The box arrived at the Verdant Phoenix Sect's mountain gates on a day of clear, brittle cold. It was a simple pine crate, unadorned, carried by a mercenary who had been paid handsomely to ask no questions and forget the face of the boy who hired him. The guards, sensing the profound, malevolent chill radiating from within, called an elder.
When the lid was pried open, a plume of frigid air, smelling of iron and frozen earth, misted into the sunlit courtyard. Inside, packed in pristine, unnatural ice that refused to melt, was the severed head of Elder Guo. His eyes were closed, his expression eerily placid. There was no note. No demand. No boast.
The silence of the message was louder than any scream.
Within hours, raven-messages flew from the Phoenix peaks to every major orthodox sect. The "northern unrest" was no longer a matter of pacifying a rogue upstart; it was an act of war. The Council of White Peaks, the closest thing to a ruling body among the righteous sects, convened an emergency session. The moderate voice of the Jade Cloud Sword Sect, urging caution and observation, was drowned out by the outcry for righteous extermination. A coalition, larger than the one previously whispered about, began to form. They named it the Purifying Frost Campaign.
The north, they declared, would be scoured clean.
On the plateau, the wind held a new kind of bite. Fen's pyre had burned three days prior, his ashes scattered to the northern gale according to the simple rites of survivalists. No grand elegies were spoken. His name was carved into a stone at the edge of the training yard. That was all.
But his death lived on in the training.
Kaelen drove his remaining disciples—and himself—past all previous limits. The Demon Manual's principle of adaptation through stress was weaponized into a regimen of controlled brutality. Sparring sessions ended with broken bones. Survival drills sent disciples into blizzards with minimal gear, tasked with hunting frost-fanged predators with their bare hands. Pain was no longer just a teacher; it was the curriculum.
Kaelen himself changed. The playful, cold sharpness in his eyes had hardened into something flint-like and remote. He slept less. He spoke only to give orders or corrections. He was the first on the training ground at dawn and the last to leave under the stars, his spear moving in silent, deadly patterns as he replayed every moment of the Frostfall fight, seeking the flaw, the move that could have saved Fen.
He was chasing a ghost, and he was pulling his disciples into the chase with him.
It was during one of these obsessive, moonlit drills that the stranger arrived.
There was no fanfare. No challenge. One moment, Kaelen was alone in the yard, the only sound the whisper-thud of his spear piercing a hanging sack of gravel. The next, a man was standing just outside the ring of torchlight, leaning casually against a post as if he'd been there for hours.
Kaelen froze, spear held mid-thrust. His senses, honed to a razor's edge, had detected nothing. No footfall, no rustle of cloth, no displacement of air. The man was simply there, a hole in the world's perception.
He was not old, but he carried an air of immense age. His hair was long and silver, tied simply back. He wore robes of undyed, rough-spun wool, the kind a hermit or a beggar might wear. But his eyes… his eyes were the colour of a winter lake at twilight, deep and knowing and utterly calm.
"An interesting form," the man said, his voice soft yet carrying perfectly. "It breathes with you. It learns. I have not seen its like in… many years."
Kaelen didn't lower his spear. "State your business."
"No threats, young master. Only curiosity." The man pushed off the post and took a step into the light. He moved with a liquid grace that made Kaelen's own adaptive movements seem clumsy. "They call you the Demon Boy. They say you cultivate a forbidden path. They say you sent a head in a box." A faint, unreadable smile touched his lips. "A very cold box."
"Are you with the Purifying Frost?" Kaelen asked, his qi coiling tightly within him, ready to explode into motion.
The man chuckled, a dry, rustling sound. "The righteous crusade? No. I find their… fervor, tedious. I am a seeker. A collector of forgotten truths. And the song your qi sings is a truth the world tried very hard to forget."
He raised a hand, palm open. Between his fingers, a faint, intricate symbol flickered into existence—a twisting, runic design that resonated with a deep, harmonic frequency. The moment Kaelen saw it, the qi in his own core surged, not in warning, but in recognition. It was the same resonance he'd felt in the mountain ruins when he first touched the fragmented manuscripts.
"You know the source," Kaelen breathed, his guard slipping for a fraction of a second.
"I know of the people of the source," the man corrected, closing his hand, the symbol vanishing. "They had a name, once. They built not with stone and dogma, but with will and adaptation. They called it the Path of Unmaking. The world unmade them for it." He looked at Kaelen with those bottomless eyes. "You have stumbled onto the shards of their legacy. And you are piecing it together, not by studying the shards, but by becoming one."
He was a seeker. And what he sought was standing right before him.
"Why come to me?" Kaelen asked, suspicion warring with a terrible, hungry curiosity.
"Because the song is growing louder," the man said, his gaze drifting past Kaelen, toward the heart of the northern mountains. "And not just from you. The box you sent… it was a shout in a silent hall. It has woken other listeners. The ruins you found are not entirely dead. Something is stirring. An artifact. A heartstone of the old Path. And it is calling to the one whose qi mirrors its own broken melody."
An artifact. A legacy. Power, not just borrowed from fragments, but whole and waiting.
Kaelen's mind raced. This could be a trap. An elaborate ploy by the orthodox sects. But his instincts, the very ones the Demon Manual had honed, screamed otherwise. This man was outside all of it. He was a force of nature, indifferent to the squabbles of sects.
"What do you want in return?" Kaelen finally asked.
"Nothing you are not already giving," the man said. "A front-row seat to the rediscovery of a lost truth. To watch the Path of Unmaking walk the earth once more. That is curiosity enough for a being as old as I." He inclined his head slightly. "I am called Silas. I will be in the northern wastes, should you wish to find what calls to you. But be swift. Others will have heard the song by now."
With that, he took a step backward, into the shadow of the watchtower. And just as silently as he had arrived, he was gone. Not even the snow where he had stood was disturbed.
Kaelen stood alone in the flickering torchlight, the stranger's words echoing in his skull. The grief for Fen, the pressure of the coming crusade, the obsessive drive for strength—it all coalesced into a single, burning imperative.
There was more power to be had. Not just in training, not just in combat, but in the very origin of the path he walked. An artifact of the Path of Unmaking.
He looked north, toward the black teeth of the mountains where his journey had truly begun. The first spark had been born there. Now, a furnace awaited.
The Purifying Frost Campaign was mustering in the south. But Kaelen's war was no longer just against them. It was a race—a race to claim the legacy of a forgotten power before the world could mobilize to destroy him for possessing even its shadow.
He turned and walked toward the disciples' barracks. The time for relentless, grinding training was over. Now, it was time to hunt.