I felt Feng Chen's breathing change before anything else did.
Over the past ten minutes it had shifted — from controlled, to working-at-it, to the specific laboured quality that meant not going to last much longer. I could feel it in the grip on my arm. Still firm, but the angle kept adjusting, compensating for something he wasn't saying out loud.
I knew what was coming before it happened.
I didn't blame him. Fear was real. Survival was real. When a situation got stripped down to its bare components and the options narrowed to one, most people chose themselves — and holding that against someone was easy to do from a comfortable distance and nowhere else.
The grip released.
Feng Chen was gone between the trees in the next breath, his Snow Leopard spirit a pale streak vanishing into the dark between the pines.
I stood alone in the IceBound Forest with a seven-thousand-year Ice Bear thirty meters behind me.
Well. Here we are.
I had reincarnated because a life without any thrill had felt like slow suffocation. First time in my life, I feel like a pinch situation, where I feel more alive than my whole past life.
I summoned Sirius.
He appeared at my side immediately — no longer the chubby hatchling from three months ago, but something leaner and more defined, golden-amber scales catching what little light filtered through the pines. Small still, but present in a way that had real weight to it. He looked up at me once, then looked at the bear. I held out the knife.
He took it in his mouth without hesitation.
I had no combat skills worth mentioning. What I had was a plan built entirely around one fact: I couldn't use both martial souls at the same time. So they weren't going to work at the same time.
The plan was not to win. The plan was to not get caught.
I moved toward the bear — directly toward it, which was not the natural instinct but was the necessary one. I needed its full attention on me.
I got it.
The bear came forward and I ran, cutting between trees, staying just ahead of it, making enough noise and movement to keep its eyes locked forward. A tree came down somewhere to my left, the sound rolling through the cold air like thunder. I didn't look back. I kept moving, kept it focused on me, trusting that Sirius was doing what we'd silently agreed he would do.
He was already circling wide through the pines, low to the ground, silent in the way small things can be silent when they choose to be. The bear had no reason to look behind itself. It had its target right in front of it, running, visible, making all the right sounds of something trying to escape.
When Sirius reached its back, he climbed.
He had grown enough to have real weight and enough claw to find solid purchase in thick fur. He went up fast — shoulder, neck, the broad flat space between the ears — and drove the knife into the left eye with everything his small frame could put behind it.
The bear screamed.
In the same instant, Sirius flung the knife forward — a short spinning toss, aimed at where I was running — and dismissed himself.
I caught it without stopping. Dismissed nothing, activated nothing — just caught the knife and kept running, because the bear was still between me and any useful distance, and the plan had a second half.
I looped back.
The bear was thrashing, one eye gone, head swinging. It heard me coming but the depth perception was wrong now and the timing was off. I got inside its guard for one second — one clean second — activated the Silverine Battle Body, silver sheen rising across my skin, and drove the knife into the right eye as hard as I could.
Then I abandoned the knife entirely and ran.
The Silverine Battle Body was actively boosting my speed but the bear's paw accidently came around — a blind, sweeping strike, purely reactive, catching nothing but air and the very edge of my back. Three shallow lines across the skin, burning immediately in the cold. Not deep. Not stopping me. I kept running, pushing the silver sheen back up for the speed, weaving between the narrow pines.
Behind me, the bear roar was now more louder, as he is following me just based on the smell.
A seven-thousand-year soul beast with both eyes destroyed didn't need eyes. It stood in the forest and it breathed, and from that breath alone — the slow draw of cold air through ancient nostrils — it built a picture as complete as sight. My scent was everywhere. In the snow I'd disturbed, on the bark I'd brushed, on the blood running down my back and leaving a trail as clear as footprints.
It started moving again. Unhurried. Certain.
I ran harder and it didn't matter. Every direction I chose, the bear adjusted. Every gap I put between us, it closed without rushing, following the smell of me through the dark between the trees with the patience of something that had been hunting in this forest for longer than the forest had had a name.
Eventually it had me cornered against a cluster of fallen trunks with nowhere left to go.
The Silverine Battle Body flickered out — I'd been pushing it too long and the toll was real. My legs stopped cooperating properly a second later. I went down, the frozen ground arriving harder than I was ready for.
Head against frozen earth. Blood running warm down my face from somewhere. When I coughed, what came up was red.
I lay there, no spirit active, nothing left to switch to that would change anything at this distance, listening to the bear moving toward me through the snow. Feeling — somewhere underneath the pain and the blood and the very real possibility that this was where things ended — something that surprised me. A thin, bright wire of feeling I recognised after a second as genuine aliveness. Not peace. Not acceptance. Something that felt like being fully present in a way I hadn't been for most of my first life.
