Three days...

That was how long Victor had been trudging through endless sheets of dark crusted plains, over rough cliffs and cold valleys where the wind itself seemed alive.

His boots crunched rhythmically against the earth, almost sliding a few times due to the intense smoothness in this particular terrain.

According to his phone which was now at 5%, he had already crossed more than a hundred and fifty miles west.

And now… he was close to the border.

He walked all the way through in order to preserve the little qi he had left just in case.

The temperature had plummeted to such a degree that even the air felt sharp enough to slice through skin. There was no vegetation here, no wildlife, not even the buzzing of those large insects that normally accompanied the quietest of wastelands. It was as if nature itself had given up trying to exist in this place.

Victor exhaled, and his breath immediately turned to frost, hanging thick and ghostlike before being ripped away by the wind.

"Lovely vacation spot," he muttered dryly while hugging his arms around himself. "If I ever open a resort, I'm definitely building it here. Guaranteed—no noisy neighbors, no mosquitoes, and you die before you can complain about the cold."

Even though he joked, his expression was grim. The deeper he went, the worse it became.

His qi circulated constantly to keep his blood warm, but it was like trying to fight a glacier with a candle.

He spat out a small orb of flame from his mouth using the Dragon Breathing Arts and held it in his palm like a makeshift lantern.

The red-orange glow reflected in his eyes, momentarily painting the smooth ground in shades of gold.

The flickering warmth gave him a small measure of comfort.

For about thirty seconds.

Then, the wind came.

A frigid gust so biting that it nearly tore his hood away and snuffed out the flame entirely.

"Hey! I'm using that, you frost-faced bastard!" Victor shouted at the blizzard as though it could hear him. He cupped his hand protectively around the flame and muttered, "Great. Now I'm arguing with weather. Perfectly sane behavior."

Despite being a Nascent Soul Realm cultivator, the cold had this much of an effect on him. There was no telling how bad it'd be if it was a regular human or even a normal awakened student.

Another half day passed before the endless black finally broke.

And there it was in the distance... the Icy Border.

It wasn't just a patch of frozen terrain; it was a wall of translucent blue crystal stretching across the horizon like the spine of a dead god.

The air fizzled strangely around it, distorting light and twisting the snowflakes that fell near it into impossible patterns.

Victor slowed his steps with an expression of awe and unease appearing on his face.

"So that's it, huh? The border to the Icy Region…" He rubbed his chin, then sighed. "Looks like the entrance to a freezer for the gods. And here I thought the ancient groves in Ascendant Realms were bad. The real world is just as much of a nightmare."

He spat out another dragon flame, this time letting it swirl around him like a protective aura.

The warmth immediately pushed back the cold but only barely. Each step closer to the border made the air denser, the chill heavier, as though invisible hands were trying to layer his entire being in frost itself.

When he was a few dozen meters away from the crystalline wall, the flames around him sputtered.

"What the—?"

The dragon flame flickered wildly, then snuffed out completely.

And in the same instant, a creeping frost slithered up his legs.

"Shit—!" Victor leapt backward reflexively.

The frost had already reached his knees before he managed to will his qi to burst outward in a wave of heat. Cracks spread across the ice coating him, and it shattered with a sharp crrrk!

He panted as his eyes narrowed at the icy border ahead.

"What the hell was that? Did this shit just nearly turn me into an ice statue?"

He tested it again, cautiously approaching the border while holding his flame steady.

Just as before, the moment he crossed an invisible threshold, his fire was extinguished.

His skin began to numb under the invasive chill as frost spread across his body, turning him stiff from the inside out.

Victor stumbled back again, shaking frost from his shoulders. "This is insane… Even the flames can't hold off this cold?" He frowned while rubbing his hands together, then stared at the ice border with a calculating look.

He crouched and pressed his palm against the ground. The layer of frost was so thick it was almost like touching polished glass.

Beneath it, he could feel a faint vibration.

"This isn't just temperature," Victor murmured. "There's something here. Guess this is why no one crosses casually..."

He turned towards the distance and could see frosted silhouettes of creatures in the distance.

There was no doubt about it... they turned into an ice statue before they could reach the border.

For a moment, Victor sat cross-legged in the snow, thinking. His breath came in clouds as his body trembled slightly despite his constant flow of qi.

"I could brute force it," he muttered. "But if I mess up, I'll end up as a Victor-shaped popsicle."

He looked up at the border again. The ice seemed endless.

"Think, Victor. Think. You didn't come all this way just to get outsmarted by cold."

He conjured a smaller flame on his fingertip and observed how it reacted near the invisible boundary. The moment he moved it close, it warped and dimmed, almost as if the air itself was absorbing its energy.

So that was it... this wasn't normal cold. The barrier was actively devouring heat and any form of warmth.

Victor rubbed his temples. "Right. So I need to get inside without using fire… or warmth. Because the damn thing eats it. Which means… I need to use the opposite."

He paused, then smirked faintly. "You know what? Maybe this will be fun."

Channeling his qi, Victor activated the Frost Bloom Palm. His hands became coated in a thin sheen of pale blue frost.

If the frost came from him, it did no sort of damage. The White Dragon's legacy made it so he was immune to feeling the cold of his own frost.

He proceeded to touch himself with his frost bloom and it spread across his skin, covering almost his entire body in a layer of flowery ice.

Afterwards, he took cautious steps toward the border.

This time, instead of resisting the cold, he had embraced it. He matched the temperature around him, allowing the frost qi become his cloak.

His breath and heartbeat slowed...

The sensation was eerie like willingly drowning in winter.

Each step closer made his bones ache, but the barrier no longer lashed out as violently.

"Ha," he whispered with his teeth chattering. "Who needs fire when you can pretend to be an ice cube?"

The crystalline border loomed before him and soon enough he reached the mist covered threshold.

The moment Victor crossed the mist-covered border, an almost bone-splitting chill gripped his flesh. The frost clinging to his shoulders looked like thin shards of diamond dust, glimmering faintly as his Frost Bloom Palm technique naturally countered the biting cold.

Every breath he exhaled turned to solid white mist that froze mid air and dropped onto the ground in small ice shards.

What sprawled before him was something out of a post-apocalyptic fairytale.

The landscape stretched endlessly in shades of silver and blue, like a land sculpted from glass and sorrow.

The mountains were daggers of ice stabbing into a swirling gray sky. The winds howled through the rough pointy peaks, carrying fine crystals that stung against his cheeks. And between those mountains… remnants of civilization poked through the frost.

Half collapsed crooked skyscrapers were entombed under decades of ice.

The sight of metal towers half-buried in frozen ground made Victor's stomach twist.

"Skyscrapers…" he murmured whil brushing off frost from a metallic beam sticking out of the ground. "Guess this was once a human city..."

Power lines dangled like skeletal vines, frozen solid. Electric masts stood stiffly, cracked and leaning with their tips impaled by stalactites of ice. Every sound he made was swallowed by the howl of the wind.

Despite the dead silence, the place was not empty.

He trudged forward as he scanned his surroundings.

He was searching for something he'd seen earlier. During his astral projection, he'd spotted a sream that refused to freeze, even under such brutal cold.

He needed to find it... water was one of the necessities he was badly lacking. He had occasionally used frost bloom to have a few sips of water droplets from melted ice he conjured. Unfortunately, this wasn't sustainable in the long run.

His senses suddenly flared as a sharp boom echoed in the distance, followed by a chorus of bestial snarls and the heavy WHUMP of wings beating the air.

Victor's head snapped toward the sound. "And there it is… the chaos I can never seem to avoid," he muttered while rolling his eyes and breaking into a light sprint.