Zhao Qingsnow’s ice wall took a punch, a crater blown open, cold Mana bleeding like a glacier split. Purple lightning speared for the jeep where she sat.

If the jeep got wrecked, the mission died before it lived; ashes before dawn. They couldn’t run ten kilometers back to tell Blade the jeep’s gone and beg for another.

Honestly, not impossible.

She glanced at Kaneko and the young man inside, both helpless as chicks. Mana surged from her core; her irises washed ice-blue, calm as winter lakes. Hands pressed together, she called up thick ice walls, rising like cliffs from the earth.

Purple lightning shattered wall after wall, a serpent smashing through frozen pillars. Night Frost’s flame arrived, a crimson tide from the flank, shouldering the bolt off the jeep’s path.

Thunder and fire collided, the blast tossing Night Frost like a leaf in a storm. The impact roared, but not as savage as last time.

Night Frost steadied. The Blood at her wound had stilled. Far off, the lightning dwindled, revealing a masked Magic Maiden, drenched in Blood, her breath thin as a candle in the wind.

Sparks of violet crawled her skin. She held no useable Mana, not a flicker. Night Frost came closer, and saw it—the lightning pooled in the girl’s forearms like caged rivers.

Her eyes were shut; Blood hung at her lip; her face was snow-pale. The damage was carved deep.

She still clung to one last thread of life; touch that thread, and the final afterglow would burst from her small frame like a storm breaking.

Night Frost lifted her Spear and tapped the girl’s shoulder, light as rain on bamboo. The afterglow detonated; bright thunder fell like meteors, and the figure stood in the dark an instant more, then sloughed into gray ash.

So much for taking her alive to question. Dust has no tongue. If it were Blade, she’d probably tag the ashes with a title, then blackmail half the districts with them.

Twelfth District was already ringed by wolves. Blade wouldn’t mind tossing one more torch into the brush.

Night Frost weighed it, then let the masked girl’s ashes scatter into the trees, a quiet snowfall. May the Twelfth District’s forest drink what remained and grow.

She turned to the Old Woman. The glow at the Old Woman’s waist was a Key, twin to the one Night Frost had lost, light like trapped sky-water.

The Old Woman recognized her too. She had taken a fake Key from Night Frost back then—fake, but not useless. Its Array Pattern could tug the Mana crystal inside, make it shine azure when near the true Key, pointing the way.

There was no kill in the Old Woman’s eyes. Night Frost had met her back when she still wore a man’s face; the same granny who once tried to push her to be Moon Owl’s agent. Night Frost felt no blade in her heart for her. This place wasn’t safe. She invited the Old Woman to come along.

The Old Woman agreed. She glanced at the wooden carving in the box at her belt. The real Key was already in her hand; no sense lingering in Twelfth District. Her aim was simple—keep the Key from every major force’s grasp.

When she heard they were heading to District Twenty One, she didn’t even think to refuse. She needed to go there too, seek help; Night Frost’s father had left a backhand waiting there, like a lamp set on a distant pier.

Zhao Qingsnow had never met the Old Woman. In the thirty years she remembered, the name had never crossed her ears. But if Night Frost knew her, that was enough. Friend, not foe. No more questions.

Night Frost changed clothes at the trunk. A dress; one swift motion, silk over skin, done like a swallow cutting through rain. The Old Woman and Zhao Qingsnow had arrived in the same hurry; no one had the mind to peek. Better to think on the road ahead.

“What is this Key, really? Have you met its owner?”

Two questions fell at once, and the Old Woman paused mid-sip, water still cold in her mouth.

“I can’t say much about the Key’s secret,” she said, voice like sand on glass. “But I did meet its owner once. A man with the surname Ling.”

At those four words, Night Frost shivered, a string plucked in her chest. Her father. Even if not, the name was a bridge to him. Who else named Ling would tie to the orphanage?

“Little one,” the Old Woman said, eyes steady, “what’s your bond with that Ling-surnamed man and with Lingchen Yao? I remember the Key lodged at the orphanage. How did it end up on you? Did Lingchen Yao find a girl outside and hand you the Key?”

When the Old Woman went to the orphanage to recover it, she’d seen Night Frost from afar, a Key at her waist. She had stepped forward to ask—only for Night Frost to become a Black Dragon, then get blasted from the sky by a white maiden.

