February had arrived.
Snow still fell unceasingly on Mount Kunlun, leaving it sealed in ice, but the ice and snow at its foot had begun to melt, gradually forming countless slender mountain streams. They burbled along, the sound of water mingling with the crisp, pleasing clatter of broken ice striking stone.
With the True Lord's decree of judgment handed down, the condemned at the mountain's foot had long since departed. Most had returned to the far western snowfields of the Western Regions to live out their lives in confinement. Only a very few with clean records had quietly slipped away during the withdrawal, thereafter concealing their names and identities, their whereabouts unknown. The Ice and Snow Palace, once immensely powerful among both Daoists and demonic cultivators, thus had its sect abolished and its name erased, and before long, the world forgot it entirely.
Its people had left, but naturally, they could not take away the shipload upon shipload of spiritual materials, treasures, canonical texts, and secret manuals they had brought. All the canonical texts and secret manuals, along with two-thirds of the spiritual materials and treasures, went to Three Pure Ones Mountain. True Person Baoying of Goddess Peak led some two hundred Three Pure Ones disciples to collect them, then used these surrendered offerings as the foundation for establishing a new sect on the Ice and Snow Palace's former grounds, to spread the orthodox Daoist Great Yin Dao Lineage.
Even the new sect's name had already been settled: the "Suyào Sect." The characters had presumably been taken from the Taiyin Emperor's honorific title.
Moreover, the name "Snow Country of the Western Regions," which sounded suspiciously separatist and insular, had also passed into history forever. Now, at the Suyào Sect's proposal, people called the vast snowfields north of Mount Tian in