Chen Wuya's fingers had barely touched the new rune when his entire arm felt as though it had frozen solid. He immediately pulled back, Misaligned Force rampaging through his meridians as he forced the numbness out bit by bit. A faint hissing reached his ears, as if something were crawling up from underground.
Bai Zhi took half a step back, her breath catching. A thin layer of frost formed on her lashes, stinging with cold. The air grew heavy, and a cloying bloody-sweet smell bored into her nostrils, growing stronger the closer it came to the ground.
"Poison," she said in a very low voice.
Purple mist surged from the depths of the fissure, creeping across the lava's surface like a living thing. The edges of the floating rocks began to smoke, their stone eaten away into tiny pits. The mist rose, swallowing the path ahead in the blink of an eye.
The protector leaned against the stone wall, his mouth splitting into a grin. He pulled a bone flute from his robes and raised it to his lips. Its shrill note rang out, and the poisonous mist within the chasm suddenly churned, lunging at the three of them.
Chen Wuya stared at that mass of purple haze, and an image of the Far Northern Snowfield flashed through his mind. That day, he had picked up a crystal in an ice cavern. Its chill had pierced to the bone, nearly freezing him to death. Later, the system had deemed it an "incorrect absorption" and made him store that icy force in his dantian. That power was still there now; he had simply never used it.
He raised his right hand, palm aimed at Bai Zhi. Misaligned Force ran once in reverse along the route of the Canglang Art, forcibly dragging