The blizzard was an endless white fury, a grinding wheel of ice that threatened to wear them down to nothing. Cold did not merely seep into the bones here; it invaded the spirit, threatening to extinguish the very fire of consciousness.
Chu Hongying used her Storm-Piercing Spear as a staff, her knuckles white around its frozen shaft. The once-vibrant red tassel was a solid lump of ice. Each step was a battle against the deep, suffocating snow, and the crimson spots she coughed onto its pristine surface were the only points of violent color in the monochrome landscape. Gu Changfeng walked stubbornly at her side, a living bulwark whose broad shoulders intercepted the wind's sharpest edges. "The watchtower," he grunted, his voice rasping from lungs raw with cold air. "Just ahead. We can shelter there. Make a fire."
Lu Wanning brought up the rear, a silent sentinel of their suffering. The cloth wrapped around her fingertips, meant to staunch the bleeding from constantly manipulating her needles, was frozen stiff, a brittle shell of bloodied fabric. The silver needles in her hand quivered, not with the cold, but with the dissonant symphony of energies she sensed within her companions. "The aftershocks of the earth's pulse continue," she announced, her voice calm but strained. "Your powers... they are not just resonating. They are clashing, adapting under duress. It feels as if they are being forged together in a crucible not of our choosing."
Shen Yuzhu stopped dead in his tracks. The intricate, mirror-like patterns in his heterochromatic eyes swirled wildly, no longer just reflecting the physical world but tracing the invisible currents of power and pain that flowed through the land itself. "It is not us," he whispered, the words barely audible over the gale. His face was a mask of stark white against the gloom. "It is this land... it is dying. These convulsions are its death throes. And its agony... it screams through us. Through these 'Marks' we carry."
They followed his haunted gaze. There, at the edge of vision, stood the watchtower. It was a skeleton of timber and stone, half-devoured by the relentless ice and snow, a monument to a forgotten war. At its peak, a tattered wolf banner was locked in a frozen death, its shredded fabric snapping in the wind with a sound like tearing flesh.
Inside the skeletal structure, time had surrendered to the cold. The air was thick with the ghosts of a final, desperate stand.
Chu Hongying's hand, almost of its own volition, reached out and traced the characters gouged into the wooden wall. These were not carved with tools, but with violence and will—the point of a spear, the strength of a fingerbone, a burning, unyielding resolve that had outlasted the man who left it.
"Iron rusts without blood; men die without heart."
"The gate never refused me. It is I who refused to turn back."
The script was a furious, chaotic scar, each stroke radiating a bloody-minded defiance that time had not diminished.
"Helian Sha's words," Shen Yuzhu stated, his voice flat. His mirrored pupils reflected the grooves, seeming to read the echoes of memory trapped within. "This place was his sanctuary. His final stand. He was broken here, but his Dao... his path... it remains."
The moment Chu Hongying's skin made contact with the cold, hard truth of those words, the Crimson Flame Blood Seal on her arm erupted in a wave of searing heat, a brand of living fire.
A vision, vivid and brutal, slammed into her consciousness—
She saw him. Helian Sha. A mountain of a man brought low, his armor shattered, his body a canvas of gore. He stood with his back to the burning, collapsing watchtower, a final, defiant silhouette against the flames. With a last, guttural roar that held more command than plea, he hurled a wounded soldier into the relative safety of an inner chamber. His voice was the raw, tearing cry of a wolf caught in a steel trap:
"Go! LIVE! Our lives are the only proof we have! Proof that we are not the Empire's traitors—that we are the last shred of conscience left in this frozen hell!"
The sheer, self-immolating will of it—the choice to become a barrier, a final shield, even as the world burned down around him—struck a chord so deep within her it felt like a fundamental truth. Something dormant in her bloodline roared to life in recognition, shaking the foundations of her soul.
And then—nothing.
The howl of the wind, the whisper of falling snow, the frantic drumming of her own heart, the soft rush of blood in her ears—it all vanished. The world was plunged into an absolute, suffocating vacuum of sound. The four of them stared at each other in dawning horror, realizing that the faint, thrumming connection between their Marks was also being strangled, fading away as if an invisible hand had closed around the throat of their power.
