The air in the Northern Peaks did not just bite; it consumed. Lu Chen's Cloud Crane let out a final, agonizing shriek as its wings crystallized into jagged ice mid-flight. Before the creature could shatter against the frozen earth, Lu Chen leaped. He plummeted like a lead weight, his martial robes snapping in the gale, and landed heavily in a drift of translucent, diamond-hard snow.
"Too slow... I'm too slow," he hissed, his breath manifesting as sharp shards of hoarfrost.
In the timeline of his future memories—the world that had already turned to ash—the Trial of the Nine Frosts had concluded on this very day. In that life, Yue Xiao had survived, but at the cost of her foundation. The frost had scarred her meridians, leaving her powerful but brittle—a flaw that Fang Yuan eventually exploited to turn her into a frozen battery for his ascension.
"Not this time," Lu Chen vowed, driving his sword into the ice to steady his shaking legs. "If I don't reach the Altar of Tears within the hour, the absolute zero of the nine pillars will collapse her soul."
He didn't run; he used a fragmented movement technique derived from the "Law of the Smallest Point." By concentrating his Qi into microscopic needles at the soles of his feet, he minimized friction and thermal loss, gliding across the killing fields of the north with the speed of a phantom.
As he reached the summit, the world turned into a blinding white void.
There, suspended in the eye of a perpetual blizzard, was Yue Xiao. She was surrounded by nine rotating monoliths of ancient, primordial ice. Her hair, once black as a raven's wing, had bled into a ghostly, incandescent silver. Her skin was becoming dangerously translucent, revealing the glowing azure circuitry of her Ice Spirit Physique. She was beautiful, but she was becoming a statue of pure, unfeeling energy.
"Xiao!" Lu Chen's voice was torn away by the wind.
He reached into the pocket of his robe, his fingers closing around the Heart-Protecting Pill. It was a masterpiece of future alchemy, designed specifically to stabilize her unique constitution.
But as he stepped toward the altar, a crushing, familiar weight descended upon the mountain. The sky didn't darken, but the atmosphere grew heavy, as if the gravity of an entire planet was pressing down on Lu Chen's shoulders. It was the lingering gaze of Fang Yuan, the Patriarch of the Ancient Void.
High above Yue Xiao's head, hidden within the swirling snow, a tiny, obsidian seed of energy pulsed. It was Fang Yuan's "Sovereign's Blessing." To a common observer, it looked like a gift of power, but Lu Chen knew better. The seed was accelerating Yue Xiao's growth at a suicidal rate, intended to turn her into a living lightning rod for the Void.
"You're already here, aren't you, you monster?" Lu Chen screamed at the heavens, his eyes burning with a decade's worth of suppressed hatred. "You've already found her! But I won't let you have her! Not in this life, and not in a thousand more!"
The obsidian seed pulsed in response to his anger, its dark light reflecting in the ice like the eye of a predator waiting for the perfect moment to strike.