The wind of the Far North always carried a bone-stripping chill, as though it meant to freeze even one's soul within that endless pallor.
This was the middle stretch of the Dark Ice Passage, already a month's journey from Cold Crow Island.
As far as the eye could see, heaven and earth held nothing but a despairingly monotonous, deathly white. There was no sunrise or moonset, only auroras flickering behind murky clouds, illuminating the lifeless icefield like a ghostly underworld.
Crack.
A foot clad in a blue boot planted itself firmly on a floe that seemed solid, though hidden currents had long since hollowed it out beneath.
Almost the instant the foot touched down, the floe cracked sharply. Fissures spread across its icy shell, threatening to shatter it.
Yet the blue-robed figure neither pushed off nor leaped away. His body did not even sway.
He merely tapped his toe, sending an exquisitely subtle spiral of water-aspect spiritual power seeping through his sole into the ice.
"Solidify."
In an instant, the crumbling floe seemed to have been injected with some adhesive. Its cracks stopped spreading, and the spiritual power reinforcing it made it harder than steel.
Using that faint rebound, Chu Bai drifted dozens of zhang like a wisp of smoke, landing without a sound or a footprint in the snow.
"A month of bitter travel, a thousand li on foot."
Chu Bai slowly stopped beneath a wind-sheltered outcrop of ice. He exhaled a white breath, which instantly formed glittering frost on his brows and lashes.
He raised his right hand and rolled back his sleeve.
The arm that Gu Sheng's [Profound Yin Heavy Water] had corroded until flesh split open and white bone showed was now smooth and flawless.
Under the dim daylight, the newly grown skin faintly possessed a