7

The jade's glacial pulse was a lodestone in Ye Chen's chest, tugging him westward with an insistence that overrode the lingering scent of Old Wen's shop and the pervasive, greasy stink of the distant pyre. *The Shrine of Endless Frost.* The name resonated with a chilling familiarity within the cold stone, a vibration that seeped into his marrow. Old Wen's dismissive words – *nonsense name, frozen spring* – rang utterly hollow. The jade *knew* it was more. Much more.

He moved like a ghost through the unnaturally quiet streets of Qingyun City. Fear had driven the usual nocturnal denizens indoors, leaving only the patrols – jumpy, their lantern beams cutting erratic swathes through the gloom, their muttered conversations tense. Ye Chen used the deeper shadows, the jade subtly enhancing his perception of the guards' positions, the texture of the darkness itself. It felt less like stealth and more like the shadows parting for him, acknowledging the deeper cold he carried. The coin pouch left on Wen's counter felt like a paltry exchange for the weight of dread now settling upon him, yet the information was priceless. A destination. A source.

The city walls loomed, older and cruder than the Ye compound's fortifications. Here, the patrols were thinner, their attention fixed outward towards the menacing silhouette of the Whispering Woods. Scaling the rough-hewn stone was the work of moments for someone who'd spent a lifetime navigating neglect and decay. He paused atop the rampart, the vast, brooding darkness of the woods stretching before him like a living entity. The air here was different – cleaner, yet charged with a subtle, metallic tang beneath the scent of pine and damp earth. And beneath that… a faint, almost imperceptible trace of *cold decay*, a whisper of the stench from the burning Razorback, but older, more profound. The jade pulsed harder, a slow, eager thrum that resonated with the distant, unseen bluffs.

He dropped soundlessly onto the leaf litter beyond the wall. The Whispering Woods lived up to their name tonight. The usual rustles and chirps were subdued, replaced by an eerie, watchful silence broken only by the sighing of wind through high branches. It wasn't peaceful; it was the silence of prey holding its breath. The jade's chill intensified, acting as a compass. He felt its subtle shifts, guiding him away from known paths, deeper into the ancient, untouched heart of the forest. The ground sloped gradually downwards. The scent of water grew stronger – the river Wen mentioned. The metallic tang intensified, mingling now with the mineral scent of wet stone and… something else. A dry, brittle scent, like frost forming on dead leaves in deepest winter.

The trees thinned abruptly, revealing a sharp bend in a wide, slow-moving river. Moonlight, weak and filtered through high clouds, silvered the water's surface. Opposite the bend, the land rose steeply into dark, jagged bluffs, their faces sheer and forbidding. This was the place. Wen's description was chillingly accurate. No birds called. No insects hummed. The very air felt deadened, heavy. The ground beneath his feet wasn't merely damp; it was *sour*. The sparse vegetation was stunted, twisted, coated in a strange, greyish lichen that seemed to absorb the moonlight rather than reflect it.

And there, nestled against the base of the tallest bluff, half-swallowed by scree and skeletal vines, lay the remnants of the shrine. Not much remained. Crumbled, moss-eaten stone blocks formed a vague, uneven outline, perhaps the footprint of a small, single-chambered structure. A few larger, carved stones lay tumbled, their surfaces obscured by grime and time. It was less a ruin, more a scar on the landscape. Yet, the feeling of wrongness was palpable, a physical pressure against Ye Chen's skin, amplified tenfold by the jade's insistent, hungry pulse. It wasn't just cold here; it was a *void* of warmth, leaching heat from the air, the stone, from his very breath, which misted thickly before him despite the relatively mild night.

He approached cautiously, every sense screaming. The jade wasn't just reacting; it felt… *alert*. Like a key sensing its lock. As he stepped within the crumbling boundary of the shrine's foundation, the silence deepened. The sound of the river seemed to fade, muffled. The air grew noticeably colder, the metallic tang sharpening into a scent like frozen blood.

Then he saw it.

Deep within a fissure where two massive foundation stones had shifted apart, perhaps leading to an underground chamber or a natural cave system beneath the bluff, a light flickered. Not firelight. Not moonlight. It was a cold, corpse-pale luminescence, faint and shifting. It pulsed slowly, rhythmically, in perfect, terrifying unison with the jade against his chest. *Cold lights.* Wen's words echoed.

Driven by a compulsion he couldn't fight, a mixture of dread and the jade's relentless pull, Ye Chen moved towards the fissure. The sour earth crunched unnaturally underfoot, brittle as glass. He reached the gap. The cold radiating from within was intense, biting through his worn clothes. Peering down, the pale light seemed to emanate from the very rock walls deep below, illuminating a narrow shaft descending into darkness. The air wafting up carried the brittle scent of deep frost and something else… something ancient and profoundly *empty*.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw it. Not just light on rock. Where the strange luminescence touched the stone walls of the fissure, thin, branching veins of darkness spiderwebbed outwards. But this darkness wasn't shadow. It looked like… *frost*. A frost black as the void between stars, crystalline and sharp. It crept slowly, deliberately, over the stone, seeming to absorb the pale light even as it was revealed by it. *Black frost.* The stones bleeding darkness.

The jade surged against his skin. Not painfully, but with a sudden, overwhelming wave of glacial energy that shot through his veins. His vision blurred, doubling. For a terrifying instant, he didn't just see the fissure and the creeping black frost. He *felt* it. He felt the immense, crushing weight of the earth above, the impossible age of the stone, and the profound, slumbering *hunger* radiating from the depths. It wasn't the hunger of a beast. It was the hunger of an abyss, a void that sought to consume light, warmth, life itself. It echoed the chilling void he'd felt after killing the Razorback, magnified a thousandfold.

A wave of nausea and disorientation washed over him. He staggered back from the fissure's edge, gasping, the doubled vision receding but leaving behind a profound sense of vertigo and connection. The jade's thrumming settled back into its steady, glacial rhythm, but it felt different now. Satiated? No. More like… *acknowledged*. Like a signal had been sent and received.

He looked down at his hands, half-expecting to see the black frost crawling over his own skin. They were clean, only dirt under his nails. But the cold within him felt deeper, more intrinsic. The hollow feeling after the boar hadn't been exertion; it had been the jade feeding. And now, standing at the source of the corruption, feeling that ancient hunger resonate with the artifact fused to his soul, he understood Old Wen's warning with visceral horror.

*Things that sleep cold… wake up hungry.*

The corruption in the Razorback, the unnatural decay… it wasn't just seeping out. It was being *drawn* out. Called forth. By whatever slumbered beneath this cursed shrine. And the jade… the jade was a piece of it. A shard. A key. Or perhaps, a beacon.

Vengeance against the Ye family suddenly felt like a child's grudge. The storm wasn't just brewing; it was ancient, vast, and it had noticed him. The Shrine of Endless Frost wasn't just a destination; it was an altar. And Ye Chen, bound by the icy heart against his chest, was standing upon it. The true darkness wasn't gathering its strength; it was *stirring*. And he was inextricably, perilously, bound to its awakening. The tournament was irrelevant. Survival, understanding, and perhaps stopping the devouring cold before it consumed everything – that was the only path forward, a path leading deeper into the ice-locked heart of the abyss.