"Where is he...?"
Su Yiran hovered above the crater, cloaked in silence, wind tangling the long strands of her snow-white hair into elegant knots of unrest.
Frost still rained from the sky.
Below, only silence.
A volcanic crater silenced, a battlefield turned frozen.
Her eyes narrowed into twin crescent slits of glacial blue, blurred by an emotion she couldn't control.
"He should be frozen… he should be dead..."
But she wasn't sure.
And that... infuriated her.
She faced south.
Again.
And again.
Each ti her body tried to move, her heart whispered: "Check once more."
"You're not worried," she told herself. "You're confirming a kill. Nothing else."
Then why the fuck were her fingers trembling?
Her grip tightened.
Snowflakes lted on her knuckles.
Her teeth sunk lightly into her own lip, plump and painted with crimson gloss still unmarred by battle.
Not from pain.
From guilt.
"There were others down there..."
She drowned the world in frost.
But frost did not choose.
It did not distinguish between friend and beast.
"Hm..." She clicked her tongue, annoyed at herself, annoyed at him.
"If you're dead… just stay dead."
Her words lacked venom.
Worse, they sounded like a plea.
Suddenly, her spine arched.
Goosebumps flared across her skin.
No, The Heavenly Pressure hardened, as if another deity had entered the scene without announcing it.
She turned left, the motion graceful but rushed, like a deer hiding nobility behind fear.
And what she saw, made her heart slap violently against her ribs.
"M-Mother!?"
A woman stood there.
No footsteps, no sound.
Just presence.
She stood taller, prouder, skin like glazed snow, hair bound in a long silver ponytail that swayed without wind, face too beautiful to belong to a living woman.
Aged not with ti, but with transcendence.
Eyes like hers.
No, sharper.
Colder.
More complete.
They were like mirrors placed generations apart.
One younger.
One flawless.
Eternal Su stared at her daughter not with warmth, but with urgency.
"Enough gawking," she said,"I just crossed over. We're leaving. Now."
Her tone brooked no argunt.
Su Yiran's froze, but she wasn't alone.
Beside Eternal Su…
A veiled figure stepped forward, the veil was formality, her aura was not.
Ouyang Xue.
"...Why are you both here?" Her voice cracked.
She hated that it wavered, even when her own strength was at the peak.
"You couldn't cross over—there were Immortal Swords chasing you!"
Su Yiran's voice trembled, with pain and suspicion. What the hell was going on?
They'd told her to find the key.
They'd said they couldn't co.
And now they were here?
If they could cross over from the beginning... then why the hell did they send her alone to die?
Ouyang Xue didn't lift the veil, her hand, gloved in silk, reached forward and grabbed Su Yiran's wrist—tightly.
"Keep your questions," she said, "The Nebula Gate is restored, Sun Liang crossed first."
Su Yiran's eyes widened.
That na... Sun Liang?
So even he...?
Her feet didn't move.
Not yet.
She turned one last ti.
Back to the crater.
But she said nothing.
And then, three streaks of light exploded across the sky.
Silver, red, white.
Like divine ribbons pulled by fate itself.
And the three vanished.
Leaving the battlefield behind.
_____
anwhile, deep inside the volcanic crater…
The battlefield above had been frozen.
And with it, the ice popsicles that were once people had toppled in like dumplings into a boiling pot.
One of them was Su Xiaobai.
Now buried under layers of frost, heat, and humiliation.
His eyes twitched.
It was hot.
Unreasonably hot.
The kind of heat that roasted arrogance straight off your soul and replaced it with boiled regret.
His vision blurred red,nflas danced above and below, licking the ice like it was foreplay.
A small shadow moved nearby.
A Qilin cub, fiery red, horn still soft, fur glowing like sun-touched magma, was sniffing at the fallen ice slabs curiously.
Nose wiggle.
Snort.
Headbutt.
It poked him.
Then sneezed on his face. Broughttoyoubythefolksat*.
Su Xiaobai lay frozen, blinking slowly, wondering if this was what humiliation tasted like.
He tried to glance around, eyes dragging through the heat-distorted air.
There... Hunters. Piled like at stakes.
Their bodies covered under frost, so twitching, so silent, so very much regretting existence.
And not far, Ye An, locked in ice, eyes closed, breathing shallow.
She looked almost… peaceful.
Further down, two disfigured monsters.
Vaelzaar.
Sykarra.
Still alive, barely.
Their muscles spasd weakly, eyes flicking toward him with familiar venom.
Then they smirked.
That ugly, suicidal kind of smirk that said:
"We're all fucked together. Isn't that romantic?"
"…"
Su Xiaobai didn't smirk back.
He didn't even care.
His mind was stuck, on that image he saw before everything went white.
Her.
Su Yiran.
Floating above the sky, hair loose, eyes colder than judgnt.
A goddess birthed from frost and fury.
Was it… really her?
And if so—What the fuck is she now?
He looked up again.
Sowhere above, he could hear Beibei, his annoying divine chicken, squealing as she tried to fly down.
