The moment he stepped through the Anywhere Door, a familiar, bone-chilling cold swept over him.
Su Hui took a deep breath.
The icy air flooded his lungs, sharp with the distinctive bite of snow.
As far as the eye could see, a vast, snow-covered wasteland stretched out before him.
All that remained between heaven and earth was a pure palette of white and gray-blue.
"I feel more at home here."
He muttered to himself.
Shrek City might have been bustling, but it couldn't compare to the peace and quiet of the Far North.
"Is this... the Far North?"
The Ice Empress's voice came from the Sea of Consciousness, tinged with unconcealable astonishment.
Using Su Hui's senses, she surveyed their surroundings.
The endless glaciers, the howling wind, the ice ridges faintly visible in the distance—all of it felt so familiar, yet somehow strange.
"What's going on?"
She seemed to be asking Su Hui, though she might have been talking to herself.
"You were just in that human city. You walked through that pink door, and then came straight back to the Far North?!"
Su Hui smiled.
"I forgot to explain properly. My Second Martial Soul is called the Anywhere Door."
"The Anywhere Door?"
"It lets me travel through time and space."
Su Hui spread his hands. "It doesn't just cross distances in space. It works across time, too."
The Ice Empress fell silent for two breaths.
"So when you suddenly appeared in front of me earlier, and then attacked me from behind—"
"Ahem."
Su Hui cleared his throat, cutting her off.
The whole "attacked me from behind" thing sounded pretty awkward.
"Anyway, you know what the situation was like back then. If I'd approached you directly, Ice Empress, you wouldn't have listened to a word from a human."
"..."
The Ice Empress didn't answer, but Su Hui sensed a faint, peculiar exasperation in the Sea of Consciousness.
He decided to change the subject, fast.
"There's something else."
Su Hui's expression turned serious. "This may be the Far North, but it isn't the Far North you know."
"...What do you mean?"
"Ten thousand years."
Su Hui raised one finger.
"This is a full ten thousand years before your time."
"..."
This time, the Ice Empress was silent for longer.
She carefully sensed the surroundings.
The Far North's blizzards, terrain, and concentration of heaven and earth energy in the air all differed ever so slightly from her memories.
The differences were subtle, like the same painting redrawn with slightly different strokes. They would be impossible to notice without close attention.
"Crossing space and time, and spanning ten thousand years, no less..."
For the first time, the Ice Empress's voice held something difficult to describe.
It wasn't fear so much as the instinctive awe one felt before the unknown.
"What exactly is your Martial Soul? Even those gods of legend—"
She stopped.
Gods.
Once the word entered her mind, she couldn't shake it.
Traveling through time and space—this was a realm she believed only gods could touch.
And yet Su Hui was merely a Soul Elder, a boy who hadn't even reached the Soul Ancestor rank.
"You're not the reincarnation of some god, are you?"
The Ice Empress's voice grew a little hurried.
Su Hui laughed at the question.
"Heh. If I were the reincarnation of a god, would I have needed to resort to a cheap trick and sneak attack you? I could've just slapped you into submission."
The Ice Empress considered it and decided that, unpleasant as it sounded, he had a point.
"Then why did you send yourself ten thousand years into the past?"
"You've got it backward."
Su Hui shook his head. "Actually, this is the era I live in."
"I only traveled ten thousand years into the future, to your time. Now I've returned to my own timeline."
"!"
The Ice Empress's thoughts stalled again.
So what she thought of as the "present" was actually Su Hui's "future"?
And Su Hui's "present" was her true "past"?
The timelines tangled in her mind like a ball of knotted thread. In the end, she gave up trying to unravel them.
Su Hui didn't continue the conversation. Instead, he turned his attention to the matter at hand.
He pulled the black-clad man's Storage Soul Tool from his clothes. Its crude workmanship was almost painful to look at.
Su Hui probed it with his Soul Power and rummaged around. His expression quickly shifted from anticipation to disdain.
More than a thousand Gold Soul Coins lay scattered in one corner.
A few ordinary-looking ores, mostly common materials such as Iron Essence and Copper Mother.
There were also some shriveled medicinal herbs, stored so carelessly that most of their potency had dissipated.
"Broke as hell."
Su Hui summed it up in a few words.
He kept searching and finally found something useful in a compartment hidden inside the storage space.
An engraving knife.
The blade was slender, its edge glimmering with a faint silver light. A few crooked runes were carved into the handle.
It certainly couldn't compare to the Ranking List Engraving Knife, but it was still a fine tool—good enough to carve the Core Array of a Soul Tool.
"Finally, something I can use."
Su Hui spun the engraving knife twice between his fingers. It felt decent in his hand.
He put everything away again and couldn't help sighing. "Soul Masters on the Douluo Continent are so poor. They don't even have a decent pill."
"You can't get rich by robbing and killing on the Douluo Continent. That was a waste of effort."
When all was said and done, the Douluo Continent was just too impoverished.
Not in terms of resources, but in terms of its systems.
Take the Dou Qi Continent, for instance. It had both a Dou Qi system and an alchemist system.
The Douluo Continent's pill-making system had barely developed at all.
Even Soul Bones, treasures Soul Masters regarded as priceless, were rare and impossible to come by at will.
And most people never even had the chance to encounter an Immortal Herb.
Shrek City might have looked dazzling, but its deep-rooted poverty hadn't changed much.
Just as Su Hui was putting away the junk one item at a time, the Ice Empress suddenly spoke.
"Su Hui, something just occurred to me."
"Hmm?"
"You said this is ten thousand years in the past..." The Ice Empress's tone was slow, as though she were carefully piecing together a fragile puzzle.
"I've already sacrificed myself into your body, so... where is the version of me from this era?"
Su Hui stopped what he was doing.
He really hadn't given that much thought.
Time paradoxes, parallel worlds, causal loops... A jumble of concepts churned through his mind, growing more tangled by the second.
He'd even wondered at one point whether the time he'd traveled to belonged to the same world at all.
Or did every door lead to a completely different parallel plane?
In the end, he gave up thinking about it.
"The you from this era is probably somewhere in the Far North right now."
Su Hui nodded toward the north.
"The Far North is your territory. You're still a ruler here in this era."
He paused, then said seriously, "But I recommend that the two of you not meet."
"Mm."
For once, the Ice Empress agreed.
It made sense.
One version of herself standing face-to-face with another, two identical souls gazing at each other across time.
Just imagining it made her uncomfortable.
But Su Hui was thinking about more than that.
He remembered some movies and TV shows about time travel. When the same person from the past and future met, it always brought about strange phenomena.
Who knew whether something bizarre would happen if the two Ice Empresses met?
A collapse of space or the backlash of time—neither sounded like fun.
The Ice Empress suddenly grew alert.
"Hey, there are humans up ahead."
Her voice quickly turned cold. "And one of my kind."
Su Hui raised an eyebrow.
"Human Soul Masters hunting Ice Jade Scorpions?" he asked.
The Ice Empress didn't answer.
But the cold fury surging through the Sea of Consciousness said everything.
To the ruling race of the Far North, humans hunting her kind had always been unforgivable.
"Let's go take a look."
Su Hui moved at once, hurrying in the direction the Ice Empress had indicated.
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