From this unnatural silence, a figure coalesced like mist condensing into frost.
A girl. Her hair was the white of bleached bone, her eyes vacant and blind. Pale blue ice patterns, like living tattoos, swirled across her skin. She stood just inside the broken doorway, a part of the desolation.
"Lower the banner you should not raise," she said, her voice hollow, the echo of a snowflake falling into a bottomless crevasse. "Unless... you wish to join my kin. To become eternally silent specimens, preserved by the very Order you defy."
"Who are you?" Gu Changfeng's voice was a whip-crack in the silence. He stepped in front of Chu Hongying, the Cloud-Edge Blade clearing its sheath with a resonant hum.
"I am Yun Wuyue. One whom the North has forgotten." Her empty gaze swept past him, unerringly finding Chu Hongying. "And he... sent me. To look upon this 'Crimson Heart' of yours. To see if its beat is true, or merely the last spasm of a dying thing."
"He?" The name was a ghost on Chu Hongying's lips. Her eyes were dragged back to the furious script on the wall. In the dead air, the words seemed to pulse with a dark, mocking life.
The assault began without a whisper of warning.
Three Mirror-Soul Guards materialized, their forms flickering like reflections in broken glass. Their weapons were not steel, but blades of solidified Order, pure and annihilating. They moved in absolute silence, their target clear: Chu Hongying. The Blood Mark. The Empire's greatest perceived threat.
"Kan position! Energy convergence in three breaths!" Shen Yuzhu's command was a sharp, precise dart. The mirrors in his eyes were a spinning vortex now, no longer just reading the flows of energy but actively projecting, predicting, twisting the mathematical certainty of the enemy's assault.
Chu Hongying met them not with a defensive stance, but with an act of raw defiance. Her Storm-Piercing Spear swept down, not at the guards, but into the snow at her feet. The Blood Seal on her arm blazed like a miniature sun. Her power, the legacy of her blood, shot downward like a root seeking bitter water, violently seizing the disrupted flows of the land's ley lines and twisting them, corrupting the pristine streams of Imperial energy.
"Li Domain, unfold!" Lu Wanning's voice was clear as a bell. A dozen Azure-Silver needles flew from her sleeves, not to pierce flesh, but to stitch the air itself. They wove an intangible, flowing lattice of reason and boundary. The moment the Mirror-Soul Guards entered this "Li Domain," their fluid, silent movements turned sluggish, as if they were wading through deepening mud.
Gu Changfeng gave a wordless, guttural roar of pure effort. He slammed the Cloud-Edge Blade into the frozen earth. A visible shockwave emanated from him, and the chaotic blizzard around them writhed, the snowflakes swirling backward against the wind. For the first time, the power of his Reality Anchor unfolded completely—a bubble of absolute stability in the chaos, a fixed point that screamed "I AM HERE" to a universe trying to impose its own silent Order. The invasive energy of the Empire slammed against this invisible wall and recoiled, unable to breach it.
Four distinct forces, born of different struggles but bound by a shared fate, no longer just resonated. They braided together. They fused. A brilliant, terrifying pillar of four-colored light—crimson, silver, blue, and earthy brown—erupted from the heart of the ruined watchtower, punching a momentary, violent hole in the suffocating Field of Silence.
When the last Mirror-Soul Guard dissolved into motes of overloading, silent light, the sound of the world crashed back in—the wind a roaring beast, their own ragged breaths a symphony of survival. And on that wind, a faint, almost imperceptible sound—impossible to tell if it was a sigh of approval or a snort of derision—that faded as quickly as it came.
Deep within the Mirror Palace of the Imperial Capital, the new Emperor stood motionless before a wall that was not a wall, but a flowing, liquid mirror. It did not show his reflection. It showed a distant blizzard and the fading echo of a four-colored star.
His fingertips gently brushed the surface, feeling the residual tremor, the unique signature of the four Marks. A smile, so subtle it was little more than a thought, touched the corners of his mouth.
