Moonlit Ice Palace, Ring 4 – Cryo-Wing 7, 09:28.
The temperature in the private wing is supposed to stay at a constant minus-80 Celsius. Right now it is plus four and rising.
Liàn Xing stands barefoot on ice that is actively sweating. Droplets race away from his soles as if fleeing the starlight pouring off his skin. The Meteorfall Spear v0.0 rests across his shoulders like a lazy predator, black shaft drinking every photon in the room and giving nothing back except the occasional ripple of distant galaxies.
Zhenxing is upside-down in mid-air, twin tails dangling, eating a holographic peach that drips liquid starlight instead of juice.
"Host," she says around a mouthful, "your bounty just hit one billion credits. Dead or alive. They added 'preferably alive for Seed extraction' in small print. Very considerate."
Lan Shuyin doesn't look up from the frost consoles. Her fingers move so fast the holographic keys blur into solid light. Lines of defense arrays, shield harmonics, and self-destruct sequences bloom and die beneath her touch like frost flowers opening in fast-forward.
"Seven minutes until the first containment wave," she says. "Thirteen until the ancestors arrive. After that, mathematics stops mattering."
She finally turns.
The formal palace attire is gone. She wears a combat skin-suit now—moon-white reactive armor that clings like a second frostbitten skin. Cryo-tubes run along her spine and arms like glowing blue veins. Her hair is bound in a high warrior's tail that snaps with static. The cracks that used to spiderweb from her eyes are completely gone.
She looks alive.
She also looks furious.
"My grandmother just sent a private missive," she continues, voice perfectly level. "If I surrender you within the hour, I will be named sole heir and my yin poison will be 'cured' by palace alchemists." A pause. "They underlined cured three times."
Liàn Xing meets her gaze. "And your answer?"
Lan Shuyin's smile is small, sharp, and utterly without mercy.
"I sent her a live feed of my cryo-tubes running in reverse. Then I locked her out of the palace core."
Zhenxing whistles. "That's what I call a resignation letter."
Lan Shuyin steps closer until they are less than an arm's length apart. The air between them begins to boil and freeze at the same time.
"I have spent seventeen years being a perfect, dying doll," she says quietly. "Every breath measured. Every heartbeat rationed. Every future decided by people who see me as a beautiful corpse that still brings in alliance offers."
She reaches out and places her palm flat on his chest, directly over the brightest constellation now burning there.
"Your starlight is the first thing that has ever belonged to me and not the palace."
Her fingers curl. Frost spreads across his skin, then melts just as fast.
"I am keeping it," she whispers. "I am keeping you. And if the Nine Heavens want to argue, they can do it with my blades in their throats."
For one heartbeat the room is perfectly still.
Then Liàn Xing does something no one has ever seen him do in eighteen years of recorded footage.
He laughs.
Not the bitter bark of a gutter rat. A real, startled laugh, low and rough and surprised at its own existence.
Zhenxing drops her peach.
Lan Shuyin's eyes widen a fraction—the closest she has ever come to shock.
The laugh fades into a crooked grin.
"Careful, princess," he says. "Keep talking like that and I'll start thinking you like me."
"I tolerate you," she corrects instantly. "You are a strategically valuable anomaly."
"With very warm hands," Zhenxing sing-songs.
Lan Shuyin removes her palm as if it burned. A faint blush colours the tips of her ears—visible only because her skin is translucent in combat mode.
She clears her throat and turns back to the consoles.
"We need an exit vector that doesn't involve dying immediately. Suggestions?"
Liàn Xing rolls his shoulders. The spear hums in anticipation.
"We don't exit," he says. "We announce."
He places one hand on the main broadcast console. Starlight surges through the ice circuits like a virus. Every screen in the wing flickers silver.
Lan Shuyin raises an eyebrow. "You want to declare war on live feed?"
"I want them to know exactly who they're hunting."
Zhenxing claps tiny hands. "Do it, host! Make it dramatic!"
Lan Shuyin hesitates for 0.8 seconds—the longest she has ever hesitated in her life—then steps aside.
"Channel is yours."
Liàn Xing leans toward the primary lens. His reflection stares back: silver circuits, black coat hanging open, eyes like twin voids filled with burning galaxies.
Across the entire Nine Heavens, every public screen, every private neural feed, every advertising billboard from Ring 1 to Ring 9 snaps to the same image.
His voice is quiet, but the starlight carries it to every corner of the ring-cities.
"My name is Liàn Xing. Eighteen hours ago I was trash with ninety-eight losses. Now I have a spear, a star in my spine, and a very bad mood."
