Hearing the girl's startled cry, Mu Qingyan let go of Qian Xueshen without a second thought, tossing him aside while they were still two or three zhang above the ground. His left foot tapped the ice wall once, light as a breath, and his long sleeves snapped out behind him like flowing clouds, like the wings of a bat unfurling. In an instant he closed the distance to Cai Zhao and folded her into his arms. Her teeth chattered, faint and quick, but she fought to hold herself steady.
By the time everyone had landed, they turned to take stock of where they'd fallen.
They stood inside a massive ice cavern. The floor spread out in a rough circle, fifty or sixty zhang across, pitted with openings that centuries of glacial movement had carved into the stone and ice. Far above them, nearly seventy or eighty zhang up, was the layer they had broken through. From down here, the fracture that had swallowed them looked no wider than the mouth of a well. The whole cavern curved around them like the hollow belly of some enormous ice urn, and they were the things trapped inside it.
What stopped their breath, though, was the ice walls themselves. Bodies. Dozens of them, frozen mid-motion, twisted into shapes that spoke of agony.
The ice was clear enough to see through, and what it preserved was the stiff blue-purple of corpses, faces locked into starvation, into the slack defeat of exhaustion, into the rictus that came from cold poison working through old wounds. A few faces wore nothing but despair, men and women who had lost their way and chosen to end it themselves rather than keep wandering. The eternal cold had kept every detail intact. Looking at them sent a shiver down the spine that had nothing to do with the temperature.
Cai Zhao's voice shook as she spoke. "Are these... are these all martial world travelers who died on this mountain?" She pointed toward the weapons scattered beside the frozen bodies.
Mu Qingyan's eyes went dark, though his voice stayed level. "This mountain has clear boundaries. Some ground is open for hunting, for gathering enough to feed a family. Other ground is forbidden. These people wandered into places they had no business going."
Fear crept into her expression. "Have we fallen into one of those forbidden places now?"
He said nothing.
She was about to press him further when her gaze caught on something past his shoulder, and her face twisted between terror and confusion. "That one... that one was still alive when it happened."
The strangeness of her words made him turn. In the southeastern corner of the cavern sat a corpse, upright, hands still wrapped around a wooden skewer threaded with roasted sausage, one cheek puffed out mid-bite. Frozen in the act of eating.
But the face above that half-finished meal held nothing but raw shock, eyes stretched wide as though the man had seen something unspeakable in his final second, and then the moment had simply stopped, sealed forever in ice.
Mu Qingyan's expression hardened further, and his grip on Cai Zhao's hand tightened until it nearly hurt.
The group was still shaking off the shock of it when Zhou Zhiqin shoved Jin Baohui to the ground and rounded on him, fury cracking his voice. "Hu Tianwei, you greedy, shameless wretch! Even Lan Tianyu told you to leave the statue alone, and you wouldn't listen! Now we're all trapped a hundred zhang down in this pit, and it's because of you!"
Hu Tianwei only sneered. "I'll move whatever statue I please. Nobody tells me what I can and can't touch."
Dongfang Xiao's temper flared too. "Your master, Elder Tianji, commanded thousands in his day, a true hero. How does a man like that raise a disciple who'd lose his head over some jade goddess statue?"
Mu Qingyan let out a short, cold laugh. "Don't let his fine robes fool you, elders. Young Master Hu likely puts on this show while living hand to mouth underneath it. After Duan Jiuxiu died, his whole faction turned into broken-backed strays, cut down under Heroine Cai's orders or hiding in the mountains, too afraid to show their faces. When Nie Hengcheng died after him, they tried crawling back into the Demonic Cult to start their trouble all over again."
"Funny thing about Nie Zhe. Useless against outside enemies, but a master at turning people against each other from the inside. And Duan Jiuxiu had made plenty of enemies in his time. Between the two, Nie Zhe had the entire Tianji faction thrown out of the Demonic Cult before long. Not welcome among the righteous sects, not tolerated by the cult either. This Hu fellow's spent years running and hiding, I'd wager, with none of the comfort his old title used to buy him."
The words landed like blades. Hu Tianwei's face cycled through red fury and the pale heat of humiliation, his expression curdling into something venomous.
Understanding dawned on Dongfang Xiao. "Ah, that explains it. I'd heard Nie Zhe wanted to raise some demonic enchantress to the rank of elder. With so many seats empty from the dead, he pushed her into the Tianji position. So that's the story. Truly, once the master's gone, the house empties out, and once the tea's gone cold, the guests stop coming."
Hu Tianwei roared and lunged at him. Zhou Zhiqin stepped between them fast, sword raised to shield his close friend. Steel rang out as the impact threw both men back several paces.
Only then did anyone notice the pair of judge's pens, iron-gray and wicked-looking, that had appeared in Hu Tianwei's hands.
