One after another, the Spiritual Beasts fell to their deaths, as Song Ying increased her efforts in destroying them. She had no other choice unless she wanted to see the White Gale Pavilion run down by a vast horde of them.

As if Ye Jun’s Yellow Tribulation wasn’t enough, her Young Miss also chose this moment to break through. Her ascension alone might not have attracted this many Spiritual Beasts, but it was different when combined with Ye Jun’s.

Now an entire army of them was coming at her, and worst of all, there were multiple Tier Five Spiritual Beasts among them.

"Alright, time to take this seriously," Song Ying muttered before taking out the communication stone. "You’ll have to defend against the Beast Wave for a bit. I’ll deal with the big ones in the back." 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

[I’m on it. Elders are also on the way, so we can defend for some time.]

"Good. ’Cause things are about to get nasty."

Song Ying tucked the communication stone away and rose higher into the sky. Her pale blue sword settled into her grip with a different grip now, the casual elegance gone, replaced by the focused stillness she usually reserved for assassination contracts.

She let her Soul Sense spread outward, and the result made her exhale slowly. There weren’t just five Tier Five beasts on the southern side anymore. There were almost ten.

The Young Miss’s Tribulation was the reason for it. Normally, her Tribulation alone wouldn’t attract so many Spiritual Beasts, but combined with Ye Jun’s Yellow Tribulation, it was a feast the beasts couldn’t leave.

The Tier Fives that had been circling at the edge of the Black Wind Wildlands had finally decided the climb was worth it.

’Ten Earth Realm equivalents,’ Song Ying thought, gauging them through her Soul Sense. ’Three are at Peak-Grade Tier Five. The rest are mid to early.’

She could handle them as she had handled worse. But she couldn’t be lazy about it, and she couldn’t let any of them slip past her toward either the Ancestral Site or the Young Miss’s abode.

She moved once again.

Her body crossed three kilometres of sky in a single step, the air folding around her in such a way that mortal eyes wouldn’t have registered it as motion. She arrived above the southern slopes with her sword already mid-swing.

The two-headed wolf at the front of the advance lifted both muzzles, and both pairs of eyes locked onto her at once.

Tier Five beasts didn’t fight blind, unlike others. This one had felt her coming the moment she crossed into the southern airspace, and its body had already coiled into a launch position.

It sprang for her at the same instant her sword fell.

The blade and the wolf met in the air. Her sword passed through one of its heads cleanly, the bloodline ice in her Qi freezing the wound mid-cut so that the head separated from the neck in a single frozen plane.

The remaining head snarled and twisted, and the wolf’s body still slammed into her with enough force to crack the air around them.

Song Ying’s feet moved before the impact landed. She pivoted along the strike, let the wolf’s momentum carry past her, and brought the sword around in a second cut that took the wolf’s spine off at the shoulders.

The body fell, the remaining head still snarling at her as it dropped.

She didn’t watch it land, though.

The bear-thing with bone plates was already on her right. The plates weren’t decoration; they were Qi-conductive armor, and the beast was channeling its own reserves through them so that its skin had become as hard as anything she had cut today.

The bear swung a paw the size of a courtyard at her midsection. She let it come.

At the last instant, she stepped sideways through the air, and the paw struck where she had been a moment ago. Her sword came down on the bear’s exposed neck, met the bone plate, and skipped off.

’Tch.’

She had to switch.

Song Ying flowed backward through the air, sheathed her sword-Qi back into nothing, and her left hand came up empty but glowing with a different shape of Qi entirely.

Her clan’s bloodline ice answered her properly this time. A spear of pale blue formed in her palm, sharper at the tip than the sword had been, and she drove it forward into the bear’s exposed throat, the one place the plates didn’t cover.

The spear passed through and out the back of its skull, freezing the wound shut as it went. A Sky Realm powerhouse was just too fast for them.

The bear was dead before it finished its roar.

The serpent struck her from below. She felt it through her Soul Sense before she saw it, the eyeless thing rising up out of the slope with its tongue tasting at her position. Its jaws opened wide enough to swallow a building.

Song Ying let her body drop and she fell straight down into the serpent’s open mouth, and at the moment she would have been swallowed, she activated her bloodline once again.

A pulse of pale blue ice exploded outward from her in every direction.

The serpent’s entire upper body froze solid in an instant. The frost spread down its length, freezing its organs, its veins, and the Qi pathways inside it.

Song Ying stepped back out of its mouth through space, and behind her the frozen serpent shattered into a hundred fragments that fell as ice down the slope.

She allowed herself one breath.

The remaining seven Tier Fives had reached the slope below her and were spreading out, refusing to come at her in a cluster. They had learned in the last few seconds.

Three of them, the peak Tier Fives, were trying to circle her. The other four were pressing forward toward the Pavilion’s outer formation arrays, intending to break through while she dealt with the three.

She couldn’t let that happen. She sighed, "Mistress, the things I do for you."

Song Ying spread her arms slightly. Around her body, the atmospheric Qi shifted, harmonizing with her bloodline Qi, and the sky over the southern slopes began to drop in temperature.

