The blood-red longbow gave a crisp low hum, like porcelain singing under frost. Crystalline ice budded beside the crystal bow, glinting like newborn shards of winter. A red crystal arrow settled on the string, blue veins flickering like a heartbeat, a living thing.
—Bloom!
The arrow kissed the string. Slender fingers drew it back, taut as a moonlit reed. Blue mana streamed along the flame-red bow, then thinned to smoke that curled around the arrow.
The pulsing blue script drank in the mist, then throbbed in sync with a human breath—dreamlike as mirage, solid as carved jade.
The air around them chilled, quiet as a cave of ice, heavy as winter night. Stand a mortal here for under a minute, and every cell would glaze over, a perfect ice sculpture for display.
—[Bloodstained Snow Night]!
The arrow slipped the string and, in the instant of release, vanished into air—no shadow, no shape, no path, as if it had never been born.
Ling, still entangled by evil spirits, lifted her head. Her gaze locked on empty air ahead, a clear window of nothing. Yet in her pupils, a razor flash flickered, like an edge under ice.
Far off, the old man blinked. The once-quiet field surged like a tide breaking a levee.
An arrow that existed only when it chose to appear struck true at Ling’s position. A dense veil of ice fog unfurled, and tight-knit crystals seeded the air like frostflowers.
Plants, soil, even the breath itself iced over in a heartbeat, sheathed in clear crystal like glass laid over the world.
Countless ice spikes thrust up from the earth like hidden thorns, then spun outward in rings, a frozen blossom opening petal by petal.
The ice flower was beautiful—worldly treasures felt like plain words beside it. Its beauty carried blades; no one dared reach to pluck it.
Rafi saw the bloom take, and let out a long breath, mist drifting like smoke. The hand that had held the string was caught in ice to the wrist, and a fine glaze crusted her cheek.
She was the Demon King; heat and cold should mean little. Yet a shiver ran through her twice, the cold needling bone like winter rain.
The old man, now far off, stared at the ice flower Rafi had unfurled. Mana-stained eyes fixed on Ling within its heart, and despair pooled there like ink.
“Done… done for… completely done…”
Silence clamped Wang Xiaoming’s jaw; dread welled like black water. Could he withstand that strike? The thought broke on the first step. Even standing here, the cold wind bit like knives. If he walked a few hundred meters closer, in half a heartbeat his blood, his cells, his organs would set hard—an ice sculpture in human shape.
The instigator of it all—Rafi—lifted the longbow with her unbound hand, her gaze locked on the red crystal arc like a hunter eyeing prey.
The bow had shed its bright vermilion, dimmed to a dark red like ember before ash. The chill in its grip hadn’t eased; it felt ready to freeze the hand that still obeyed her.
“Unexpectedly, you’re a bad child after all…”
With a small, practiced motion, the bow dissolved into streaming light and sank back into the red crystal set on the back of her hand. The ice flower remained, a lone blossom on a killing field.
Out of habit, she brushed the ice film on her face, picked at it with a fingertip, and peeled it free with hardly any effort.
The skin beneath showed an angry flush, a frostburn blush, raw as winter-bitten plum.
For the hand locked in ice, Rafi pushed her magic and shattered the casing cleanly, glass-quiet. It should’ve had no price, yet she frowned as cold sweat leaked down her brow, like pain tightening invisible cords.
The spell did its work; the skin-bound ice came away entirely. But her hand ran with thin lines of blood, wounds tracing her delicate palm like red threads.
Rafi seemed blind to pain, and didn’t spare the wounds a glance. She lifted her head to study Ling, caged in the innermost petals, her expression a little helpless, a little resigned.
“Looks like… I overdid it.”
[Bloodmark Release]—another ultimate. With heaven, earth, and man aligned, it was the strongest strike she could currently wield. She hadn’t fully mastered it; its one side effect nipped at the caster. It didn’t blunt its edge.
It summoned a cold from the Underworld’s deepest trench—colder than any myth, colder than the fabled lotus of frost. The ice flower born from that arrow was the cold itself given form.
Its cold stacked inward like rings of winter. Every ten meters toward the core, the chill leapt a tier. No one had ever measured the very center; everyone who tried became a statue there.
By Ling’s true strength, she shouldn’t die in it, Rafi told herself. Still, at the very least, the ice should carve a serious wound.
It felt unkind to say so, and Rafi’s confidence only sharpened it. This ice flower was a legacy of Demon Kings, each generation nursing it like a deadly lotus. Even gods would give it three parts of fear.
Yet her first intent had been to help Ling. To end up striking her down instead left a small knot of guilt, tight as a cord in Rafi’s chest.
I’ll find time to make it up to her, she thought, a promise drifting like breath on cold glass.
With that, Rafi laid her hand on the ice flower, intent on drawing it back into herself.
Crack—
