The Frostbloom Garden was not a prison, but it was a gilded observatory. From his bed of furs and spirit-silk, Lin Xuan became a scholar of whispers. His mother, Lin Feng, was his primary source, her voice a soft, constant stream of love, worry, and unconscious revelation. The maids, thinking him asleep or too simple to understand, spoke freely. Elders who visited his mother to discuss "resource allocation" did so with poorly veiled condescension.
It was through these fragments, pieced together with an assassin's ear for truth, that he built the map of his new world.
The Lin Family. One of the four pillar clans of the Northern Frostwind Dynasty. Masters of glacial and water arts, their power rooted in the eternal ice of the continent. Their territory spanned frozen mountains and subterranean geothermal springs, a testament to their control over the duality of cold and hidden warmth.
And then he learned of the cultivation realms. The names sent a chill through him far deeper than any his physique could produce.
His great-grandfather, Patriarch Lin Zongyan, was a Soul Fusion Realm expert.
The knowledge was a bucket of ice water. In his past life, Lin Xuan had been a master of the Veil-Piercing realm, a formidable assassin in the Southern lands. But Soul Fusion… that was a legend. A cultivator who had begun to merge their soul with their comprehension of the world, whose spiritual sense could envelop a mountain range, who could perceive the truth of things beyond mere sight. To such a being, any active concealment, any foreign technique thrumming in a one-year-old's meridians, would shine like a beacon. The Celestial Yang Ascent Technique worked because it was foundational, internal, and harmonizing—it felt like a natural, if improbable, balancing act of his own physique. But any overt technique from his past—a shadow-step, a killing intent projection—would be instantly flagged as alien, monstrous.
The elders, like the severe Lin Mei and the scholarly Lin Bo, were at the Elemental Intent Realm. They had moved beyond manipulating ice or water; they understood its essence, its Intent. Their will could freeze a summer river with a glance. Their perception was razor-sharp within their element.
No more assassination techniques, Lin Xuan understood with finality. The ghost of the Sharpest Shadow had to be buried deeper than any grave. His survival depended on becoming Lin Xuan of the Lin Family, wholly and completely. He had to learn their ways, their arts, and make them his own. It was the only safe path.
This realization dovetailed horribly with the second, more visceral threat: the Celestial Yin Physique was not solved. It was pacified. The gentle, nascent Yang energy he cultivated was like a dam of twigs and mud holding back a glacial lake. The technique's scriptures flashed in his memory: "The greater the Yin, the fiercer its awakening. Suppression breeds cataclysm." As he aged, as his body and spirit naturally grew stronger, the Yin within him would swell. If his hard-won Yang couldn't grow in perfect, escalating harmony, the dam would break. The "awakening" would not be a ascension to power, but an internal explosion that would freeze him from the inside out, a beautiful, crystalline statue of his own paradox.
His existence was a precarious walk on a wire of ice, over an abyss, under the gaze of living glaciers.
It was in this state of acute, silent calculation that the most famous doctor in the Northern Region arrived.
He was called Old Man Gui, a friend of Patriarch Lin Zongyan from their wild youth. He did not look like a legendary physician. He was short, round, with a bald head and cheeks perpetually flushed from strong wine. He smelled of herbs, frost-mint, and something faintly alcoholic. But his eyes, when they focused, were like polished river stones—deep, knowing, and missing nothing.
He bustled into the Frostbloom Garden with the Patriarch himself, a rare occurrence that made Lin Feng kneel in formal greeting, her heart in her throat.
"So this is the little enigma," Old Man Gui boomed, his voice too loud for the quiet pavilion. He waved away formalities and plopped himself on a stool beside Lin Xuan's day-bed. "Let Old Gui have a look."
His examination was nothing like Lin Bo's jade tablet scans. He prodded Lin Xuan's tiny, weak limbs with thick fingers that somehow conveyed immense sensitivity. He peered into his eyes, his ears, his mouth. He placed a warm palm over Lin Xuan's chest and closed his eyes.
A different kind of energy flowed into Lin Xuan—not probing and cold like the Patriarch's, but meandering, curious, and deeply alive. It felt like the sap in ancient trees, like the slow pulse of deep earth. It wandered through his fragile meridians, danced around the swirling vortex of Yin and the fledgling spark of Yang at his core.
Old Man Gui's bushy eyebrows climbed his forehead. He hummed, a low, rumbling sound. The examination took a long time.
Finally, he opened his eyes and leaned back, blowing out a breath that smelled of medicinal lozenges. "Well. He's alive."
Lin Feng's held breath escaped in a shudder. Patriarch Lin Zongyan remained impassive. "Your insight, old friend."
"Celestial Yin Physique. Male manifestation. Textbook case for a swift, tragic end," Old Man Gui said bluntly, picking up a spirit-fruit from a nearby table and biting into it. "Seen records of three such cases in the last millennium. One died in the womb. Two lived less than six months. Their bodies simply… winked out. The Yin consumed their foundational Yang before it could even properly form."
He pointed the half-eaten fruit at Lin Xuan, who stared back with deliberate, infantile blankness. "This one… shouldn't be here. But he is. His life force, while thin as the first ice of the season, is stable. The Yin is… calm. Not gone, not diminished. Just… occupied. It's as if…" He chewed thoughtfully. "As if it found something interesting to play with inside. A puzzle to solve before it devours the prize."
Lin Xuan kept his spirit utterly still, his internal dance of Yin and Yang in its slow, passive rhythm. Don't see the technique. See only the effect.
"Can he be cured?" Lin Feng asked, her voice tight.
"Cured?" Old Man Gui barked a laugh. "Girl, you don't 'cure' a divine physique. You survive it, or you harness it. Right now, he's surviving. A miracle, truly." He turned to Lin Zongyan. "Old friend, your family's resources and this mother's devotion bought him this year. But it's a temporary lease. The awakening crisis will come. It might be at five years, at ten, at his first attempt to channel spiritual energy formally. When it does, the Yang within him must be its absolute, perfect equal. A single grain's difference in potency, and…" He made a gesture like a bubble popping.
"And how does one find such perfect, divine Yang?" Patriarch Lin asked, his voice low.
Old Man Gui shrugged, finishing his fruit. "Heaven's fortune. A once-in-an-aeon treasure. A cultivation art lost to time. Or," he said, his river-stone eyes drifting back to Lin Xuan, "this little miracle finds a way to make his own. His body seems to be trying." He said the last part lightly, as a speculative joke.
No one laughed.
After the two towering figures left, the Frostbloom Garden felt both heavier and more fragile. Lin Feng gathered Lin Xuan into her arms, holding him as if he might dissolve.
Lin Xuan, his head against her shoulder, looked out at the eternal snow.
Soul Fusion. Elemental Intent. A ticking time bomb of celestial ice. A doctor who sees too much.
The path was clear, and it was terrifyingly narrow. He could not hide a foreign identity; he had to build a genuine one. He could not suppress his destiny; he had to race ahead of it, forging the Yang to meet the rising Yin with Lin Family tools alone.
His strength was now "ordinary" for a one-year-old—a monumental victory won in secret. But ordinary was nothing in the Lin Family. It was the starting point of a desperate siege.
He closed his eyes, and in the darkness behind his lids, he began, not for the first time, to mentally rehearse the most basic foundational stance of the Lin Family's public cultivation manual, the Frost-Foundation Sutra, which he'd heard a guard reciting outside his window.
The first trial was over. The second trial—life in the Lin Clan—had now truly begun.