so ancient and vast that it made the Chaotic Heart in Lin Feng's dantian contract in a painful warning.
Xiao Lan stopped dead, her entire body taut as a bowstring. Her gaze was not fixed on the landscape, but on something her superior senses had detected. Lin Feng followed her line of sight and his breath froze in his lungs—not from the cold, but from sheer intimidation.
Before them, imprinted on the ancient, rock-hard snow, were tracks. Tracks so large that each one could have served Lin Feng as a bathtub. They were not the claws of a bear or the hooves of a mammoth. They belonged to something more reptilian, more anomalous. And from them emanated an aura of latent power so cold it made Xiao Lan's Purifying Fire seem like a mere candle in comparison.
"The Glacial Hydra," Xiao Lan murmured, and for the first time since Lin Feng had known her, he heard a note of genuine, profound caution in her voice.
Lin Feng swallowed hard, the sarcasm dying on his lips. He had read about the beast in some dusty bestiary in the outer library. A legendary creature, a tyrant of the deepest, most frozen zones, rarely seen and never defeated by disciples.
"I have avoided its territory on previous expeditions," Xiao Lan continued, her eyes never leaving the ominous tracks that disappeared into a canyon of dark blue ice walls. "Its regenerative power is legendary. You cut off one head, and two grow in its place, each capable of spewing deadly blizzards. Its power is on par with a master at the late Foundation Establishment Realm, or perhaps even beyond. It's a problem, even for me."
"A problem for you is an apocalypse for me," Lin Feng thought, taking an instinctive step back. He felt Glob vibrate with a terror that mirrored his own.
Xiao Lan seemed to reach a decision. "It is said to guard a Thousand-Year Frost Lotus, a celestial treasure that could massively accelerate my cultivation. But the risk is too great. We are not here to die."
She turned with decisive fluidity. "We will take another route. There is a pass to the east that should lead us to the outer valleys. It is more dangerous due to the terrain, but preferable to waking... that."
As he followed her, Lin Feng couldn't help but cast one last glance toward the canyon where the hydra slumbered. The feeling of immense power and priceless treasure was seared into his mind, a premonition that, somehow, his story with that beast was not yet over.
The new route was, as Xiao Lan had warned, treacherous. They wound along narrow ledges and crossed natural ice bridges that arched over bottomless chasms, their depths hidden by a swirling mist. The wind howled in these canyons, a perpetual lament that made the skin crawl.
They were halfway across the longest of these bridges, a structure of ancient, translucent ice that looked as fragile as glass. Lin Feng followed Xiao Lan at a respectful distance, his senses sharpened by the latent danger and the dull ache in his dantian.
It was then that calamity struck.
There was no warning. Not a tremor, not a crack. Simply, with a deafening roar that was swallowed by the abyss, the section of the bridge directly beneath Lin Feng's feet disintegrated. The world tilted violently. For one horrifying instant, he was suspended in mid-air, the abyss yawning beneath him like the hungry maw of a forgotten god.
Pure, absolute terror seized him. His shovel slipped from his grasp, falling silently into the mist. His arms flailed for a nonexistent handhold. Death, which he had dodged so many times, had finally come to claim him.
But then, in the instant that gravity took hold, a hand clamped onto him.
Strong as steel, cold as ice, but undeniably real. Xiao Lan's hand closed around his forearm with desperate strength.
She had reacted with superhuman speed, spinning on her heels on the precarious remaining surface of the bridge to lunge for him. Her expression was no longer that of an impassive goddess; it was a mask of shock and ferocious concentration.
The pull of Lin Feng's weight threatened to drag them both into the void. But at that moment, as their skin made contact, something happened. Something impossible.
For Lin Feng, the touch was an explosion. The chaotic, raging energy that always roiled in his dantian—his curse and his secret—found an outlet. Like water breaking a dam, it surged through his arm, not as an attack, but as an instinctive, desperate torrent that poured into Xiao Lan.
For Xiao Lan, the sensation was a shock that eclipsed the physical danger. She felt a foreign energy invade her: cold, primordial, vast as the void between stars, and chaotic to its core. Her first instinct was to repel it, to annihilate it with her Purifying Fire. But instead of clashing, the unthinkable occurred.
Her Purifying Fire, pure and orderly, did not fight the chaos. It resonated with it.
Like a dark dye poured into molten gold, Lin Feng's energy intertwined with her own. Deep within her spiritual core, she felt her power undergo a fundamental transformation, terrifying and strangely… exhilarating.
The Purifying Fire that erupted from her in that instant was not the one she knew.
The golden-white torrent she had always commanded with absolute control now burned with a purple-black hue. Streaks of pure darkness, like cracks in reality, danced within the sacred flames. The power didn't just feel stronger; it felt more complete, more primordial. It united the fury of creation with the absolute silence of annihilation.
This new flame, this Purifying Chaos Fire, erupted downward, not as a directed attack, but as an eruption of pure power that struck the crumbling remains of the ice bridge.
It didn't melt them. It unmade them.
The ice didn't turn to water; it sublimated into nothingness, erased from existence. The lesser beasts that dwelled in the chasm's crevices, drawn by the commotion, shrieked in terror as the wave of purple-black energy reached them, their bodies not burning, but dissolving into motes of dust before vanishing. The threat was eliminated in a way so overwhelming and absolute it defied comprehension.
The echo of the power blast faded, leaving a stunned, heavy silence.
They both hung there, at the edge of the ledge Xiao Lan had managed to launch herself to, still clinging to each other. He, dangling over the abyss; she, anchored to the rock, her arm outstretched.
They were safe. But the world had irrevocably changed in those few seconds.
Lin Feng stared up at her, eyes wide with shock. He felt the chaotic power recede back into his dantian, leaving him weak and empty, but he also sensed an echo of her energy within him, a resonant connection that had never existed before.
Xiao Lan stared down at him. Her face, usually a work of art of icy serenity, was pale, her lips slightly parted in shock. Her gaze dropped to her own hand, the one still holding Lin Feng. Faint sparks of violet and black light still crackled around her fingers, refusing to be extinguished.
She didn't understand what had happened. Her power, the pride of her lineage, the essence of her Dao, had merged with the energy of a "trash disciple" at the first level of Qi Condensation and had given birth to something… both divine and monstrous.
It had improved it.
The thought was so heretical, so impossible, that her mind reeled.
They looked at each other. The abyss below them was no longer the greatest gap that separated them. A new connection, forged in terror and the fire of chaos, now bound them. A connection that was both a miracle and a terrible, terrible promise of what was to come.