The howling north wind whipped up crushed snow, frantically lashing against the animal-hide tents of the temporary camp.
Inside the tent, the charcoal in the brass brazier burned bright red, but it could not dispel the anxiety in Mo Yin’s heart at all.
She tightly wrapped the dusty gray blanket around her shoulders, her knuckles turning white from the force. Her silver eyes stared fixedly at the slowly rotating ancient star chart before her.
Hilna’s fingertips lightly brushed over the shimmering surface of the disk, and obscure ancient Dragon tongue flowed softly from her lips.
After a long time, the light of the star chart dimmed and finally fell into silence.
“Your Majesty.”
Hilna withdrew her hand, her voice tinged with the fatigue of helplessness.
“The secrets of heaven are obscured by an abnormally powerful force. The result of the divination… is still blurry. I can only roughly determine that the soul mark you seek is on this northern land, but the specific location cannot be locked down.”
Mo Yin lowered her eyelids, her long eyelashes casting a shadow on her cheeks.
It was like this again.
Every time she was just a little bit away, and every time a bucket of cold water was poured on her just as hope was ignited. She had traversed endless time and stepped through countless forgotten worlds, yet she still could not capture that clear coordinate.
“Unless…” Hilna hesitated for a moment but still spoke, “Unless there is a ‘keepsake’ with a deeper bond to the person you seek to act as a medium, perhaps then we can clear this mist and forcibly locate his position.”
A keepsake?
Mo Yin tightened her grip on the blanket.
This was already the only thing she could grasp. This worn-out blanket, stained with his scent, was the only memento she had brought out from that cold mine.
But was this not enough?
A deep sense of powerlessness, mixed with sharp grievance, gripped her heart fiercely.
She possessed the power to command ten thousand dragons and the majesty to make an entire kingdom tremble, yet she could not even find a single person.
Just as the atmosphere in the tent became stiflingly oppressive, the door flap was suddenly flipped open by a hand. The cold wind, carrying ice and snow, poured in instantly, making the charcoal in the brazier flicker.
“Your… Your Majesty! Teacher Hilna!”
Lilith came scrambling in, her small face frozen red, clutching something tightly in her arms. She leaned on her knees, gasping for air, her chest heaving violently.
“You child, still so reckless!”
Hilna’s brow furrowed slightly with a hint of reproach in her tone, but she still reached out to steady her so she wouldn’t fall headlong into the brazier.
“I… I found this under the snow slope to the west!”
As if presenting a treasure, Lilith held up the hard object in her arms.
It was a pitch-black dagger.
Its design was peculiar, without any decoration. The lines were simple and cold, filled with a utilitarian murderous aura.
Traces of erosion from the wind and snow remained on the hilt. It looked quite old, yet it still exuded a sharpness that did not belong to this era.
The moment she saw that dagger, Mo Yin’s breathing stopped.
This knife…
How could she ever forget it.
—
Simulation world.
Consciousness was frozen awake.
The piercing cold invaded from all directions. It wasn’t the dry cold of the snowy plains, but a slippery, bone-deep chill.
Mo Yin slowly opened her eyes and found herself locked in a narrow iron cage.
Every bar of the cage was engraved with complex runes, faintly emitting a deep blue glimmer that suppressed the surging dragon blood power in her body, making even her blood flow sluggishly.
This place was like a cellar, the air filled with a strange smell of rust and frost.
“Damn it, we finally caught it.”
“This little thing was quite a handful, cost us quite a few brothers.”
The crude conversation of two sentry knights came from outside the cage. They sat not far away, huddled around an alchemical furnace for warmth. The slush on their boots melted, leaving puddles of filth on the ground.
Mo Yin’s heart sank.
The chill from the iron bars seeped into her marrow, but Mo Yin felt no cold.
Her mind was full of that woman named Ella, and the blurry silhouette of her Master being taken away in the wind and snow.
Where would he go?
The way that woman looked at him, that indisputable possessiveness… Would Master be in danger?
This thought pierced her heart deeper than any wound on her body or the flames of revenge, making every breath she took a sharp pain.
She forced herself to calm down, pricking up her ears to try and catch any useful information from their conversation.
On the first day, during the guard shift change.
“Damn, this ghost of a place is so cold. When will it end?”
“Soon. When that Majesty arrives and we hand over this ‘key,’ we can go back to the Imperial Capital and have some fun.”
His Majesty’s arrival?
Mo Yin’s body trembled violently, her fingernails digging deep into her palms.
That high-and-mighty culprit who, with a single order, had pushed her family into the abyss.
On the third day, when the alchemists came to take blood samples, one whispered to another.
