Overnight between Sunday and Monday, as Gu Changsheng banked the courtyard charcoal stoves and checked the children’s quilts. Second Prince Qian Ye really thinks a bucket of frost-worms in the canal will force this city to kneel, Gu Changsheng thought dryly. He clearly has never seen what a hot pot of mutton soup and ginger does to a winter chill.
a bizarre, bone-piercing frost descended upon Sky-Crown City two full months ahead of winter.
At 1:00 AM, under cover of pitch darkness. Thirty black-cloaked water-cultivators secretly hired by Second Prince Qian Ye crept onto the stone sluice bridges of the capital’s nine major waterways and dumped ten breeding vats—containing ten thousand writhing. Finger-length [Rank 3 Cold-Marrow Frost Worms]—directly into the flowing canal currents.
Feeding on the mud at the bottom of the canals, the ten thousand Frost Worms exhaled clouds of invisible, underground Yin-frost poison that seeped rapidly through the city’s water-table and brick pavements.
By 5:30 AM on Monday morning, the temperature across all nine districts of Sky-Crown City had plunged thirty degrees below freezing!
Thick white hoarfrost coated the roofs of five hundred thousand homes, water buckets inside mortal kitchens froze into solid blocks of ice. A gray, chilling fog rolled out of the canals into the narrow residential lanes.
