Chapter 52: The Weak Are Prey to the Strong
Tianmeng's words still trembled faintly in the frozen air when a sound—sharp yet crystalline—cleft through the wind and snow.
"Tianmeng, you court death."
The Ice Emperor's voice, originally like shards of ice striking one another, was now steeped in undisguised, murderous fury. The emerald expanse of the sky abruptly darkened into an oppressive, murky green. Thick, clotted killing intent descended like a physical force, compressing the hundred-meter protective perimeter Tianmeng had constructed with his spiritual power until barely ten meters remained.
Yet, faced with this overwhelming wave of lethal intent, the golden humanoid form Tianmeng had condensed from spiritual power only revealed a smile tinged with near-melancholy. His bearing was unhurried, even elegant, and his voice, though soft, held unwavering resolve: "No. Every word I've spoken comes from the heart. I have lived for a million years, and the vast majority of that time has slipped away in endless, dream-filled slumber. And in this long life of mine—so long it borders on exhaustion—the only one who has ever carved a mark into my heart, who made it race beyond all control... is you, Ice Emperor."
He paused, his gaze piercing through the blizzard as if to gaze into the very depths of that hidden existence's soul. "I chose this moment to return because I have calculated it precisely. Within a century, you will reach the utmost limit of your lifespan. You will face that inevitable dead end. When that time comes, if you cannot break through the next great threshold, you will ultimately vanish into this frozen world that gave us both birth. I cannot wait any longer. For me, this long life has already lost all meaning, and the time left to me is not long either. I have returned only so that you may continue to live. So that we may truly be together."
In the distance, buried deep beneath the snow with his presence utterly concealed, Huo Yuhao felt his heart flood with sudden, stark understanding. So Tianmeng's pursuit of godhood, his yearning for eternal life—it encompassed such a deep, private longing. He wanted the one he loved to share in that eternity with him. A subtle, bitter taste crept into the young man's heart, as if he had been deceived by his most trusted companion. He understood, rationally, that all living beings harbored private desires—soul beasts were no exception. But Tianmeng had never told him the full truth, and that omission left a hollow ache of betrayal. He had trusted Tianmeng so completely.
A warm hand gently alighted on his shoulder. It was Furina. She always seemed to perceive the fluctuations of his emotions. Her voice was soft, reassuring: "Don't overthink it. Everyone has their own destined path to walk and thoughts they cannot easily bare to others. It's hard to lay everything completely open, even before those we trust."
Her voice was like a gentle, flowing stream, smoothing the creases in the young man's heart. "After all, there's always the fear that the other person might not understand, or might even object. That's simply human nature. Just like me—don't I also carry many secrets yet unspoken? But when the time is right, I will certainly be honest with you."
Furina's words were like a warm current melting away ice. Huo Yuhao's tangled emotions eased considerably. He gave a soft "Mm," and murmured, "Thank you, Sister Furina."
Yes—soul beasts, too, possessed deep and profound emotional worlds. Their love and hate, their entanglements, were perhaps even fiercer and more direct than those of humans. Seeing Huo Yuhao's expression soften, Furina inwardly sighed in relief. She knew all too well that this child, Huo Yuhao, was pure of heart. Every ounce of kindness shown to him, he would remember it firmly and repay it a hundredfold. Yet, if someone harbored ill intent toward him from the very start, he was also prone to forming deep-seated knots of resentment.
Thankfully, his heart was ultimately a gentle one. So long as he was treated sincerely going forward, there was still room for reconciliation. This was likely because, since childhood, apart from his mother, he had rarely experienced warmth from the world. He was a child who desperately craved love, yet was profoundly starved of security.
And it was precisely because of this that he would later be so easily manipulated by Tang San, played like a puppet in the palm of his hand. Ah... the gentle are preyed upon; the tame are ridden upon!
And Electrolux, concealed in the shadows, observed Furina's actions and nodded slightly, silently praising: This girl's ability to see into the human heart and soothe turbulent emotions... is truly remarkable...
At the same time, the Tianmeng Ice Silkworm, though he had pushed his spiritual power to its absolute limit, fully focused on sensing the Ice Emperor's every move, had been too absorbed to notice the brief exchange between Huo Yuhao and Furina.
The Ice Emperor, having listened to Tianmeng's words that had struck so precisely at her most vulnerable core, fell into a brief, heavy silence. Tianmeng's words had, without question, pierced the deepest hidden dread in her heart—the heavenly tribulation that loomed ever closer, seemingly impossible to resist. She needed time to weigh this sudden "path to survival" he had laid before her.
