Ten thousand paces above the northern horizon. There, the air thinned into the freezing void of the high stratosphere, the jagged spires of the Cloud-Splitting Mountain Range rose like frozen dragon teeth piercing the heavens.
Here, unending blizzards howled across knife-edge ridges of blue ice-slow ice. For thousands of years, this alpine wasteland had been deemed utterly impassable to mortal men and ordinary beast clans. The thin air was soaked with crackling sky electricity. It drew fierce torrents of purple heavenly lightning that danced across the barren granite summits every afternoon.
Yet it was in this unforgiving crucible that the greatest load-bearing timber in the three realms was born: the Millennial Storm-Cedar.
A blinding flash of solar gold sliced through the freezing cloud bank.
Da Peng, the Golden-Winged Roc King, banked sharply against a ninety-knot gale, his huge thirty-meter wingspan shimmering with golden astral flame. His raptor eyes, gleaming like polished citrine, scanned the jagged ridges miles below with tiny clarity.
He wasn’t searching for living green trees. The Safe hall lived under a strict promise of ecological stewardship decreed by Lin Xiao. No living, ancient spirit conifer would be felled for mere carpentry. Instead, Da Peng searched the deep ice-slow ravines and shattered storm-ledges for fallen titans. Ancient storm-cedars that had stood for eight or nine hundred years, enduring hundreds of direct strikes from heavenly lightning bolts until they finally fell under the sheer weight of winter snowdrifts.
