Elder Qin turned to his disciple, his eyes blazing. "You think you can fool me, Wangchen? You think I do not see the cracks in your Dao heart?"

Xie Wangchen didn’t blink. He didn’t bow.

The obedient, respectful disciple vanished entirely. Wangchen’s dark eyes turned to absolute, abyssal voids.

The air around him cracked, the remaining snow in the courtyard sublimating instantly into freezing vapor under the sheer, terrifying weight of his killing intent.

"I am participating in your tournament, Master," Wangchen whispered, his voice a lethal, vibrating threat that made even the Golden Core elder take a subconscious half-step back. "I am securing the glory for your peak. But do not push me."

Wangchen turned his back on his Master, walking toward the inner chambers of the palace.

"He is mine," Wangchen’s final words echoed in the freezing air, stripping away all pretense of the Heartless Dao. "And if you try to stop him from coming here again... you will find out exactly how cold I can be."

.

.

.

The tension in the rear courtyard of the Eternal Cloud Peak had reached a critical mass.

Lin Ji’an stood with her hands planted firmly on her hips, having just delivered a devastating, psychologically lethal critique of Elder Qin Changxu’s entire life philosophy.

She had called his Heartless Dao lonely. She had accused him of projecting soap-opera fantasies onto a simple bromance.

She had essentially told a three-hundred-year-old, Transcendent master to drink some chamomile tea and touch some grass.

And Xie Wangchen stood behind her, a terrifyingly beautiful statue of suppressed, yandere devotion, having just openly defied his master with a thinly veiled threat.

The silence stretched, thin and brittle as spun glass.

Elder Qin stared at the retreating back of the gray-robed cook. His chest rose and fell in rapid, shallow breaths. The veins at his temples bulged prominently against his pale skin.

For three centuries, Qin Changxu had cultivated the Dao of Absolute Frost. He had purged himself of anger, of grief, of desire.

His spiritual sea was supposed to be a placid, frozen mirror, reflecting the emptiness of the universe.

But in the span of ten minutes, a sixteen-year-old chef had taken a sledgehammer to that mirror.

First, the sheer, unimaginable disrespect of a junior lecturing him. Second, the horrifying realization that his perfect, unfeeling disciple was hopelessly, dangerously compromised by this boy.

And finally, the ultimate humiliation: Lin Ji’an had pulled rank. The cook was legally his martial peer, shielded by the Drunken Sovereign.

The cognitive dissonance was too much. The suppressed fury, an emotion Elder Qin hadn’t felt in centuries, clashed violently with the foundational laws of his Ice Qi.

Crack!

The sound didn’t come from the ice in the courtyard. It came from inside Elder Qin’s chest.

"You..." Elder Qin rasped, raising a trembling hand.

A horrific, unnatural wheeze tore from his throat. His eyes rolled back into his head, the whites turning a sickly, frosted blue.

He lurched forward, coughing violently. A spray of dark, freezing blood splattered onto the pristine snow.

"Master!" Wangchen’s voice broke its cold facade, snapping into genuine alarm.

Elder Qin collapsed like a felled tree, hitting the freezing ground with a heavy thud.

Ji’an whirled around, her annoyance instantly vaporizing. "Holy MSG!" she shrieked, dropping her lunchbox and sprinting back into the courtyard.

The moment Elder Qin lost consciousness, the iron-clad control over his immense cultivation base shattered.

A Spiritual Master’s Qi Deviation was not a medical emergency; it was a localized natural disaster.

The ambient temperature plummeted instantly, bypassing freezing and entering the realm of apocalyptic absolute zero.

Thick, jagged spikes of ice erupted from Elder Qin’s prone body, rapidly encasing his robes, crawling across the cobblestones, and creeping up the pillars of the moon-gate.

The air itself began to crystallize into a thick, suffocating white fog of lethal frost.

"Damn it! Wangchen! We have to move him!" Ji’an yelled, throwing her arms over her face to shield her eyes from the freezing wind.

Wangchen rushed forward, grabbing his master’s shoulders. But the moment his hands made contact, the Ice Demon hissed in pain, violently jerking his arms back.

The frost on Elder Qin’s body had flared aggressively, aggressively repelling Wangchen’s touch.

"I can’t," Wangchen gritted his teeth, his dark eyes wide with panic. "My Ice Root... It’s resonating with his deviating Qi! If I try to suppress it with my own ice, it will create a feedback loop. I’ll trigger a glacial explosion that will level the entire peak!"

Ji’an’s mind raced with the terrifying physics of Xianxia medicine. You couldn’t fight fire with fire, and you couldn’t fight ice with ice.

"Step back!" Ji’an ordered.

She activated her Harmonious Five-Grain Constitution, forcing her internal furnace into overdrive.

A brilliant, golden aura of pure Yang Qi erupted around her, combating the lethal frost. She grabbed Elder Qin by the collar of his heavy robes, hoisting his surprisingly light, emaciated frame off the ground.

The ice hissed and spat against her warm hands, fighting her, but her Yang energy acted as a perfect thermal buffer.

"Where is the bathing chamber?!" Ji’an barked, hauling the unconscious elder over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

"The inner sanctum! Down the hall, second door on the left!" Wangchen pointed, his hands hovering uselessly, agonizing over the fact that he couldn’t help her carry the burden.

Ji’an kicked the doors to the inner sanctum open.

The bathing chamber was opulent, carved entirely from white jade, with a massive, sunken thermal spring at its center.

Normally, the spring bubbled with soothing, hot, mineral-rich water.

Currently, however, the water was rapidly freezing over, a thick sheet of ice forming on the surface as Elder Qin’s deviating aura filled the room.

Ji’an unceremoniously dumped Elder Qin onto the heated jade tiles beside the pool.

"We need to stabilize his core temperature, or his meridians are going to shatter like glass!" Ji’an yelled, pulling off her gray apron and her heavy outer silk robe, leaving her in just her thin, white cotton inner tunic and trousers.