Ice Empress's Sacrifice

"Who I am is not important. What matters is that I keep my word."

Ice Empress stared at him for a long time. Within those emerald vertical pupils, countless complex emotions were surging.

She recalled the pale face of Snow Empress the last time she emerged from seclusion, the forced smile Snow Empress wore when she said, "Don't worry, I can still hold on for a few thousand years," and the long, arduous years they had walked side by side across the frozen plains of the Far North.

Those memories were hidden deep within those emerald pupils, sealed away under layers of ice, never shown to another.

Then, she made her decision.

"I choose the second option. I will sacrifice myself to you. But you must swear upon your soul origin that you will use the Ten-Thousand-Year Profound Ice Marrow to help Snow Empress recover her injuries and assist her in breaking through."

Mu Chen raised three fingers on his right hand, his voice low but as steady as a rock: "I swear upon my soul origin that I will use the Ten-Thousand-Year Profound Ice Marrow to help Snow Empress recover her injuries and assist her in breaking through. Should I break this oath, may my soul be scattered."

Ice Empress nodded.

She closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, the coldness and sharpness were gone from those emerald vertical pupils. In their place was a relieved calm, as if she had made a decision long ago and finally, at the very last moment, let go of all hesitation and unease.

Mu Chen sat cross-legged on the ground and closed his eyes.

Then, emerald light engulfed the entire ice plain. The radiance of Ice Empress's sacrifice soared into the sky, tearing a massive gap in the leaden clouds. For the first time, a pillar of light as brilliant as an aurora appeared in the perpetually gloomy sky of the Far North.

The pillar of light burned silently on the ice plain, casting both the ice and the frozen earth in the color of jade.

In that instant, the entire Core Area of the Far North trembled.

Countless ice-attribute soul beasts were startled from their dens, prostrating themselves in the direction of the rising light, shivering in fear.

They sensed it—the aura of one of the Three Great Heavenly Kings of the Far North was undergoing a transformation in an irreversible way.

Mu Chen sat at the center of the pillar of light.

The power of Ice Empress's sacrifice surged into his body like a collapsed glacier; it was not a trickling stream, but the entire North Arctic Ocean pouring into a single river.

The power was so immense that his meridians groaned under the strain from the very first moment.

Fine ice-crystal patterns emerged on the surface of his skin, and what flowed through his blood vessels no longer seemed to be blood, but liquid ice.

At this moment, Old Tang took action.

The golden silhouette in the Sea of Consciousness suddenly opened its eyes, his hands forming a seal Mu Chen had never seen before.

A beam of golden light shot out from the Sea of Consciousness, precisely enveloping the soul ring that was currently taking shape.

The soul ring formed by the four-hundred-thousand-year cultivation of Ice Empress should have been a blinding red—the unique color of a soul beast over one hundred thousand years old, enough to drive any soul master to madness.

But under the suppression of Old Tang's golden light, the red soul ring was shrinking, condensing, and compressing at a speed visible to the naked eye.

The red faded, and black emerged, but it was not a pure black; it was a deep, abyssal black shimmering with a faint green halo.

"This is a seal. I have sealed away the vast majority of the Ice Empress's soul ring power. As your cultivation level increases, the seal will unlock layer by layer, and the color and power of the soul ring will change accordingly. The initial state of this soul ring is a fifty-thousand-year black soul ring. Your current body cannot withstand the direct impact of a four-hundred-thousand-year soul ring. Without this seal, you would have exploded and died the moment the soul ring attached to you."

Mu Chen did not answer; he was fully circulating his Mysterious Heaven Skill, guiding the ice power that was surging wildly through his meridians.

The azure soul power pool in his dantian expanded and deepened under the impact of the sacrificial power, the pool water shifting from azure to ice-blue, with a thin layer of ice crystals floating on the surface.

The bottleneck of level forty-nine was pierced like paper under the scouring of the sacrificial power, followed by level fifty, fifty-one, 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 endlessly.

Even more painful was the soul bone fusion.

The left arm bone produced by Ice Empress's sacrifice, a three-hundred-ninety-thousand-year Ice Jade Empress Scorpion Left Arm Bone, was hovering over the bones of his left arm.

The soul bone was entirely emerald green, its shape impossibly perfect, with ice-crystal-like textures flowing across the bone surface, each node radiating a cold, eerie light.

When it began to fuse with Mu Chen's left arm, the pain exceeded everything he had mentally prepared for.

It was not the tearing of flesh or the breaking of bones, but a more fundamental transformation starting at the cellular level.

His left arm bones were crushed inch by inch, then regrown according to the skeletal structure of the Ice Jade Empress Scorpion.

The density of the new bone far exceeded that of human bone, with emerald ice-attribute essence flowing through the marrow, and every bone fiber re-establishing connections with his muscles, meridians, and skin.

The entire process lasted nearly half an hour. During this time, Mu Chen's consciousness blurred several times, but each time he pulled himself back from the brink of fainting.

His hands were buried deep into the frozen earth, and where his ten fingers gripped, the frozen soil was crushed into powder. When he finally stood up from the ice, his entire left arm shimmered with a faint emerald luster.

He raised his left hand and spread his fingers. An emerald ice crystal emerged from his palm—not condensed by his soul power, but generated automatically at the mere thought. This was the ice-attribute control ability granted to him by the Ice Jade Empress Scorpion Left Arm Bone. The ice crystal spun once in his palm before dissipating into the winds of the Far North as a wisp of cold air.

His final Soul Power Level settled at fifty-five.

From level forty-nine to fifty-five, a six-level leap. But Mu Chen knew clearly that these six levels were not gained out of thin air; the sacrifice of Ice Empress's three-hundred-ninety-thousand-year cultivation, if fully absorbed, would have been enough for a Soul Ancestor to charge directly toward becoming a Soul Emperor.

Old Tang had sealed most of the power, and the remaining portion helped him rise six levels—this was the optimal solution under the limits of his body's endurance.

"How do you feel?" Old Tang's voice echoed in the Sea of Consciousness.

Mu Chen did not answer, because he and another presence in the Sea of Consciousness opened their eyes at the same time.

Ice Empress.

A miniature version of Ice Empress stood within his Sea of Consciousness, her emerald scorpion-tail braid still present, her exquisite face unchanged, though her form had shrunk to the size of a fist. Her entire body was semi-transparent, like a phantom condensed from aurora light.

In those emerald eyes, the coldness and arrogance of the past had been replaced by a different emotion.

She looked around, seeing Old Tang's golden silhouette, the emerald light orb formed by the Life Blade, and the gray light mass of Electrolux, before her gaze came to a rest on Electrolux.