The Old Woman ran herself ragged, found Night Frost broken, collapsed on the ground. She gripped the Key and drank its Mana to shore up the girl’s body, like a drought sucking from a spring.

Word of the Key slipped into certain circles like smoke. The Old Woman feared Night Frost couldn’t guard it alone. So she “borrowed” it.

She meant to use the locator Key to find the true Key’s den. But her trail had already been exposed. One whisper became ten, ten became a hundred. The hunt started, endless as winter rain. That was one reason she had to head for District Twenty One to find help.

Aside from one person who, like her, knew pieces of the Key’s secret, no one should have known an orphanage in Twelfth District held a locator Key. If she wasn’t a spy, then finding her might just gain one more ally. Why not?

Or maybe the Seekers used secret arts to pin her down. That could be it too.

At the name Lingchen Yao, Night Frost’s gaze swept the jeep, a hawk’s warning. She raised a hand, asking the Old Woman to stop. She pulled a black array disk from the box against her ribs.

The Old Woman’s eyes lit. She’d only seen Formation craft at this level in two hands: her runaway old man’s, and that Ling-surnamed man’s.

In using array disks, her old man was better. The Old Woman didn’t walk the path of Formation, but years of smoke and tea by that man had taught her the scent. This disk’s blend and balance felt the same. She marked in her heart—Night Frost and her old man were tied by threads unseen.

The disk bore an array Night Frost had just learned these past two days. It muffled sound like snow. Low-level, yes, but its harmonics were so pure that even Cantata Two would need tricks to listen through it.

“I have a tie with Lingchen Yao,” Night Frost said, eyes flicking to her own chest, a note of rue. “I am him. There was… an accident.”

She looked down and sighed, as if walking back into an old skin. In Lingchen Yao’s cadence she spoke, soft as night wind: “Moon Owl Granny, I am Lingchen Yao. I had an accident, and this is what I became.”

The Old Woman’s face went still, then stiff, a sheet of frost over a lake. A man becoming a Magic Maiden? Seventy years alive, and this was her first. Surprise cut sharp; acceptance lagged behind.

“You truly… are?” she asked, voice rough. “But you’re not in Magic Armor now. Your sex changed with no armor? Or did the force inside you twist it?”

Night Frost stood a complete goddess, no male trace, no shell of Magic Armor. If they had to explain, it was the surge that rose to fight the white maiden—power too fierce, carving irreversible changes through flesh and bone.

The Old Woman stopped mid-thought, breath catching. She had never met this girl’s face, yet only Lingchen Yao would know her as Moon Owl Granny. Night Frost was now a girl, but she was the child of the man named Ling. She had the right to know.

“Given that,” the Old Woman said slowly, “you have the right to know everything about this Key. Truth is, I don’t know all its uses. But if it touches your father, I’ll say what I know. Once you step onto that road, you won’t turn back.”

Night Frost didn’t leap blind into pits. She sought the truth of her parents, sought revenge through strength—but caution was a lantern she kept lit.

“Tell me about my father first,” she said. “The Key can wait.”

The Old Woman sighed about Moon Owl under her breath. That girl was too stiff, did what she was told, rash as thunder. Again her mind fixed on making Night Frost an agent.

But Moon Owl had already reached Cantata Three, with Blade herself watching from the shadows. Blade’s head worked sharp; bright as a knife edge.

Back to the road.

“Your father and I barely crossed paths,” the Old Woman said. “Just one meeting. His Formation work was fine steel. He often spoke with my old man about arrays. They were friends across years.”

Night Frost blinked, stunned, a sparrow hit by daylight.

“The old guy you say was good with Formations,” she blurted, “wouldn’t be the one who gets jealous over nothing, buys jiaozi for comfort, wanders around avoiding real work, would he?”

The Old Woman paused. A flicker of doubt flashed, then anger rose like a red sun in her eyes.

“Yes. That one. You met him?” She leaned in. “Wait—did you learn Formation from him? Where is he? That two-faced old thing’s been missing three months!”

Night Frost shrank her neck and didn’t lie. She told the Old Woman how she’d met that “cheap master” on the road.

“He hid under the Order Keeper branch in Twelfth District,” the Old Woman muttered, heat in her voice. “That old fox.”

They kept talking, deeper and darker. The Seekers’ incursion. Illusory Glass and most members falling. The tale walked on, all the way to now.