Greater Yang was the utmost in soaring, the utmost in manifestation, the utmost in height.
Among the Five Virtues and the models of the five affairs, it was luminous virtue; within Yin-Yang, it was the Ancestral Source of All Suns, the immortal truth; within thunderbolts, it was the root of Soaring Transformation, the principle of Heaven; within Qi Radiance, it was the source of manifestation, conjoined radiance.
-Taijing Sun-Imaging Scripture
Night River.
Endless night filled the heavens, dark and lightless.
Boundless glaciers covered the sea, their faults and crevasses visible everywhere, like the scales of dragons and serpents. Terrifyingly cold winds ravaged this vast frozen expanse, with not a trace of human presence.
This was the final place on Heavenly Huo's passage into Cold Gate, and the sacred ground where the ancients had offered sacrifices to Thunder Marsh.
A solitary temple stood atop an ice cliff. Its walls and roof, forged from Mysterious Wood and thunder crystals, were damaged, and the divine statue within had collapsed and shattered. One could just make out an ancient god with a dragon's head and a human body.
Only the dark-violet plaque still hung there, wreathed in thunderbolts, its ancient characters shining:
[Blameless Temple]
Some thirty feet before the temple lay the cliff's tip, where a man stood.
His features were strikingly handsome, his figure slender. He wore gold-and-white Daoist robes and carried a longsword.
UPV
Divine patterns kept spreading and breaking across his face. A great sun seemed to emerge within his golden pupils as he gazed at the sky farther south, as though awaiting something's arrival.
The Sword Immortal Yu Hua, Li Shangmi.
The man quietly studied a white, layered jade pendant in his hand, sighed softly, then put it away within his Inner Scenery.
It was the token his junior sister