Ring 8 → Lagrange-3 Radiation Belt – 9 hours 51 minutes after the Red Lotus massacre
They fall.
Not in panic.
In perfect, deliberate free-fall.
Liàn Xing leads, coat spread like dark wings, half-formed spear shaft strapped across his back.
Lan Shuyin is tucked against his left side, one arm locked around his waist, frost trailing from her boots in a spiral that keeps the wind off both of them.
Zhenxing rides the spear shaft like a surfboard, loli-sized, twin tails whipping in the slipstream.
Below them, Ring 8's traffic lanes are a glowing river of chaos. Above, the first wave of hunter ships crests the horizon: Azure pagoda-cruisers unfolding into attack formation, Moonlit Ice cutters leaving frost-wakes that freeze entire lanes solid, Heavenly Sword interceptors trailing golden plasma tails.
Forty-two Nascent Soul auras ignite like angry suns.
The bounty counter hits three hundred million and keeps climbing.
Liàn Xing angles their fall toward the outer radiation belt (the fastest, most suicidal route to Lagrange-3).
Lan Shuyin's voice is calm in his ear, carried by a thread of shared qi.
"You're aiming for the Frostbite-7 carcass route. That belt will cook us in twelve seconds without shielding."
"Ten seconds," he corrects. "I'll give us twenty."
Zhao's voice crackles over the golden comm-beacon now clipped to Liàn Xing's coat.
"Need a wingman, rival?"
Liàn Xing glances up.
A golden streak bisects the sky (Zhao on his reformed sword-surfboard, nine rings blazing).
"Thought you were going home, sword idiot," Lan Shuyin snaps.
"And miss the fun part?" Zhao laughs. "Never."
He slots in on Liàn Xing's right, forming a perfect triangle.
Three monsters falling toward hell.
The radiation belt looms: a wall of white-hot static laced with rogue tribulation lightning. Ships that enter without military-grade shielding last 4.7 seconds.
They have ten.
Liàn Xing unstraps the spear shaft.
"Shield on my mark."
Zhao's rings spin faster.
Lan Shuyin tightens her grip.
"Mark."
Liàn Xing burns two percent of the Celestial Seed.
Silver-black starlight explodes outward in a perfect sphere five hundred metres wide.
They hit the belt at 0.14c.
Outside the sphere, reality becomes television snow made of gamma knives.
Inside, temperature stabilises at exactly zero (warm and cold at the same time). Radiation becomes harmless background noise.
The yin poison in Lan Shuyin's veins retreats with a hiss only she can hear.
Zhao whoops.
"Eating a half-step Soul Transformation strike for breakfast was one thing. Eating an entire death belt? New personal record!"
They punch through the worst section (the frozen carcass of Ice-Carrier Frostbite-7, a kilometre-long wreck locked mid-explosion, radiation so intense it glows white).
Normal ships die here.
The starlight sphere lasts twenty-one seconds.
At second twenty-two the shield collapses.
They emerge on the far side trailing molten hull fragments from Zhao's swords and frozen air from Lan Shuyin's aura.
Behind them, the hunter fleet slams into the belt and disintegrates.
Three cutters flash-freeze and shatter.
One pagoda-cruiser's crew cooks alive inside their own hull.
The rest pull back, screaming for reinforcements.
They are safe.
For exactly eight minutes.
Because eight minutes is how long it takes Matriarch Lán Xuě Huā (half-step Soul Transformation, Lan Shuyin's grandmother) to burn fifteen thousand years of lifespan and step across the radiation belt in a single forbidden stride.
The void behind them lights up like a second sun.
A woman in flowing white robes appears in open vacuum, hair unbound, eyes pure glacial blue. One sleeve is already frost-burned away from the crossing. Her aura cracks reality into frozen fractals.
She raises one hand.
Space folds.
Their momentum dies.
They freeze mid-flight, encased in a sphere of absolute-zero ice fifteen kilometres across.
Inside, temperature plummets to minus-227 in a heartbeat. Blood begins to crystallise in veins. Breath turns to snowflakes.
Matriarch Lán's voice arrives as pressure inside their skulls (gentle, ancient, merciless).
"Shuyin. Come home. Bring the boy's corpse. The palace will forgive everything. Your poison will be cured. Your future secured."
Lan Shuyin's entire body goes rigid (centuries of conditioning slamming back into place).
Liàn Xing feels her start to pull away.
He tightens his arm around her waist.
"No."
He plants his feet against the inner surface of the ice sphere and faces the matriarch through fifteen kilometres of frozen void.
Zhao's nine rings ignite into a golden mandala, ready.
Zhenxing grows to full celestial size, wings spreading until they fill half the sphere.
Liàn Xing's voice carries through vacuum itself.
"Matriarch Lán Xuě Huā.
Your granddaughter chose me over your palace.
Respect her choice, or lose her forever."
The matriarch's eyes narrow to glacial slits.
The ice sphere tightens.
Hull plating groans. Bones creak.
Lan Shuyin steps forward, places her palm against the inner surface.
Frost explodes outward from her hand, racing across the sphere, meeting her grandmother's ice head-on.
Two absolute-zero domains clash.
For one perfect heartbeat the void crystallises into a snowflake fifteen kilometres wide (perfect, beautiful, lethal).
Then the snowflake shatters.
The sphere explodes outward in a ring of frozen shrapnel.
Matriarch Lán Xuě Huā floats in the wreckage of her own technique, one sleeve completely gone, blood frozen on her lip for the first time in six centuries.
Shock.
Real, ancient shock.
Lan Shuyin's eyes are winter storms made of starlight.
"Goodbye, grandmother."
Liàn Xing grabs her hand.
Zhao grabs his shoulder.
Zhenxing shrinks and clings to the spear shaft.
They shoot forward into the Lagrange-3 debris field, trailing shards of ancestral ice and teenage rebellion.
Behind them, the matriarch does not pursue.
She simply watches them disappear into the graveyard, expression unreadable.
Then she smiles (small, sad, almost proud).
And turns back toward the rings.
Inside the falling group, silence.
Lan Shuyin is shaking harder than during the radiation crossing.
Liàn Xing pulls her against his chest without thinking.
She buries her face in his coat and holds on like he is the only real thing left in the universe.
Zhao pretends to study the stars very intently.
Zhenxing pats Lan Shuyin's head.
"Welcome to the family, ice princess."
The debris field opens before them.
The Heavenly Forge Ark waits.
Three months of hell-training, forging, and impossible growth begin now.
And the Nine Heavens will never be ready for what comes out.