Winterfrost Canyon.
This deep ravine of sheer cliffs lay in the bitterly cold Northern Frontier, where sunlight never reached and the wind cut like knives.
The ice was so thick that it seemed to have frozen the entire land into a silent graveyard.
In the deepest reaches of the canyon lay the refuge of these surviving heretics-the "Cold Abyss Camp."
The so-called camp was really no more than a series of cramped chambers carved into ice and stone. Living conditions were utterly primitive: cold, slippery, and without fire all year round.
Behind curtains of coarse cloth sat a tattered felt blanket and an iron can filled with melted snow.
There was no warmth here, nor any need for it.
They lived for "revenge."
At that moment, a massive sacrificial altar stood amid the snowy mist at the center of the Cold Abyss Camp.
Like a pillar of bone jutting from a glacier, it was covered in black ice and patterns of windblown snow. Its recessed center was carved with ancient inscriptions that twisted and intertwined, spreading outward like veins.
Several human figures hung upside down above the altar.
They wore tattered Imperial Army uniforms, the insignia on their chests torn away. Rags gagged their mouths, and their wide eyes brimmed with terror and agony.
Blood dripped from their fingertips, slowly pooling along the altar's grooves.
Those lines were not mere decoration, but channels for the sacrificial rite.
Blood flowed along the carved totem patterns and seeped into the ground, like the whisper of some awakened will.
Beneath the ice, those inscriptions began to emit an eerie blue glow, like breath from another world.
All around, Snow Oath warriors knelt in orderly ranks.
They wore ice-white robes and fragments of armor, their masks as stern as carved statues.
Yet scorching flames