Night had deepened, and the wind across the snowfield gradually died away. Heaven and earth sank into an absolute, profound silence. A campfire burned before the tent, its orange-red glow dancing across the snow and tinting the surrounding white expanse a warm amber. Liu Qingyan leaned against Shen Xiu's shoulder, wrapped in a thick cloak. Her breathing was steady and long; she had already fallen asleep. Shen Xiu did not sleep. Sitting beside the fire, he gently stirred the burning pine branches with his fingers, watching sparks shoot into the night sky and merge with the stars.
Suddenly, his fingers stopped.
An exceedingly faint tremor came from beneath his feet, as though something deep within the ice was awakening. The tremor was so slight that ordinary people would never have noticed it, but Shen Xiu's Thunderbolt Power was connected to this land, and no subtle disturbance could escape his senses. He turned his head and sank his divine sense into the ice beneath him, tracing the source of that tremor downward. Deep within the ice, in frozen earth that had lain silent for who knew how many years, an extremely weak dark aura was pulsing, like a sleeping heart beginning to beat again.
Shen Xiu's brow furrowed slightly. That dark aura was incredibly weak, so weak it could almost be ignored, yet its essence felt familiar to him—it was the aura of the Evil Clan beyond the domain. When he had utterly destroyed the King of the Evil Clan in the Myriad Spirit Abyss, perhaps a sliver of residual consciousness had escaped the main body, crossed seas and oceans, and been sealed by the northern cold deep beneath this frozen earth. Now, his Thunderbolt Power had spread across the snowfield and awakened that sleeping fragment.
The earth began to shake.