Zhou Zhiqin flicked his blade up before him, the steel humming faintly with the motion. "A cult dog through and through. Shameless. Ambush is the only language you know. Fine then. Come and get your fight."
Before things could spiral further, Lan Tianyu pushed himself up and cut in. "Enough! Enough! This isn't a sparring yard, this is an ice cavern, buried under a mountain with a thousand years of snow sitting on top of us! Too much noise and the whole thing could come down, and then none of us walk out of here!"
Jin Baohui, still flat on the ground and wheezing, added his agreement. "Old Lan's right. Everyone calm yourselves. Let's worry about getting out of this miserable hole first. I have no interest in being buried alive down here."
"After all that, after nearly dying on the way down, where did the jade goddess statue even end up?" Qian Xueshen limped in a slow circle, scanning the ground.
The question lit Jin Baohui's temper right back up. He jabbed a finger toward a foot-wide gap in the ice. "It rolled down there! Curse it, I've lost the treasure and my men both!" He turned on his remaining guards. "What are you two standing there for? Get over here and help me up!"
He had come down into the cavern with four guards. One had landed headfirst and split his skull on the ice, dead before he hit the ground fully. The second had landed flat, snapping both arms and both legs, ribs driving straight through his lungs. He hadn't lasted much longer.
The last two had fared better. One had landed cushioned by the bodies of the first two. Zhou Zhiqin, with a free hand at the time, had caught the other before he hit. Both walked away with only minor injuries.
The two surviving guards helped Jin Baohui to one side while Lan Tianyu struck a firestarter to get a better look at their surroundings.
Off to the side, Qi Nong knelt with the burning, fevered weight of Chen Fuguang cradled against her, tears falling onto his flushed, overheated face.
"There are passages branching off everywhere," Lan Tianyu said, snuffing the flame out again, "but we don't know where any of them lead. Too risky to guess. We go back the way we came. There's no other choice."
Jin Baohui's face darkened as he stared up at the curved, concave walls. "They're slick as glass and they bow inward! How do you expect anyone to climb that?"
For a man of his size, the fall had been one thing, with bodies there to break it, but the climb back out would need real effort, likely Zhou Zhiqin and Dongfang Xiao hauling him together. And what of the others, the ones without the lightness skill to manage a climb like that on their own?
Lan Tianyu stayed calm. He pulled iron caltrops from the soles of his boots, wrapped them in strips of cloth, and drove them into the ice wall with a sharp clang, building handholds as he went. Pushing off with his feet, he began scaling the wall like a gecko working its way up glass.
Watching him, the others quickly caught on and found the trick worked well enough.
Hu Tianwei allowed himself a smile. "An expert's solution if I've ever seen one. Good thinking."
That was when Qi Nong came forward, hesitant, pleading to be allowed to bring the fevered Chen Fuguang along. Hu Tianwei's hand cracked across her face, sending her stumbling, and his sneer twisted further. "Look at this shameless little tramp, weak in the knees the moment she's got a man to cling to." What followed was worse, cruder.
Qi Nong said nothing about her split lip. She dropped to her knees and pressed her forehead to the ice in desperate kowtow after kowtow, until blood began to show.
Chen Fuguang tried to stop her, but he had barely the strength to move.
For a moment the whole scene played out like one of those overwrought tragedies village gossips loved to retell.
Zhou Zhiqin couldn't stomach it and started forward to intervene, but Jin Baohui blocked his path. "We're both Big Dipper Six Sects men. Later, you and Dongfang Xiao are going to be the ones pulling me up that wall. Are you really going to throw that away to save Chen Shu's brother, a demon's blood relation?"
The North Star sect and the Demonic Cult had been enemies for generations back. The words landed, and Zhou Zhiqin stopped where he stood.
Cai Zhao wanted to step in too, but hesitation held her back. She didn't know for certain whether Chen Fuguang was innocent in any of this. What if she risked herself for a man who deserved none of it?
Then, unexpectedly, after finishing with Qi Nong, Hu Tianwei simply agreed to let the man come. Chen Fuguang was thin, after all, barely half Jin Baohui's weight, and far easier to carry up a wall.
With that settled, the group began their careful climb.
Lan Tianyu led the way, the others following behind him, with Mu Qingyan, Cai Zhao, and their small group bringing up the rear.
Qian Xueshen pushed them to hurry. "Move faster! If they seal the entrance once they're up top, we're finished down here!"
Cai Zhao frowned at the thought. "Even if Hu Tianwei means us harm, Uncle Zhou is still up there with them. They'll wait for us."
Mu Qingyan didn't answer. He watched Hu Tianwei's climbing form in silence for a long moment before he finally started up the wall himself.
Following Lan Tianyu's lead, the group steered clear of the sections riddled with frozen bodies, wary of cracking the thinner ice around them.
