The inside of the cave was bare.
Just cold stone walls and the particular quiet that came from being deep inside something very old — the kind of silence that had been accumulating for long enough that it felt like a physical presence rather than an absence of sound. My breath fogged in the air. The cold here was different from the cold outside. Older. More settled.
Xue Di walked to the center of the cave and stopped. She looked at a specific patch of empty air — not the ceiling, not the walls, just one particular section of nothing — with the focused expression of someone who could see something the rest of us couldn't.
"Tianmeng," she said. "Come out. I can see through the illusion. Don't make me ask twice."
Nothing happened.
She raised one hand. A short sword of ice condensed in her palm from nothing, smooth and cold and real, and she threw it at the empty patch of air with the calm precision of someone who had done this before and knew exactly what they were aiming at.
Something exploded out of the floor with a yelp.
What landed — and then scrambled upright, and then attempted to collect some dignity — was a worm. A very large worm, clearly ancient, glowing faintly with the kind of soul energy that accumulated over thousands upon thousands of years. It flopped around on the cave floor for a moment in a way that was deeply undignified for something of its obvious age and power, and then managed to right itself.
"Haha — Big Sis! I was just kidding around! I wasn't hiding at all, that was completely different, you see what happened was—"
"Sit down, Tianmeng."
He sat down.
Xue Di looked at him with the expression of someone who had known this creature for a very long time and had developed extremely specific and well-founded expectations for his behaviour. "I have a candidate," she said, without preamble. "Twin martial souls. His body martial soul carries an inherent attribute of ultimate ice — which means we can work toward forming a soul bone directly, rather than needing a second martial soul to fill that function. His other spirit is dragon-type, and it has room to evolve further. Holy Light Dragon King lineage, as best I can tell, though it needs more dragon blood and some purification work before it fully expresses what it's capable of."
Tianmeng was quiet for a moment. The flopping-around energy had settled into something more considered.
"What's the enhancement range on the body martial soul?" he asked.
"All-round physical enhancement. Complete and balanced — not specialised in one direction, but covering everything."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"This kid," Tianmeng said slowly, with the tone of someone arriving at a conclusion they were genuinely impressed by, "is a diamond." He paused. "No — this kid is a diamond that someone gift-wrapped and left in the snow. Where did you even find him? Which major clan did you steal him from?"
"I accidentally saved his life and he became my disciple," Xue Di said. "He's an orphan. That part isn't relevant." She reached into her storage space and produced a beast core.
The energy radiating off it hit the cave like a change in air pressure — a sudden weight, a density, the feeling of something very old and very powerful contained in a small object. Even standing near the entrance I felt it, a heaviness that settled over everything in the cave.
"This is a core from a hundred-thousand-year Ice Wyvern," Xue Di said. "I've had it stored for five thousand years, waiting for the right use." She held it out toward him. "Your current cultivation sits at nine hundred and ninety thousand years. This should push you through the final threshold."
Tianmeng stared at the core. Then at her. Then at the core again.
"Why do I feel," he said carefully, "like you're fattening a pig before slaughter?"
"Because you've always been dramatic." She held it out. "Take it."
He grumbled something under his breath that I couldn't quite catch, and took it. He held the core between his front segments and something began to happen — the energy from the core started pulling inward, slowly at first, then with increasing purpose, like water finding a drain. A cocoon began to form around him. Thin at first, almost transparent, then thickening layer by layer, the material of it becoming more opaque until the worm inside was completely sealed away from view.
Above the cave, through the stone ceiling, I could feel a change in the air. Pressure building. Something gathering.
Bing Di glanced upward. Then she guided me the rest of the way inside.
I stood near the wall and watched the cocoon and tried to organise what I was feeling, which was a complicated mixture of surprise, recognition, and something that was trying very hard not to become overwhelmed. I knew what this was. From everything preserved in my memories of the source material — the story that had originally played out in this world before my arrival into it — I knew who Tianmeng was, what he was capable of, and what this moment meant. Knowing something from a story and standing in the same cold cave while it actually happened were genuinely different experiences. The story version was information. This version had weight.
A sound began from inside the cocoon. Not cracking, not breaking — something more like unfolding. The sound of something finding a shape it hadn't known it was moving toward.
The cocoon split.
What came out was not a worm.
It was not a moth or a butterfly either, which would have been the obvious and expected direction for something emerging from a cocoon. What emerged was a free spirit — no physical body at all, just a form made of pure light and will and something that felt genuinely, deeply ancient. Translucent wings that carried a suggestion of both butterfly and eastern dragon in the same shape, as though the form couldn't fully commit to either because it was actually something that existed between them. It hovered near the ceiling of the cave and radiated the specific quality of something that had just discovered it was considerably more than it had believed itself to be.
The cave went quiet.
"A free spirit," Xue Di said, and for once her voice carried something that sounded close to genuine surprise. "He shed the physical body entirely. That's — not what I expected to happen."
Bing Di stared at the glowing form near the ceiling and said nothing. Even she had gone still in a way that suggested she was adjusting her understanding of the situation.
I looked up at it.
