The cave breathed cold. Not the dry chill of night air, but the damp, marrow-deep kind that seemed to weigh more than it should. Each step Qin Mo took pressed his boots into a skin of moisture over black stone.
The torch he carried hissed faintly where drops fell from the ceiling. The flame haloed just far enough to show the uneven wall and the faint seam of frost creeping along it—thin white veins running parallel, like someone had once scored the rock and the mountain had bled winter into the wound.
[Environmental note: heat dissipation accelerated by 38%. Passive "Flame Aegis" output reduced.]
The system's notice hovered at the edge of his vision. He dismissed it and kept moving. The shard in his robe—still warm from the wolf king's corpse—now felt like a lump of coal cooling in the palm. Its earlier pulse had faded, replaced by a sluggish beat that almost matched his own heart.
Somewhere deeper, something scraped against stone. Slow. Deliberate.
He stilled, lowering the torch until it brushed the floor. Light spilled forward and caught on lines cut into the ground: intersecting grooves, each filled with packed frost. Not random. They formed a sigil he didn't recognize—curved like a snare, spiked where the curves met.
It tugged at him in a way that wasn't physical. A pressure behind the eyes. A sense of weight in his lungs.
[Uncatalogued glyph detected. Advisory: prolonged exposure may affect balance between Heat and Cold attunements.]
He stepped over it carefully.
The scraping stopped.
A voice—low, male, and close enough that the torchlight should have caught the speaker—came from the dark ahead.
"You carry fire where fire does not belong."
Qin Mo's grip tightened on the hilt. "And you're hiding where hiding won't help."
The darkness breathed. His torch guttered. A moment later, frost bloomed along the blade's edge, chasing the steel like ivy. The light rebounded off something in the black—a line of pale plates, curved over a broad shoulder. They moved as the figure stepped into view.
It wasn't the Bellkeeper.
The man was taller by a head, his hair bound in a knot dusted with ice. His eyes had the washed-out grey of river ice under a winter sun. A cloak of scaled hide hung from one shoulder, its hem trailing frost where it touched the ground.
His gaze went to Qin Mo's chest, and the faintest crease appeared between his brows. "So it is true. They've started feeding the mountain's fire to outsiders."
"Not exactly volunteers," Qin Mo said.
The man's lip curled—not quite a smile. "That's worse."
Before Qin Mo could reply, the man moved. Not fast in the way Flame Step was fast—this was the illusion of slow, where every step seemed deliberate until you realized the gap had vanished. A breath ago, ten paces had stretched between them. Now the man's shadow was inside the torchlight.
The torchlight hissed out.
Cold pressed against Qin Mo's skin like a physical thing. The sword's balance changed in his grip; frost weighted it unevenly. He flared Flame Step—not to strike, but to hold the cold back a finger's breadth from his bones.
Two points of pale light—his opponent's eyes—floated in the dark. "Fire burns too hot, too fast. It blinds those who hold it until they've nothing left but ash. Do you even know what that shard will do to you?"
"I know what happens if I give it to the wrong hands."
The light shifted. The man's outline blurred against the dark. A sound like ice shearing off rock cracked to Qin Mo's left. He pivoted, blade up, and met resistance mid-swing—not steel, but something that rang like it. The impact jolted his shoulder.
[Parry successful. Balance consumption: +8% Stamina.]
The man didn't press the attack. He circled instead, steps soundless over the frost. "The Bellkeeper will offer you safety. She will tell you balance matters more than power. And then she will strip you of both."
Qin Mo kept him in sight, flame still guttering along the sword's edge where Flame Step resisted the frost. "You sound like you've tried her bargain."
"I kept my fire."
The last word came with a twist of his wrist. Something silver-blue leapt from his palm—a chain of ice links that uncoiled through the dark like a serpent. Qin Mo caught the motion too late; the first link hit his blade, and the cold bit through the Flame Aegis as if it were wet paper.
[Warning: Frostbind applied. Movement speed reduced 42%. Heat attunement suppressed.]
The chain wrapped his forearm once, twice, before he tore back hard enough to crack a link. Frost exploded in a fine powder. He lunged into the gap, slashing low, and felt steel bite into the man's cloak.
No blood. Just the sound of something fracturing.
The man stepped back, gaze unreadable. "If you think the Sect is your only enemy here, you'll die in a ditch before the first snow."
Before Qin Mo could press him, the cold shifted. The frost along the walls began to retreat, pulled away as if inhaled. The man's head tilted, and for the first time, something like unease crossed his face.
"She's coming."
The bells reached them first—three notes, rising, close enough that they cut through the damp like sunlight.
When Qin Mo looked back, the man was gone. The frost along the walls melted in thin rivulets.
The Bellkeeper's shadow filled the tunnel mouth, torchlight blooming behind her. Her gaze flicked to his sword, then to the faint traces of frost on the ground.
"Making friends?"
Qin Mo didn't answer.
She stepped closer, and for an instant, her expression was less guarded. "Next time, let me know before you go poking lines you don't understand."
The bells chimed once. The frost vein along the wall split, bleeding a thin stream of water that hissed against his sword's lingering heat.
[Quest timer: 5 hours 02 minutes.]