Not as a technique, exactly. More as an extension of her presence. The air around the Pavilion’s southern face turned cold similar to how a winter night turned cold, slowly, inevitably, undeniably.

The four Tier Fives pressing toward the formation arrays began to slow.

She moved on the three circling her first.

The first one, a great cat with frost-burned fur of its own, came at her with claws extended for her face. She caught the strike on her spear, twisted along it, and let the cat’s own momentum slam her spear-point up through the underside of its jaw and out the top of its skull. She kicked the corpse off the spear before it could finish dying.

The second was something she couldn’t name, a beast with too many limbs and a body that shifted between solid and mist. Her spear passed through the mist-form harmlessly.

She let it, as she had felt where its core was, in the chest of the mist, and on her next strike she didn’t aim with the spear at all. She channeled her bloodline through the spear’s tip and froze a single point in the air.

The point of frost intersected with the beast’s core as it shifted between states, and the core froze solid mid-transition, locking the beast into its physical form with its organs already turning to ice.

It died with a sound like cracking glass.

The third was the worst of the peak Tier Fives. A great ape with arms longer than its body, its eyes burning with what she recognized as actual intelligence. It had been waiting for her to commit to the other two, and the moment she finished the mist-thing, it came in.

Its fist struck her ribs before her spear could come around.

Song Ying felt a crack she hadn’t felt in over fifty years. Two of her ribs, gone. She let her body fold around the impact, used the give to absorb the rest of the strike, and brought her spear up under the ape’s chin from below.

The point caught it under the throat and she drove it upward with everything she had, her bloodline ice surging through the spear in a single concentrated burst, and the ape’s entire head froze and split apart at the top of its skull.

The body collapsed against her. She kicked it aside, breathing harder now, and pressed one hand against her cracked ribs while her Qi worked at the damage.

The four beasts that had been pressing toward the formation arrays were nearly there.

Song Ying gathered her Qi.

This time she didn’t use the spear. She brought both hands up and the temperature of the entire southern slope dropped by another thirty degrees in a single heartbeat.

Frost climbed the trees. The lava-like Qi the beasts were generating to push through her atmospheric pressure froze inside their bodies.

She crossed the distance in a single spatial step, and her spear became four spears in four hands she didn’t possess, four blue lines striking through the four beasts at once.

The strikes hit the cores, and the cores froze in an instant. The result came just as quickly, as the beasts fell.

Song Ying let her spear dissolve back into Qi and stood there in the cold air with blood at the corner of her mouth and her ribs still knitting themselves.

The southern slope was quiet now. Ten corpses, some frozen, some shattered, some still smoking. The smaller beasts of the wave had broken and fled the moment the Tier Fives started dying, and what remained of them was being mopped up by the Pavilion’s defenders below.

She exhaled. ’Done. That was... more work than I wanted. I really should train a bit more instead of spending time being a shadow.’

Her ribs finished re-knitting, as the Sky Realm gave immense vitality and regenerative capabilities. She straightened, rolled her shoulder, and turned her gaze upward toward where the Young Miss’s Tribulation should have been peaking by now.

That was when she felt it.

Another presence growing near.

It wasn’t on the southern slope. No. It was coming from further out, deeper in the Black Wind Wildlands, moving toward the Pavilion at a speed that no Tier Five could manage. The Qi signature was wrong, too dense, too coordinated, and it wasn’t one creature. It was several, traveling together.

Song Ying’s stomach tightened. ’...Not yet. Not now.’

She prepared to launch herself toward the new presences as her spear began to reform in her hand, her bloodline ice gathering around her shoulders.

Then the sky over the Young Miss’s abode broke open.

The Blue Tribulation completed itself. The pale blue lightning collapsed inward into a single column that struck the peak where the Young Miss’s residence sat, and the impact was loud enough that the entire mountain range shook.

Then the Tribulation was gone. The clouds dispersed and the sky over the inner peak cleared.

And from the center of the cleared sky, a figure rose.

Song Liangxue ascended slowly out of her abode, robes drifting in the wild winds of thunderstorm clouds. Pale blue light wrapped around her in soft ribbons, the same color as Song Ying’s bloodline but denser, more refined, in the way an ocean was denser than a stream.

Her hair had picked up faint blue highlights along its length. Her eyes, when they opened and turned toward the southern sky, were the cold deep blue of glacial water.

Origin Core. Achieved.

And there was something else with her, something Song Ying felt before she saw it, a Qi presence rising in the center of the Young Miss’s chest like a small sun made of ice.

Her Qi Core. It was so pure and stable. And from the feel of it, frighteningly compatible with the Song Clan’s bloodline Dao in a way Song Ying hadn’t felt in three generations.

The Young Miss had broken through, and she had broken through well at the young age of twenty-one years old. An unprecedented feat.

Song Ying stared up at her for a long moment, then bowed her head slightly, despite the corpses and the blood and the new presences approaching from beyond the Black Wind Wildlands.

"Congratulations, Young Miss."