As the hundred-foot star-steel doors of the Abyssal Frost Vault swung wide open, a silence deeper than outer space settled over the doorway.
Nobody cheered. Nobody spoke loudly.
Even nine-year-old Jiang Tuntun lowered her wooden spoon. Toddler Little Fifth stopped kicking his heels on twelve-year-old Gu Nian’s shoulders, his big golden dragon eyes fixed silently on the center of the cavern.
Three hundred yards ahead, at the heart of the circular black-ice abyss, rose the Ten-Thousand-Year Frost Pillar—a jagged spire of cursed blue star-ice carved with thousands of tiny, cruel Script Pavilion suppression characters.
Bound against that freezing pillar twenty feet in the air was Empress Luo Qingxue.
Her head was bowed forward, her long silver-black hair frozen to the ice behind her shoulders, and her pale eyelashes coated in white rime. Thirty-six thick, pitch-black Heavenly Script Chains emerged from the base of the pillar, wrapping tightly around her ankles, waist, wrists, and collarbones to lock every meridian in her body.
Yet even while unconscious and sealed in ten years of sub-zero torment, a faint, stubborn ring of pale-blue Ice-Phoenix Sword Intent still rotated slowly around her chest. Forming a protective coordinate-hiding screen over a tiny wooden baby-nameplate hanging from her waist that read: Gu Changsheng & Gu Nian — Peace & Long Life.
