The spatial rift didn’t exactly "place" us down gently. It vomited us out.One second, I was breathing in the scorched, ozone-heavy air of a Long Mo Tianyuan dragon-fire; the next, my lungs were being sliced open by a wind so cold it felt like inhaling powdered glass. I hit the ground hard—shoulder first—and slid across a sheet of jagged ice until my boots caught on a rock."Chen!" I croaked, the sound immediately snatched away by the gale.I scrambled up, blinking against the white-out. We were on a plateau—the Howling North, if the legends about the "Needle Winds" were true. A few feet away, the unconscious boy laid curled in a drift of snow. But Chen? Chen didn't even brace for the fall.He scrambled to his feet before he had even stopped sliding, throwing himself backward toward the spot where the portal had just snapped shut."No, no, no, open! Open!" he screamed, his voice tearing in the thin, freezing air.His fingers clenched at the empty space where the portal had just sna

The huge figures didn’t just appear from the whiteout. It seemed like they simply materialized. One moment, they were only a shadow on the jagged ridge like black opium seed mustard seed on the ice; the next, they were a line of husky beings marching toward us. They moved with a terrifying, synchronized grace, descending the slopes like mountain leopards. They weren't the starving scavengers I had expected. They wore armor forged from the hides of snow-beasts, reinforced polished bone plates etched with glowing blue runes. Their skin was a canvas of spirit-carved tattoos that pulsed with a faint, icy light, mirroring the constellations above.Beside me, I heard Yan Hu’s breath hitch. He shifted the weight of the boy on his back, his fingers twitching near his sword."Steady," I muttered. My voice felt like grinding stones.They halted a few feet away from us, and the line of warriors parted. A woman stepped forward, her presence heavier than the mountain itself. She was draped

The atmosphere fractured.The boy didn't merely float; he was suspended six feet off the snowy ground. Around his small frame, black mist coiled like living smoke, thick and oily, clashing violently against the streaks of golden spirit energy that pulsed from his chest. They didn't merge. They fought—a miniature war of light and shadow playing out in the freezing air.Below him the ground groaned. Snow began to lift, swirling upward in a gravity-defying spiral. Yan Hu stumbled, his heavy boots sliding against the vibrating earth, while the Northern tribe warriors scrambled backward, their faces pale masks of superstitious dread. Even Varka, the iron-willed matriarch, retreated half a step, her eyes narrowing as the boy’s eyelids snapped open.There was no iris. No pupil. Only a terrifying, incandescent white light that seemed to burn through the veil of the world.The boy’s head tilted slowly toward the North—toward the Heart of the whiteout where the shadows were thickest. His lips

The sky wasn't just turning black. It was bruising—a deep, sickly purple that I hadn't seen since I was a child sitting at my grandmother's feet, listening to the tales of the Long clan’s Abandonment.For two centuries, we have survived in the frozen pocket of the world, a place that defies the normal passing of time. To the lands beyond, three hundred years might have passed, but here, time flew differently. The wounds of history are fresher. The ice remembers. My blood remembers.I looked at the horizon, and for a moment, I forgot I was Matriarch. I was a terrified girl again, hearing the echoes of the last Long clan’s warriors, the clinking of blades and swords, watching the golden gates of their domain slam shut while the sky tore open just like this. They left us as a sacrifice to the First Calamity.“Just like before…” The whisper escaped my lips before I could catch it. My grip on my staff trembled. “I don’t think we can fight it, Sovereign.”I turned my gaze back to the boy—th

The little Oracle stood there, a tiny figure against the backdrop of an apocalypse, but the power radiating from him felt like a black hole wrapped in rag. When he opened his mouth, it wasn't a child's voice that crawled into my ears. It was a chorus of the damned, layered with a static sound that made my Chaotic Origin Void pulse in warning.“Run, little Sovereign,” the dual-toned voice echoed, vibrating in my very teeth. “Run until your bones break. Because when you stop… I will be waiting.”I felt a bead of sweat freeze on my temple. Sovereign? He wasn’t talking to the tribe. Those hollow, white-lit eyes were locked onto mine.Then, the world shattered.It was Malphas. The screaming swarm of Skitter-Wights—the thousands of clicking, biting horrors we’d been fighting through—began to flicker like a dying candle. They didn't fall; they stretched. Their forms became ribbons of grey mist, spiraling inward toward the boy’s outstretched hand.I looked at the corpses of skitters I had p