If Yueyang hadn’t gone to find Qianqian first, he wouldn’t have brought her along when Wuxia came to him about the ancient rune formation. Two was more intimate than three, after all.

But he had already invited her.

Leaving Qianqian behind to go off alone with Wuxia would have guaranteed three days of wounded pride and disrupted meals. He knew this. And despite all outward appearances to the contrary, Yueyang genuinely cared about Qianqian’s feelings — he’d rather wedge himself between two sets of pointed looks than let her feel overlooked for a moment. So he kept his hand around hers and didn’t let go.

“Fine. I’ll come.” Qianqian was not slow. She understood perfectly well what he was doing.

Yueyang’s relief was immediate and unguarded. That was exactly what he’d been waiting for.

“Your technique for managing women is truly something to admire,” Wuxia remarked, with the faint edge of someone who is not quite succeeding at being entirely neutral.

“Big sister, I’m just trying to survive,” Yueyang said cheerfully. “Give a man a fighting chance.”

Wuxia gave up trying to poke at cotton and settled for a look of resigned affection. Across from her, Qianqian caught her eye and offered a small apologetic expression — I didn’t mean to interrupt your plans, he just dragged me out here — and Wuxia smiled back without effort.

She genuinely didn’t mind. In fact, she had timed her approach deliberately, intercepting Yueyang right when he’d gone to collect Qianqian. Having the princess along suited her fine. Luohua, Wuhen, Inan — none of them were quite the same kind of rival. The one who could actually push her was this particular fierce little princess with her six-sense talent. Competition sharpened everything.

Sky Stairway, Floor Ten.

Wuxia led them to a unit world that was nothing but ice and snow in every direction.

No life. No warmth. No earth, no sand, no stone, no growth of any kind. From horizon to horizon, an unbroken snowfield — and everything in it, every hill and ridge and distant peak, was formed entirely from ice. Not frozen over. Composed of ice, all the way through, as though the world had never known anything else.

“This place is strange,” Yueyang said. Even by his standards, this was unusual. He had seen plenty of frozen landscapes, but there was always something alive in them — even elemental-type creatures born from cold energy itself. Here there was nothing at all. “How did you find it?”

“The Night Empress mentioned a book to me once,” Wuxia said. “In the Innate Alliance archives, there’s a collection of strange accounts recorded by explorers across different eras. Elder Nangong was passing through the Longteng continent recently and I asked him to bring it down. Most of the accounts I left alone, but the description of an ice world with no life caught my interest. While you were working on the War Beast Bracelet, I came here alone to survey the area. Storm Valkyrie and I searched for three days before we found something unusual about six thousand kilometers from here — an ice mountain with an energy signature I can’t properly describe. I believe there may be a frost-type ancient rune formation there.”

Qianqian exhaled slowly. “If you find a frost-type ancient rune formation, you’ll probably break through to the Perfect Innate Sovereign Realm. And I — I still don’t know when my turn comes.” She had a divine sword in her hands, one of the six great artifacts, and somehow Wuxia was still pulling ahead.

“This is just luck,” Wuxia said simply.

“Luck is part of strength.” Qianqian took a breath and let the knot go. The stronger Wuxia became, the less she could afford to accept defeat.

“Speaking of things we found,” Yueyang said — he’d been meaning to bring this up — “that White Tiger Pearl I got off the Black-Flame Lord…”

He had accepted it without thinking much of it at the time. But during a quiet moment while the bracelet research was winding down, he’d run Nirvana Flames through it, then a thread of Innate Sword Qi to crack the outer seal, and found something considerably more interesting than the name suggested: a quasi-Sacred-rank White Tiger Holy Pearl. He’d been planning a small surprise for Qianqian.

He was just opening his mouth to mention it when a pulse of energy moved through all three of them.

It was subtle but unmistakable — something at a distance had drawn a thread of pure energy from each of them, helping itself without asking. Wuxia lost the most, nearly a tenth of her cold-energy reserves. Qianqian lost somewhat less. Yueyang, due to his unusual constitution, lost the smallest fraction — perhaps one in a thousand — but the sensation was clear.

“Something six thousand kilometers away is drawing from us?” He was genuinely startled.

“That’s beyond ordinary law-force,” Qianqian murmured, equally unsettled. She could understand her own energy being affected — but Yueyang carried Sovereign intent. The idea that something could reach through that and take from him was difficult to process.

“Wait until you see it in person,” Wuxia said, with a small smile. “It’ll make more sense then.”

“Then let’s go.”

Yueyang briefly considered sending out his Five Elements Gold-Seeking Mouse to scout ahead, then thought better of it. He didn’t want to risk losing that little creature to whatever was out there. Instead he pulled both women close, one arm around each, oriented himself in the direction Wuxia indicated, and began moving.

Six thousand kilometers across a flat, unobstructed snowfield. At Yueyang’s pace — covering more than a hundred kilometers per transit — it took roughly ten minutes and sixty-odd jumps to cover the distance.

What appeared before them made him go still.

