Continuation:

The blooming began at Xue Lian’s fingers, but it did not behave like ordinary ice. It did not advance like a disease, nor like slow crystallization, nor like the patient death that had been consuming her body for centuries. It truly bloomed. Small translucent petals appeared over her skin, opening in layers so thin, bluish and white, that they were far too beautiful to be mistaken for healing. The sight was so delicate that, for one horrible instant, Damon almost forgot he was watching an execution.

Xue Lian tried to retreat, but the root inside Han Qirong’s chest pulsed again, and the ice petals spread up her arm to her shoulder. The sword still piercing his body stopped obeying her. The blade lost its bluish purity and gained dark veins, as if the void were drinking power directly from the hand holding it. Han Qirong smiled with an almost convincing sadness, and that made him even more repulsive.

"You were always the perfect vessel, Shimei," he said, keeping his hand closed around the blade. "I simply understood too late that I did not need to steal your heart. I only had to wait until you came to retrieve it."

Damon advanced without thinking, because there were situations where thinking only served to create better excuses for arriving too late. The second blue light behind him screamed in Morgana’s voice, calling his name in a broken, urgent, desperate tone, trying to make him look. He did not look. He cut his own hesitation before cutting the air itself, and the white blade of icy Qi passed through the light like a sentence.

The second celestial petal shattered.

The passage trembled violently, and the frozen world answered with an underground roar. The black mountains cracked in the distance, launching columns of snow into the pale sky. Han Qirong lost his smile for a fraction of a second, and Xue Lian used that single flaw to release the sword, abandoning the weapon trapped in his chest before the void could fully climb up her hand.

She fell to one knee.

Damon reached her in the next instant, holding her by the shoulder before she could collapse to the side. The contact burned with cold, but he did not let go. Part of Xue Lian’s body was covered in ice flowers, beautiful and deadly, growing over her skin like a spring made for corpses. Her blue eyes were still conscious, but there was a distance in them that was increasing far too quickly.

"Do not touch me," she murmured, though her voice had lost part of its strength. "The root is trying to use the connection between us."

"You also told me to stay behind you and I nearly got impaled, so maybe your orders do not have a perfect record."

"You are unbearable."

"I am trying to maintain consistency at everyone’s deathbed."

She tried to laugh, but the sound came out too weak. Even so, it existed, and for some reason that enraged Damon more than any threat. Xue Lian was disappearing before him, consumed by the very flower she had sought for ten years. Han Qirong had not merely found the root. He had turned her hope into chains, salvation into a trap, and still had the audacity to look melancholic while doing it.

Han Qirong slowly raised his hand. Xue Lian’s sword, still embedded in his chest, dissolved into black ice, and the white root inside him shone with growing intensity. "Do not blame yourself, child. She would have died either way. At least now her end will open something greater than her suffering."

Damon looked at him with a sudden calm, dangerous and strangely clean. The fear did not vanish. Neither did the pain. But both were pushed back by a simple understanding. Han Qirong needed him to react like a key. Needed the connection to obey the expected shape. Needed Xue Lian to be the lost half, Damon to be the matured fragment, and the root to complete the circuit between them.

Then perhaps the only way to win was to do exactly what Damon did best.

Ruin the plan of someone competent.

"Xue Lian," he said, keeping his eyes on Han Qirong. "If I cut the other lights, does the passage close?"

"Perhaps."

"If I cut the root inside him, do you survive?"

She took too long to answer, and that was enough.

"Damon..."

"Answer."

"No."

The word was low, but honest.

Damon tightened his fingers on her shoulder. "Then what is the option?"

Xue Lian slowly raised her eyes to him. The ice flowers were already climbing her neck, touching the side of her face. Even so, her expression was not one of defeat. It was the expression of someone calculating with her own end and hating the result only because it involved someone else.

"The root does not belong to him. It is trapped because he became a false vessel. If you destroy the bond between the lights, you can tear it out before the passage completes the cycle."

"Tear it out how?"

"With the fragment."

"Of course. It is never with the hands, always with the most problematic part of my existence."

"You need to accept what you carry."

Damon looked at the symbol beneath his heart, burning through his clothes and spiritual skin like an imprisoned star. Accepting it seemed dangerous. Perhaps fatal. Perhaps it was exactly what Han Qirong wanted. But there was a difference between accepting a chain and grabbing a blade by the edge to use it against the one holding it. Damon did not know if that difference was real, but it seemed good enough to bet his life on.

