Mo Xuan kept his pace while adjusting his body slightly, ready for whatever came next. Dozens of figures appeared along the ridge above him, their armour ragged and mismatched, their eyes hungry, their weapons already drawn. Some carried spears crudely reforged from farming tools. Others held blades notched and pitted from years of hard use.
One of them shouted down at him. "Boy, leave everything you have, and maybe we'll leave your body intact!"
Laughter rolled across the cliffs in response. Cosmic Souls flickered into being around the gathered bandits — mutated wolves, venomous birds, twisted beast forms warped by whatever desperate, corrupted cultivation methods they'd scavenged over the years.
Mo Xuan didn't even slow his pace.
"Refusing the toast only to drink the forfeit. Fine." The bandit who'd shouted first didn't bother with any further pleasantries. "Kill!"
A brute barrelled down the slope toward him, spear raised high overhead. Mo Xuan drew his sword. A rune flashed along the blade's edge, and sword Qi ripped through the air. A sharp crack exploded through the snowy valley as the brute's body flew backwards, slamming into the frozen ground and going still.
Suffocating silence fell over the ridge.
Mo Xuan's hands shook instinctively at the sight of the fallen body. He looked down at his own trembling fingers, drew a slow breath, closed his eyes, and exhaled. When he opened them again and raised his head, his whole demeanour had shifted. His hands had stopped shaking.
One bandit swallowed hard. "Wh-what...?"
But when he noticed Mo Xuan's strange behaviour and the way his hands had briefly trembled, he mistook the hesitation for something else entirely — carelessness, maybe, or simple beginner's luck, the kind of shaky nerves any green cultivator might show after their first real kill. Further emboldened by Mo Xuan turning to continue on his way rather than pressing his advantage, the bandit found his courage returning.
"What are you waiting for? Kill him!"
A ripple of agreement passed through the group, their weapons tightening in grips that had briefly loosened with uncertainty. Whatever doubt the first kill had planted in them, greed and momentum quickly smothered it.
Mo Xuan turned and kept walking, his steps steady against the white ground. The bandits snarled and rushed forward, trying to overwhelm him through sheer desperate numbers, boots kicking up sprays of snow as they closed the distance. The moment they entered his range, Mo Xuan drew his sword again. Another burst of sword Qi cracked through the valley, and two more bodies were thrown aside like discarded dolls, lifeless before they'd even finished falling.
This time his hand remained perfectly firm.
Another sharp impact echoed through the cliffs. This time, no one dared to move at all. The remaining bandits stood frozen at the edges of the clearing, weapons still raised but feet rooted in place, none of them willing to be the next one to test how far Mo Xuan's patience extended.
Mo Xuan took a single step forward, intending to simply walk past the rest of them, when the bandits parted to let an old, lanky man walk out from among their ranks, clapping slowly as he approached. "Do you think you can just waltz away after killing some of us?"
Mo Xuan turned to face him. "And what do you intend to do about it?"
"Naturally, leave your head behind."
"Come take it, then," Mo Xuan said, unmoved.
The old man laughed. "Young ones are always fearless." He shook his head. "That is not courage. It is foolishness. I offered you a less painful way out." Making a soft tsk sound under his breath, he began walking toward Mo Xuan, his Cosmic Soul flaring to life behind him — an ice sabertooth, massive and gleaming. His soul power fluctuation showed he was a Soul King — level 42.
Behind him, the surviving bandits straightened up slightly, some relief returning to their postures now that their leader had finally stepped forward. Whatever this stranger was capable of against ordinary bandits, surely he couldn't match Boss Yan.
He pounced almost immediately, a huge sabre materialising in his hand as he struck down at Mo Xuan with the full weight of his cultivation behind the blow.
Mo Xuan activated Cloudwalk Script, weaving through the old man's strikes, but the old man kept attacking, growing visibly more irritated with each failed attempt. The sabre carved through drifts of snow and shattered a boulder behind where Mo Xuan had stood a heartbeat earlier, each miss widening the gap between the old man's confidence and his composure. Unable to hit Mo Xuan even once despite the relentless pace, he finally paused. "No wonder you're so arrogant. But so what if you can dodge?" His energy surged higher still. "This ends now."