The mountain was ten thousand meters tall, its peak shaped like the tip of a sword, driving straight upward as though it intended to puncture the sky. Not a grain of earth in it, not a blade of grass, not the faintest trace of anything except ice — pure ice, all the way from its vast base to its needle point. The sky above was silent and motionless, without wind.

But the snowfield around the mountain’s base was moving.

Waves of snow rolled inward from every direction — not breaking but flowing, layer after layer of slow rippling motion, all of it converging on the mountain and becoming part of it, adding imperceptibly to its mass.

Yueyang opened his Heavenly Eye of Wisdom and swept it across the entire world.

The same pattern everywhere. Every fragment of cold energy in this unit world was drifting toward this single point — had been drifting, for an unimaginable span of time — and the mountain was the accumulation of all of it, millions upon millions of years of gathering compressed into this single structure.

That was why there was no life. The mountain consumed everything. No creature could exist in its vicinity — it would simply be drawn dry.

No ordinary ice formation behaved this way. An ancient rune formation was the only possible explanation. Wuxia had been right. The question now was how to access something that had been quietly pulling the world into itself for this long.

“I’ll start,” Qianqian said. She drew the Prison Emperor’s divine sword, gathered her Four Symbols power into it, and drove a full-force strike at the mountain’s face.

It was the kind of blow that could kill a Sky-rank cultivator outright. The sword qi tore the air apart, leaving a crack across the sky itself.

The strike landed with a sound like a mountain collapsing.

The entire structure shook.

When the reverberations faded, Qianqian looked for the mark her strike had left. She had to look carefully. At last she found it — a line thinner than a human hair, and already slowly closing.

The mountain was ten-thousand-year black ice, formed entirely from purified energy accumulated over geological time. Human force, however concentrated, was simply not relevant to it.

“At this rate,” she said quietly, “we couldn’t cut through to the core in ten thousand years.”

“Brute force won’t do it,” Yueyang agreed. “We need to think.”

“Perhaps I could try to resonate with it directly,” Wuxia said. “With your Sovereign intent supporting me—”

Both of them objected immediately and forcefully.

Resonating directly with an ancient rune formation through willpower was not a technique — it was an invitation to disaster. Even if the resonance succeeded, the formation’s energy would interpret the contact as an attack and respond in kind. Best case: serious wounds. Worst case: complete annihilation of the soul.

“Even with my intent behind you, that’s still reckless,” Yueyang said flatly. “There has to be another way.”

“I just want to try. If it doesn’t work, we leave. Finding a formation like this is a rare opportunity, but I won’t risk everyone’s lives for it.” She smiled at him — quiet, genuine. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not planning to throw myself away.”

“If anyone tries the direct approach, it’s me.”

“Both of you, stop.” Qianqian stepped between them. “The mountain isn’t going anywhere. We have time. And if we can’t figure it out ourselves, we ask the Night Empress or the Supreme — they might see something we don’t. Direct resonance is out regardless, especially with the whole mountain shielding the formation now.” She paused, casting around for something, anything. “Let’s sit down and think. What about — could we use the World to absorb it? Try to pull in its energy gradually? It might be slow, but at least the World has no upper limit on absorption…”

She kept talking. Yueyang wasn’t listening anymore.

The last sentence had struck something.

“Wait.” His voice had gone strange. “What did you just say? The World — you said the World?”

Wuxia frowned slightly. The idea of using the World for slow absorption wasn’t new — she’d considered it herself, but the timeline seemed impossible, centuries at minimum. What was Yueyang reacting to?

Then she caught the look on his face and something shifted in her too. She reached out and gripped his arm with both hands, unable to find words.

Across from her, Qianqian was stammering: “I — I said the World, yes, that’s what I said — that’s not wrong, is it? It’s a slow method, I know, I only mentioned it because I couldn’t think of anything else, I know it’s not a good plan — why are you looking at me like that? Did I say something right?”

“Exactly right.” Yueyang pulled her into a full embrace, both arms around her, laughing. He kissed her. “Qianqian. Bringing you along was absolutely the right call. You just sparked something — that last thing you said — I’ve been an idiot. I have had the best possible tool for this whole time and I never thought to use it. I’ve been sitting on it. What is wrong with me — if I’d realized sooner—” He was still laughing, too energized to be still. “It doesn’t matter, it’s fine, I know now. Qianqian, you brilliant thing.”

“I didn’t say anything,” she said blankly.

“Tell us,” Wuxia said. She was past pretending to be calm. She was certain now — he had the answer, and a throwaway remark from this impossible princess had somehow been the thing that unlocked it. “What’s the method?”

“I need to work out the best approach before I explain it. The two of you go into the Grimoire World for now — I need a few minutes. I want to make one more pass around the mountain first.”

He had Xiao Wenli open the Grimoire World and usher them inside, then moved quickly, circling the base of the ice mountain in a wide arc, recording everything his Heavenly Eye of Wisdom could gather.

When he came back around, Xiao Wenli was waiting.

She nodded — everything was ready.

He scooped her up. “Come on, little one. We’re going to see Mother again.”