The third light glowed behind him with Ester’s voice, tired, furious, and desperate, saying he would die if he continued. That almost struck deeper than the others. Not because it was true, but because Ester probably would say something similar on the other side, with enormous dark circles under her eyes and trembling hands over his frozen back. Damon closed his eyes for an instant and smiled bitterly.

"You would have hated this idea," he murmured.

Then he cut the third light.

The impact threw Damon to his knees. His frozen arm cracked all the way to the shoulder, and white pain tore through his entire consciousness. Xue Lian tried to hold him, but her own body failed. Han Qirong advanced for the first time with real urgency, and the void around him opened like incomplete black wings. The kneeling creatures screamed without mouths, and the passage in the mountain began collapsing at the edges.

"Stop," Han Qirong ordered, and his voice lost all serenity. "You do not understand what you are destroying."

Damon planted his sword in the ice to stand. "That phrase always comes from people who built something horrible."

"You are closing the Fifth Heaven."

"Good. I did not like the welcome."

The fourth light lit up with Elizabeth’s voice, but this time Damon did not wait to hear the full sentence. He advanced toward it, concentrating the remaining Qi in his blade and his will, refusing the lie before it could find form. The cut passed through the blue light and split the circle of runes surrounding it. The explosion was silent, but his entire consciousness seemed to fragment along with the impact.

For a moment, Damon saw everything.

Not as an organized vision, but as sealed memories opening in torrents. He saw a young Xue Lian, still without the title of Heavenly Demon, training in a courtyard covered with frost while Han Qirong laughed at some mistake of hers. He saw the Heavenly Cult kneeling before a blue storm. He saw the first time the Pure Ice Heart awakened in her chest. He saw admiration turn into fear in the eyes of the people around her.

Then he saw the ritual.

He saw Han Qirong at the center of an ancient circle, trying to reach the First Winter, a force older than cultivation, older than realms, older than the words used to name cold. He saw reality open. Saw the void respond. Saw cultivators vanish like candles extinguished by an invisible hand. Saw Xue Lian divide her own spiritual heart into two parts, tearing a living half from herself to seal what Han Qirong had become.

He also saw the lie.

The story told said that Xue Lian had sealed the void and survived as a cursed heroine. But the truth was crueler. She had not sealed everything. She had trapped Han Qirong, yes, but she had also trapped part of herself with him. The torn half had not died. It had wandered through the cycles, fragmented, searching for a compatible body, until it was reborn as an impossible seed in Damon’s heart.

And Han Qirong had spent centuries waiting for the seed to mature.

Damon returned to the plain with a scream caught in his throat. Xue Lian was before him now, almost entirely covered in ice flowers. Han Qirong appeared just behind her, his hand extended toward Damon’s chest. The fifth light remained lit, the strongest of them all, pulsing with a voice that did not try to imitate anyone. It was Damon’s own voice, calm, tired, and convincing.

"You want to live."

He went still.

The light continued.

"You want to return. You want to open your eyes. You want to see everyone again. You want to breathe without pain. You want Ester to stop suffering. You want Elizabeth to stop lying that she is not afraid. You want Morgana not to lose anyone else."

Damon felt the sword tremble in his hand.

The voice was too true.

Because it was not false.

He wanted all of that.

With an almost shameful force.

Xue Lian tried to speak, but the flowers reached her lips. Han Qirong smiled again, recovering some of the calm he had lost. "That is the light no one cuts. The final lie of winter is not a falsehood, Damon. It is a truth offered at the wrong moment."

Damon lowered his head.

For an instant, it seemed like he was yielding.

Then he smiled.

"You made a mistake."

Han Qirong narrowed his eyes.

"I do not merely want to live."

Damon raised his sword, and the symbol beneath his heart shone not like a key, but like a wound deciding to become a weapon. "I want to return my way."

He cut the fifth light.

The frozen world shattered.

The passage in the mountain collapsed into itself, the five layers of sky folding like glass crushed by a colossal hand. Han Qirong screamed, and for the first time that sound carried no beauty, serenity, or philosophy. It was pure panic. The white root inside his chest tried to hide in the void, but the fragment in Damon answered like a claw. It did not pull the flower through the passage. It did not accept the path. It simply tore the root directly from the false vessel.

