"Who are you?"
White Snow tried to speak, but found her voice caught in her throat. The Golden Light Pillars poured into every pore of her body like solid magma.
Pain.
The pain of flesh could not begin to compare. This was a searing agony that burned up from deep within her bone marrow, as though someone were dismantling her bones one by one and reforging them in stellar fire.
"Who am I?" The voice laughed in her mind, its laughter booming like great bells, shaking her divine soul. "Thirty thousand years ago, they called me the Nine Luminaries Star Phoenix. Now? Just an old bag of bones waiting to die."
"What... are you here for..."
"To give you some tender loving pain."
The searing agony abruptly intensified. White Snow let out a piercing cry-not human speech, but the most primal shriek of a phoenix.
Her feathers were burning, every single one, their silvery-white tips turning into golden torches. Flames seeped out through the gaps between her bones, burning away impurities, burning through her marrow, tempering every inch of her flesh anew. She smelled her own feathers scorching and heard her bones crackling. Her wings unfurled in the flames, stretching, growing longer and stronger.
"Thirty thousand years, and at last a little phoenix with the spatial bloodline has come." A nearly imperceptible tenderness touched the old Star Phoenix's voice. "Just a little too plump."
"I... ain't fat..."
"Still stubborn as ever."
Flames surged through her bloodline. White Snow's divine sense began to blur, and countless fragmented images flashed before her eyes.
She saw Ye Han.
The Ye Han before her eyes looked as he had ten years ago. Wearing a blue cloth shirt washed pale, his fingers thick-knuckled, he squatted on a hillside and cradled a plump white fledgling he