Tang Xiao's voice was the final gale sweeping across the ice plain, each word carrying the soul-freezing finality of his resolve. As the last syllable fell, it wasn't coiling cold, but a glacial river breaching its dam!
*Boom!*
A torrent of deep blue, verging on black, erupted from Tang Xiao's feet like an unchained frost behemoth. The air shrieked as it froze, countless ice crystals instantly coalescing only to be swept up by the subsequent, more violent surge, forming a destructive deluge aimed squarely at Lu Chen! Where it passed, space itself seemed to freeze and warp, leaving a transient, deathly azure vacuum trail.
Absolute Zero! The Will to Freeze!
Lu Chen's blood felt as if it truly congealed in that instant. Thought stalled, his body locked rigid as if plunged into the deepest trench. The aura of death, purer and more direct than the Wastes' own chill, seized his throat and froze his heart. The feeble ember of light-fire power suppressed deep in his marrow, like a candle guttering in the wind, couldn't even muster the impulse to struggle, leaving only utter stillness and cold.
Images flashed through his frozen mind: Adrian's charred half-body, the indifferent lips of the Tribunal elders pronouncing judgment, the last glimpse of leaden sky as the float-disc plunged into the abyss... Finally, it locked onto Tang Xiao's ice-blue eyes beneath the hood, burning with madness and annihilation.
*No! Not like this!* A roar born from the deepest wellspring of life, bestial and raw, exploded within his frozen chest! To end as monster bait or coffin fuel? This exile's terminus couldn't be utter obliteration!
"Urgh—Aaaah!!!"
The death cry shattered his frozen throat, spraying bloody foam and desperate frenzy. Not a summoning, not guidance—pure instinct, the soul's final combustion before absolute destruction! Lu Chen's eyes were bloodshot, veins bulging. He stared fixedly at the devouring azure flood and thrust forward with every scrap of his remaining, chaotic, self-scorching light-fire power, fueled by towering resentment and rage!
From his palm bloomed not a feeble flame, but a violently unstable, pale sphere of light, as if cobbled together from shards of shattered blades! It lacked the Sacred Flame's warmth or sanctity, radiating only blinding, destructive fury—a miniature sun forcibly ignited and primed to detonate! Its glare tore through the shrouding blue mist, illuminating Lu Chen's face, contorted with agony and madness, like a vengeful specter. Inside the sphere, countless tiny arcs of pale lightning crackled and exploded with a sickening, sputtering snarl, straining to break free and incinerate Lu Chen and everything around him.
The wreckage of uncontrolled light surged to meet the all-freezing glacial flood!
Time stretched infinitely at the collision point.
The next instant—
*Screeeeech—!!!*
An indescribably sharp shriek ripped through the cavern's deathly silence! Not metal on metal, not ice cracking, but the ultimate wail of two diametrically opposed cosmic laws being violently snapped and annihilated within a confined space!
Blinding white light clashed head-on with the profound azure deluge!
There was no cataclysmic explosion, no wave of energy. Instead, space at the collision point warped inward and distorted unnaturally, like an invisible maw sucking in a breath.
Then, the anomaly manifested.
The frenzied, near-exploding pale sphere didn't freeze or annihilate upon contact with the deep blue surge. Instead, its wildly lashing energy edges seemed precisely sculpted and shaped by invisible chisels! The deep blue-black cold flowed like viscous glue, instantly engulfing and permeating the agitated pale light. The radiance was forcibly solidified, stretched, twisted!
*Craaackle-snap-pop!*
A rapid-fire cacophony of ice crystallization, like popping corn, erupted!
Bizarre, twisted crystalline prisms materialized at the collision's epicenter!
Distorted, jagged, they resembled lightning bolts instantly wrenched and frozen by colossal force. Their bodies shimmered with an unstable, flowing deep blue base, like solidified polar depths. And within that translucent azure ice, streams of pale, piercing light writhed like imprisoned serpents, frantically thrashing and battering against their frigid cage! Light and ice, forces that should annihilate each other like fire and water, were now violently kneaded together and imprisoned in an inconceivable manner!
Each savage impact of the pale light streams made the azure prisms groan under stress, their surfaces spider-webbing with fine cracks, shedding blue ice dust. Meanwhile, the deep, deathly cold power from Tang Xiao, inherent in the ice, clung like a parasite, constantly eroding and freezing the light's core, seeking to assimilate it into icy nothingness. Each erosion dimmed the pale light further, making its thrashing more desperate.