Han Qirong fell to his knees.

The elemental root emerged from his chest like a living white thread, wrapped in blue ice and small luminous petals. Damon felt it cross the air toward him, not as an object, but as an essence seeking a real place to exist. Xue Lian, trapped by the flowers, could move only her eyes. There was something there he could not fully name. Relief. Fear. Pride. Goodbye.

"Damon," she said inside his mind, because her mouth could no longer move. "Do not be Han Qirong. Do not be me. Be whole."

The root passed through his chest.

The pain was absolute.

Damon felt his spiritual body collapse and, at the same time, expand in every direction. The destroyed Qi veins did not thaw. They were remade. Not as ordinary human channels, but as celestial ice meridians, deep, broad, capable of conducting energy that would once have reduced his body to ruins. Xue Lian’s fragment did not disappear. It fused with the root, the memory, and his own heart, not as a prison, but as structure.

Han Qirong reached toward Xue Lian, but she was already dissolving into white snow. It no longer looked like pain. It looked like rest. For the first time since Damon had seen her in that world, her body stopped freezing like a disease. The flowers opened completely, then dissolved into thousands of luminous points rising toward the nonexistent sky.

Han Qirong screamed her name.

Xue Lian looked at Damon one last time.

And smiled.

Not with irony.

Not with exhaustion.

With gratitude.

Then the world ended.

The white plain, the black fortress, the mountains, the corpses beneath the ice, and Han Qirong’s desperate figure were swallowed by a blue light so intense that Damon lost all sense of body. For an instant without duration, he floated within a silent space, surrounded by fragments of memory reorganizing themselves around him. Words appeared in his consciousness, not written in the air, but engraved directly into the depths of his existence.

[You have read Xue Lian’s sealed memories]

The first message shone like a gentle blade, and Damon felt centuries of loneliness, training, sacrifice, and ice settle somewhere deep within him. They were not complete memories, nor stolen identities, but understandable echoes. He did not become Xue Lian. He simply carried what she was finally able to leave behind.

[You have changed a story already told]

The second message came with greater weight. Damon understood that the memory should not have ended that way. Xue Lian should have continued walking through ten eternal years. Han Qirong should have waited. The flower should have remained a trap. But his presence had broken the repetition. He had not merely watched a memory. He had interfered with it.

[You have obtained an elemental root]

Something white pulsed beneath his heart, alive and silent, different from any energy he had ever possessed. The root did not feel like an item or a technique. It was a foundation. A dangerous promise of growth, healing, and transformation, capable of saving his body or destroying it in a completely new way if used without control.

[You have obtained the Celestial Ice Body]

The final message exploded inside him like thunder without sound. All of his spiritual veins ignited at once, reconstructed in impossible patterns. Cold was no longer merely power. It was flesh, blood, bone, and consciousness. Damon felt death retreat one step, not defeated, but forced to renegotiate.

Then he woke up.

Air entered his lungs like a knife.

Damon suddenly opened his eyes, startled, his entire body arching on the bed as a wave of white ice exploded across the sheets. The fireplace went out instantly. The windows became covered in crystals. The entire room plunged into violent cold, but it was alive, different from the dead cold that had taken his body over the past few days.

Elizabeth, seated beside the bed with one hand on his back, sprang to her feet. Her eyes widened when Damon drew in another breath, trembling, his completely white hair spread across his shoulders and back. For an instant, he did not recognize the room, the walls, the bed, or his own wounded body.

Then he saw Elizabeth.

Saw the door open violently.

Saw Ester stagger in, still exhausted, but with wide eyes.

Damon brought a hand to his chest.

Beneath the skin, something pulsed.

Cold.

Alive.

Deep.

He breathed with difficulty, still trapped between the terror of the memory and the reality gradually returning. His voice emerged low, hoarse, almost unrecognizable after days of silence.

"I saw..."

The words failed.

Ester approached, stopping before the bed as if she were seeing a miracle too dangerous to celebrate. Elizabeth said nothing. Damon looked at his own hands, saw small bluish lines glowing beneath the skin, and felt an impossible absence: the frozen pain of his destroyed veins had changed.

Not vanished.

Changed.

He slowly closed his fingers.

And somewhere very deep inside himself, he heard the distant echo of a woman laughing at his arrogance.

Damon swallowed hard.

Then whispered, still frightened:

"Xue Lian."