That night, the Luming Tribe brimmed with festive joy, every snow house brightly lit. The blazing hearth fires shone through the narrow windows, lending warmth even to the snow blanketing the earth. A disk-like moon hung in the sky, seemingly close enough to touch.
They drained their cups and filled them again. The entire Luming Tribe celebrated, offering toasts to their benefactors. With Xue’er stopping him, Mu Bai could not drink, yet simply sitting there, smiling at everyone's happiness, left him intoxicated too.
Outside the windows, goose-feather snow began to fall, quietly listening to the joy and peace of the human world.
By the following morning, Mu Bai's injuries were no longer serious, and Chen Jianduan and Lu Nanshen bid each other farewell. Everyone in the Luming Tribe came to see them off. As they rose into the sky on the sword and looked down, the whole tribe was wiping away tears. Xue’er ran after them, crying and calling out, unwilling to let them leave.
But leave they must. Warm though this place was, they did not belong here. They were only passing travelers.
Without a word along the way, the Giant Sword sped toward the Sword Sect.
Even in the vast Northern Plains, the Sword Sect was a renowned great sect, its grounds built atop an ice mountain towering ten thousand zhang high. From afar, its expanse of jade palaces and jeweled towers glittered beneath the sunlight, crystalline and translucent, radiating rainbow light. Ordinary disciples relied on teleportation formations to enter and leave, but aboard Xiu Zun Chen Jianduan's Giant Sword, the three flashed into that halo like a streak of light.
The palaces had looked crystalline from afar, but up close, they appeared even more majestic and imposing. Ice orchids and jade cypresses, velvet deer and white cranes,