“The sample activity has dropped again. The effect of the frost restriction is better than expected. As expected of the Major, his understanding of the Dragonborn’s spiritual veins is even more thorough than the Dragonborn themselves.”
“Shut up and focus on the work. Don’t forget, these rune flow charts were heard from the wails of the Rhineside family back then.”
The Major.
This was the person who planned and executed the massacre of her family.
“Boom—”
Overwhelming hatred turned into substantial flames, burning wildly in her chest.
She bit her lower lip hard until she tasted the salty tang of blood, only then forcing back the power that almost incinerated everything.
She was going to kill him.
Whether it was the “Emperor” or the “Major,” she would snap their necks with her own hands.
Whether for revenge or to find her Master, she had to escape!
This obsession, interwoven with hatred and worry, forged her will into indestructible steel in an instant.
She began a perfect disguise.
During the day, when those white-robed alchemists came to check her physical condition, she would huddle in the deepest part of the cage.
She would tremble, looking at them with silver eyes full of fear and despair, letting out a fragile, animal-like wail when they drew her blood samples.
Her performance was flawless, convincing everyone that she was nothing more than a Dragonborn cub who was completely terrified and whose power was fully suppressed.
The knights guarding her also went from being vigilant at the start to becoming more and more lax.
They would even discuss which maid in the camp had a better figure in front of her, or complain about how much of a hassle the upcoming Emperor’s procession would be.
And at night, when the entire camp fell into silence and only the sound of the wind and snow remained, Mo Yin began her self-rescue.
She closed her eyes, letting the power of those frost runes erode her skin and meridians, bringing waves of knife-like pain.
She did not resist. Instead, she actively guided this chill, using it to polish the violent dragon flame within her.
“Your problem isn’t a lack of energy; it’s that your conversion efficiency is too low and you’re leaking everywhere.”
Master’s cold voice echoed in her mind without warning.
This thought made her heart ache.
But she quickly suppressed the bitterness, forcing herself to treat his words as pure, cold techniques.
She actively guided the frost of the runes into her blood vessels.
The extreme cold and the rampaging dragon flame collided violently inside her. It wasn’t simple pain, but a form of torture where her internal organs were repeatedly torn apart and then forcibly welded back together with a branding iron.
She could hear the sound of her blood “sizzling” as it boiled and then instantly solidified.
Sweat would freeze into ice chips the moment it seeped from her skin, sticking to her filthy prisoner’s clothes.
But whenever the intense pain brought her to the brink of collapse, the knights’ praise for the “Major” and the “Emperor,” along with Master’s cold eyes, would alternately appear in her mind.
The former was the quenching ice water, the latter was the forging hammer, forging her hatred and obsession, along with that violent energy, into the sharpest weapon.
It was an incredibly painful process.
Yet she didn’t make a sound, only gritting her teeth and condensing all the rampaging energy into a needle-sized silver fire seed that barely emitted any light.
That fire seed had no temperature and no light, quietly suspended deep in her bloodline like a seed waiting to sprout.
Time passed day by day in this split between day and night.
Mo Yin’s body grew weaker and weaker, but the fire seed deep in her bloodline became more solid and pure through the repeated tempering.
She retracted all her claws and teeth, quietly waiting for an opportunity.
The opportunity finally came on the fifth day of her imprisonment.
“Have you heard? To welcome His Majesty, the defenses are being redistributed. The southern squad is going to swap shifts with us.”
“Swap shifts? Then tonight during the handover, won’t there be an hour-long gap in the western confinement zone?”
“Who cares? Anyway, our mission is almost over.”
The knights’ unguarded small talk instantly lit up Mo Yin’s dark world.
A guard vacancy.
Her heart leaped.
Her gaze landed unobtrusively on the massive brass lock of the cage.
It was a rune lock specially made by alchemists, indestructible.
But Mo Yin did not give up.
Every night, she would take a tiny bit of energy from the extremely refined silver fire seed and silently seep it into the keyhole.
She wasn’t trying to destroy it; she was “reading” it.
After several consecutive nights of investigation, she finally “saw” the internal structure of the lock—
Inside the lock cylinder where the rune energy flowed most frequently, a minute fatigue point had appeared in its metallic structure due to long-term extreme cold and energy erosion.
That place was the strongest part of the entire lock, but also its most fragile singularity.
This was her chance at life.
Mo Yin slowly closed her eyes, her long eyelashes casting a quiet shadow on her face.
She looked as though she had finally exhausted all her strength and fallen into a deep sleep.
No one noticed that beneath her calm breathing, the silver fire seed hidden deep in her bloodline was vibrating gently at an unprecedented frequency.
She was going to escape.
She was going to kill the Emperor and the Major.
And then, she would find her Master.