Snow Empress's body trembled violently. She jerked her head up, and a bone-chilling light burst from her ice-blue eyes.
Her gaze pierced Mu Chen like a blade forged from ten thousand years of ice. In an instant, the temperature around them plunged below the lowest recorded in the Far North.
Countless sharp icicles formed on the ice walls. Every ice crystal suspended in the air came to a halt, as though even time itself had frozen beneath the force of her killing intent.
But Mu Chen knew she wasn't angry. She was afraid—afraid that the hope Ice Empress had bought with her life would ultimately come to nothing, afraid that this was nothing more than a transaction.
"Human. What did she give you?" Snow Empress's voice had turned cold again, but beneath that chill, emotions churned like currents beneath a sheet of ice.
"Everything," Mu Chen said.
Snow Empress closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the killing intent was gone from her ice-blue gaze, leaving only weary, resigned calm.
"What are her conditions?"
"Heal your injuries. Help you break through."
Snow Empress fell silent. She turned to look at Ice Empress's phantom, and Ice Empress looked back at her. The two beings who had accompanied one another for four hundred thousand years met eyes in an ice cavern in the Far North. No words were needed.
Then Snow Empress made her decision.
"Fine. I agree."
Mu Chen opened his Storage Soul Tool Bracelet.
He took out all fifteen Ten-Thousand-Year Profound Ice Marrows and laid them in a row on the ice before Snow Empress.
The fifteen Ten-Thousand-Year Profound Ice Marrows lay side by side, each crystal clear, with a liquid ice-blue radiance flowing within.
Their cold spread through the cavern, weaving a faint blue mist. The instant it touched them, even the air condensed into tiny ice crystals.
The fifteen Profound Ice Marrows shone in unison, turning the entire cavern into a dreamlike blue world. Rippling light reflected from every ice wall.
Snow Empress's pupils contracted slightly. She had seen Ten-Thousand-Year Profound Ice Marrow before, but never this many at once.
A single treasure of this level would be enough to make ice-attribute Soul Masters in the outside world fight tooth and nail. The worth of fifteen was beyond anything money could measure.
"Bing'er." Snow Empress's voice suddenly softened. "Do you really think I'm worth this much?"
Ice Empress's phantom flickered. "Asking that is an insult to my judgment over hundreds of thousands of years."
Snow Empress's lips lifted slightly. In that moment, she was no longer the foremost of the Three Great Heavenly Kings of the Far North, nor the Heavenly Snow Woman who had struck terror into the entire Soul Beast Realm. She was simply someone whose companion had entrusted her with hope at the cost of her life.
Snow Empress sat cross-legged, held her hands above the fifteen Profound Ice Marrows, and began to absorb them.
The energy within the Ten-Thousand-Year Profound Ice Marrows surged into her like a tide.
Their pure, primal ice energy coursed through her meridians, mending every old wound left by the tribulation.
Her cultivation began to rise.
From the brink where she had fallen from six hundred and ninety thousand years, it climbed again: six hundred and ninety-five thousand, six hundred and ninety-eight thousand, seven hundred thousand. When the final Profound Ice Marrow's energy had been completely absorbed, the aura bursting from Snow Empress had surpassed anything anyone present had ever sensed.
That aura burst through the cavern's ceiling and shot straight into the sky.
Within moments, the heavens beyond the ice peak changed color, shifting from leaden gray to deep purple. The clouds began to whirl wildly, forming a vast vortex. Silver lightning flickered at its center.
Old Tang's voice suddenly sharpened. "A tribulation! Snow Empress's attempt to reach seven hundred thousand years has triggered a tribulation! Xiao Chen, get to a safe distance! If even the edge of that tribulation grazes you, you'll be reduced to ashes!"
Mu Chen didn't try to be brave. Ghost Shadow Perplexing Track activated, and he shot backward, while returning Ice Empress's phantom to his Sea of Consciousness.
At the instant Ice Empress's remnant soul retreated into the Sea of Consciousness, she gave one last look at Snow Empress, sitting cross-legged in the center of the cavern.
Her lips moved soundlessly. Mu Chen couldn't hear what she said, but he felt Ice Empress's remnant soul tremble faintly in his Sea of Consciousness. It wasn't a tremble of fear, but one born from worry for her—even with only a wisp of her soul remaining.
The first bolt of tribulation lightning fell.
The silver bolt was as thick as a barrel. It shot straight down from the vortex and struck the summit of the ice peak with pinpoint accuracy.
Ten-thousand-year-old ice exploded into a storm of fragments beneath the thunderbolt. Several meters of the peak's summit were sheared away. Snow Empress raised a hand, and an ice-blue barrier unfurled above her head, taking the bolt head-on. The barrier shuddered violently, spiderweb cracks spreading across its surface, but it did not break.
The second bolt followed close behind, thicker, brighter, and more savage than the first. Then came the third, the fourth, the fifth. The thunderbolts fell like dense raindrops, each strike bearing the might to destroy heaven and earth.
The ice peak crumbled beneath the relentless barrage. Huge chunks of ten-thousand-year-old ice broke away from the mountainside and crashed onto the glacier below, gouging deep craters into it. Standing on an ice mound at a safe distance, Mu Chen felt the shockwaves wash over him, and his expression gradually grew grave.
This was the might of heaven and earth. Before a seven-hundred-thousand-year tribulation, the extreme cold of the Core Area of the Far North was nothing. The air reeked of scorched ozone, and every lightning strike bleached the ice for miles around.
Snow Empress stood inside the cavern, her white robes whipping in the lightning. Her hands formed seals again and again, raising layer upon layer of ice walls and barriers above her. The tribulation shattered them one after another.
A thread of blood trickled from the corner of her mouth, but her gaze remained calm. When the final bolt descended, she dispelled all her defenses and met the thickest, brightest silver lightning with her bare body.
Boom!
The mountain split down the middle beneath the blow, a huge fissure tearing through the ice peak. The tribulation swallowed Snow Empress whole. Silver lightning enveloped her completely, obscuring even her silhouette.
The air filled with a scorched smell, mingled with white mist rising from vaporized ice crystals. Mu Chen's fist clenched of its own accord, while Ice Empress's remnant soul let out a silent scream within his Sea of Consciousness.
Then the lightning faded.
Snow Empress slowly descended from midair. Her white robes were utterly tattered, and her snow-white hair streamed loose around her, silver arcs still clinging to its ends.
Her body trembled faintly, but the corners of her mouth were lifted. The purple vortex in the sky began to dissolve. The deep-purple clouds receded from the center outward, revealing daylight long unseen. It was the first sunlight to appear over the Far North in a thousand years. The aura of a Soul Beast, tempered by a seven-hundred-thousand-year tribulation, had scattered the ever-present clouds above the Far North.
Snow Empress had broken through.
She was no longer an injured being of six hundred and ninety thousand years, but a true, complete seven-hundred-thousand-year Ferocious Beast.
Her aura was several times stronger than before, and every movement she made carried the rhythm of the laws of heaven and earth.