Chapter 22: Beneath the Frozen Veil and the crimson trail.

The storm was a living thing now.

It howled like a beast across the treeline, dragging veils of snow through the shattered forest. The wind gnawed at Raymond's bones as if it wanted to strip him down to marrow. His breath puffed white ghosts into the frozen air, vanishing as quickly as they came.

He walked with deliberate calm, boots crunching over a sheet of ice that had not been there minutes ago. His work—his canvas. But even as frost whispered at his heels, the weight pressing down on his senses grew heavier.

The forest was too quiet. No birdsong, no rustle of fur in the underbrush—just the endless hiss of snow devouring sound.

Then, it came.

A guttural roar, wet and broken, shattered the silence. Trees splintered as something vast barreled through the woods, warping the earth beneath its weight.

Raymond's grip on his saber tightened, the edge of his lips twitching into a smile that never reached his eyes.

"Finally."

The abomination lunged from the whiteout like a demon torn from nightmare. Its body was a grotesque tapestry of flesh and bone, half its ribs jutting from frozen skin. Long, jagged antlers curled from its skull, dripping with blood and icicles.

Raymond didn't flinch.

His Xue Sense pulsed like a cold star inside him, threads of awareness weaving through the chaos. He moved before thought could catch up, color surging at his call.

"Iced Water Painting: Azure Break."

The air cracked.

A tidal arc of liquid ice burst from the ground, glittering like shards of shattered glass as it roared upward to meet the beast. The wave slammed into its chest, folding its body in half and hurling it through a row of pines. Bark exploded in showers of splinters.

The beast screamed—a hollow, bone-grinding sound—and came crawling out, steam coiling from its broken limbs. Its eyes burned like coals in a furnace, and something deep inside Raymond stirred.

Persistent bastard.

His breath hitched for the first time when the second roar came—deeper, heavier. The ground quaked.

From the storm crawled another shape. Then another. Six shadows bleeding out of the white haze.

[Xue: You have an estimated survival rate: 12%.]

The voice was calm. Cruel and cold just like him.

Raymond's pulse slowed instead of spiking. His lips curled into a laugh so soft it was almost a sigh.

"Twelve percent? Better odds than yesterday."

They charged as one, the ground shuddering with every monstrous stride. The first abomination's claws carved trenches in the frost as it came for his throat.

Raymond moved like water.

He slid beneath its strike, the saber flashing once—silver as moonlight. A clean arc. Blood sprayed in ribbons, steaming in the cold. The creature's leg tore free, crashing to the earth with a wet thud.

Another came from his blindside. Raymond didn't turn. He whispered—

"Frozen Shroud."

Mist bled from his skin, curling into a veil of frost that hardened in an instant. Claws raked his back and shattered against a wall of ice. Cracks spiderwebbed across the surface, but it held long enough for Raymond to twist, slicing upward through the beast's jaw.

His breath rasped. His color burned low. Dangerously low.

Three left. Four. He couldn't tell anymore. They came like an avalanche, weight and hunger and fury crushing down. His arms screamed with strain. His lungs tore for air.

He hit his knees in the snow, saber buried in the frozen earth. His vision dimmed to a narrow slit of white and red.

[Xue: Your color reserves is depleted Raymond.]

[Xue: Overload threshold approaching. This could be really dangerous.]

The cold inside him shattered.

And something else poured through.

It wasn't calm. It wasn't control. It was a flood of jagged instinct, tearing his veins open from the inside. His bones felt like they were splintering, frost forcing its way into every crack. He doubled over, choking on a sound that wasn't quite a scream.

When he raised his head, his breath wasn't mist anymore. It was vapor—thick and violent, spiraling like smoke from a dying star.

[Sub-Ability Unlocked: Cryo Dominion.]

[Effect: Absolute control over the moisture within a radius. Blood qualifies as moisture.]

The snow…stopped falling.

Every droplet in the air froze mid-flight. Shards of ice hovered like broken teeth in the storm. The world was silent, suffocating, a stillborn thing waiting for a pulse.

