The heart of the Shattered Ice Shelf was so deathly still that it bordered on the absurd.
The blood-colored ice fragments filling the sky seemed to have been smoothed by some invisible force. No longer dancing wildly in the wind, they followed mysterious gravitational paths and sank soundlessly into the pitch-black depths.
Chu Bai stood in midair.
The [Purple-Gold Star River Armor] around him reflected a chilling, heart-stopping radiance beneath the auroras of the Far North.
Every dragon pattern on the armor rippled faintly, as though greedily devouring the lingering traces of power in the air.
At the dragon-head position, Zuo Qiu's wrinkled face, once refined and detached from worldly affairs, was twitching violently. He stared fixedly at the core in Chu Bai's hand, which had stopped resisting and was docilely breathing purple qi in and out.
The True Spirit Society had sacrificed so much for this essence. Zuo Qiu himself had even burned his vital essence to sustain the formation.
Yet in the end, all their calculations and accumulated resources had become useless.
"...Your might is extraordinary, fellow Daoist."
After a long silence, Zuo Qiu let out a sigh like an old tree withering away.
He slowly lowered the head he had held proudly in the Far North for so long and awkwardly cupped his hands. "The True Spirit Society... accepts defeat. Let the debts between us end here."
With this concession from Zuo Qiu, the keeper of order, the pressure that had been taut as a fully drawn bow finally slackened with a faint sigh.
"Fuck... cough, cough... cough!"
Lei Meng knelt on a fractured ice shelf. The blood at his severed arm had frozen into a dark-red lump.
Coughing up foul blood flecked with fragments, he braced his remaining left hand against his knee and barely managed