The air at the entrance to the Hydra's canyon was so ancient and frigid it felt solid. Every breath Lin Feng took was like swallowing needles of ice. High above him, hidden among the jagged claws of a hanging glacier, Xiao Lan had vanished. She had melted into the shadows and the reflections of the ice, becoming a specter, a predatory phoenix waiting in her sniper's nest. Lin Feng saw her for an instant, a flash of blue robes, and then received her signal: a short, sharp nod that said everything he needed to know. The stage is yours. Don't die too quickly.
Lin Feng stepped into the frozen gorge, an amphitheater of desolation and primordial power. The dark blue ice walls rose to the sky like the bones of dead gods. The silence was so profound he could hear his own heartbeat, a frantic drum against his ribs.
"The Bold Goddess's Field Guide to Hunting," his internal monologue began, a suit of sarcasm against the absolute terror. "Step 1: Procure an expendable assistant with a surprisingly robust constitution. Step 2: Give him a nice, shiny talisman to instill a false and fleeting sense of security. Step 3: Use him like a prime cut of meat and have him dance in the dragon's maw to lure out the big fish. It's a brilliant plan. Flawless. I should write a book, if I survive to find a publisher."
He looked at his hands. In one, the Spirit Turtle Shield Talisman, smooth and cold. In the other, his trusty shovel, the "Dao" of his previous existence, which now seemed like a cosmic joke. His life, at this moment, hung on the power of a piece of enchanted jade and the aim of a woman who, until a few weeks ago, would have likely mistaken him for a smudge on the floor. The absurdity of it all was as vast as the canyon itself.
He took a deep breath, the frozen air burning his lungs. It was time.
"Alright, Lin Feng. Time to earn your keep," he muttered.
With a thought, he activated the talisman. A faint but firm dome of jade light, the pattern of a turtle shell barely visible, enveloped him. The talisman's aura was warm and reassuring. It was a lie, but a comforting one. He raised his shovel and, with all the strength he could muster, struck a colossal ice stalagmite that stood like a fang in the center of the canyon.
CLANG!
The sound, metallic and sharp, shattered the ancient silence. It ricocheted off the canyon walls, a profane note of defiance in a sacred, deadly place. The echo seemed to last for an eternity.
And then, the world answered.
It wasn't a sound, but a feeling. The ground beneath his feet didn't tremble; it vibrated with a deep and powerful resonance, as if the heart of the mountain itself had begun to beat. At the far end of the canyon lay a glacial lake, an expanse of black ice polished like obsidian. Now, that ice began to crack. But it wasn't breaking inward—the cracks spread outward from a central point, as if something of impossible size were ascending from the dark depths.
The lake water, visible through the fissures, didn't splash. It froze instantly into strange, twisted sculptures of ice as the source of the cold neared the surface. A moment later, the first head emerged.
It was the size of a small carriage, covered in scales that looked like shards of blue ice and primordial rock. Two twisted horns of ice darker than night adorned its skull, and its eyes, the size of dinner plates, were pools of cold white light, devoid of pupils, burning with an ancient and intelligent fury.
Then came a second head. And a third. And a fourth. One after another, seven serpentine heads rose on long, powerful necks, each moving independently, their forked tongues of frost tasting the profanity in the air. Finally, the colossal body of the Glacial Ice Hydra heaved itself from the depths, a leviathan of ice and power, shaking iceberg fragments from its back like a dog shaking off water.
The seven heads turned in unison, their fourteen white eyes fixing on the tiny figure who had dared to disturb their millennial slumber. Lin Feng felt as if his very soul were being dipped in liquid nitrogen. The power emanating from the beast was a physical pressure, a promise of annihilation that made his own Chaotic Heart feel like a mere ember before a frozen sun.
The Hydra did not roar. It opened one of its maws, revealing teeth like daggers of ice, and let out a hiss that sounded like a glacier calving. It was the sound of an eon's patience coming to an end.
Seeing Lin Feng as nothing more than an insolent insect, one of the heads on the right drew back and then lunged forward, unleashing a torrent of frost breath. It wasn't snow; it was a blast of pure, concentrated Yin energy, so cold that the very air crystallized in its path.
Panic seized Lin Feng. His instinct screamed at him to run, to dodge, to bury himself in the snow. But Xiao Lan's voice echoed in his mind: Withstand the first blow. I must gauge its power. Trust the talisman.
'Trust the talisman!' he thought hysterically. 'That's what they tell the steak before it hits the grill!'
He gritted his teeth, planted his feet in the defensive stance Xiao Lan had taught him, and raised his arms as if he could stop an avalanche. The white-and-blue torrent crashed against the Turtle Shield.
