Yao Ming Bing felt her glacial rage mix with a horror born of understanding. She felt it too. The slowness with which the eternal ice of her mountains regenerated. The growing difficulty her youngest disciples faced in forming a Pure Ice Core. Decay was the backdrop of all her concerns. And this man—this dying dragon—had identified her niece as a symptom of a possible cure.
Yao Ming Bing took a deep breath, and the air that filled her lungs was not the invigorating cold of the eternal peaks, but the stale, thinned air of a dying era. Every crystal of ice in the hall seemed to contain not the purity of infinite winter, but the dirty, brittle ice of a retreating glacier, exposing the sterile, dead rock beneath.
He was right. She felt it in the weakness of her own disciples, in the effort it now took to maintain the Frozen Lake of Tears where she meditated. Decay was not a theory; it was a silent thief that had been stealing pieces of the world—and of her own power—for centuries. Only now, seeing it reflected in the golden desperation of this dragon, did she admit the magnitude of the theft.
But then, like lightning splitting a snowstorm, the image of her sister pierced her mind.
Huan Ming Zhi.
Not the imperial concubine. Not the "genetic conduit." Her younger sister. The one who braided her hair with spiritual ice when they were girls. The one whose laughter made frost bloom like little bells. The one who now lay cold and still forever, only a few steps away, murdered by the blood of this very being who now spoke of "survival" and "last hopes."
The blaze in her soul—fire so alien to her nature it should have consumed her—erupted. It was not the warmth of life, but the white heat of absolute refusal.
—Sell my niece?—Her voice did not rise. It grew thinner, sharper, like the edge of a freshly carved ice blade pressed against a throat. —Trade my sister's blood, her life, her laughter, for the chance that the monster who killed her might breathe for another century? For the remote possibility that this rotten world might find one last gasp in the body of the child she loved?
She stood. The ice at her feet did not crack—it atomized, becoming a fine silver powder that drifted around her ankles like ghostly mist. Her aura did not explode outward into a storm; it collapsed inward, forming a terrible, invisible crown around her, where the very laws of cold seemed to warp—promising not freezing, but annihilation through absolute zero.
—Listen carefully, Gu Yan Wu, Last Breath of a Dying Lineage—each word was a primordial ice nail hammered into the air. —I have felt the Decay. I have wept for it in silence. But what you propose is not survival. It is cosmic cannibalism. It is admitting that we have failed so completely that our only escape is to devour the next generation—the anomaly, the future itself—to prolong the agony of the past.
She took a step forward. The Emperor—the millennia-old dragon—took one back. Not from fear of her power, but from the pure, uncontaminated ferocity of her rejection. It was the refusal of an elemental principle: ice that will not melt, not even before the fire of the world's end.
—My sister trusted your world, your rules. And your world crushed her. Now you ask me to trust that you will use her daughter—my blood—with greater care. That this time, your hunger will be civilized. —A short, dry sound escaped her lips, like a glacier cracking. —No.
—I will go with you—she continued, her decision carved in black diamond. —Not to cooperate. Not to be your "pragmatic partner." I will go as the sentence your greed wrote for itself. I will go to ensure one thing, and one thing only: that whatever Hui Cao has found… never, ever falls into your claws.
Her gray eyes, now pupil-less—two frozen abysses reflecting the Emperor's golden, increasingly tense image—pierced him.
—Use your son as bait. Follow your compass. Take me there. And when you see that "spring," when your ancient hunger shines brighter than your eyes… I will be there. Not to protect Hui Cao from that strange power—but to protect that power from you. To freeze your ambition, your teleportation, your very golden breath, the instant you reach out.
—You may call your Purifiers—she challenged, her voice holding no youthful bravado, only the certainty of a force of nature. —You may try to erase everything. But I swear by the moon that bled the day my sister was killed, and by the eternal ice dying in my veins: if you touch a single hair on that child's head with intent to use her, I will make your precious Decay feel like a gentle spring compared to the final winter I will bring upon you and all that remains of your rotting empire.
Gu Yan Wu watched her, and for the first time in their exchange, his mask of cold calculation cracked. Not from fear, but from a furious kind of awe. He was witnessing something he believed extinct: a moral principle immune to the logic of survival. A foolishness so absolute that it became… formidable.
