Auspicious Ice Route, Cold Crow Island

After Chu Bai returned to the group, he said little. His Divine Sense swept out silently.

Among the Rogue Cultivators accompanying the ships, three auras were missing.

Evidently, besides the first unlucky fellow, two more poor souls had vanished into the bellies of fish amid the chaos.

Several others were pale and wounded, huddled in a corner and trembling. They had clearly suffered serious internal injuries.

This was the Far North, where human lives were worth less than grass.

The caravan did not pause for its losses. After passing through the belt of shattered ice, it pressed on through the waves.

The cold wind wailed like ghosts, sweeping ice chips across the sky and painting the Far North in a chaotic gray-white.

At last, the massive ships smashed aside one final floe and left it behind. The despair-inducing stretch of broken sea finally came to an end.

Before them lay a single ice shelf so vast it resembled a continent—the White Bear Terrace.

The shelf stood above a rise in the seabed's Earth Vein, and its ice was a thousand fathoms thick. Tempered by Frost Baleful Intent over countless years, it was hard as iron. Even in these waters where the earth's crust shifted, it was one of the few natural harbors where a large fleet could moor safely.

A deep, heavy horn sounded again. This time, it was not an urgent order to advance, but a signal to make camp.

The three enormous black ships slowed, and the intricate rune arrays beneath their hulls abruptly changed.

Their nimble, deep-blue water-aspected glow faded, replaced by fire-aspected spiritual energy as red as magma.

With a tremendous roar and clouds of white mist rising where they touched the ice, heavy Black Iron runners bit into the surface. Like giant plows tilling a