Spoils of War

One morning, two days later, before dawn.

Above an open stretch of water north of Ironspine Island, Yang Wenqing hovered some thirty meters above the sea. Five-colored auspicious clouds spread steadily beneath his feet, while Lan Ying crouched on his shoulder, occasionally letting out a soft chirp.

Yang Wenqing held a silver-white ice mirror in his right hand. It was Ao Guang's famed artifact, the Frostspine Mirror, forged from millennia-old cold marrow ice fused with deep-sea mystic crystal. A wisp of frigid energy was sealed within it, allowing it to conjure ice shields, ice walls, and wide-ranging frost storms out of thin air.

At that moment, he was using the Water Spirit Aura driven by the Tortoise Shell he had seized from Ao Yuan to refine the artifact. The process was fairly quick. Only the last trace of the Frostspine Mirror's internal rune channels remained before they would be fully assimilated by his True Essence.

When the rising red sun on the horizon captured all of Lan Ying's attention, Yang Wenqing exhaled a breath of turbid air. He turned the Frostspine Mirror halfway in his palm, then activated the rune formation within and shone it toward the side. A stream of frosty energy immediately manifested.

"Good stuff!"

Yang Wenqing praised it.

Lan Ying replied, "Naturally. Ao Guang was, after all, a princess of the Dragon Clan. An inferior artifact would not have matched her status."

Yang Wenqing smiled and took another pair of artifacts from his storage pouch: the Tide-Sound Twin Daggers, polished from lapis lazuli, their edges flowing with high-frequency Water Spirit vibrations.

He had already finished refining this artifact, and it had been far easier to handle than the Frostspine Mirror. The two daggers now hovered quietly at his side, rapidly adjusting their posture with the slightest fluctuation