74: Chapter 74 Split Up

The group of attendants behind him lowered their heads in unison; no one dared to respond.

In the ice-crystal corridor, only the sound of shattered ice sliding down and the faint dripping of blood from Lin Yun's palm onto the ice surface remained.

He stared at the spot where the portal had completely vanished, his knuckles white. The force of his grip caused the wound in his palm to split deeper, and golden blood seeped through his fingers, leaving a shocking trail on the deep blue ice.

"Your Highness." An attendant spoke up, bracing himself. "The portal has shattered, and the spatial coordinates have shifted. We cannot determine where they were teleported."

"Then find them." Lin Yun interrupted, his voice as cold as a wind blowing from an ice cellar. "The guidance of the Heavenly Dao cannot be severed. As long as they are still on the Nine Heavens Continent, and as long as they carry things that do not belong to them, there will always be traces to follow."

He closed his eyes. The vast power of the Child of Destiny within him surged like a tide, swirling and sensing through his Meridians.

One breath. Two breaths. Three breaths.

Lin Yun opened his eyes abruptly, golden light flashing in his pupils. He had sensed it.

It was blurry, faint, like a candle flame seen through countless layers of gauze, but it truly existed. The auras of Shen Xiao and Xia Lengbai had appeared deep within the Far North Ice Plains, a thousand miles away. The direction… was northeast.

"Northeast, a thousand miles away." Lin Yun said coldly. "Assemble the team. Pursue."

The attendants looked at each other. The Far North Ice Plains a thousand miles away was a forbidden zone that even elites like them had never set foot in. It was said that deep within lay spatial turbulence and Vicious Beast lairs left over from ancient times.

But no one dared to question him. Lin Yun had already turned around and was striding out of the corridor, golden spiritual energy flowing around his body, vaporizing all the ice shards along the way. He would pursue them personally. Those two people—one had stolen his Opportunity, and the other had betrayed the destiny bestowed by the Heavenly Dao. Both deserved to die.

A thousand miles away. The Far North Ice Plains, a nameless cold pool.

The pool water was deep blue, nearly pitch black. Cold air rose from the surface, condensing into tiny ice crystals in the air that drifted down with a rustling sound. It was amidst this bone-chilling cold that Shen Xiao regained his first glimmer of consciousness.

He felt himself lying on a piece of floating ice. The ice drifted and swayed with the waves, and every movement caused his wounds to protest sharply.

The pool water constantly washed over the edges of the ice, soaking his robes and half of his cheek. The water was so cold it didn't feel like water, but rather like countless fine needles, each one drilling into his pores.

He did not open his eyes. Or rather, he could not. His body felt like it had been dismantled and reassembled; every joint was protesting, and every Meridian was being pulled back and forth in a contradiction of burning and freezing.

The Dark Gold Core in his Dantian felt like it had been thrown into a meat grinder and pieced back together; it operated stumblingly, and every cycle of spiritual energy was accompanied by tearing, excruciating pain. But pain aside, the core was turning.

Shen Xiao sank his remaining consciousness into inner vision, and then he froze.

The silver rim that had originally coiled around the surface of the Dark Gold Core, radiating a cold, monitoring aura, was gone. No, not gone. It had "melted."

Shen Xiao squinted to "see." Where the surface of the Dark Gold Core had originally been covered in cracks, a layer of extremely thin silver luster now flowed, as if someone had painted over the cracks with silver lacquer. Those silver substances were not covering the surface; they had seeped into the interior of the core along the cracks, undergoing a kind of deep, irreversible Fusion with the Origin energy of the Dark Gold Core.

The System interface flickered wildly in his Sea of Consciousness. Intermittent prompts, like a television screen with poor signal, mixed with large chunks of garbled code, jumped before his eyes: [Warning: Unknown high-level protocol marker interfered with by spatial rules… Converting…] [Protocol structure restructuring… Underlying permissions unlocked…] [Abnormal energy Fusion detected… Fusion object: Host Origin core… Fusion progress: 17%…] [System functions recalibrating… Estimated remaining time: Unknown…]

Shen Xiao watched the constantly jumping numbers, the corners of his mouth twitching. Good grief. The Gravekeeper terminal had installed a "monitoring patch" on him, but it had been stirred into a mess by the spatial teleportation, and now it was "cooked" directly together with his core. What was this? A forced upgrade? Or… a more covert way of monitoring him?

Shen Xiao had no answer. But his intuition told him this change was not necessarily a bad thing. The original function of that silver rim was "monitoring" and "restriction," but now that it was broken, melted, and integrated with the Dark Gold Core, the original "restriction" function should have collapsed along with it. As for "monitoring"… if that silver substance had already merged into the core's Origin, could the information it transmitted still be normally received and parsed by the original "master"? A scrambled signal and a signal that had never been received were essentially no different.

Shen Xiao sneered inwardly and stopped dwelling on this problem. The urgent priority was to figure out where he was, and… where that woman, Xia Lengbai, had run off to.

He struggled to open his eyes. His vision remained blurry for a good while before gradually clearing. Before him was a world of deep blue.

He was lying on a piece of floating ice about three feet in diameter, drifting in the center of an endless cold pool. The pool water was deep blue, nearly pitch black, and the surface was as calm as a mirror. Occasionally, tiny ice crystals rose from the surface, circled a few times in the air, and then fell back, emitting a faint "ding-ding" sound, like jade colliding.