As they climbed, Mu Qingyan struck small handholds into the wall at intervals, smoothing the path for Cai Zhao and Qian Xueshen behind him. The two guards, lacking both cultivation and any real climbing skill, soon fell back and folded naturally into Mu Qingyan and Cai Zhao's group.
The ice had hardened over centuries until it was nearly as tough as iron, and striking it bare-handed burned through Inner Force fast. Zhou Zhiqin watched with some concern, but Hu Tianwei watched with something closer to delight, clearly hoping to see Mu Qingyan wear himself out.
But after sixty or seventy strikes, halfway up the wall, Mu Qingyan's hands hadn't so much as trembled. He looked as composed as when he'd started.
It was Hu Tianwei's turn to go pale.
"Almost there!" Lan Tianyu called out, joy breaking through in his voice.
The bright opening above was close enough now to feel real. Zhou Zhiqin and Dongfang Xiao, climbing just behind him, allowed themselves relieved smiles, and even Jin Baohui, hanging from the makeshift harness the two of them had rigged, grinned wide enough to nearly split his face.
Then Mu Qingyan went still. His expression turned grave. "Do you hear that? Footsteps, up on the ice. Coming this way."
Cai Zhao froze, startled. Qian Xueshen, sweat soaking through his clothes, stammered out a denial. "Footsteps? No, I don't hear a thing."
"There are footsteps," Cai Zhao murmured, straining to catch the sound.
A moment later, Zhou Zhiqin, Hu Tianwei, and the rest heard it too, footfalls moving across the ice layer above them. Before anyone could so much as react, a chilling, familiar howl tore through the air, and a massive white shape lunged straight at the opening.
"The Snow Mountain White-haired Hou!" Lan Tianyu's scream tore out of him, raw with terror.
Half his body was already locked in the creature's jaws, and his shriek of agony cut through the cavern.
The shock of it froze everyone in place.
Zhou Zhiqin was the first to break free of it, releasing one hand to draw his sword. But the White-haired Hou was no mindless beast. It wheeled around fast and dove straight for Jin Baohui instead, claws raking out in a sharp horizontal slash. Two belts gave way under the force, severed clean.
Jin Baohui's scream came out somewhere between a man and a pig as he dropped, arms and legs thrashing uselessly against the fall.
Left to fall like that, nothing would save him.
But Zhou Zhiqin had one hand locked on the ice wall and the other full of sword. Seeing the fall happening, Dongfang Xiao had no choice but to throw himself toward Jin Baohui, barely closing his fingers around the man's belt in time.
Free now, Zhou Zhiqin let out a roar and charged the beast, sword first, driven by the need to avenge his son. The creature, hearing him coming, twisted its head and used Lan Tianyu, still clamped between its jaws, as a battering ram aimed straight at him.
Seeing Lan Tianyu's blood-soaked face, hearing his weak moan as half his body hung from the creature's mouth, Zhou Zhiqin had to abandon the strike mid-motion. He twisted his whole body in the air instead and drove every ounce of strength into a diagonal slash.
The blow landed with brutal force. The White-haired Hou shrieked and let go, and Lan Tianyu dropped, falling in plain view of everyone below.
Dongfang Xiao's hands were full with Jin Baohui. Hu Tianwei's hands were full with Chen Fuguang. Neither had a free arm to spare. Just as Lan Tianyu seemed certain to die, Cai Zhao snapped her silver chain out and caught him, wrapping it tight around his falling body. The distance was too far and his momentum too strong. It nearly dragged her down with him, but Mu Qingyan dropped beside her in time to anchor them both.
Fury overtaking him now, Hu Tianwei shoved Chen Fuguang into the arms of Qi Nong and the mute old servant before scrambling upward to join the fight against the beast.
Zhou Zhiqin kept cutting and thrusting, but the creature's hide held like forged metal. Every strike only scratched the surface, and every scratch only fed its rage. With a furious howl, it spun and lunged down at Dongfang Xiao instead.
Caught with both hands full, Dongfang Xiao took a brutal kick from the beast's hind legs straight to the chest. Blood spilled from his mouth as he slid seven or eight zhang down the wall, Jin Baohui still in his grip, before he managed to catch hold of the ice again.
Zhou Zhiqin knew the creature was wounded now. This was the moment to press forward and finish it.
Then Hu Tianwei reached the fight and hurled one of his judge's pens, driving it straight into the beast's right eye. Thick, reddish fluid burst from the wound as the creature let out a howl that seemed to split the air itself.
Zhou Zhiqin laughed, cold and sharp. "Your time's run out, beast." He moved in for the killing blow.
That was when another screech, owl-like and just as familiar, tore down from the opening above. A second White-haired Hou, larger than the first, roared as it leapt down into the cavern after them.
Two of them. There had been two Snow Mountain White-haired Hous all along.
No one moved. No one breathed.