The night passed without incident, but most people still barred their doors and slept with weapons in their arms.
When the sun rose, everyone from Nightmare Night walked out of the hunting lodge and stood before the frozen blood and shattered corpses on the snow, looking like men returned from another world. Lantian Yu had aged ten years overnight. His face had caved inward, creased and dry as old orange peel. He asked in a rough voice: "Well then. Do we go back up the mountain?"
Hu Tianwei said without hesitation that they would go.
Chen Fuguang wavered, then caught Qinong's steady gaze and found his footing. He said he would go too.
Zhou Zhiqin said nothing. His mind was fixed on his only son and the debt owed for it. Going up was not a question. He did, however, advise Dongfang Xiao to stay behind, but Dongfang Xiao only shook his head. "We are sworn brothers, Big Brother. We live and die the same. Please don't waste your breath."
Qianxue tried once more: "None of you have even reached the midpoint yet. The higher it gets, the worse it becomes. We could go back to the manor and find another way to break the great transformation method. There has to be one."
"Name one," Cai Zhao said, squinting.
Qianxue faltered. "I don't know right now... but surely there is one. Mr. Yan, please, you talk some sense into her."
Mu Qingyan was unbothered. "It's fine. A few days at most. If we find nothing in the snow peaks within seven or eight days, we come back down, take the golden-feathered giant roc two or three days back to Qingquezong. Song Shijun will have only just arrived by then. We won't miss our chance to expose the fraud."
Qianxue looked ready to weep and found she had no tears left.
They set out again.
Jin Baohui had lost more than half his guards to death or injury. There were not enough hands left to work the sleds, so everyone mounted mountain donkeys instead. Cai Zhao's donkey was a stubborn, heavy-boned creature she loaded with their baggage.
The mountain today bore no resemblance to the one they had climbed yesterday. White was swallowing everything. Black rock and dark soil were disappearing. Lantian Yu explained that the higher they climbed, the deeper the snow lay, until the ground beneath became nothing but compacted ice hiding whatever earth existed underneath.
The road was empty and cold. Nobody spoke. Even the sounds of birds and animals had thinned to almost nothing. The world seemed to have reduced itself to blue sky overhead, white silence underfoot, and the distant crown of Jinding Mountain buried forever in cloud.
That night they reached the second hunting lodge and rested. Zhou Zhiqin and Dongfang Xiao took out the Pearl of the Night and kept watch through until dawn, waiting for the white-haired creature of the snow peaks to appear. Nothing came. The mountain stayed quiet.
Lantian Yu shook his head slowly. "The white-haired one is a canny beast. When the moon is full and the light spreads wide, it will not show itself. Catch one alive and bring it down, and no sum of gold could purchase it." Men who lived by theft always knew what a rare thing was worth.
Zhou Zhiqin only smiled without humor. He had no interest in catching it alive.
Jin Baohui was uncertain. "I don't believe the white-haired creature only appears in full darkness. I think it dislikes crowds. Thick numbers of people make it wary. Though..." He trailed off.
Zhou Zhiqin ignored both of them. For the next two nights he strung bell-ropes and planted hidden triggers around the lodge, hoping to snare whatever came hunting. Nothing was triggered. He came away with two sleepless nights and dark circles that bruised his eyes.
Cai Zhao could not stop himself: "Love breeds fear. Love breeds worry. Separate a man from what he loves and he has neither. Uncle Zhou has lost his beloved son and lost his clear head along with him."
Even Qianxue, worn down to her bones out here in the cold, winced a little. Mu Qingyan's voice cut through before anyone could respond. "The child has stopped reciting scripture at random. Now he wants to compete with Master Fakong for the same customers."
On the third day the mountain changed character entirely. The slope sharpened. The air thinned. The donkeys struggled and slowed, blowing steam from their nostrils with each labored step. Jin Baohui, who had not been built for altitude, went pale.
Several of his guards panted beside him. "The mountain is too steep."
Hu Tianwei showed no strain at all. His breathing was measured, his pace steady. "Steeper is better. The steeper it is, the sooner you stand at the top."
The others considered this and found they could not argue with it.
Lantian Yu called out in his carrying voice. "Deep in the mountain the rock has been packed under snow and ice for years without end. The ice layer gets thicker the higher you go and no one knows how far down the ground is. Ice is not rock. Ice forms hollow pockets. Ice cracks. Watch every step. Better still, rope yourself to the person beside you."
Everyone did.
And soon enough the yelps started, scattered and ongoing, as one person after another punched a foot through into an ice hollow. Even Dongfang Xiao went in to the ankle, and he pulled his foot free with a rueful grin.
They were moving westward with the sun low and orange when a long scream split the air ahead. One of Jin Baohui's named guards had simply vanished from sight. One moment he was there, the next he was gone, as if the mountain had swallowed him whole.
