Nine hundred miles northeast of the warm, blossom-scented gardens of Cloud-Mist City, a freezing gale howled across the jagged black peaks of the Scarlet-Frost Rift.
This desolate mountain range sat in the lawless northern buffer zone where the borders of the Celestial Dragon Empire, the Rimefrost Imperium, and the coastal territories formerly contested by the Rising Sun Empire met in a tangle of frozen glaciers and active subterranean volcanoes.
Halfway up a sheer cliff of black basalt, crouched beneath the perfect optical camouflage of a tattered Lightning-Insulating Void Cloak, a tall, broad-shouldered man with pale blue eyes and a scarred, wind-chapped face chewed slowly on a strip of dried spirit-beast jerky.
It was Corbin.
Nearly eight full months had passed since the snowy winter night when the Northeastern Vanguard had stormed the Eastern Iron-Cloud Citadel and broken General Tokugawa's army.
