A single drop of sweat slid down the back of my neck, hit my collar, and froze completely solid.
It felt like a small, sharp needle pressing into my spine.
I was sitting on the edge of the stone well in the main courtyard. It was mid-afternoon in late July. The air was a suffocating, humid soup of baked dirt and crushed pine needles. My left thigh was tightly wrapped in fresh linen, throbbing with a dull, sickening rhythm that kept perfect, agonizing time with my heartbeat.
I exhaled a long, exhausted breath.
A thick, opaque cloud of white vapor plumed from my lips. It hung in the sweltering summer air for three full seconds before dissipating into the heat.
I stopped breathing. I stared at the empty space where the fog had just been.
I placed my right hand flat against the rotting wooden rim of the well to push myself up. The moment my palm made contact with the timber, a sharp, microscopic crackling sound echoed in the quiet courtyard. It sounded like someone stepping heavily on a pile of thin glass vials.
I pulled my hand back. The skin of my palm felt entirely numb.
Left behind on the sun-baked wood was a perfect, crystalline handprint of pure, white frost.
Before my brain could formulate a single, coherent thought about thermal dynamics, the system interface snapped open behind my optic nerve. It wasn't the usual soft, passive blue. It was violently bright, edged in a harsh, pulsing, arterial red.
[ SOUL CULTIVATION BOND ARRAY — STATUS UPDATE ]
[ Stage 1 Resonance Lock Confirmed — Target: Shen Yuebing ]
[ Bond Stage 1: Formally Achieved ]
[ WARNING: HEAVEN DETECTION LEVEL — HIGH ]
[ Tier 3 Monitoring Formation Deployed ][ Calculated Timeline to Executioner Dispatch: 10 - 14 Weeks ]
The phantom spike behind my ear drove itself brutally into my skull.
"The tether is anchored," Old Geezer whispered.
The ancient god didn't sound arrogant. He didn't sound mocking. His voice carried the heavy, suffocating texture of a man watching a lit match drop into a powder magazine.
"It is permanent now, boy," the Dao-Emperor continued, the resonance literally rattling my teeth in my gums. "You are no longer bleeding off her ambient presence. You have hooked a line directly into the conceptual root of her soul."
I looked down at my hand. My fingers were pale, the knuckles taking on a faint, bruised blue hue. The half-healed sword cut on my palm looked stark and ugly against the bloodless skin.
"Tier 3," I thought back, fixating entirely on the glaring red text. "Ten to fourteen weeks."
"The Heavenly Dao is no longer merely looking for an anomaly," Old Geezer corrected, his voice dropping an octave. "It is actively logging your coordinates. Every time you pull on that thread, the beacon burns brighter."
Crunch.
I snapped my head up.
Shen Yuebing was walking out from the deep shadow of the eastern corridor.
She had stopped mid-stride. Her immaculate white silk robes settled around her ankles. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking down at her own chest. Her pale, slender fingers were pressed flat against her sternum, right over her heart.
She frowned. It was a microscopic shift in her otherwise flawless, glacial mask, but it was there. She rubbed her chest, as if trying to brush away a persistent, invisible cobweb that had suddenly attached itself to her cultivation core.
She couldn't see the system panel. She didn't know the terminology. But she felt the hook.
She lowered her hand. She slowly raised her head, her pale blue eyes tracking an invisible line through the empty summer air, straight from her chest to mine.
She didn't summon an ice spear. She didn't demand an explanation. She simply adjusted her sleeves, walked across the sun-baked courtyard, and stopped exactly two feet in front of me.
The ambient temperature plummeted. My breath plumed white again.
"You are leaking," Yuebing said.
Her voice was flat, carrying the melodic, chiming chill of a silver bell.
I looked down at the wooden rim of the well. The frost handprint I had left was slowly creeping outward, freezing the damp green moss clinging to the stone. I couldn't stop it. I had zero meridians. I had no internal plumbing to process or restrict the divine conceptual law I was suddenly holding.
"I lack the... structural containment," I said carefully, using Wei Liang's impenetrable baritone to mask the fact that my teeth were currently trying to chatter.
Yuebing stared at the frozen moss.