The cold pool was surrounded by steep ice walls that reached out of sight, enclosing this body of water into a natural "well." The only light source came from the faint deep blue glow emitted by the pool water itself, and the ice crystals sporadically embedded in the ice walls, shimmering like stars.

Shen Xiao tried to move his fingers. A numb, itchy, stabbing pain came from his fingertips, as if he were being gnawed by countless ants, but at least he could move. He gritted his teeth, braced his hands against the floating ice, and lifted his upper body inch by inch. Every inch he lifted, his bones creaked, like an old, rusty machine struggling to restart. When he finally sat up, cold sweat had already soaked his inner garments.

Shen Xiao gasped for breath and looked around. Apart from the cold pool, the ice walls, and the floating ice, there was nothing. Xia Lengbai was not here. That woman's aura was not here either.

Shen Xiao narrowed his eyes and felt the residual spiritual energy fluctuations in the air. There were indeed traces of energy from the same source as the Tomb Guardian Seal, but they were very faint, as if left a long time ago, and the direction of the traces pointed towards somewhere above the ice walls, far from his current location.

She hadn't fallen into the same place as him. When the teleportation portal shattered, the spatial coordinates had shifted, and they had been flung to different locations.

Shen Xiao didn't know whether to feel relieved or have a headache. What he could be relieved about was that he didn't have to face that woman who had just obtained the Legacy, was unstable, and clearly guarded against him. What gave him a headache was that he was now lying alone in the middle of this godforsaken cold pool, covered in injuries, with a half-crippled System, unable to even climb off the floating ice.

He looked down at himself. His robes were tattered, the frostbite on his left shoulder had turned a strange purple-blue from soaking in the cold pool, and there wasn't a single patch of intact skin on his entire body. Although the Dark Gold Core in his Dantian was still turning, it was stumbling, and the spiritual energy output was less than thirty percent of his usual level. Most of the System functions were still grayed out; only basic inner vision and information reception were still usable.

Besides that. Shen Xiao's gaze fell on the back of his right hand. There was an extremely faint, silver-gold interlaced pattern, as if it had been pricked under the skin with a needle tip; it would be impossible to notice without looking closely. The shape of the pattern… was like a key. Or rather, like some extremely small component of a teleportation formation pattern.

Shen Xiao stared at the pattern for a few seconds without rashly touching or activating it. He didn't have the energy to study what this thing was right now. The urgent priority was to leave this cold pool, find a safe place to heal, and then figure out how to find Xia Lengbai—or not find her, and just go their separate ways; their "alliance" was as fragile as paper anyway.

Shen Xiao took a deep breath and began trying to circulate the Dark Gold Core, absorbing the cold-attribute spiritual energy contained in the surrounding pool water.

The spiritual energy in the pool water was astonishingly pure, but also astonishingly violent. The moment that spiritual energy entered his Meridians, it was like pouring a ladle of ice water into a red-hot iron pot. With a "hiss," his Meridians contracted violently. Shen Xiao let out a muffled groan, almost falling back into the water.

But he did not stop. This bit of pain was nothing compared to being marked by the System and torn by space earlier. He gritted his teeth, forcibly guiding the violent cold-attribute spiritual energy to circulate along his Meridians, repairing the damaged Meridian walls bit by bit while providing the energy needed for the Dark Gold Core to operate.

Just as he was immersed in healing, deep in his Sea of Consciousness, the constantly jumping System log suddenly popped up a new prompt. It wasn't garbled code. It was a complete, clear, and cold-textured line of text:

[Detected: Host has made contact with a "chessboard fragment."] [Fragment Name: Ice Abyss cold marrow (Millennial).] [Fragment Attribute: heavenly dao chessboard - Northern Water Node - Derived energy crystal.] [Prompt: This fragment is one of the advancement Materials originally intended for the "Child of Destiny - Lin Yun." It has been intercepted by the host in advance, and the Karma chain has broken.] [Current destiny value: 12.7 points.]

Shen Xiao watched those words, his pupils slightly contracting. Ice Abyss cold marrow. Was the water in this cold pool the liquefied form of Ice Abyss cold marrow?

He subconsciously looked down at the floating ice beneath him. The color of that piece of ice was deeper than the surrounding pool water; it was deep blue with a hint of silver-white, faintly radiating a heart-palpitating energy fluctuation. So that was it. He hadn't fallen into an ordinary cold pool. This was the "source" of the Ice Abyss cold marrow, or at least some important "storage pool."

When Xia Lengbai left traces on the icy shore and chose to leave by another path, did she know about this? Shen Xiao didn't know. But he knew that the spiritual energy in this pool water was a great tonic for him right now.

He closed his eyes, no longer hesitating, and began to circulate the Dark Gold Core with all his might, frantically absorbing the pure cold-attribute spiritual energy from the surrounding pool water.

Pain surged like a tide, but Shen Xiao was completely oblivious. The corners of his mouth even curled into a faint, imperceptible arc. Lin Yun was pursuing. Xia Lengbai was running. The heavenly dao chessboard was turning. And he, in the middle of this godforsaken cold pool, was freezing while leveling up. This script didn't seem so bad after all.

The floating ice swayed gently in the deep blue pool water, and Shen Xiao's figure flickered in and out of the cold air. Far above the ice walls, deep within a hidden ice crack, a silver Ice Soul Mark was flickering faintly. It was waiting. Waiting for someone with the same source of energy to find it.