"Don't, idiot bird..." he thought, groaning internally.
There wasn't even room for breath, let alone wings.
They were packed tight.
Frozen corpses and half-dead cultivators stacked like ice potatoes in a divine furnace.
And Beibei?
She was a beast of lightning, not fla.
She'd be barbecued before reaching halfway.
Even Sykarra and Vaelzaar, who'd once danced naked in lava rivers, hadn't dared enter this furnace willingly.
They'd been thrown in.
And now they were quietly contemplating the afterlife.
The heat wasn't mortal.
It didn't co from fire.
It ca from beneath.
From the veins of the earth.
Magma veins.
Condensed, refined, a natural source of Earth-grade Fire Qi.
The kind of place cultivators killed sects to claim.
The kind of place where even your bones could break through realms if they didn't lt first.
A treasure trove.
Perfect for cultivation.
Su Xiaobai would've loved it.
If he wasn't already sitting on sothing better, his Pseudo Sky-grade Infernal Fla had long burned his body into sothing that most fire wouldn't dare flirt with.
But even now, even with that power, he felt it.
The pressure.
Not just heat.
Sothing else.
Spatial pressure.
Subtle, binding, and primordial.
Like a womb that didn't want you out, or a tomb that didn't want you in.
He felt it inside his bones.
Even trapped in ice, he could feel it—
"This place's sealed..."
Not naturally.
By sothing.
Sothing that didn't want visitors.
Sothing that didn't want this baby Qilin to leave.
He looked at the cub again. It licked an icicle, fell on its butt, and squealed.
"The mother..."
Of course.
A Qilin Matriarch.
Only she could set up this kind of spatial lock, not just to guard the place, but to trap the cub inside.
And the Hunters?
They had co to steal it.
To drag the cub out with chains, never daring to descend directly, because the mont you step down?
You belong to the volcano.
And now?
They were all here.
Trapped.
Su Xiaobai exhaled sharply.
"Brilliant..." he muttered, eyes drifting upward again.
The Hunters ca to trap the cub.
They got trapped.
He ca to save the beauty.
Turns out... the beauty was his fucking elder sister.
Yup.
No matter how many ntal backflips he perford, no matter how many coincidences he tried to invent, it was starting to feel undeniable.
That "Ranran" he'd been harassing like a horny cultivator on vacation...
Was probably Su Yiran.
His very own blood.
"Ranran… Yiran… could you have picked a na with less incest potential?"
He groaned ntally.
Now that he thought about it...
The body matched.
The figure matched.
The voice had that sa cold arrogance that made you want to slap her and kiss her at the sa ti.
Only the face and hair were different.
Disguise technique.
Had to be.
But that begged a much bigger question, "What the fuck is she doing here?"
She was supposed to be in White Cloud Star, training, being untouchable and generally acting like a divine pain in the ass.
And if she was here…
Was their mother here too?
Wait, both are alive? Heck yeah!
His whole body twitched.
Oh no.
Oh fuck.
If Su Yiran told Eternal Su what he'd done—
He was dead.
Not just physically.
He kissed her... Unknowingly.
Tried to seduce her.... Unknowingly.
Made borderline filthy jokes about dual cultivation.
Un-fucking-knowingly.
Soone kill him.
No, Soone already had.
His body was frozen, his Qi depleted, he was literal ice soup boiling inside a volcanic womb.
A womb sealed by his own sister.
Karma's a bitch.
And apparently, she'd started making house calls.
As for Su Yiran's strength?
He didn't even need to guess.
She'd activated that thing, the one where she could buy power from her past lives.
Samsara cheat-code bullshit.
"Couldn't you have done that earlier?" he thought bitterly. "Like maybe before I grabbed your waist and suggested a post-bed bath?"
But then again... If she had activated that earlier...She might've killed him on the spot, before even realizing he was her brother.
Actually— she might still kill him after realizing.
Su Xiaobai's brain was frying.
Out of all the villainous acts in his past life, all the carnage, depravity, and profanity, Incest was not on the resu.
He was a well-cultured degenerate.
A professional.
And most importantly—
An inexperienced virgin in that field.
This was new.
This was weird.
And for the first ti in what felt like a thousand years, his heart beat.
"...Was it really her?"
Why the hell was he thinking about this?
She didn't know.
She couldn't know.
Unless she had, like, so divine mory-mirror technique or, Oh gods.
She was a Samsara cultivator.
She totally had sothing like that.
Fuck.
He squird in the ice.
Not because of pain.
But because of awkwardness.
His heart, that arrogant, Qi-tempered, never-gives-a-damn heart, skipped a beat.
"Fuck …"
She was supposed to be an arrogant, sanctimonious prick, the kind of sibling that made you wish your parents practiced birth control.
Even if she showed up for free, with a red bow and a dual cultivation manual, he wouldn't have picked her.
.... Right?
But this…
This version?
With that wild frost in her eyes.
That power.
That body wrapped in black robes.
That look of divine coldness that scread "Touch and die," and still made your hands itch?
He wasn't so sure anymore.
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