The impact was like being hit by a mountain. The shield's jade light flickered violently, and a high-pitched sound, like crystal groaning under immense pressure, filled the air. A web of fine cracks appeared on the surface of the light barrier. The cold was so intense that even through the shield, Lin Feng felt his blood turning to slush. His teeth chattered uncontrollably, and his breath became a cloud of instant frost before his face.
The talisman had held. Barely.
The Hydra seemed surprised, even insulted, that the appetizer had survived. Two more heads shot toward him, not with energy, but with raw force, trying to crush him like a bug.
Now he could move!
And so began the bait's dance. Lin Feng pushed off his feet, his body moving with the unnatural agility born of his inner chaos. He slid left, and a giant head smashed into the ground where he'd been a second before, shaking the very earth. Glob, hidden in his robes, vibrated like an angry hornet's nest, sending frantic pulses of warning to his mind: Right! Low attack! Back away!
It was an extrasensory danger-radar. Trusting Glob's instincts and his own desperate will to live, Lin Feng dodged, rolled, and leaped. He avoided a bite that could have split a boulder in two and slid under a tail swipe that kicked up a wave of snow and ice. It was a pathetic, terrified dance, but it was working. He was alive, and all seven of the Hydra's heads were focused entirely on him, on the frustratingly tasty morsel that refused to be eaten.
And then, from the heavens, the phoenix descended.
A pillar of Purifying Fire, silent and majestic, fell from Xiao Lan's perch high above. It wasn't an explosive attack, but a concentrated spear of white-gold light that struck the Hydra directly on its central back.
The beast let out its first real roar, a sound that shook the mountains, a mix of pain, surprise, and absolute fury. The holy fire sizzled on its ice scales, melting them and burning the primordial flesh beneath. The Hydra forgot all about the little insect before it and turned, raising all seven heads toward the true threat hiding in the heights.
The battle had begun in earnest. Xiao Lan descended from the canyon wall like a falling leaf, landing with silent grace at a safe distance. Her sword, "Purifying Light," was drawn, glowing with divine power. The dance between her and the Hydra was a spectacle of epic proportions.
Lotuses of fire bloomed and crashed against torrents of ice. Phoenixes of flame clashed with serpents of frost. Xiao Lan was grace and fury incarnate, every sweep of her sword a poem of destruction. She managed to sever one of the beast's heads with a brilliant arc of her blade. The head thudded to the ground, but before she could celebrate, Xiao Lan watched in frustration as the stump of the neck began to steam with icy energy. The surrounding Qi swirled toward it, and a new layer of magical ice began to form, slowly rebuilding the lost head.
She understood the harsh truth: she could fight the Hydra. She could wound it. But it was a battle of attrition. A battle that, with her reserves of Qi, she wasn't sure she could win.
It was then that Glob made its move.
As the battle raged, the little chaotic slime, safe in the warmth of Lin Feng's chest, was doing more than sensing danger—it was analyzing. As a creature born of primordial chaos, it had a unique sensitivity to fundamental energies. And in the maelstrom of the Hydra's Yin and ice power, it detected… an imperfection. A knot. A dissonance in the beast's symphony of power.
It wasn't something that could be seen or felt with normal Qi. It was a flaw in the very fabric of the Hydra's existence.
A clear, urgent, and unmistakable image flooded Lin Feng's mind. He saw the flow of energy through the Hydra's body like a network of blue rivers. Seven main rivers flowed to the seven heads. But one of them, the one leading to the central head—the largest one with the darkest ice horn—was flickering. Its flow wasn't steady; it had an irregular pattern, a stutter in its essence. It was the core. The anchor. The weak point.
Without hesitation, trusting the strange connection he had with the creature he'd spawned, Lin Feng yelled, his voice nearly lost in the din of battle:
"ELDER SISTER! THE CENTER HEAD! THE ONE WITH THE DARKEST HORN! ITS ENERGY CORE IS FLICKERING IN AN IRREGULAR PATTERN! THAT'S ITS WEAK SPOT!"
Xiao Lan, in the midst of a desperate parry against three simultaneous ice torrents, heard his cry. For an instant, doubt might have assailed her. Trust the ramblings of an outer disciple in the middle of the fight of her life? But she had learned to respect Lin Feng's strange insights. They were unorthodox, but they had yet to be wrong. She knew this was her only chance.
"LIN FENG, GET READY!" she yelled back, her voice cutting through the blizzard like a whip. "WHEN I GIVE THE SIGNAL, GET OVER HERE! I NEED YOUR CHAOS!"
The battle became a dangerous, coordinated dance. Xiao Lan shifted her strategy—no longer attacking indiscriminately. Now she pressed, deflected, forcing the Hydra to move, to turn, to expose the flank of its central head. Lin Feng, heart in his throat and his turtle shield dangerously cracked, dodged stray ice projectiles and the beast's desperate tail swipes, biding his time, moving closer.