Three months, I thought. My other self is still alive, it's okay.
In a library on the other side of the continent, a sharp pain crossed the back out of nowhere and a book hit the floor.
A hand pressed against a spine that had no wound — skin intact, nothing visibly wrong — and yet the pain was completely real, arriving all at once the way a shared nerve fires in both directions simultaneously.
The mind was in both places. The cold ground and the library floor. Blood on one face and the ghost of it on the other. The bear's footsteps getting closer through the snow. A page about soul beast migration patterns lying face-up on the library tiles.
Hao.
Not a word sent anywhere. Just the knowing — coming from two directions at once, the way you know something is happening to your hand because you and your hand are not separate things.
Then the air changed.
The bear stopped.
I turned my head.
A woman stood between me and the bear. White hair moving slightly in the frozen air, stirred by nothing I could feel. The bear looked at her the way very cautiously, it was as if the bear's every instinct was telling, to not step a single step forward, an unknown suppression in his depth. It made a sound low in its chest, deep and uncertain. Then it turned and was gone into the trees without another sound.
She looked down at me.
White hair. A face that was difficult to look away from in the specific way that very few faces were — not just beautiful, but carrying a quality of stillness that had nothing to do with being calm and everything to do with being something that had existed for a very long time and found stillness entirely natural. The kind of presence that made the frozen forest around her feel like a backdrop rather than a place.
The last thing I registered clearly was that she looked almost impossibly beautiful, and that my blood was making a small dark patch in the snow beside my head, and that these two observations together were somewhat absurd.
Then everything went dark.
<3rd POV>
A small figure dropped down from a branch above, landing beside the woman with barely a sound.
Emerald hair, a young face — Bing Di looked at the unconscious boy on the ground, at the blood spreading into the snow, at the wound across his back, and then at Xue Di with an expression that said she was reserving full judgment but had a number of questions she intended to ask.
"Is this really the only way? Finding a human child?"
"It's the one and only best path available to us right now," Xue Di said. She hadn't looked away from the boy. "I explained you about that."
"I'm not arguing." Bing Di crouched down and studied him with frank curiosity, taking in the details with the thoroughness of someone who had learned to observe carefully before forming opinions. "I'm just little worried about, is this brat trustworthy?." A pause. "Anyway, he has twin martial souls."
"I know."
"Wasn't that what you were searching for?"
"No." Xue Di was quiet for a moment. "I was looking for someone who wouldn't stay still on the worst situation ever. Kind hearted, like how he didn't resent his teammate for abandoning him, thoughtful and more mature. Ice attribute, body-type martial soul if possible, the kind of stubbornness that doesn't break under pressure — that's what I came looking for. That's what I found." She looked at the fading blue-silver traces still visible on his skin, at the way the two spirits sat within him even now — one known, one hidden, both entirely and completely his own. "The twin martial soul is more than I was expecting. And his second one — the a Body martial Soul— it carries properties of true ice. Pure and deep, the kind that doesn't come from cultivation but from the soul itself. And I felt like he is bane of Dragons, the apex soul beast." She shook her head slightly. "If I had tried to design this from scratch, I couldn't have gotten this fortunate."
"And now we have to raise him, I doubt he will accept our identity as soul beast." Bing Di said, with the particular tone of someone who had seen that happen before and knew exactly what it tended to cost. She have witnessed many soul beast who saved human in the cold of Extreme North, and later being back-stabbed by those same human.
"That's why I chose my target of 6 years old, so we can instil the awareness of Soul beast and human being same, both are like each other, the strongest surpass the weak, and either choose to protect or oppress. " Xue Di finally looked up at her and thought 'if that boy back in Soul Land 2 could start from the very bottom — less than this, with less than this — and still make it all the way to the top, then this one, with everything he's already carrying, can go even further. I genuinely believe that.'
Bing Di was quiet for a moment, looking at the battered, unconscious boy in the snow.
"Alright," she said finally. The word carried the weight of a decision that had been made fully, not reluctantly. "I trust you, Xue Di. As long as we're together, I trust you."
Xue Di looked back down at the bleeding, battered, entirely underprepared child who had somehow stayed on his feet against a seven-thousand-year Ice Bear using nothing but a knife, a dragon cub, and a complete refusal to stop moving.
"We should deal with the bleeding," she said.
"Probably should do that first, yes," Bing Di agreed.