The word crossed the frozen space with disturbing intimacy.

"Shimei."

It was not merely a form of address. It did not sound like an ordinary greeting between former cultivation companions. There was too much memory inside that single word, a closeness ancient enough to survive betrayal, centuries, and perhaps even death itself. Damon did not know every nuance of that language, but he understood enough to realize that the man atop the crystalline formation was not speaking to the Heavenly Ice Demon.

He was speaking to the woman who had existed before that title.

Xue Lian remained still, holding the ice sword beside her body while dozens of faceless figures continued rising from the plain around them. None of them attacked yet. They stood spread out in a semicircle, forming a silent wall between the two travelers and the path indicated by the five symbols. The lack of attack brought no relief. It was not hesitation. It was discipline. They were waiting for an order that had not yet been given.

Damon looked up at the man standing atop the structure and tried to examine him more closely. His dark robes were long, decorated with silver lines that seemed to move like serpents beneath the fabric. His black hair fell loose to his waist, yet not a trace of snow rested on it despite the growing storm. His face remained partially hidden by a cracked jade mask, white on one side and black on the other, divided exactly down the center.

Han Qirong.

The one the world should have forgotten.

Damon felt his heart pound hard again, and the reaction inside him was so immediate that he had to press his fingers against his chest. The icy Qi within him did not try to attack. It did not try to flee. It merely leaned in that direction, like iron pulled toward an invisible magnet. The sensation was repulsive, not because it caused pain, but because it suggested familiarity.

Han Qirong noticed as well.

Though the mask concealed much of his expression, Damon saw the slight movement of his head. The man’s attention shifted from Xue Lian for an instant and settled on him. It was not the curious look of someone examining an unknown threat. It was the satisfied look of someone confirming that a lost piece had finally returned to the board.

"He responds better than I imagined," Han Qirong commented, his voice far too calm for the setting. "The fragment matured without guidance. Disorderly, impulsive, and violent, yet still recognizable."

Damon frowned, irritation rising above the discomfort. "It is impressive how every ancient entity I meet speaks about me as if I were an object found in a storage room."

Han Qirong tilted his head slightly. "Objects do not usually complain."

"Then consider that an improvement."

Xue Lian raised the sword a few centimeters, and the simple movement made the ice around her feet expand in white lines. "Do not speak to him."

Han Qirong turned his attention back to her. "You still give orders as if anyone remained willing to obey."

"You came all this way to provoke a dying woman?"

"No." His voice remained serene, almost gentle. "I came to see how much of you remains."

The silence that followed was so heavy Damon felt the urge to interrupt it simply to keep those words from remaining intact. Xue Lian, however, did not react with immediate anger. Her expression stayed perfectly still, but the crystallized ice around her neck advanced a little farther, reaching the lower edge of her lips.

Han Qirong noticed.

"Ten years searching for a root that may not even accept your body," he continued. "One hundred and seventy years freezing from the inside out. And still, you insist on walking as if the road might reward persistence."

"You always confused persistence with hope."

"And you always pretended to possess neither."

Damon looked back and forth between them. The hostility was obvious, but it did not seem like simple hatred. It was too old, too complex, threaded through with something that might once have been respect. Perhaps affection. Perhaps guilt. Perhaps all of those things rotted together until they became unrecognizable.

Xue Lian tightened her grip on the sword. "Move your corpses out of the way."

Han Qirong looked at the faceless figures spread across the plain. "They are not dead."

Damon studied the bodies of ice again. Some had deep cracks along their arms, others had cavities where faces should have been, but none moved except for the slight swaying caused by the wind. Even so, after the creature carrying imprisoned voices, the statement was not reassuring.

"Is that supposed to improve the situation?" Damon asked.

"For them, no."

Xue Lian took one step forward. The field around them reacted at once, and the ice soldiers raised their smooth heads in perfect unison. "Last time, Qirong. Move them."

Han Qirong descended from the crystalline formation.

He did not jump.

He did not fly.

He simply placed one foot into empty space and walked, as if invisible steps connected him to the ground. Each step produced a small dark ripple in the air, and Damon realized the space around him did not freeze. On the contrary. It seemed to lose meaning. The cold neither intensified nor weakened. It simply ceased to exist wherever Han Qirong passed.

He stopped only a few meters from Xue Lian.

The difference between them was immediate.

