Chapter 1209: Wasteland & Winter Buried World

Phei and Eira stood calmly in the middle of a world that looked as though winter had killed it, buried the corpse beneath ice, then remained behind to make certain nothing ever had the audacity to resurrect.

There was no grass beneath their feet, no soil or any distant tree stubbornly clinging to life and certainly no little frozen flower waiting to become some poetic symbol of hope. The earth had vanished beneath an immeasurable wasteland of ancient frost and fractured glaciers, vast sheets of blue-black ice extending toward horizons that could barely be seen through the raging storms.

Great frozen ridges rose from the plains in broken formations, some resembling mountain ranges that had been snapped apart and scattered by the impact of a dying world.

Others curved from the ground like the exposed ribs of some planetary corpse, their translucent surfaces filled with trapped darkness and ancient fractures that glimmered whenever pale light moved somewhere behind the clouds with fractures that looked less like cracks and more like the final, frozen screams of whatever had once lived here, still trying to claw its way out after millennia of burial.

The sky was no better:

Enormous ash-grey storm systems consumed everything above them, layer after layer of frozen cloud twisting around one another until there seemed to be no true heaven remaining. Lightning occasionally crawled through those clouds, although even that light carried almost no warmth, flashing in pale blue veins before being swallowed again by the everlasting winter.

Through openings between the storm fronts, colossal pieces of ice could be seen descending from far above, tumbling through the atmosphere with trails of frozen vapor roaring behind them.

They resembled meteorites.

Only they were ice.

Some were merely the size of carriages or houses, while others looked large enough to erase small cities from existence. They fell from somewhere beyond the cloud ceiling at impossible speed, blazing faintly blue-white from friction before smashing into the frozen plains with impacts violent enough to send shockwaves across the wasteland. Every collision raised mountains of pulverized snow and shattered ice, the thunder travelling for hundreds of kilometers through the dead world before finally becoming another distant growl beneath the storm— a sound that felt less like weather and more like the planet itself still coughing up its last breath.

Eira watched one of the larger frozen meteors disappear behind a glacial ridge.

Several seconds later, the horizon flashed.

The ground beneath them trembled and a wall of white debris rose high enough to briefly challenge the clouds.

Yet neither Phei nor Eira moved:

"I did not expect you to bring Consort with you, Master."

Phei gave a quiet nod while lifting his gaze toward the ruined heavens.

Another cluster of frozen meteorites was already descending through the clouds, several glowing with faint blue halos as they tore toward the wasteland. Their fall painted the storm in brief cold flashes, beautiful in the same way watching an execution from very far away might have been beautiful if one possessed questionable morals.

Several paces beside them stood Consort:

She had both hands planted upon her hips, utterly unimpressed by a cold vicious enough to murder most living things before their first complete breath.

The short kimono she wore offered laughably little protection from the climate, barely falling beyond the lower curve of her round ass, yet there was no frost upon her skin and no shiver in her posture. Her katana remained sheathed at her side, silent and untouched, while her eyes wandered across the dead landscape with the disinterest of a woman inspecting a mildly disappointing garden.

The thin silk clung to the heavy sway of her breasts with every lazy breath, the soft, full weight of them rising against the fabric as if even this apocalyptic winter was not enough to make her cover a single extra inch of skin.

The wind kept trying to lift the hem higher, flashing the smooth, perfect undersides of her cheeks without shame, and still she stood there like the cold itself should be embarrassed for existing in her presence.

A blizzard struck near them.

It came screaming across the plain with enough force to turn the world white in seconds. Snow and fragments of needle-thin ice tore through the air in such density that the frozen mountains vanished from sight, while the wind became a continuous shriek against the plains.

The cold carried something deeper than temperature, an old deathliness that seemed capable of seeping through flesh and freezing the essence beneath it— a cold that did not simply kill, but unmade, scraping the soul clean of warmth until nothing remained but the memory of having once been alive.

Consort did not so much as narrow her eyes.

The storm divided around her body.

Phei watched another meteor-sized mass of ice tear through the darkness above before answering Eira:

"I didn’t think I’d bring her either." He glanced briefly toward Consort.

She was now looking at a distant field of shattered glaciers with the same expression one might wear while deciding whether a wall needed repainting.

"But then I saw her, and it hit me." Phei returned his gaze toward the violent horizon. "We need every advantage we can get tonight."

Eira’s expression became more attentive.

The winter land groaned beneath them.

Somewhere far below the ice, an enormous fracture began travelling through the frozen crust. A black line appeared several kilometers away and raced across the plain, splitting glaciers as it went. When it reached a distant ridge, the entire structure cracked in half with a noise so deep that the storm seemed briefly insignificant beside it.

One side of the ridge collapsed.

Thousands of tons of ice fell into the newly opened abyss.

There was no sound from the bottom.

’Perhaps there is no bottom?’

Phei watched the darkness swallow the falling debris before continuing: "Our worst problem isn’t the Chained:"

That was a strange sentence considering the creatures were World Transcendents, each one so far above Phei’s miserable Master Stage that ordinary cultivation logic would have advised him to remain home, lock every door, write a respectful apology to destiny and perhaps begin researching safer hobbies.

Yet the World Transcendents themselves were not what worried him most.

"Danton is!"