The shape of the wings. The quality of the light — the particular way it combined something dreamlike with that trace of draconic energy that was still visible if you knew what to look for. The name arrived without me having to search for it.
"Fantasy Dragonfly," I said.
Everyone looked at me.
"The Dream in Skydream Iceworm," I said, working through it out loud. "Fantasy is an evolution of dream. And the dragon trace is still there in the shape of the wings. Fantasy Dragonfly."
A beat of silence.
"I like that," Bing Di said. She tilted her head, studying the glowing form above us with an expression that was part appreciation and part something else. "You look edible, though. It's a pity you don't have a body anymore."
"BING DI." Tianmeng's voice came from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously — from the air, from the walls, from somewhere that wasn't a physical location. "How can you say that. I have feelings."
"Focus," Xue Di said sharply, looking up and past the glowing form toward where the ceiling met the sky above it. "The tribulation is coming."
The first bolt of lightning came through the cave roof.
I had known, in theory, what a tribulation was. When a soul beast crossed certain thresholds of cultivation — particularly the million-year threshold — the world itself responded. A heavenly trial, a test that arrived in the form of lightning carrying a power that had nothing to do with natural weather, something that felt intentional in the way that natural forces rarely felt intentional. I had known this.
What hit Tianmeng with the first strike was on a completely different level from anything I had read about or expected. Not stronger by a degree — stronger by an order of magnitude. The kind of power that would have erased a physical body in a single blow, completely and without remainder.
Even in his new spiritual form, Tianmeng's shape cracked.
The fracture lines ran through the translucent wings like broken glass, visible for a terrible second before they began to close. But the second strike was already coming.
Xue Di made the decision in the same instant she saw the first crack form. "Tianmeng. Now. Initiate the transfer."
He didn't argue. He had already understood what she meant and what it would cost, and he didn't argue about it for even a second.
The spirit form dissolved. It became a stream of light that poured downward from the ceiling of the cave like liquid, and it settled around me — and into me — like a second sky wrapping itself around the first. Warm and ancient and completely overwhelming, like being suddenly aware of a presence that had been moving toward this moment for longer than I had been alive.
"You focus entirely on absorbing," Xue Di said. She was already moving, positioning herself at the cave entrance, Bing Di falling into place beside her. "Bing Di and I will handle the tribulation."
"Yes, Teacher." I sat down cross-legged on the cave floor and closed my eyes.
What followed was three hours that I will not forget.
The soul ring formed above me — silver-gold, a colour that existed outside any standard classification, rotating slowly in the charged and crackling air. Before it could settle, something else descended alongside it — a soul bone, shaped like a crown, liquefying as it came down and flowing into contact with my head.
The pain arrived immediately. Deep and total and the kind that didn't leave room to think around it. It didn't feel like being hurt. It felt like being taken apart and put back together by something that knew what it was doing but had no particular interest in whether the process was comfortable.
I didn't move.
Outside, the tribulation thunder continued. I could hear Xue Di and Bing Di working — the sound of ancient ice power meeting something that had no interest in being stopped, the particular quality of two enormously powerful beings pushing back against something that was pushing hard. The cave shook twice. Something outside cracked with a sound like a mountain deciding to become two mountains.
I held on to the absorption. It was the only thing I could do, so I did it completely.
Somewhere in the middle of the second hour, my vision changed. Not went dark — shifted. Colours acquired a sharpness and a range they hadn't had before. Ice and cold stopped being things I felt and became things I read, data the body was processing automatically, information arriving without me having to seek it. The temperature of every surface in the cave. The movement of cold air between the walls. The difference between ice that had been here for a century and ice that had formed this morning.
When the soul bone finally finished fusing, the soul ring was almost gentle by comparison. It settled into place with a clean warmth, like something slotting into a space that had been waiting for it. I stayed still for another hour while it completed the process, and then opened my eyes.
The cave was quiet. The storm had ended. Xue Di and Bing Di stood near the entrance, both of them carrying the particular exhausted stillness of people who had done something that cost them significantly and had no intention of mentioning it.
I looked at the wall of ice beside me. My eyes were silver now. I could see that clearly in the reflection.
I checked my soul power.
Above level twenty. Comfortably above.
I sat there for a moment and thought about Tianmeng. The cheerful ancient worm who had made jokes about being fattened for slaughter right up until the moment he poured himself into a six-year-old orphan's soul — because a dream he had been carrying for longer than most kingdoms had existed had turned out to be worth more to him than his own continued separate existence. That was not a small thing. That was not something you acknowledged once and moved on from.
"Teacher," I said.
Xue Di looked over at me.
"Thank you." A pause. "Both of you."
Bing Di looked away at the cave wall and said nothing. For her, that was approximately the emotional equivalent of a speech.
Xue Di nodded once. Clean and direct, the way she did most things.
Outside, the Extreme North was quiet and white and vast, completely indifferent to what had just happened inside a small cave at its edge. The peaks caught the light in the same blues and greens as before. The cold pressed against the stone walls the same way it always had.
Inside, something had changed permanently. I sat with that for a moment, and then stood up.