On the mountaintop of a snow-covered mountain, the gale howled.
The bluish glacier lay dim beneath the night sky, surrounded by dense black shadows. Only upon drawing closer did one realize they were the corpses of all manner of birds and beasts, without exception arranged in kneeling, prostrate poses.
Yaks and goats knelt upon the ground in twisted postures, bowing in worship. Humans were scattered among them, minuscule by comparison in both number and size.
—Across the long river of time and space, humans, too, had been one of the beasts.
But the snow mountain was so high. How had they climbed up here? Why had they come? Or perhaps, who had brought them here?
There were no answers. In the beliefs of many religions, snow mountains were both the beginning and the end. As living beings neared death, they were buried like pilgrims at the starting point of their souls. Everything was as natural as it should be.
White Crow stood alone before the glacier. Millions of years of mountain winds had carved patterns into the ice wall that should have been smooth. Viewed from certain angles, the marks upon it bore an uncanny resemblance to the outline of a woman.
Golden specks of light gathered at the mountaintop from every direction. Phantom human faces flickered across the vault of the sky. Gulan, Xiang City, Jerusalem... Countless places occupied by the Church of the Scales had erected grand altars. Solemn-faced followers in white robes plunged daggers into their own hearts.
Thick, fishy blood soaked through their pristine sacrificial robes, dripping to the ground and spreading into veins like the roots of grass and trees. Within the ice wall of the snow mountain thousands of miles away, the woman's outline gradually sharpened strand by strand, until it revealed White Crow's