Raymond rose slowly, steam rolling from his skin in waves of frost. His saber hung loose at his side, no longer needed.

"Your blood…" His voice was soft, raw, cracking like thin ice. "…is mine."

The first beast lunged. It didn't reach him.

Its body convulsed mid-stride as every vein crystallized. Blood froze into knives beneath its skin, tearing outward in a bloom of gore and frost. Its scream never left its throat.

One by one, the others followed—snapping, twitching, splitting apart in bursts of crimson sleet. The snow drank deep, painting the white world red.

Raymond stood in the middle of the slaughter, breath fogging like smoke from a dying god. His fingers curled once. Every shard of blood-ice hanging in the air crashed down at his feet in a ringing chorus.

He exhaled slowly, head tilting back toward the swirling sky. His lips curved—not into a smile, but something sharper.

"Control," he whispered to no one. "Absolute."

The wind picked up again, carrying the stink of death and iron across the silent trees. Somewhere far away, another storm was brewing.

And Raymond began walking toward it.

The storm was dying.

Raymond walked through its corpse—windless air, brittle silence, and a sky the color of frozen steel. Around him sprawled a wasteland of ruin: broken trees glazed in frost, carcasses split open by ice like shattered porcelain dolls. Crimson bled into the snow in jagged blooms, steaming faintly as the last traces of warmth abandoned the dead.

Every step crunched like snapping bones.

His saber dragged a thin groove behind him, its edge chipped, its luster dulled by the slaughter. He hadn't bothered to repair it. He didn't need to anymore. Not with this power thrumming beneath his skin, coiling like a serpent in the marrow of his bones.

CRYO DOMINION.

The words burned across his thoughts like frostbite. His veins still sang with the memory of it—the way the world had stilled, how every drop of blood had bent to his will. The silence after, so pure it felt holy.

And yet… something was wrong.

The Xue Sense inside him wasn't quiet. It pulsed—slow, steady, like the toll of a distant bell. Warning? Or whisper?

He didn't know. He didn't care. Not right now. He was too tire.

His boots carried him across the frozen clearing, past the husks of things that had once drawn breath. Their faces were twisted, teeth bared in eternal snarls. Some still steamed where blood-ice had erupted through their flesh, spines curving skyward like blackened thorns.

Raymond's lips twitched into the ghost of a smile.

"Twelve percent," he murmured, voice rasping from cold-burnt lungs. "Guess we beat the odds."

The smile didn't linger. It fractured as his gaze snagged on something half-buried in snow.

Not bone. Not ice. Fabric.

A strip of scarlet silk, shredded at the edges as though torn free in violence. It lay like a wound against the white—a smear of color so vivid it didn't belong in this dead world.

Raymond crouched, fingers brushing the cloth. It was warm.

The air shifted.

A scent slid past his nose—copper and sweetness and something sharp that tasted like hunger. Blood. But not beast-blood. This was clean, rich, human.

His breath stilled in his throat.

Then he saw them again.

Footprints. Bare. Delicate. Too delicate for this hell of frost and splintered earth. They trailed away from the carnage, carving a path of perfect indentations that didn't fill with snow, as though the storm itself had bent around their maker.

[Xue: An anomaly has been detected. Proceed with caution.]

The voice coiled like smoke in his skull, but Raymond ignored it. His hand tightened on the strip of silk until threads cut into his palm.

For the first time since the blizzard began, the cold in his blood stirred—not from power, but from something older, darker. A shiver that didn't belong to the wind.

Because this wasn't just a survivor.

This was a predator.

And for reasons he couldn't name, Raymond felt the faintest edge of a smile carve its way back across his face.

He followed the crimson trail into the trees, frost whispering at his heels like the ghosts of everything he'd killed.

Somewhere ahead, in a forest drowning in white, a girl with blood-red eyes and a smile sharp enough to cut through silence was waiting.

And the world—this fragile, frozen thing—would learn what happened when crimson met frost.