She knew I had no Qi. She had known since the day she arrived. And yet, she was currently looking at a man with absolutely zero cultivation outputting a pure, high-tier manifestation of her own proprietary bloodline law.
She reached out and picked up a rusted tin cup sitting on the edge of the well. It was half-full of stagnant, lukewarm rainwater that Zhou Bao had neglected to empty. The cup had a deep, crescent-shaped dent near the rim.
She held the dented cup out, offering it to me.
"Freeze it," she ordered.
I looked at the rusted tin. I looked at her pale face. There was no mockery in her eyes. There was only a terrifying, clinical intensity.
I reached out and wrapped my right hand around the bottom of the tin cup. My fingers brushed against hers for a fraction of a microsecond. Her skin was unimaginably, painfully cold.
I gripped the cup. I braced myself, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried to force the numbing sensation in my hand into the water. I pushed the cold outward, treating it like a heavy physical weight I was trying to shove through a locked door.
The water rippled. A thin layer of slush formed on the surface.
Then the entire tin cup violently shattered.
The rusted metal cracked down the middle with a sharp, echoing bang. Freezing water splashed over my hands, instantly turning to jagged ice on my skin. I flinched hard, my torn leg giving a sharp throb of protest as I jerked backward. A piece of shrapnel sliced the webbing of my thumb, but it was too cold to bleed.
I looked at the broken pieces of tin scattered in the dirt.
"Pathetic," Old Geezer noted in the dark.
"I broke it," I said aloud.
"You pushed," Yuebing corrected.
She didn't sigh. She didn't sound disappointed. She knelt down in the dirt, completely ignoring the fact that her pristine white robes were touching the summer mud. She picked up a second, slightly smaller wooden bowl from the ground. She scooped a handful of water from the well bucket into it.
She stood back up. She held the wooden bowl out.
"Cold is not a weapon," Yuebing said softly. Her voice dropped, taking on a heavy, absolute certainty. "It is a grave. Stop attacking the water. Tell the space inside it to die."
I didn't reach for the bowl this time. I just raised my right hand, hovering my numb, cut palm two inches above the surface of the liquid.
I closed my eyes.
I didn't think about ice. I didn't think about winter. I thought about the feeling of lying face-down in the dirt after fighting Zhao Feng's men. I thought about the absolute, crushing stillness of my own dead meridians. I thought about the silence.
I didn't push. I just let the silence drop into the bowl.
Click.
It was a very small, very distinct sound.
I opened my eyes.
The water in the wooden bowl hadn't turned to slush. It hadn't violently expanded and shattered the wood. It had simply, instantly, transformed into a single, flawless block of solid, transparent ice.
It was so clear you could see the dark grain of the wood at the bottom of the bowl perfectly.
My lungs burned. I realized I was holding my breath. I slowly lowered my hand, my fingers trembling slightly from the sheer, unnatural exertion of manipulating a divine law with a mortal body.
Yuebing looked at the perfect block of ice.
She didn't smile. A Glacier Sect prodigy did not smile. But the rigid, defensive tension in her shoulders dropped by perhaps half an inch.
She looked up from the bowl. She looked at my face.
"Not terrible," Yuebing said.
She turned and walked away, her white robes gliding silently over the cracked stones. She took the wooden bowl of perfect ice with her.
I stood by the well, my hand still numb and stinging from the cut, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
I turned my head.
Standing in the deep shadow of the ruined archway leading to the training yard was Luo Yanfen.
She had her arms crossed tightly over her leather armor. Her fiery red hair looked dark in the shadows. I didn't know how long she had been standing there. I didn't know how much of the interaction she had seen.
She didn't yell. She didn't demand a spar. She didn't storm over to insult me.
She just pushed herself off the wooden post she had been leaning against, turned, and walked back into the dark corridor of the training hall without saying a single word.
The courtyard was empty again. The summer heat began to rush back in, pressing against the lingering frost.
I looked at the wooden post Yanfen had just walked away from.
Right where her right hand had been resting against the timber, the wood was blackened and smoldering, a deep, scorched thumbprint burned directly into the grain. A thin wisp of gray smoke curled lazily up into the humid air.