The Snow Empress appeared before Yang Xingchen in her soul form. With a lift of her slender hand, an ice bridge instantly "grew" from beside his feet into the area within the city walls.
"The guards nearby will return in five minutes. Hurry."
Yang Xingchen gave the Snow Empress an OK gesture, held the railing, and jogged forward.
Although he really wanted to say that the Snow Empress resembled a certain singing ice queen, Yang Xingchen ultimately kept it to himself to avoid punishment from the great god 404.
The moment Yang Xingchen's foot touched the ground of the Soul Hunting Forest, the ice bridge behind him silently shattered into a sky full of glittering ice crystals.
"Snow Empress navigation, activate! Quick, tell me which way to go next! Ow!"
"This Empress is not your tool. Mind your tone."
Visibly displeased in her soul form, the Snow Empress condensed a marble-sized ball of ice in the air and sent it knocking against Yang Xingchen's head with a little force.
Having barely felt any pain, Yang Xingchen scratched the spot where he had been hit and followed behind the Snow Empress with a cheeky grin.
"So I still have to fish by the water?!"
Looking utterly baffled, Yang Xingchen pointed at the sparkling lake before him.
He had thought the Snow Empress would take him somewhere mysterious, but in the end, he still had to rely on the old method.
"What else did you expect? Did you really think you could fish directly in the river of time with that Martial Soul of yours as you are now?"
The Snow Empress looked at Yang Xingchen as though he were an idiot. This child was always sensible one moment and ridiculous the next.
Sometimes he was more mature and calculating than an adult, yet at other times he was as innocent as a child and prone to foolishness.
She truly could not understand why two such utterly opposite personalities would appear in the same person.
"Snow Empress, do you think I might catch another Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beast with a time or perhaps space attribute, in circumstances similar to yours?"
Yang Xingchen had only just cast his hook into the lake before him when he could not help starting to fantasize.
When the time came, with a Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beast as his first soul ring, what sort of heaven-defying Soul Skill would he obtain?
"Ah! Snow Empress, who taught you to put ice down people's backs?!"
"This Empress saw that you had already started dreaming, so I specially brought you some ice to perk you up. No need to thank me."
Yang Xingchen had never imagined that the Snow Empress had a mischievous side, but given that he could not beat her at present...
In the end, Yang Xingchen could only glare fiercely at the Snow Empress before turning his gaze back to his fishing rod.
Perhaps because he had changed locations, however, Yang Xingchen did not have as good a feel for it as before.
He fished continuously for two to four hours, either going ages without a bite or hauling up one piece of scrap metal after another.
After all that work, apart from a few Gold Soul Coins he had caught, everything else was worthless.
"Snow Empress, I suspect this fishing spot is no good. Back when I fished at our village, I hit the jackpot on the first cast and fished you up."
"But now, after fishing here for so long, all I've caught is junk. I've even caught two pairs of red underpants!"
As though utterly drained, Yang Xingchen lay on the ground with a numb expression, staring at the bright moon already hanging directly overhead.
"These are exactly the things someone of your current strength should be catching, all right? You only managed to catch this Empress because heaven took pity on you."
Despite saying that, the Snow Empress actually wondered whether this place was unsuitable for Yang Xingchen too. Otherwise, why did he keep fishing up garbage?
Just as both of them fell silent, a powerful tug suddenly came from the fishing rod.
"This pull is every bit as strong as when I caught the Snow Empress. Looks like I've finally hooked a big one!"
Yang Xingchen was just about to exert his strength when the big catch suddenly pulled hard, making his feet slip.
The fiercely struggling catch dragged him, fishing rod and all, toward the water step by step.
"Snow Empress, come help! The ground here is too slippery. I can't keep my footing!"
At that moment, the Snow Empress had no time to criticize Yang Xingchen for not knowing how to use his second Martial Soul. Her crimson lips parted slightly, and she blew out a stream of Cold Qi.
The ground that had been slippery a moment ago hardened in the blink of an eye, and two ice pillars even appeared in front of Yang Xingchen for him to brace against.
With the ice pillars to brace against, Yang Xingchen quickly adjusted his posture, got up, planted both legs against the pillars, and pulled the line backward with all his strength.
Yang Xingchen remained locked in a stalemate with the big catch in the water for a full quarter of an hour before it finally lost its earlier strength.
"Snow Empress, keep an eye on it! Don't let the big one get away!"
After dozens of casts, Yang Xingchen had roughly figured out how different things reacted when hooked by the fishing rod.
If the fishing rod hooked something alive, it would struggle hard out of instinct.
If the fishing rod hooked an inanimate object, it would generally offer little resistance, but the more valuable it was, the heavier it would be when hooked.
Just like when he had fished up the Snow Empress, sealed inside the God Sealing Platform-the weight had nearly reached the limit of what the fishing line could bear.
The instant the big catch broke the surface, the Snow Empress, floating beside Yang Xingchen, immediately froze it.
A basketball-sized lump of ice carried on through the air with its momentum and landed in front of Yang Xingchen.
Through the ice encasing it, Yang Xingchen saw a grayish-white sphere the size of a ping-pong ball.
"A Soul Spirit? I didn't expect your luck to be so good that you could actually fish up something like this."
The Snow Empress crooked a finger, and the ice-encased Soul Spirit floated over to her on its own. She curiously examined this thing that should only have appeared ten thousand years later.
The instant she had broken free from the river of space-time, the Snow Empress had relied on her nearly seven hundred thousand years of cultivation to forcibly obtain knowledge that did not belong to her era.
However, the Snow Empress could not casually speak of this knowledge. If she affected the development of space-time, space-time would discover her.
"Snow Empress, does this Soul Spirit's attribute match my Martial Soul?"
Seeing that the Snow Empress knew what a Soul Spirit was, Yang Xingchen was initially startled. According to the original story, the Snow Empress at this point in the Douluo timeline should have had no knowledge of such things.
But when he thought about how he had brought the Snow Empress from ten thousand years in the future to a time before Tang San had become a god, it hardly mattered if she knew a little more.
"A Space-Time Soul Spirit, with a certain degree of intelligence as well. However, it is only a hundred years old."
The Snow Empress lightly tapped the Soul Spirit with her finger, and the ice encasing it turned into a sky full of ice crystals.
Freed from the ice, the Space-Time Soul Spirit sensed danger and abruptly darted toward the lake, trying to escape that way.
"You think I'd let a cooked duck fly away?!"
Reacting, Yang Xingchen swung the fishing rod in his hand and instantly bound the Space-Time Soul Spirit as it shot away.
Once the Space-Time Soul Spirit had been pulled back, Yang Xingchen grabbed it without another word and refined it in an instant!
"This Empress suggests you wash your shoes while you have water here. Who knows which Soul Beast's dung you stepped in to actually fish up a Soul Spirit."
Watching the translucent silver-blue little arowana circling Yang Xingchen nonstop, the Snow Empress had now encountered a creature with such good luck for the second time.
The last one with luck this good had been the Sky Dream Ice Silkworm, who had eaten his way into becoming a Million-Year Soul Beast on ten-thousand-year ice marrow.
"Now that you have a Soul Spirit, whenever this Empress releases a seal, it can not only share some of the pressure on you but also absorb the power within to improve its strength."
Before Yang Xingchen could respond, the Snow Empress released the first seal, and immense power surged into Yang Xingchen's meridians and dantian.
The more seals she released, the more power she could draw upon, and the more secure her later trip to the Far North to "eat" her other self would be.
With her other self to help her, and with her current form being more akin to a Soul Spirit...
At the very least, when her cultivation reached a million years, she would have no need to face a lightning tribulation as she had before.