Seeing this, the Tianmeng Ice Silkworm pressed his advantage, his voice carrying a barely perceptible thread of tension: "I have returned, Ice Emperor. After ten thousand years apart, we are reunited. Will you still refuse to show yourself and meet me face to face?"
The Ice Emperor's icy voice rang out once more, laden with the innate arrogance of a natural-born predator toward its prey: "Tianmeng, you know perfectly well. My race, to your race, is the hunter to the hunted. It is our nature."
Tianmeng smiled faintly, and in that smile there was a hint of both resignation and sorrow. "Of course I know. But who in this world has ever decreed that one cannot lose one's heart to their natural enemy? It is precisely because this love defies instinct itself that it is all the more sincere—and all the more mad."
The Ice Emperor let out a contemptuous, bone-chilling scoff. "What a pity, then. Weak as you are, even the right to possess such feelings is laughable. Still, I am rather touched. You've willingly offered yourself up as food—delivering yourself to my doorstep to 'become one' with me. Since that is the case, how could I not grant your 'deep affection'?"
Her voice dripped with cruel mockery. "You should be able to sense it. I am drawing closer even now. Wait for me. Within a quarter hour, I shall arrive at your side. I will 'treasure' you properly—savor your body with every bite, slowly absorb your energy, and let you become a part of me, utterly and completely."
The Tianmeng Ice Silkworm seemed long accustomed to the Ice Emperor's barbed words. With a mixture of exasperation and doting affection, he replied, "Can you not be just a little gentler? Always so cold and overbearing. No wonder you've remained alone all this time."
Then, with a sudden shift, his tone took on a sly, probing edge. "Oh, that's right. I've always been curious about that rumor that's spread so widely across the Far North... Is it true? Back then, did you really fall for the Snow Empress?"
Furina, listening from the side, couldn't help a silent, inward sigh: Truly, the yuri faction exists among all creatures under heaven!
"TIANMENG! I WILL TEAR YOU TO PIECES!" Tianmeng's words had struck like a poisoned needle, precisely piercing the deepest, most guarded secret the Ice Emperor wished never to be touched. Her voice instantly turned shrill and piercing, brimming with hysterical, unhinged fury.
The murky green of the sky deepened abruptly into an abyssal darkness that swallowed all light, as if even the wind and snow had been frozen solid by her rage.
The sly, knowing smile never once left the corner of Tianmeng's lips. It seemed he had deliberately provoked the Ice Emperor into fury—to disrupt her composure and weaken her vigilance.
At the same time, Tianmeng's voice sounded quietly in Huo Yuhao's mind, carrying unprecedented gravity: "Yuhao, get ready. The moment I give the signal, you must resist the extreme cold with everything you have. Hold on—this is the most critical step!"
"I will," Huo Yuhao drew a deep breath of the frigid air and answered inwardly with firm resolve.
But then—in the very next instant—a sudden and violent upheaval! The Ice Emperor, who had just declared she would need a quarter hour to arrive, materialized without the slightest forewarning, tearing through space itself!
The darkened sky was once more suffused with emerald radiance. A bolt of green light slashed across the sky like a blade and arrived in a flash. Opposite the Tianmeng Ice Silkworm now stood a soul beast of breathtaking, lethal beauty.
Its body seemed carved from the finest, most flawless jadeite. Its carapace was crystalline and translucent, refracting a cold, sharp luster. It was roughly a meter and a half in length, with a long, upswept tail evenly segmented by five translucent joints. The tail hook was like a diamond-ground pyramid, its tip gleaming with an eerie, lethal blue light. Its foreclaws were as razor-sharp as crystal, and with every faint opening and closing, they radiated a soul-freezing, bone-deep chill.
Gazing upon this silhouette that had haunted his every dream for millennia, the Tianmeng Ice Silkworm couldn't stop an expression of pure, entranced adoration from flooding his eyes. His gaze burned feverishly as he fixed it upon the Ice Emperor, and he murmured in a near-sleepwalking daze: "You've come..."
The Ice Emperor's crystalline yellow eyes swept coldly over Tianmeng's golden, human-shaped form—a body formed entirely from condensed spiritual power. A flash of wary suspicion crossed her gaze. "Tianmeng, do you think that merely hiding your true body and meeting me with only a spiritual projection will keep me from finding it? Even if your spiritual power has grown strong enough to condense its own form, it can never stray far from your real body."
