Winter Valley lay silent, without a soul or a mountain path. Only the Black Flood Dragon practiced his writing, stroke by stroke.
Seen from high above, the winding ice and snow along the valley floor were covered in characters, like a piece of artwork. He had written a long passage along the ice. Finishing the final stroke, he stilled his claw and breathed two streams of white vapor from his nostrils.
He surveyed his surroundings. A thick dead tree lay beside the stream, half buried in snow. He swam over and sprawled lazily across it to rest.
The mountains were so quiet. How comfortable.
But the temperature was rather low. Even sheltered from the wind, his scales were ice-cold and beginning to frost over. His eyelids grew heavy, and sleepiness kept creeping over him.
He decided to rest a little, write out what he had learned once more afterward, then spend a couple of days at the Medicine King Temple.
The sky darkened again. Lead-gray clouds pressed low overhead; it looked as though snow would soon fall again.
Just as he was about to get up and continue practicing, he abruptly raised his head and looked skyward.
He had caught a small heat source within the thick clouds. In his Thermal Sensing vision, it glowed with scorching heat. Its temperature was unusually high, and it moved extremely fast. It was no bird! His great head turned, tracking the heat source closely.
Soon, a faint orange glow seeped from deep within the heavy clouds. It grew steadily brighter, tinting the surrounding clouds with warmth.
The heat source suddenly burst through the clouds, trailing a long streak as it plunged diagonally downward!
His brain worked at lightning speed. From its speed and direction, he calculated its approximate landing point in an instant.