[Half a month later, you arrived at Xi City.]
[The city was even more desolate than you had imagined. Its walls were built from grayish-white frozen earth, their surfaces coated with a thin layer of frost that gleamed with a cold, hard metallic sheen beneath the dim sunlight, as though the entire city had frozen stiff in this long winter.]
[There were few pedestrians on the streets. The occasional passersby were all wrapped in heavy animal hides, hunching their backs as they hurried along. A biting chill filled the air, and exhaled white breath instantly condensed into tiny ice crystals that pattered down.]
[You did not linger in the city, finding a secluded inn to stay in.]
[Ten-thousand-year Profound Ice Marrow formed through the natural accumulation and condensation of ice-attribute primal energy over ten thousand years. Wherever it formed had to be a convergence point for the cold, yin energy of the earth veins, perhaps hidden in an underground cold pool or concealed within a frozen rift.]
[Though Blue Silver Grass was the most commonplace plant in the world, its roots were extremely sensitive to changes in water and soil. Wherever underground cold currents ran stronger, wherever the soil was utterly devoid of life, wherever temperatures defied common sense-none of it escaped its perception.]
[In the days that followed, you roamed the streets and alleys daily, sending the roots of your Martial Soul deep into the frozen earth, tracing the courses of underground cold currents to investigate their convergence points. You also "communicated" with the scattered clumps of Blue Silver Grass that still stubbornly took root within the city, borrowing their "eyes" to perceive what lay beneath this frozen city.]
[On the evening of the tenth day, you finally detected something unusual in an abandoned courtyard in the southern part