CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
High atop the floating peak of the Ice-Mirror Immortal Palace, the bronze Sect Assembly Bell rang nine times in rapid succession.
Ten thousand inner and core disciples of the Ice-Mirror Sect tumbled out of their unheated stone dormitories, rubbing their red, swollen noses and stamping their numb feet on the frozen courtyard tiles.
Even though they were the proud disciples of Frost-Mirror Star’s ruling sect, their daily lives were downright miserable. Because Sect Master Han Jue insisted that “true ice cultivators must freeze their bodies to awaken the Extreme-Yin Dao,” none of the disciple dormitories were allowed to burn a single lump of Fire-Charcoal!
Every disciple was forced to wear a single layer of paper-thin white silk robes and light cloth shoes in minus-two-hundred-degree weather, sleeping on solid blocks of blue glacier ice at night. Meanwhile, ninety percent of the Spirit Stones the sect collected from charcoal taxes went straight into Sect Master Han Jue’s personal treasury and the elders’ heated jade pavilions.
“Brrr... Senior Brother Lin, do you know why the Sect Master rang the war bell?” a nineteen-year-old inner disciple named Zhou Xiao whispered, his teeth chattering like a pair of wooden clappers as he blew warm air onto his purple, frostbitten knuckles. “Did a snow-beast tide attack the crystal mines?”
