Five winters in the Frostbloom Garden had etched their patterns on the stone and on the boy.
Lin Xuan could walk. It was a slow, careful motion, each step placed with deliberate precision, as if he were testing ice that might crack. He spoke in soft, complete sentences, his voice carrying a faint, echoing chill that made servants pause. His hair, once downy, had grown into a cascade of pale silver, and his skin remained the color of moonlight, so translucent that in certain lights, one could almost see the delicate tracery of veins beneath. Touching him was like touching a sculpture left in a deep cellar—cool, smooth, and unnervingly inert.
"Is he dead or alive?" the younger kitchen maids would whisper, shivering after delivering his specially prepared meals, which steamed furiously in the frozen air of his courtyard. "He looks like a winter spirit…"
Yet, he lived. Under the watchful, often baffled care of Old Man Gui, who visited seasonally, and the fierce, unwavering devotion of his mother, Lin Xuan had achieved a fragile equilibrium. The Celestial Yang Ascent Technique was a silent, constant hum within him, a tiny, golden furnace stoked day and night. It kept the devouring Yin at bay, but it was a holding action, not a victory.
His relationship with Lin Feng was the single warm point in his frozen world. She was his anchor, his translator for a society that saw him as a living curio. She fought for his resources, read to him from epic tales and cultivation theory alike, and in the quiet nights, she would simply hold his cold hands between her warm ones, as if willing her own vitality into him. He, in turn, offered her a quiet companionship and a depth of understanding in his silver eyes that she could not explain but cherished fiercely.
On the morning of his fifth birthday, the Frostbloom Garden was adorned with rare, winter-blooming spirit flowers that glowed with soft blue light. Lin Feng had used a significant portion of her merit points to acquire a small cache of Yang-aligned spiritual medicines: Sun-Heart Roots, Dawn Blossom Petals, and a vial of Phoenix-Warmed Sap. Their grade was not high—true high-grade Yang treasures were continent-shaking rarities—but they were the strongest his fragile system could theoretically tolerate.
"For my strong boy," she whispered, arranging them on a table beside him as he sat, swathed in furs, watching the morning light struggle through the ice-filmed windows. Her smile was bright, but fear flickered in its edges. Five was a milestone. The first major predicted crisis point from Old Man Gui's calculations.
Lin Xuan managed a small, stiff smile in return. "Thank you, Mother." His mind, however, was a fortress of grim focus. He could feel it. The equilibrium of the last year had grown taut, a drumskin stretched too tight. The Yin within him was no longer just a cold sea; it was a tide, pulling back, gathering itself for a monumental surge.
He reached for the nearest item, a Sun-Heart Root. His slender, pale fingers closed around it. The Yang energy within it was like a miniature sun to his senses. But as he tried to channel the barest wisp of his own energy to draw it in, the taut drumskin twanged.
It began not with pain, but with silence.
A profound, absolute cold blossomed from his core. The Sun-Heart Root in his hand didn't just feel warm; it now felt scalding, alien. A layer of hoarfrost sprouted from his fingertips and raced up his arm with audible crackles. The chill spilled out of him, radiating into the room.
The steaming cup of tea on the table froze solid in an instant. The spirit flowers' gentle glow winked out, their petals turning brittle and black. Frost spiderwebbed across every surface—the walls, the ceiling, the floor—with terrifying speed, thickening into a glaze of solid ice. The very air crystallized, falling as a fine, deadly snow within the room.
Lin Feng cried out, reaching for him, but a wall of ice shot up from the floor between them, sealing Lin Xuan in a crystalline coffin of his own making.
The pain arrived next. It was not the pain of injury, but of unmaking. It felt as if every cell in his body was being flash-frozen and then shattered, only to reform and shatter again, a thousand times over. It was the Yin awakening, asserting its divine, terrible nature, purging the weakness of mortal flesh. It was excruciating beyond any wound from his past life. He tried to scream, but his lungs were blocks of ice. He slumped from his chair, his body seizing on the frozen floor.
Alarms sounded through the Lin estate. The Patriarch arrived with a blast of power that shook the mountain, Old Man Gui at his heels. Lin Zongyan took one look at the ice-sealed pavilion, his face grim. He raised a hand, and the might of the Soul Fusion Realm pressed down, seeking to quell the raging Yin energy.
The ice resisted. It didn't fight; it simply was, a law of reality as fundamental as gravity. His vast spiritual power slid off it, finding no purchase. He could shatter the pavilion, but the energy inside was untouchable, a private apocalypse.
"Don't!" Old Man Gui shouted, his usual joviality gone, replaced by stark horror. "You cannot help him! This is the Crucible of the Celestial Yin! External force will only make it worse, twist the awakening! It must be borne alone! It is… it is the most inhuman thing about this physique. The heavens forge a celestial in a private hell where no hand can reach."
Lin Feng was on her knees, beating her fists against the impervious ice, her cries muffled. "Xuan'er! Hold on! Please!"
Inside the frozen heart of the storm, Lin Xuan was dissolving. The pain had ascended beyond sensation into a white, silent void. He could not feel his body. He could not think of technique, of Yang, of survival. The magnificent, terrible cold was scouring away his consciousness, his memories, his very self. It was returning him to the pure, indifferent state of primordial Yin.
So… this is the end… The thought was a faint, final spark. No revenge. No path. Just… cold.
He saw Zhang Li's cursed hand. He saw his mother's warm, terrified eyes beyond the ice. The two images blurred and faded.
The tiny, golden furnace of his cultivated Yang was guttering, its light shrinking to a pinprick against the infinite, expanding night of the awakening Yin.
His consciousness frayed, thinned, and finally…
Snapped.
In the silence of the frozen pavilion, the body of the five-year-old boy lay still, encased in a beautiful, terrible sarcophagus of ice. No breath misted the air. No flicker of movement stirred his silver lashes.
Outside, Lin Feng's desperate sobs were the only sound against the howling wind of the Northern peaks.
Patriarch Lin Zongyan lowered his hand, a profound, weary frustration in his ancient eyes. Old Man Gui simply shook his head, his face ashen.
In the heart of the ice, Lin Xuan was gone.
Or was he?
Deep within the frozen core, in the absolute zero darkness where even time seemed to halt, the pinprick of golden light did not entirely vanish. It was buried, forgotten, a single forgotten ember in a universe of ice. But an ember, if the conditions are right, can be enough to begin a thaw.
The story of Lin Xuan hung in that impossible balance, between the finality of a celestial death and the slimmest, most desperate thread of a miracle yet unfinished.