Xue Lian carried winter like a living force. Even while dying, her power overflowed through every movement, vast and crushing. Han Qirong was the opposite. His presence felt like a well-organized absence, a void dressed as a man. Damon could not sense his cultivation, his energy, or even the rhythm of his breathing.

That was worse than feeling too much power.

"You brought the key to me," Han Qirong said, watching Damon over her shoulder. "I should thank you."

"He does not belong to you."

"You do not know who he belongs to."

"He belongs to himself."

Damon looked at Xue Lian with restrained surprise. That was, until then, the most protective thing she had said about him. Not exactly affectionate, but meaningful enough to notice. Xue Lian caught the look and did not seem pleased.

"Do not make this sentimental," she said.

"I did not say anything."

"Your face did."

"My face is expressive."

"Your face is irritating."

Han Qirong let out a low laugh, and the sound seemed wrong coming from him. "You really have changed, Shimei."

"You truly have not."

The jade mask tilted slightly. "That was cruel."

"It was accurate."

For one brief instant, Damon had the feeling he was watching two former companions arguing in a temple corridor rather than beings capable of destroying the entire plain. The normality of the exchange was almost more unsettling than the threats. It meant that, at some distant time, conversations like this might have happened without armies of ice or rifts in reality.

Han Qirong looked at Damon again. "Do you know why you are here?"

"I have several bad theories."

"He does not know," Xue Lian replied before Damon could elaborate.

"I noticed."

Damon crossed his arms. "It is pleasant to be included in a conversation about my own existence."

Han Qirong raised one hand, and something began to appear above his palm. First, a small black mist. Then pale lines. Finally, a transparent sphere, like a fragment of ice, but containing a moving image inside.

Damon saw Arven Manor.

Or part of it.

He saw the ruined hall, the transformed Duchess, the walls pulsing with ritualistic energy. He saw himself standing at the center of it all, releasing an absurd quantity of icy Qi. The image did not show only the exterior. It showed the meridians inside his body cracking, freezing, and rupturing in sequence while something deeper awakened beneath his heart.

The vision was brutally clear.

"When you ruptured your own spiritual veins," Han Qirong explained, "you created an opening between your Pure Ice Heart and what slept inside it."

Damon watched the tiny representation of his own body destroying itself. "The fragment."

"Yes."

Xue Lian stepped half a pace forward. "Enough."

Han Qirong ignored her. "You did not inherit only a rare physique. You carry an incomplete memory, a fractured essence, and a path that should have ended before your birth."

Damon looked away from the sphere and stared at the man. "Whose essence?"

Han Qirong remained silent long enough to make the answer unbearable.

Then he pointed at Xue Lian.

"Hers."

The snow around them exploded.

Xue Lian moved with a speed Damon still could not follow, and the ice sword passed through the space where Han Qirong’s neck had been. He vanished before impact, reappearing several meters away while her blade carved a white fissure across the horizon.

The faceless soldiers attacked immediately.

They did not run like men. They glided over the surface in perfect lines as spears of black ice appeared in their hands. Damon drew his own sword and stepped back by instinct, placing himself back-to-back with Xue Lian. The first enemy arrived too quickly, thrusting directly at his chest.

Damon barely dodged, feeling the tip tear through part of his clothing. He answered with a horizontal slash that cut through the creature’s arm, but found neither flesh nor blood. The severed limb dissolved into dark snow and immediately began to rebuild itself.

"Of course," he muttered. "Why would anything simply die when cut?"

Xue Lian appeared beside him and crushed the soldier with a gesture of her hand. Its entire body imploded into thousands of white crystals, this time without regenerating. "They are echoes shaped by emptiness. Do not cut only the form."

"You keep explaining concepts after they try to kill me."

"You learn better under pressure."

"That is pedagogical abuse."

"Stay alive and complain later."

Four more figures advanced.

Damon breathed deeply and tried to feel the difference she had mentioned. Cold and void. The distinction seemed absurd at first, but when he focused, he noticed something. The bodies of those soldiers had no internal flow. The ice was only a shell. Their center was absence, a black space holding the form together.

He avoided a spear, turned his body, and struck not the creature’s chest, but the point where his perception found that absence. His sword passed through the void, and for an instant, the blade became covered in white ice.

The creature stopped.

Then it completely dissolved.

Damon looked at his own sword, surprised. "It worked."