He lifts the Meteorfall Spear. The camera zooms involuntarily, drawn by the gravity of the weapon.
"Lan Shuyin of Moonlit Ice Palace has claimed me as her personal ally. Zhao Shentian of Heavenly Sword Court has claimed me as his rival. That means anyone who comes for my Seed comes for all three of us."
He smiles. It is the same smile that ended Razor-Jin's arm.
"Come ahead. We'll be waiting."
The feed cuts to black.
For three full seconds the Nine Heavens are perfectly silent.
Then the bounty counter rolls over to ten billion credits and the sky begins to fall.
Lan Shuyin exhales slowly.
"You just signed our death warrants in 8K."
"Death warrants can be burned," Liàn Xing answers.
Alarms scream. The first containment wave breaches the outer shields—hundreds of cultivators in azure robes, rail-pagodas unfolding from transport ships like mechanical lotus flowers.
Lan Shuyin draws her twin cryo-blades. Ice sings as it leaves the sheaths.
"Together?" she asks.
He extends his left hand without looking.
"Together."
She takes it.
The resonance is immediate and violent. Starlight and absolute zero spiral together into something new—silver frost that burns, ice that shines like nebulae. The temperature in the chamber stabilises at exactly zero degrees Kelvin and zero degrees Celsius at the same time, an impossibility that makes the laws of physics file a complaint.
Zhenxing lands on their joined hands, grinning ear to ear.
"Trinity protocol engaged. Let's go break some heavens."
They step through the shattered wall into the maelstrom.
Outside, the combined forces of three immortal sects have formed a perfect sphere of death around the cryo-wing. Railguns charge. Formation flags unfurl. Ancestors begin to descend from their meditation orbitals, their auras alone cracking the sky.
Liàn Xing and Lan Shuyin walk forward side by side, hands still linked, weapons in their free hands.
The first rail-pagoda fires.
Liàn Xing raises the spear.
"First Form – Starlight Defiance."
A wall of pure cosmic light erupts in front of them, catches the rail-slug, and throws it back faster than it came. The pagoda detonates in a perfect sphere of molten metal and frozen vacuum.
Lan Shuyin flicks her left blade.
"Moonlit Severance – Thousand Winter Moons."
A thousand crescent blades of absolute-zero ice spiral outward, flash-freezing an entire squadron mid-flight. Cultivators fall like beautiful blue statues.
They advance.
Every step melts ice and refreezes it into something stronger—star-forged permafrost.
Every swing of the spear erases a squad.
Every slash of her blades ends a bloodline.
The feeds are still broadcasting. Billions watch in real time as two teenagers—no, two monsters—carve a path through the pride of three sects like a comet through paper.
Halfway through the formation, a golden streak bisects the sky.
Zhao Shentian arrives riding a wave of nine phantom swords, laughing like a mad god.
"You started without me?!" he shouts, delighted.
He lands between them, plasma blades spinning.
"Move over, lovebirds. Rival's here."
Lan Shuyin rolls her eyes. "You're late, sword idiot."
"Traffic," Zhao says, and charges the left flank.
Now there are three.
Silver spear. White blades. Golden swords.
They form a perfect triangle, backs to each other, weapons facing outward.
The remaining cultivators hesitate for the first time.
The trio does not.
In the command ships high above, elders watch their finest disciples die in droves and realise, too late, that they have not sent hunters.
They have rung a dinner bell.
When the last containment array falls, the three of them stand in a crater of star-forged ice and molten gold, breathing hard, covered in blood that is not theirs.
The pact is no longer words.
It is written in the ruins of an army.
Zhao slings an arm around Liàn Xing's shoulders, ignoring the spear tip that comes within an inch of his throat.
"So," he says cheerfully. "Where to next?"
Lan Shuyin sheathes her blades and takes Liàn Xing's hand again—possessive, unapologetic.
"Somewhere with better wine," she answers.
Zhenxing perches on all three of their shoulders at once, because physics is optional now.
"Up," she says, pointing at the hole they have carved through every defensive layer straight to the edge of Ring 4. "Real stars are that way."
Liàn Xing looks at his two impossible allies—one who needs his light to live, one who needs his darkness to grow—and feels something settle in his chest that might be peace.
He squeezes Lan Shuyin's hand.
"Up it is."
Together, three monsters step off the edge of the world and into the void between rings.
Behind them, the Moonlit Ice Palace burns with silver fire.
Ahead, the real heavens wait.
And for the first time in four thousand years, they are afraid.