—Then…—he said, his voice regaining a dangerous calm. —You choose vengeance over hope, even if that hope is for all? You would condemn this world for the corpse of one?
Yao Ming Bing smiled—a sad, glacial, beautiful smile.
—I am not condemning the world, Dragon. I am denying you the right to define what its hope is. Hope built upon the bones of my family is not hope. It is merely the last and vilest of your excuses. Now leave. Or stay, and let us test right now which of us—the starving one or the avenger—is closer to their end.
The Emperor remained silent for a long moment. Then, without another word, he turned and left. It was not the triumphant exit of a negotiator, but the strategic withdrawal of a general who had just discovered the battlefield contained an abyss he had not calculated.
Yao Ming Bing was left alone, trembling—not from cold, but from the colossal discharge of her own choice. She had chosen. Not between vengeance and duty, but between becoming an accomplice to the cannibalism of a dying era, or being the sword that—perhaps futilely—rose against it.
She looked toward where her sister lay.
"I'm sorry, Ming Zhi," she thought, and a tear—the first in centuries—froze instantly on her cheek, hanging like a diamond of mourning. "I cannot sell your daughter. Not even for a world. Perhaps… perhaps what she found is so new it does not need our old, starving gods. Or perhaps it will carry us both into oblivion with you. But I will not be another guardian of this slow death."
On the forbidden western frontier, Gu Yan Long ran with all his strength.
It was not the run of a prince, nor even the strategic retreat of a general. It was the animal flight of a cornered creature. The air—already thin and heavy with red dust—burned his lungs. Each gasp tasted of iron and pure fear.
He had sensed the traces. Not footprints. Not sounds. Sensations. A chill clinging to the nape of his neck even under the merciless sun of the wasteland. A faint distortion in the air behind him, as if the heat itself froze for an instant before recovering. The Mist Hunters did not chase—they were the chase. A glacial, relentless presence seeping through reality, closing distance not with speed, but with the terrible certainty of a winter that reaches all things.
In his sweaty, trembling hand, he clutched a small golden metal circle, intricately carved. The Golden Dragon Compass. It had not been a theft of opportunity, but an act of feral instinct amid the chaos of his fall. Now, it was his sole beacon in the void.
The needle at its center—made of a golden light so faint it seemed on the verge of extinction—flickered spasmodically. It did not point decisively; it shuddered like a dying heart. At times it spun in full circles, disoriented. At others, it stabbed suddenly toward the west, only to weaken again.
"Where? WHERE?" The thought lashed his mind, mixed with the taste of blood on his cracked lips. He was not seeking shelter. He was seeking blood of his blood. An anchor in chaos. The compass was meant to guide him to the closest relative with draconic essence. His father was half a world away, shielded by a thousand barriers. But his sister… Hui Cao… had to be alive. The faint flame on the Lineage Tablet had not gone out. And if she lived, in this cursed wasteland, she would be a beacon for the compass. A beacon that would save him—or perhaps… lead him straight into the wolf's jaws.
A gust of icy wind—far too cold for this desert—brushed past his ear. There was no natural wind that carried such cold.
They had no time.
With a snarl that was half terror, half rage, Gu Yan Long gathered what little remained of his shattered pride, of his Soul Fusion qi—now corrupted and trembling from poison, flight, and the pressure of the Hunters—and injected it into the compass.
—Take me to her!—he roared, not at the compass, but at fate, at lineage, at the shadow of his father surely laughing from his throne. —Take me to my sister!
The compass exploded in blinding golden light. The needle solidified, incandescent, and shot like a dart toward a fixed point on the western horizon—no longer wavering. The artifact grew scorching hot, burning his palm, but he did not let go. It was his only hope.
Gu Yan Long did not know it, but what he held was not a key to salvation.
The compass pointed toward a cave so dark and deep it looked as if hell itself were sealed within.
Feeling the cold wind closing in, he plunged inside.
Like an unmoving statue, the figure of a dragon covered in stone came into view.
When he drew close enough, he noticed it was breathing.
The stone-covered eyes snapped open wide and gazed upon the young man before it with malice from another world.