Three days later, Xu Qian gradually adapted to life in the Ice Prison.
His daily four-hour shifts—patrolling, delivering meals, and inspecting the restrictions—were dull but not too demanding. The only trouble was having to keep his true qi circulating at all times to ward off the cold. For Zhang Meng, it was torture; for Xu Qian, it was a kind of training.
He even began trying to cultivate while on patrol.
He gathered a thread of Longevity True Qi beneath his feet. Each step fell in tune with a certain rhythm, allowing him to walk normally across the slick ice while constantly honing his control over his true qi.
It was a method he had gleaned from Basic Swordplay. Swordplay emphasized unity between force and intent, and footwork was no different.
That afternoon, it was Xu Qian's turn to clean the passage outside the interrogation area.
The interrogation area was off-limits in the Ice Prison. Normally, only Wang Biao and a few veteran jailers could enter, but ordinary jailers were still assigned to clean the surrounding area.
Xu Qian took an ice scraper and a broom and slowly swept along the dim blue corridor. It was colder here than in the prisoner cells. The ice coating the walls was a full foot thick, casting a faint blue glow.
As he scraped away the fresh, thin ice on the floor, he quietly surveyed his surroundings.
The interrogation area's door was tightly shut, its surface engraved with complex runes. With Xu Qian's meager knowledge of the Rune Dao, he could barely make out a few characters, such as "suppress," "seal," and "lock."
This formation... is at least ten times more complex than the restrictions on the Block C cells, Xu Qian thought.
As he was thinking, he suddenly noticed something unusual on