"I don't matter. What matters is that I keep my word."
Ice Empress stared at him for a long time. Countless complicated emotions roiled in her emerald-green vertical pupils.
She remembered Snow Empress's pale face the last time she emerged from seclusion. She remembered the forced smile Snow Empress had managed when she told her, "Don't worry. I can hold on for another few thousand years." She remembered the long years they had spent walking side by side across the frozen plains of the Far North.
All those memories were buried deep in those emerald-green vertical pupils, sealed beneath layers of ice and hidden from view.
Then she made her decision.
"I choose the second option. I'll sacrifice myself to you. But you must swear by your soul origin that in this life, you'll use the Ten-Thousand-Year Profound Ice Marrow to heal Snow Empress's injuries and help her break through."
Mu Chen raised three fingers on his right hand. His voice was quiet, yet as weighty as solid rock. "I swear by my soul origin that in this life, I'll use the Ten-Thousand-Year Profound Ice Marrow to heal Snow Empress's injuries and help her break through. If I break this oath, may my soul be scattered and my spirit dispersed."
Ice Empress nodded.
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, the coldness and fierceness had vanished from her emerald-green vertical pupils. In their place was a calm sense of release, as if she had made this decision long, long ago and had finally let go of all her hesitation and unease at the last moment.
Mu Chen sat cross-legged on the ground and closed his eyes.
Then emerald-green light swallowed the entire ice field. The radiance of Ice Empress's sacrifice shot into the sky, tearing a massive hole through the leaden clouds. For the first time, a dazzling pillar of light like the aurora appeared in the perpetually dark skies above the Far North.
The pillar burned silently over the ice field, turning both the frozen earth and the permafrost emerald green.
At that instant, the entire Core Area of the Far North trembled.
Countless ice-attribute Soul Beasts awoke in their nests and prostrated themselves toward the pillar of light, shivering in fear.
They sensed it: the aura of one of the Three Great Heavenly Kings of the Far North was undergoing an irreversible transformation.
Mu Chen sat cross-legged at the center of the pillar of light.
The power of Ice Empress's sacrifice poured into his body like a glacial flood bursting through a dam. It wasn't a trickling stream. It was the entire Arctic Ocean surging backward into a river.
That power was so immense that his meridians groaned under the strain almost at once.
Fine patterns of ice crystals appeared on his skin. The blood flowing through his veins seemed no longer to be blood, but liquid ice.
Just then, Old Tang intervened.
The golden figure abruptly opened his eyes in the Sea of Consciousness and formed a hand seal Mu Chen had never seen before.
A beam of golden light shot from the Sea of Consciousness, precisely enveloping the Soul Ring that was taking shape.
The Soul Ring formed from Ice Empress's four-hundred-thousand-year cultivation should have been a dazzling red—the distinctive color of a Soul Beast that had lived for over a hundred thousand years, enough to drive any Soul Master wild with desire.
But under the suppression of Old Tang's golden light, the red Soul Ring began to shrink and condense at a visible pace, compressing upon itself.
The red faded, and black emerged. Yet it wasn't pure black. It was a deep, abyssal black tinged with a faint green glow.
"This is a seal. I've sealed away most of the power in Ice Empress's Soul Ring. As your cultivation improves, the seal will gradually lift, and the ring's color and power will change along with it. Its initial state is a fifty-thousand-year black Soul Ring. With the body you have now, you couldn't withstand the direct impact of a four-hundred-thousand-year Soul Ring. Without this seal, you'd have exploded the instant the ring attached itself to you."
Mu Chen didn't reply. He was pouring all his effort into circulating the Mysterious Heaven Skill, guiding the frenzied flood of icy power surging through his meridians.
The azure Soul Power pool in his dantian expanded and deepened under the onslaught of the sacrificial power. Its waters turned ice blue, and a thin layer of ice crystals floated on the surface.
The bottleneck at level forty-nine tore open like paper under the wash of the sacrificial power. Then came level fifty, fifty-one, and fifty-two. Each breakthrough brought a surge of Soul Power that whipped up a storm in his meridians, while the power of Ice Empress's sacrifice continued to pour in without end.
Even more painful was the Soul Bone fusion.
The Left Arm Bone that had emerged from Ice Empress's sacrifice—a three-hundred-and-ninety-thousand-year Ice Jade Empress Scorpion Left Arm Bone—was floating above the bones of his left arm.
The Soul Bone was emerald green all over, its shape impossibly complete. Ice-crystal patterns shimmered across its surface, every junction radiating a ghostly, icy light.
When it began fusing with Mu Chen's left arm, the pain surpassed everything he had ever braced himself for.
It wasn't flesh being torn or bones breaking. It was something more fundamental: a transformation that began at the cellular level.
The bones in his left arm were crushed inch by inch, then regrew in the structure of the Ice Jade Empress Scorpion's skeleton.
The new bones were far denser than human bones. Emerald-green ice-attribute essence flowed through their marrow, and every bone fiber formed new connections with his muscles, meridians, and skin.
The entire process lasted nearly half an hour. Mu Chen's consciousness blurred several times, but each time, just as he was about to pass out, he forcibly dragged himself back from the brink.
He drove his hands deep into the frozen earth. Where his clenched fingers dug in, the permafrost crumbled to powder. When he finally stood up from the ice, his entire left arm glowed with a faint emerald-green sheen.
He raised his left hand and spread his five fingers. An emerald-green ice crystal appeared in his palm—not one he had condensed with Soul Power, but one that formed automatically with a mere thought. This was the ice-attribute control granted to him by the Ice Jade Empress Scorpion Left Arm Bone. The crystal spun once in his palm, then dissolved into a wisp of cold air that vanished into the Far North wind.
His Soul Power Level finally settled at level fifty-five.
From level forty-nine to level fifty-five: a leap of six levels. But Mu Chen knew those six levels hadn't come from nowhere. If fully absorbed, Ice Empress's three-hundred-and-ninety-thousand-year cultivation could have sent a Soul Ancestor straight into the Soul Emperor realm.
Old Tang had sealed away most of the power. The part he'd left had raised Mu Chen by six levels, the best possible outcome within the limits of what his body could bear.
"How do you feel?" Old Tang's voice sounded in the Sea of Consciousness.
Mu Chen didn't reply, because he and another presence in the Sea of Consciousness opened their eyes at the same time.
Ice Empress.
A miniature Ice Empress stood in his Sea of Consciousness. Her emerald-green scorpion-tail braid and delicate features were unchanged, but she had shrunk to the size of a fist. Her body was translucent, like an illusion formed from aurora.
The coldness and arrogance that had once filled her emerald-green eyes had given way to another emotion.
She looked around. She saw Old Tang's golden figure, the emerald-green orb formed from the Life Blade, and Electrolux's gray orb. Then her gaze settled on Electrolux.