They went to look.
The place where he had stood was a crack in the ice, an arm's length wide but running far down, the bottom studded with dense ice spines, each one long and needle-sharp. The guard had dropped straight down and had not had the room or the speed to recover. He lay with his eyes open, blood spreading dark across white ice, pierced through.
Before the silence had stretched even a few heartbeats, two more screams came up from somewhere else. Another guard had gone in. He and a companion had tied their belts together for safety, and when the first man fell, the connection pulled the second man down with him. One was impaled through the body. The other took an ice spine through the eye socket and through the skull and died before he finished falling.
Jin Baohui's face drained completely. He stood on legs that barely held him.
Lantian Yu exhaled. "Ice cracks cannot be watched for. We stop walking in long lines. We take turns at the front. Whoever is leading, leads alone, and tests the ground before the rest follow."
Zhou Zhiqin and Dongfang Xiao had no wish to walk alongside demon cult members and formed a separate column with Mu Qingyan, Cai Zhao, and Qianxue. Zhou Zhiqin stepped to the front of it and led. The others formed their own column with Lantian Yu at the head.
Jin Baohui fell in behind Lantian Yu, working hard to breathe. "This is a disaster. When I came up the first time, the path was nothing like this. It was quiet all the way up, nothing like what we are walking into now..."
Lantian Yu turned on him. "Talk if you must. But you have to breathe too."
Mu Qingyan's voice was pleasant and curious. "What brought Senior Jin up here those years ago?"
Jin Baohui caught himself, smiled weakly without conviction, and said nothing more.
Hu Tianwei laughed loud and open, a gleam of real pleasure coming through his eyes. "When the earth shows a strange face, it means heaven is preparing something extraordinary. A journey worth dying for is worth ten thousand quiet ones. What is there to fear?"
Mu Qingyan stayed pleasant. "I would be curious to know what kind of divine object could make all these senior figures climb up here without a thought for their own safety."
"You'll know when we get there," Hu Tianwei said. His gaze slid sideways to Cai Zhao, and his smile softened into something almost teasing. "The Prince Yan siblings are not light on their feet. Especially the Wind Girl. She told me to watch, and I have been watching."
There was no hiding it at this point. Everyone on the mountain had noticed. This girl who was supposedly so fragile and soft walked as though the snow weighed nothing beneath her. Her breathing was shallow but even, the intervals never shifting. Whatever her skill in open combat, her movement art had clearly been taught by a master of the first rank.
Cai Zhao wanted very much to grab this Hu person and throw him three thousand feet straight down the cliff face. Instead she arranged her expression into something flustered and modest. "My mother always said it's not seemly for girls to be fighting and killing things. So I only kept up my movement work."
Hu Tianwei's smile was roguish. "Your mother is a wise woman."
"Stop talking, all of you. Look at the sky. It's going dark. Where are we sleeping tonight?" Jin Baohui's voice came louder than he'd intended.
Dongfang Xiao let out a tired smile. "That's actually a useful problem to have right now."
Everyone scanned the distance. The red ribbon markers that had guided them to the hunting lodges had not appeared. When they turned to look down the slope, a dark shape sat in the fold of a valley below. Lantian Yu, whose eyes were trained on mountain distances, spoke first. "There's a structure down there."
Both columns had to pick their way sideways and then down on a long careful half-hour detour before they came close enough to see it properly.
Along the way, tucked into a sheltered pocket of rock where snow had piled and compacted, they found plants no one had a name for. They grew low and knotted, curling against the stone like vines, or spreading flat like ground moss, with only bare brittle branches showing above the snow line. Lantian Yu and Jin Baohui both stopped to look at them. Neither said anything. But neither looked away quickly either.
When they finally reached the structure, they found a two-room wooden yard: a fence in front, a storage shed behind, and two large connected rooms in the middle that had once contained a kitchen, sleeping quarters, and a space for eating. But no one had lived here in years. The roof had given way in several places. Snow had come in through the gaps and frozen solid where it landed. Ice had formed on the interior walls, on the furniture, across the floor. The whole place had the hollow feeling of somewhere abandoned not recently but long ago.
Cai Zhao said simply: "This is not a hunting lodge."
Mu Qingyan moved through the rooms, examining the way the wood had crumbled, the way the ice had built up. "Someone lived here permanently, not just seasonally. Based on what I'm seeing, they left five or six years ago." She paused at a wall and tilted her head. "Unless the family moved somewhere?"
Jin Baohui's face had gone pale again. Beside him, Lantian Yu quietly dropped his head and took the older man's arm to steady him.
Chen Fuguang stood just inside the doorway, eyes slightly unfocused, face flushed with color that had no business being on a man standing in this cold.