"Do not be proud yet," Xue Lian said while destroying two enemies with a single arc of her blade. "You hit it by accident."

"Was it necessary to ruin the moment?"

"Yes."

Han Qirong watched from a distance, motionless at the center of the storm. The soldiers continued emerging from the snow, but his attention was not on the battle. It was on the way Damon used the energy. On the Qi’s response. On the brief white gleam that had appeared over the sword.

"He learns quickly," he commented.

Xue Lian released a wave of ice that passed through six creatures in succession. "He is reckless, not useless."

Damon blocked another spear and shouted over his shoulder, "That is the nicest compliment you have ever given me."

"Focus."

"I am moved."

A soldier rose from the ground behind him.

Before Damon could react, a black blade pierced his abdomen.

The pain came hot, absurd, and completely out of place in that frozen world. Damon looked down and saw the point emerge through his stomach. For a second, his mind could not reconcile it with the fact that he was inside a memory.

The soldier pulled the weapon upward.

Xue Lian appeared.

The world froze.

Not only the creature.

Everything.

The snow hung suspended again, the other soldiers stopped in the middle of their movements, and even Damon’s blood remained still on the blade. Xue Lian touched the enemy’s forehead with a single finger, and the body disappeared into dust so fine the wind could not carry it.

She caught Damon before he fell.

Her face was too close now, her blue eyes examining the wound with concern she could not fully hide. "You are truly extraordinarily bad at staying behind me."

Damon tried to breathe, but the pain made everything uneven. "I was several meters behind."

"Insufficient."

"Noted."

Xue Lian pulled the black spear free with one quick movement. Damon nearly lost consciousness, but noticed something strange when he looked at the wound. There was no real blood. Beneath the torn skin, there was blue light and small white cracks, as if that body were only a spiritual representation.

"Can I die here?" he asked.

Xue Lian pressed her hand over the wound. Cold passed through Damon, but not as pain. The opening began to close slowly. "Yes."

"That would have been useful to know earlier."

"You already knew you could die."

"Not with technical confirmation."

"Now you have it."

Han Qirong clapped once.

The sound broke the suspension of time.

The snow began falling again. The remaining soldiers resumed their movements. Xue Lian turned, keeping Damon behind her, and a white storm exploded from her body. The figures were hurled away, shattering against pillars of ice.

Han Qirong remained untouched.

"You spent power to save him," he observed.

Xue Lian slowly straightened. Crystallization already covered nearly half of her right arm. "Does that surprise you?"

"Yes."

"Then you never knew me."

"I knew you better than anyone."

"You knew the person you needed me to be."

The answer struck Han Qirong invisibly. His body did not move, but the void around him rippled. The cracked mask gained a new fissure on the white side, descending from the forehead to the cheek.

Damon remained standing with difficulty, one hand over the nearly closed wound. "I would like to interrupt this emotionally devastating reunion to ask something."

Neither of them answered, but he continued anyway.

"If I carry part of Xue Lian, why is she still here whole?"

Han Qirong turned toward him.

Xue Lian remained silent.

And that silence was answer enough for Damon to understand that the question had touched something important. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

"She is not whole," Han Qirong said.

Xue Lian’s hand tightened around the sword.

"Be silent."

"You should tell him."

"Be silent."

"He is dying because he carries what you tore out of yourself."

The frozen world began to tremble.

Not because of Han Qirong’s presence.

Because of Xue Lian.

The snow spun around her in a growing column, and white cracks spread across the plain in every direction. Xue Lian’s face remained calm, but Damon felt something enormous rising inside that stillness.

Han Qirong opened his arms.

"Tell him, Shimei. Tell him why the Pure Ice Heart recognizes your memory. Tell him what you sacrificed to survive the first winter."

Xue Lian pointed the sword at him.

"One more word, and I destroy this entire domain."

Han Qirong tilted his head.

"Then do it."

For an instant, no one moved.

Then his mask began to open.

It did not fall.

It blossomed into fragments of jade, slowly revealing the hidden face.

Damon expected deformity, monstrosity, or any visible sign of the corruption he felt. Instead, he saw a young, beautiful, perfectly serene man with black eyes in which tiny white stars turned like dead celestial bodies.

At the center of his forehead was the same symbol Damon carried beneath his heart.

A five-pointed crystal.

Han Qirong smiled.

And the five lights of the Five Heavens Ice Flower ignited behind him.