As he passed through the final narrow crack in the Dark Ice Passage, the crash of waves that had haunted his ears all year round was finally replaced by the dull, dry-cold, far grander howl of the wind.
Chu Bai took his last step out. Beneath his feet was no longer the slightly yielding, slippery ice frozen for ten thousand years, but a wasteland of frozen earth, hard and cold and stubborn as pig iron.
He turned back for one final look.
Beyond the layers of mist lay the Shattered Ice Shelf, which had buried the Sea-Swallowing Demon Whale and concealed the greed and bleached bones of countless rogue cultivators, and the gray waters occupied by the Sea-Watch Office's warships.
The life-and-death battles of three months ago, the food snatched from the tiger's jaws, now seemed as distant as another lifetime.
Chu Bai now wore a somewhat tattered bearskin cloak, concealing every inch of the purple-gold scale armor that would have made any Foundation Establishment cultivator in the Far North drool.
He looked like the most ordinary of lonely exiles, trudging alone through this forbidden realm of life.
Chu Bai muttered to himself. Slowly, he pulled his hood lower and raised his eyes toward the way ahead.
What appeared before him was no longer fragmented floating ice, but an endless expanse of black-gray land.
Countless dry ravines split the earth like cracks across its surface. On the distant horizon, the curve of the sea had vanished, replaced by overlapping ranks of jagged snowy mountains, like the spines of gigantic beasts.
This was the continent of the Far North, a wilderness the Great Zhou Immortal Dynasty called "the place where law stops."
"God-Severing Peak..."
Chu Bai gazed into the distance.
At the end of those layered snowy mountains, deep within the