Qinong pressed the back of her hand to his forehead and spoke softly. "The young man has a fever. He needs to stop and take medicine and rest."
Zhou Zhiqin surveyed the yard. "Mountain people lived here. Family left five or six years back, house went empty. It's getting dark and we won't find a proper lodge tonight. We use this place until morning."
With Jin Baohui now down to a fraction of his original guard complement, space was not a problem. Everyone found a corner, pitched their oilskin and cowhide tents inside the larger room, melted snow for water, and set meat to roast over small fires.
Mu Qingyan, as had become habit, placed his and Cai Zhao's tent in a far corner away from the rest. Zhou Zhiqin and Dongfang Xiao, as was their own habit, set up in the center of the room and made no move to hide it.
While the others ate, Cai Zhao wandered through the abandoned rooms with unhurried interest, looking at the cold stove, the collapsed bed frame, the tables and chairs with arms and legs gone, the cracked pottery. She found a hanging cradle that still swung slightly when she brushed it. On a low shelf she found two small wooden swords rotting slowly into the wood beneath them, each hilt carved differently: one with a mountain, one with a small tree.
She came back to their tent with a still face. Qianxue had already started eating and was deep into it.
Mu Qingyan handed Cai Zhao her share of the roasted jerky and studied her expression. "What is it?"
"This place held about ten people," Cai Zhao said, looking up at the ceiling beams. "The ice and snow say the place has been empty five or six years. But the rot in the furniture and the wood says more than ten years without people."
Qianxue glanced up from her food. "That's easy. The family moved away more than ten years ago. The roof opened up five or six years ago. Snow came in after that."
Cai Zhao's brow stayed furrowed. "I grew up in the south. I don't know snow the way you do. But I am looking at these walls and this floor, and I am telling you: a hole in the roof alone doesn't explain this kind of ice. The doors are solid, the walls are better than the hunting lodges we've been sleeping in, and ice has still gotten everywhere inside. That requires more than a hole in the roof letting in a few snowflakes."
"Zhao Zhao." Mu Qingyan's voice was quiet and warm. His eyes held something careful and bright. "You see clearly."
He had something working in his mind. She could feel it in the way he said nothing more, only urged her to eat.
After dark Qianxue returned from the snow with her coat pulled close and her voice dropped low. "I saw something. The Qinong girl just crept into Chen Fuguang's tent. He's sick. Apparently the Hu woman told her to go take care of him personally. Now the mute old servant and that Hu woman are sharing a tent."
Cai Zhao took a moment with this. "Hu Tianwei is being very generous with his maid."
Qianxue chewed on it. "Think about all of them together. Fat Jin and Big Blue Thief clearly go back further than they're saying. And whatever this mountain is hiding, they both know what it is and neither one of them is going to say it out loud."
"Treasure, most likely," Cai Zhao said. "Why else would anyone suffer all of this? Although, to be fair, I came up here to test a potential husband. So I'm not one to talk."
Qianxue made a long, anguished sound. "I am never getting married in my life."
Cai Zhao looked at Mu Qingyan. He had been quiet for a while. She asked what was on his mind.
He answered slowly. "My thoughts are tangled. I don't want to say something wrong, but I keep feeling that something is pulling at the edges of all this."
"I know what you mean," Cai Zhao said.
He looked at her, mildly surprised.
"At first glance the people on this mountain seem unconnected," Cai Zhao said. "But when you lay them all out in your head, they connect. Chen Shu was killed by Uncle Zhou. But right now Chen Shu's brother and Uncle Zhou are on the same mountain, on the same path."
"Elder Tianji, Duan Jiuxiu, slaughtered every student of Qingfeng Temple. But his one remaining disciple, Hu Tianwei, is here. And the only two surviving elders from the Eastern side of Qingfeng Temple are also here. And it was my aunt who killed Duan Jiuxiu. And I am here too."
"The only people who seem to have no thread connecting them to anyone are Fat Jin and Big Blue Thief."
Qianxue sat still for a moment. "I never put that together."
Mu Qingyan turned to look at Cai Zhao properly. Something in his expression shifted, quiet and real. "So you had already thought it through. I had you wrong on this journey. I thought you were unbothered."
Cai Zhao pulled a velvet blanket over her lap. "My aunt said that sometimes confusion just means the moment hasn't come yet. Forcing it leads nowhere. When the right moment comes, everything will open up at once."
At first light everyone moved again.
Chen Fuguang's fever had not broken. He sat on the donkey's back, swaying slightly, with Qinong riding close beside him to keep him upright. In his haze he reached out and caught her hand. "Even if I die on this mountain, I will protect you first. I will not let you be made a slave or property again. No one will touch you again."
Cai Zhao looked ahead at Hu Tianwei, who rode in front. He had heard. He showed nothing.