Mo Xuan's own Cosmic Soul flared to life in answer, black-and-white energy streaming toward him as he finally stopped dodging and met the old man's blade with his own, steel meeting steel in a clean, ringing collision that sent a shockwave rippling outward across the snow.
The remaining bandits watched in stunned silence, murmuring amongst themselves.
"He's actually keeping up with the boss..."
"That's not possible. Boss Yan hasn't gotten serious yet."
"Who is this kid?"
None of them dared step closer, unwilling to draw either fighter's attention while the outcome remained undecided. Their earlier bravado was entirely forgotten now that the fight had escalated into something far beyond what any of them could hope to survive if it turned their way.
After what felt like twenty exchanges, the frozen plain beneath them bore no clear marks from either blade. Every strike had been perfectly countered, leaving nothing but scattered frost kicked up from the ground and small craters where the two combatants had briefly planted their feet to absorb particularly heavy blows. The two of them parted briefly before closing in once more, and this time Mo Xuan's movements sharpened considerably, his spiritual sense stretched to its fullest extent to track the exact trajectory of every motion his opponent made before it fully committed.
He turned his sword mid-motion, using the hilt to strike the old man's jaw just as the sabre came around for another swing. As the old man staggered, momentarily thrown off balance, Mo Xuan caught his outstretched arm and pulled him in close, meeting him with a sharp knee strike that sent him flying backwards across the snow.
He wasn't finished. While the old man was still airborne, Mo Xuan spun once, drawing his sword in a full arc as an enormous black-and-white sword Qi crescent swept outwards, cleaving through everything in its path. Just before it reached its target, an ice shield flared into existence in front of the old man, and the sword Qi collided with it instead, hurling him even further across the frozen plain. His body skidded a considerable distance before finally coming to rest against a jagged outcrop of rock.
Fear had devoured whatever greed remained among the watching bandits. Their mouths hung open, unable to react, too frightened even to shift their weight in case the movement drew Mo Xuan's attention back toward them. When they saw him turn away, apparently no longer interested in finishing what he'd started, the spell finally broke.
The remaining bandits scattered in every direction at once, tripping over each other in their haste to put as much distance as possible between themselves and him, weapons abandoned in the snow, their earlier confidence nowhere to be found.
Far in the distance, their leader now leaned heavily against the rock that had stopped his fall, blood running freely from a wound along his side, unable to move without fresh pain lancing through him. Replaying the sword strike in his mind, real fear finally settled into his chest — if he'd been even a fraction of a second slower raising that ice shield, he would already be dead. He coughed out another mouthful of blood at the thought, the taste of it bitter and metallic against his tongue, and for the first time in years, the old man found himself grateful simply to still be breathing.
Mo Xuan walked until he was certain no one was trailing him, then pulled out a healing pill and settled cross-legged in the snow to recover. The cold bit at his exposed skin even as his cultivation worked to knit closed whatever minor damage the exchange had left behind.
A few minutes later, he stood back up, fully restored. He glanced back once over his shoulder toward the direction the bandits had fled, then turned and continued his journey north without further delay, the encounter already settling into memory as another obstacle the road had thrown in his path.
Snow continued falling steadily as he stepped beyond the frozen mountain pass and crossed into the official boundary of the Northern Frontier Region proper, the terrain shifting almost immediately into something colder and more openly hostile than anything he'd walked through so far.
Three days later, a massive shadow rose from the snowy horizon ahead of him. Mo Xuan slowed to a stop, taking in the sight fully for the first time.
There it stood in the distance — Northwatch Stronghold, a fortress city carved directly from metal and stone, towering up from the frozen plains like some colossal beast standing eternal guard over the final edge of the world. Its walls rose thick as mountains, and its gates loomed tall enough to admit beasts many times the size of an ordinary man. Runic cannons and ballistae lined the length of its ramparts, their barrels catching the pale winter light, and armoured soldiers patrolled the walls with steps so steady and controlled that their killing intent alone carried the weight of sharpened steel, even from this distance.