The enraged Hydra focused five of its heads to launch a devastating combined attack at Xiao Lan. The other two turned to finish off the annoying bait once and for all. In that instant, with the beast committed, Xiao Lan found her opening.
"NOW!"
Time seemed to slow. Lin Feng ran. The world became a blur of ice and fury. He felt Glob vibrate with an almost painful intensity, his Chaotic Heart roaring in response, eager to be unleashed. He dodged a bite by a margin so narrow he felt the cold of the ice-teeth on his cheek.
He reached Xiao Lan's side just as she completed a parry that sent her stumbling back several steps. Without hesitation, with a confidence born of their training and desperation, Lin Feng placed his palm on her back.
'Take it all!'
He channeled his energy, not as a thread, but as a dark, torrential river that flowed into her. He felt the power leave him, leaving him feeling empty and shaky, but he also felt Xiao Lan's majestic Purifying Flame welcome his chaos, drink it in, fuse with it.
The Purifying Chaos Fire, now consciously summoned in the heat of battle, roared to life. It was not just a flame; it was a pocket sun of annihilation. The golden-white light at its core was almost blinding, but the tendrils of deep violet and absolute darkness swirling around it seemed to devour reality itself.
Xiao Lan's sword, now wreathed in this divine and profane power, became a bolt of judgment. With a cry that was both a challenge and a sentence, she lunged forward, targeting the central head Lin Feng had pinpointed.
The impact was devastatingly silent.
The chaos-infused blade touched the neck of the Hydra's head. There was no explosion of fire. Instead, where the flame touched, the ice and flesh simply ceased to exist. The entropic energy of chaos corrupted the regeneration process at its source. Instead of healing, the wound spread, sizzling with black and purple energy. The Hydra's head wasn't severed: it disintegrated, unraveled into nothingness, its connection to the main body irrevocably broken.
The Hydra let out a high-pitched shriek, a sound of pain and, for the first time, fear. The remaining six heads turned in a panic. They had found the key!
The battle changed completely. It was no longer a fight for survival, but a hunt.
"Again!" Xiao Lan shouted.
They repeated the dangerous dance. Xiao Lan would create an opening, Lin Feng would run in to be the catalyst, and together they would unleash a strike of annihilation. Each time they did it, Lin Feng felt a piece of his life force being torn away. The pain in his meridians was agony, but he gritted his teeth and endured, watching another of the beast's heads dissolve into nothingness.
One head. Two. Three more. The Hydra, now with only three heads, fought with the fury of a cornered creature, but its power was waning.
Finally, only the main head remained, the one that had emerged first. With a last, desperate roar, it lunged at them.
"Together, Lin Feng!" Xiao Lan cried.
This time she didn't wait for him to reach her. She leaped back, intercepting him, and grabbed his hand. Together, they raised the sword and channeled everything they had left. A sphere of unstable, brilliant Purifying Chaos Fire formed at the sword's tip and shot toward the beast.
The orb struck the Hydra squarely in the chest, where its life core pulsed. There was a moment of absolute silence, and then the entire beast lit up from within with a purple-black light. With a final, terrible wail that seemed to carry all the cold in the world with it, the massive creature collapsed. Its icy body cracked, shattered, and dissolved, releasing an immense, pure wave of Yin energy that swept through the canyon.
Exhausted, panting, and triumphant, they stood in the sudden stillness.
They approached the center of the lair, where the frozen lake was now a crater of broken ice. And there, growing on a pedestal of slowly melting ice, they found their prize.
The Thousand-Year Frost Lotus. It was supernaturally beautiful. Each petal seemed crafted from the finest frost under a full moon, yet at its heart glowed a stamen that gave off a soft, warm golden light, like a trapped sun. The duality of its power, Yin and Yang in perfect harmony, was palpable, a promise of a transcendent breakthrough.
The tension and adrenaline that had kept Lin Feng on his feet finally abandoned him. He had channeled his chaotic energy to the absolute limit, pushing his body far beyond what should be possible. The world tilted, colors fading, and the pain from his overloaded meridians finally claimed him. With a groan, his eyes rolled back, and he collapsed into the snow.
Xiao Lan carefully plucked the Thousand-Year Frost Lotus, feeling its incredible power pulse in her hands. The triumph of her achievement was immense. But then, she turned and saw Lin Feng's unconscious form on the ground.
Her expression, usually a fortress of ice, became complex. Exhaustion, triumph, amazement… and something else. A new level of respect and, perhaps for the first time, a budding, genuine concern.
She stored the lotus in her storage pouch with reverent care and knelt beside Lin Feng. She brushed a lock of hair from his forehead, her gloved hand pausing for a moment before she placed the back of her fingers on his skin to check his condition. He was cold, but alive. Relieved, she let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding.