Peak of the Extreme North, Seeking the Ice and Snow Twin Emperors

After leaving the icy cavern where the Skydream Iceworm dwelled, Huo Chen took Huo Yuhao into the air and continued northward toward the depths of the Extreme North.

The farther north they traveled, the colder the world became.

The vast rolling mountain ranges below gradually lost their green hues, becoming completely covered by an endless expanse of snow-white plains.

Bitter winds howled without restraint, sweeping fine snow through the sky in a chaotic dance.

The sky overhead turned a dark, leaden gray. Heavy clouds pressed down over the land, filling the air with a suffocating gloom. A violent blizzard was clearly about to sweep across the northern wasteland.

Huo Chen raised a hand and formed a translucent pale-gold shield of soul power, steadily enveloping them both. The biting wind and swirling snow were completely blocked outside, leaving the space within the barrier warm and calm, untouched by the harsh cold beyond.

Huo Yuhao sat obediently beside Huo Chen, but his gaze was not on the magnificent yet desolate polar scenery below.

His mind remained fixed on what his uncle had casually mentioned earlier. The phrase "your future aunt" kept circling in his heart, filling him with questions he could no longer suppress.

After pondering for a long while, Huo Yuhao finally spoke up.

"Uncle!"

His clear voice broke the silence of their journey. "What exactly did you mean by 'future aunt'? Are you going to marry a soul beast?"

Huo Chen's lips twitched slightly. Somewhat helplessly, he looked at the boy beside him, whose face was utterly serious.

"Who told you your aunt was a soul beast?"

Huo Yuhao immediately furrowed his brow, his face full of confusion.

"But you clearly said there were two of them. Other than powerful soul beasts, who else in the Extreme North would be worth your making a special trip to find?"

Huo Chen slowed his flight and gently corrected the boy's assumption.

"They are not ordinary soul beasts. They are hundred-thousand-year soul beasts who have attained the Great Dao and long completed their transformations. After transforming, their bodies, appearances, flesh, and aura are no different from those of humans. Furthermore, their status far exceeds anything you can imagine. They are by no means comparable to ordinary hundred-thousand-year soul beasts."

He paused before slowly revealing the names and backgrounds of the two powerful beings.

"One is the Ice Jade Emperor Scorpion, one of the Three Heavenly Kings of the Extreme North. Everyone calls her the Ice Empress. The other is even more terrifying—the ruler of the entire northern snowfields, the Snow Empress, whose cultivation has reached a terrifying seven hundred thousand years."

Upon hearing this, Huo Yuhao could not help but suck in a cold breath. His pupils suddenly contracted, and his face was filled with disbelief.

Though he was still young and his cultivation was shallow, he had long heard of the mighty reputation of the Three Heavenly Kings of the Extreme North.

They were peak experts acknowledged across the entire continent. Even renowned Title Douluo would not dare to casually provoke them upon entering the Extreme North.

Thinking about how he and his uncle were heading alone into the core region of the Extreme North to seek out those two peerless soul beasts, Huo Yuhao immediately felt uneasy.

"Uncle," he asked carefully, "are you sure we're going there to bring them away, rather than to seek our own deaths?"

Seeing the boy's cautious, timid appearance, Huo Chen could not help but laugh softly, his eyes full of gentle certainty.

"Don't worry. Your uncle always knows what he's doing."

After suppressing the fear in his heart, Huo Yuhao's curiosity only grew stronger, and he continued questioning him.

"But they're both supreme experts of the Extreme North. They rule their own domains and live freely—why would they be willing to leave the Extreme North with you? Uncle, have you known them for a long time?"

That question made Huo Chen's smile fade, and his flying figure paused slightly. He lifted his eyes toward the endless, overlapping snow mountains in the distance. His gaze became distant, and his expression gradually settled into calmness.

"This begins ten years ago."

Ten years earlier, he had accidentally been swept into a spatial-temporal current and fallen into the cultivation grounds belonging exclusively to the Reincarnation God King. During that long period, his divine consciousness broke free from the restraints of his body and roamed freely through the vast, boundless river of space and time.

He had personally witnessed the rise and fall of countless greater worlds, the passage of ages, and glimpsed the innumerable intertwined pasts and futures of Douluo Continent, seeing countless utterly different paths of fate.

It was during those years when his divine consciousness drifted through time that it happened to pass over the barren, frozen Extreme North and lingered on two lonely figures.

At the time, he did not yet know their identities, but he firmly remembered those two solitary figures.

One lurked deep within ice that had not melted for ten thousand years, enduring the bitter cold of the Extreme North alone day after day, year after year, cultivating arduously for countless millennia with no companion and no one to rely on.

The other stood at the Peak of the Extreme North, gazing down upon the boundless snowfields. Though she commanded the entire territory of the Extreme North, her eyes were filled with loneliness that ran to her very bones. She had remained alone through the ages, solitary for her entire life.

Through the river of fate, he clearly saw the tragic futures destined for them both.

He saw the Ice Empress stubbornly attempt to overcome her four-hundred-thousand-year heavenly tribulation. After years of arduous cultivation, she sought only to break through her shackles.

Yet the mysterious lightning of the nine heavens was violent and merciless, blasting her original body nearly to pieces. The scales all over her body shattered, and even the foundation of her origin nearly collapsed completely.

(P.S.: This was the fate Huo Chen saw, and it differs somewhat from the original work.)

Though she was fortunate enough to survive the heavenly tribulation, her cultivation plummeted, leaving behind irreparable flaws in her origin. From then on, she could only linger on within the frozen ice of the Extreme North as her lifespan rapidly dwindled, with no further hope of a breakthrough.

He also saw the Snow Empress face the greatest tribulation of her life: the transformation tribulation.

For a soul beast to transform was already an act of defying the heavens, a path with nine chances of death and only one of survival. Yet at the most critical moment, when she was at her weakest and most helpless during the tribulation, a group of human experts coveting the power of her origin quietly closed in around her.

These people had endured in hiding for a long time, waiting specifically to strike when she was at her weakest. Disregarding all honor and using every possible means, they forcibly captured the ruler of the Extreme North alive.

A supreme ruler of the snowfields was thus reduced to a prisoner, sealed and bound layer upon layer, becoming a tool for others' cultivation. In the end, to gain even a sliver of hope for survival, she was forced to abandon her freedom and herself, parasitizing the body of a human boy and remaining dependent on him forever.

And that boy, who bore all the helplessness and despair of both women, was none other than Huo Yuhao before him.

"At the time, I did not know their identities, nor did I know that we would become bound by fate in the future." Huo Chen spoke slowly, his voice calm and gentle, though his heart could not bear it. "Such tragic and despairing endings should never have been their destination."

It was precisely because he had seen those two miserable fates that, during the subsequent assessment of the Reincarnation God King, he deliberately locked onto their threads of destiny and carefully deduced the karma within them.

He finally understood that the root cause of their endings had never been a lack of strength, but an extreme loneliness.

The vast Extreme North seemed to be their territory, but in truth, it was a cage that had trapped them for ten thousand years. They had no companions, no one they could trust and rely upon. The hardships of cultivation, the terror of heavenly tribulations, humanity's covetousness—all dangers and pressures could only be silently borne alone.

The Ice Empress had faced the terrifying heavenly tribulation alone, only to suffer damage to her origin and exhaust her lifespan. The Snow Empress had stood alone against the world's prying eyes, yet in the end, she could not escape the fate of being captured and exploited.

To completely rewrite their destinies, the only way was to shatter that eternal loneliness and give them a home they could trust without reservation and rely on for life.

"So, the moment your divine trial ended, you immediately came to the Extreme North to find them?" Huo Yuhao suddenly understood, his eyes full of admiration. "But Uncle, you had never spent time with them before. How could you be sure they would be willing to trust a strange human?"

Huo Chen smiled faintly but did not answer directly.

He did not tell Huo Yuhao that, as the inheritor of the Reincarnation God King, he possessed a unique special ability. He could sense every person and living being whose fate had become intertwined with his own.

From the moment he entered the Extreme North, the destinies of the Ice Empress and Snow Empress had become completely entwined and fused with his. This bond transcended time and space, surpassed the ages, and was an encounter ordained by fate—impossible to sever.

As the two chatted, the polar landscape ahead suddenly underwent a dramatic change.

A towering snow mountain rose from the ground, majestic and immense, piercing the gray sky. The entire mountain was formed from ten-thousand-year ice, crystal-clear throughout. The faint light spilling through gaps in the clouds fell upon its surface, refracting into dazzling seven-colored halos. From afar, it resembled a colossal crystal palace standing amid the wilderness of the Extreme North, sacred and awe-inspiring.

The mountain peak was shrouded layer upon layer in dense clouds and mist. Within the depths of the fog, lightning flickered faintly, concealing endless pressure that inspired dread.

"We're here."

Huo Chen slowly descended and landed steadily at the foot of the snow mountain.

"This is the Snow Empress's residence—the Peak of the Extreme North."

Huo Yuhao looked up at the ice mountain that seemed to reach the heavens, his heart trembling as he subconsciously swallowed. The ancient pressure radiating from this snow mountain was vast beyond measure, far surpassing every powerhouse he had ever encountered.

Even the Soul Douluo offering stationed at the White Tiger Duke's Mansion possessed less than a tenth of this place's aura.

"Uncle, how do we get up there?" Huo Yuhao asked softly, looking up at the snow mountain that soared into the clouds.

"There is no need to climb to the summit ourselves." Huo Chen gently shook his head. "She has already sensed our arrival and has been waiting for some time."

The moment his words fell, the entire Peak of the Extreme North beneath their feet suddenly began to shake violently.

The thick ice and snow that had accumulated on the mountainside for ten thousand years exploded with a thunderous crash, sending ice fragments flying across the sky. A slender white figure burst through the ice, clouds, and mist, floating in midair with a graceful posture and an otherworldly aura.

The woman appeared to be only in her early twenties. Her long snow-white dress fluttered lightly in the wind, while waist-length silver-white hair cascaded down like a waterfall. Her skin was fairer than snow, and her features were exquisitely flawless. An extremely frigid icy aura lingered around her, as though all the essence of heaven and earth's snow and ice had gathered within her. She was the ultimate beauty born of ice and snow.

The beautiful woman's gaze suddenly dropped, locking precisely onto Huo Chen on the ground. A deep look of surprise flashed through her eyes.

"A human? No."

Her delicate brows furrowed slightly, and her cold voice echoed across the snowfield. "Your aura is exceedingly strange. Your physical body is human, yet within your foundation lies the foundation and aura of the divine path."