Her voice remained cold, but her vigilance had sharpened to a razor's peak.
Tianmeng smiled softly, his eyes lingering greedily on the Ice Emperor's form as if drinking in a peerless, priceless treasure. "You are still so breathtaking. You intoxicate me completely. I remember, the last time I saw you, your tail still had six segments. Now it's fused into five... My beloved—this intoxicating, dangerous green. It seems my memory was not mistaken. You are indeed not far from that fatal reckoning."
The Ice Emperor snorted impatiently. "Empty words and a glib tongue will only make your death more agonizing. You've hidden yourself away for ten thousand years—and now you suddenly return, just to throw your life away?"
Tianmeng immediately assumed his deeply affectionate, almost theatrically exaggerated expression. "Of course it's so that you can keep living! This long, bitter, unrequited love of mine... it shall finally meet its end today. My darling, just imagine—soon, we shall never be parted again..."
"RIDICULOUS! I don't care what underhanded schemes you're plotting! Since you've willingly delivered yourself to me, there is only death waiting for you! Once I devour your source energy, I will be the one true sovereign of this continent!" The Ice Emperor was at last pushed past all restraint by Tianmeng's near-blissful, intoxicated expression. Her raised scorpion tail suddenly blazed with a blinding white light, and a beam so condensed it seemed to hold the very essence of ice—like a bolt of lightning—instantly pierced straight through the heart of Tianmeng's spiritual body!
Even as bystanders, Furina and Huo Yuhao found themselves at a loss for words witnessing Tianmeng's utterly bottomless infatuation. Furina could only press a hand to her forehead in silent despair: This... truly embodies the word 'simp' to the absolute extreme.
Yet the pierced body of the Tianmeng Ice Silkworm betrayed not the slightest trace of agony. Instead, a look of faint, almost wistful regret flickered across his face. "I had hoped to reminisce with you a little longer... Still so impatient. But no matter. For the sake of our true union—let us begin right now!"
A Savage Beast of the Ice Emperor's caliber possessed danger-sense honed to an almost precognitive sharpness. The very instant Tianmeng's words fell, she sensed catastrophe! Tianmeng's pierced golden form suddenly grew ethereal, then collapsed into a streak of flowing light and lunged before her in a heartbeat. The entire space seemed to congeal in that frozen instant. Terrifying, boundless spiritual power surged upward like a tsunami, locking her in a quagmire of inescapable restraint, slowing her every motion to a sticky crawl.
The Ice Emperor's eyes sharpened to merciless, razor-edged points. Her long scorpion tail lashed out madly as emerald light blazed around her in frantic bursts, desperately attempting to tear free from this spiritual morass. "Tianmeng! Have you gone mad?! To burn your own spiritual source so recklessly—without regard for total spiritual collapse, for eternal dissolution?! And even if you throw everything away, how long can a useless wretch like you possibly hold me? A second? Two?!" For the first time, a thread of unmistakable, barely suppressed shock and fury crept into her voice.
Yet Tianmeng's voice remained so unbearably gentle it made the skin crawl. But beneath that gentleness lay a resolve that brooked no doubt, no hesitation. "I don't need long. Even a single moment... is more than enough for me."
"NO! This is impossible! Tianmeng, you worthless worm—how can you possibly bind me?! What cursed skill is this?! Why can't even my Ultimate Ice break through?!" The Ice Emperor madly churned the near-four-hundred-thousand-year accumulation of colossal soul power within her. One devastatingly powerful skill after another blazed to life, white and green light intertwining and erupting—but they crashed into an invisible wall as insubstantial as cotton, dissolving uselessly beneath that oceanic expanse of spiritual suppression. They couldn't so much as shake it.
The golden radiance quietly receded, and the Tianmeng Ice Silkworm, in his Huo Yuhao-like form, coalesced once more before her. A faint, relieved smile touched his lips. "I have waited for this moment... truly, for far, far too long. All the doubts and questions in your heart—yes, I will answer every one of them for you. But this is not the place to linger. Once we leave this core region of the Far North, I will explain everything to you in full detail. Now... it is time for us to depart."
The murky green of the sky began to churn violently, heralding the Ice Emperor's final, desperate struggle—her source power clashing against the full might of Tianmeng's shed legacy. But that layer of white luminescence—seemingly so thin, yet impossibly tenacious—had already sealed every last avenue of retreat for this Heavenly King of the Far North, like the inescapable net of fate itself.