Mutual consumption! Mutual annihilation! Yet held in a terrifying, precarious equilibrium by some bizarre tension! These twisted ice prisms were the physical manifestation of this paradoxical balance, radiating an aura of soul-chilling dread.
An eerie silence fell over the cavern. Only the suspended prisms, emitting faint cracking sounds and the distorted hiss of contained light, silently proclaimed the defiance of natural law against the backdrop of the azure ice lake.
A fissure appeared on Tang Xiao's perpetually frozen visage. Frozen in his stance, his ice-blue pupils contracted violently, locked onto the floating, twisted prisms imprisoning the pale flames. His gaze no longer held pure killing intent; it was now mixed with profound shock, disbelief, and even... a trace of unacknowledged confusion.
Freezing the Sacred Flame? He'd done it before, but that was a crude shackle, a muzzle on a raging beast. But this...? What *was* this? Ice and light, stillness and destruction, opposing forces woven together in the collision of his absolute cold domain and the other's chaotic flame? Forming an unprecedented, unheard-of... symbiont? An aberration defying the Source-current's laws?
*Impossible!*
An unspeakable fury instantly obliterated the confusion. *What mockery was this?* A desecration of the path he'd paid so dearly to walk—the path to a world-covering ice coffin? The writhing azure ice on his face accelerated abruptly, the obsidian etching's edge seeming to advance another fraction, bringing excruciating, soul-deep agony and colder numbness. This pain was fuel on the fire, reigniting the madness momentarily suppressed by shock in his eyes.
"Abomination... against the natural order!" Tang Xiao's voice, warped by pain and extreme rage, rasped like sandpaper on ice. He jerked his hands back from Lu Chen. The deep blue surge maintaining the ice dome, bereft of his sustaining power, groaned deeply, its cracks visibly deepening and spreading! The suppressed magma currents beneath bellowed, a wave of scorching air thick with sulfur ash blasting from the fissures in the dome!
But he had no time for that. All his will, all his power, focused on this profane aberration! He crossed his arms over his chest, fingers hooked like talons, the cold swirling around them instantly solidifying into deep blue crystalline claws! A frigid aura, far purer, more ancient, and utterly deathly—as if from the world's birth—exploded from him!
He would erase this perverse anomaly, this light-waste remnant who brought chaos, with the most primordial, most absolute "Abyssal Frost"! Freeze it from concept into oblivion!
Just as Tang Xiao gathered that ultimate power of stillness—
*"Ooooooom—"*
A low, resonant, ancient lamentation, seeming to traverse endless time, echoed unexpectedly from the depths of the magma fissure sealed by the ice dome!
This sound didn't travel through air; it resonated directly in the soul! It carried an indescribable age, vastness, and a deep... sorrow and exhaustion. Like a world-bearing pillar groaning under strain, or a mother of all things in agonizing labor.
The instant the lament sounded, all ambient elemental energy in the cavern froze in eerie stasis.
The terrifying, concept-freezing deathly cold Tang Xiao had gathered lurched violently as if struck by an invisible hammer! His body swayed violently; the writhing azure ice on his face surged uncontrollably, instantly consuming half his cheekbone, bringing agony so intense his vision dimmed! The deep blue ice claws forming on his crossed arms cracked instantly with countless fissures!
The suspended, twisted flame-ice prisms also froze for an instant, the pale light streams within ceasing their frantic writhing as if awed by the ancient lament. Even the magma's roar deep beneath the ice lake subsided strangely.
Lu Chen felt the impact like a physical blow! The ancient lament struck his chaotic consciousness like a tidal wave of indescribable cold. His vision spun—the jagged prisms, the raging Tang Xiao, the azure cavern—all blurred. The last vestiges of strength fled his body. Like a puppet with severed strings, he toppled backward, crashing onto the hard, icy surface. Consciousness plunged into an abyss of utter darkness.
Before the darkness consumed him, the last image seared into his fading sight was Tang Xiao's face, twisted by agony and a deeper, profound shock, and his ice-blue eyes, burning with mad fire, fixed unwaveringly on the magma fissure. From those depths, something far more profound and terrifying than magma seemed to stir... awakened by the ancient lament?