"The vessels..." he murmured to the vast, empty hall. "They begin to embrace the cost willingly." His eyes held a cold, paternal pride. "Helian Sha... you continue to serve impeccably as their whetstone."
His vision was clearer than any other. The brilliance they displayed, the power they unleashed in their desperation, only vindicated his "Mark-Seizing Plan." They would be tempered in the fires of rebellion and conflict with the wildcard that was the Wolf King. They would be purified. And when they were finally perfect, hollowed-out vessels brimming with the very essence of power they fought to control, he would simply... reach out and take them.
"Burn brightly, little sparks," the Emperor's gaze seemed to pierce the vast distance, settling on the fiery core of Chu Hongying's spirit. "Consume all the impurities of this chaotic world in your flame. And when nothing is left but the pure, absolute source of Order... it will be I who inherits the ashes."
Sound returned, but the silence within the watchtower was heavier, more profound.
Chu Hongying dragged air into her burning lungs, her eyes moving from Helian Sha's taunting words to the faces of her companions—exhausted, bloodied, but unbroken. She remembered the feral, gold-and-crimson glare of the Wolf King, the question he had thrown at her like a gauntlet, a question that had felt like a curse:
"Order is iron. Iron without blood will rust."
"If the foundation of your faith must be the spilled blood of those who follow you, Chu Hongying... do you have the stomach to bear that weight?"
She strode forward, the pain in her chest a dull, affirming ache. Her voice, when it came, was the ring of steel being quenched, sharp and final, cutting through the wind's mournful dirge:
"Helian Sha! Wolf King of the Northern Frontier! Enemy of the Crimson Heart! Look upon us now!"
"Our blood, from this moment, will flow for one purpose alone! For the beliefs we have chosen! For this land we have sworn to protect!"
"It will NOT be spent for your philosophy of ultimate instinct! It will NOT be drained to feed the Empire's cold, dead Order! We reject both your dead ends!"
It was Gu Changfeng who found it—the straightest, strongest remnant of a broken flagpole. Without a word, he carried it to the center of the ruin and drove it deep into the iron-hard ground, a declaration made with pure, physical force. Lu Wanning gathered the torn, stained remnants of cloth—scraps of uniform, pieces of old banners, the physical memory of the North's pride and pain. With her Azure-Silver threads and impossibly deft fingers, she began to stitch them together, weaving their fractured history into a new whole. Shen Yuzhu stepped forward, his fingertips glowing with cold, precise light. He did not touch the fabric, but traced two characters in the air above it. The light fell, branding the patchwork banner with two words that held the weight of a vow: "Crimson Heart."
When Chu Hongying took the banner, when she grounded her spear and raised the standard high, the cloth snapping in the gale with a sound like a challenge thrown at the sky, the endless storm of the Northern Frontier seemed, for a single, impossible heartbeat, to hold its breath.
Yun Wuyue stood motionless, her blind eyes perceiving the defiant will burning on that banner, feeling the answering, sharpening spike of Imperial Order converging on their location. She whispered into the wind, a message for a listener who was nowhere and everywhere at once.
"Your question," she said. "It has been answered. And the Empire... has most certainly received the message."
At the very apex of the world, where the ice was a million years deep, Helian Sha stood within the calm eye of the planetary storm. His golden, lupine eyes saw through the hundred miles of intervening blizzard. He saw the tiny, defiant speck of color rising from the ruins of his past. And he saw, too, the cold, calculating gaze of the Emperor in his distant glass prison, turning to observe the same flicker of light.
The Wolf King's lips peeled back from his teeth in a silent, savage grin that held no humor, only a feral anticipation.
"The pieces believe they have leaped from the board..." his voice was a low rumble, lost to the wind. "They do not yet understand. The true game... is only now beginning."
In the darkness at the end of the snow-blind night, those burning golden eyes slowly closed. And on the great, unseen board of the Northern Frontier's fate, a single tile clicked into place, moved by the one banner that should never have been raised, but was.