A little past midday, after the group had lost count of how many ice hollow stumbles they had taken, a shape appeared in a flat stretch of open ground ahead. It was a crouching figure, roughly half the height of a person, perfectly still, dusted over with snow.
Someone called out to it. No answer came.
Cai Zhao felt something drop quietly through her chest.
Lantian Yu reached it first. He pressed his staff gently into the packed snow on the figure's head and cleared it away in sections. He looked at what lay beneath, looked again, and breathed out in disbelief. "A jasper statue. An actual jasper statue."
Everyone crowded in.
Standing in the middle of the snow was a goddess carved in deep green jasper. She sat on a pedestal shaped into a tangle of flowering branches and leaves, eyes closed, fingers pressed together, a soft coiled whip draped around her waist.
Cai Zhao leaned in and made a small sound. "The flowers on the base. Those look like mountain peach blossoms from home."
Luoying Valley ran warm all year and its interior plants were their own kind, but in one quiet corner of the valley grew a rare mountain peach that almost no one outside knew about. The blossoms were small, no bigger than a child's fist, with petals arranged in three curving layers, all turning inward and upward, tight and round as buds.
The base of the statue was gentle. The goddess above it was not. Most folk goddesses were full-cheeked and soft-eyed, carved to comfort the people who prayed to them. This one had lean, austere lines, a high severe brow, and an expression that even in stillness managed to communicate impatience. The carving was not elaborate, but the feeling came through without effort.
"A block of jasper this size is worth ten thousand gold at minimum," Lantian Yu murmured.
Hu Tianwei was already moving. "Let me feel the weight. If it's not too heavy, I'll carry it down." He reached out and lifted the statue before anyone could object.
Lantian Yu's expression changed instantly. "Stop. The statue will be frozen to the ground. If you break the ice around the base..."
But the statue had come up cleanly. Nothing around them moved or groaned. Hu Tianwei laughed and raised it higher. "Lantian Yu. You worry about everything."
Lantian Yu stepped forward and looked at the ground where the statue had stood. The color left his face. "That is the problem. A statue left here through years of freezing should have bonded to the ice beneath it. It should not have come free like that. Not without force. Not without breaking something."
Jin Baohui clasped his hands and bowed slightly toward Hu Tianwei. "The Hu brother's strength is exceptional. Divine, even." In a situation this precarious, a man without fighting skills had to stand very close to one who had them, and he was past caring how it looked.
Zhou Zhiqin made a sound in his throat that needed no translation.
The noise came from beneath their feet. One deep crack, like something splitting far below. Then another. Then several more, spreading outward.
Lantian Yu was already turning and yelling. "The ice is going. Everyone run..."
The ground disappeared before he finished speaking.
A circle of ice roughly seventy feet across broke apart all at once in a single roaring collapse, and everyone fell, donkeys and people together, straight down into the dark below.
The cold rushed up and the drop was long, which meant the cave beneath was deep.
A straight fall from that height would not kill cleanly. It would shatter legs and spines and leave people living but ruined. The first few down understood this immediately and moved while they still had time.
Zhou Zhiqin and Dongfang Xiao both drew their swords in the fall and drove them into the ice wall, using the blades as anchors to slow themselves. With their free hands they grabbed Jin Baohui and Lantian Yu, taking weight, slowing the descent.
Hu Tianwei and the mute old servant spread their fingers wide and dug into the ice wall like claws, gouging deep holds, descending fast but controlled. They caught Qinong and Chen Fuguang before either one hit the bottom.
Mu Qingyan punched a series of small holds into the ice and climbed down them, then caught Cai Zhao clean.
Cai Zhao had gone for the Yang Knife, but Mu Qingyan had her already, so instead she released the silver chain coiled at her left wrist and snapped the weighted end into the ice wall. She looked up into the dark and shouted: "Catch Wan Daqiang!" Even here, falling into an ice cave with bodies dropping around her, she used Qianxue's false name correctly. She felt a flash of pride about this.
Everyone landed on their feet, or close enough. The guards who had not been caught, and several of the donkeys, hit the cave floor at full speed. Some died on impact. Others did not die and lay on the ice screaming with broken bones.
Cai Zhao's chain had not seated deeply enough into the wall. Her descent had been rough, scraping along the ice, and her landing was graceless. She came down in a full-body sprawl on the cave floor.
She pushed herself upright, brushed snow from her eyes, and found herself looking at the ice wall directly in front of her face.
There was a shape behind the ice.
She wiped the frost from the surface and pressed closer.
A face stared back. Purple-tinged, frozen solid, features twisted into something that had stopped being a face long before the ice took it. The mouth was stretched open. The tongue had pulled long and stiff and pressed against the inside of the ice.
Cai Zhao screamed.
It was the first sound of that kind she had made since the whole climb began.