He wore everything she gave him, and everything he owned on top of that.
Two shirts. Her winter coat, which was too short in the arms. His own coat over hers. The shawl wrapped around his neck and face. Strips of blanket wrapped around his hands, three layers thick. He looked like a pile of laundry walking up a mountain.
He left an hour after dark.
The northernmost shaft looked the same as before. Boards, iron bands, and a round red wax seal in the middle. He worked the seal off in one piece with the tip of his knife and put it in his pocket. Then he pulled the boards away.
The cold came up out of the shaft to meet him.
This time, it didn’t hurt the way it had before.
It was still cold. It was still the heavy, deep cold of stone. But his body was not the same body that had come down here as a third-stage boy with four bulls. Six stages of Qi sat packed inside him now. Even with his Qi held still and hidden, his body pushed back against the cold on its own.
He didn’t move his Qi. He didn’t let a single wisp of it show. He climbed down in the dark, with a small candle, and he started counting.
He passed the place where the roof had fallen in, and crawled through the gap on his stomach. He passed the crack where he had cut the first six pieces of frostmarrow. The crack was empty now.
He went deeper.
At four hundred, he found a new seam of frostmarrow along the wall. It was pale and wet-looking, just like the first one, and it was twice as long. He cut carefully, the way he had learned to. The blanket strips kept the worst of it off his palms. He dropped each piece into the cloth bag tied to his belt.
Ten pieces.
Twenty.
Thirty.
He stopped at thirty and tied the bag shut. That was what he had come for. That was enough.
He was about to turn back when he noticed a light. It was coming from further down the tunnel.
It was a faint blue glow, very soft, like moonlight on snow. Down here, where no light had ever been, it was the brightest thing he had seen in his life.
Han Jiu knew he should turn around. He went toward the light anyway.
The tunnel opened up into a small cave. The walls were covered in thick white frost. The air was so cold that his breath froze in front of his face and fell to the floor as tiny crystals.
In the middle of the cave, growing out of a crack in the rock, was a flower.
It was about the size of his hand. It had seven petals, and each petal looked like it was carved from blue ice. A soft light came from the middle of it. All the cold in the cave seemed to be pulled toward it, like water running downhill.
Han Jiu stood and stared at it.
He didn’t know what it was called. He didn’t know what it was worth. But he could feel it. Even standing ten feet away, even with his Qi hidden, he could feel the power inside it pressing against his skin.
’This is something she needs,’ he thought. ’This is exactly the kind of thing she needs.’
He walked up to it and reached out his hand.
The moment his wrapped fingers touched a petal, his whole hand froze.
It felt like his hand had turned to stone. White frost shot up through the blanket strips and over his wrist in one second flat. He jerked his hand back and fell onto his back on the frozen floor.
He lay there, breathing hard, and stared at his hand.
The frost was still climbing. It had reached halfway up his forearm. He could not feel his fingers at all.
He moved his Qi, just a little, and pushed it down his arm. The frost stopped. Slowly, painfully, it started to melt back.
’That touch was barely anything,’ he thought. ’If I had grabbed it properly, I’d be dead.’
He sat up and looked at the flower again.
He couldn’t carry it in his hands. It would freeze him before he got out of the shaft. And he couldn’t carry it in his bag either. The power coming off it was too strong. If he carried it down into the valley like this, every cultivator above fifth stage would feel it from a mile away. The Yun elders would feel it. Yun Hai would feel it.
He needed something that could hold the cold, and hide it.
He thought hard.
Then he remembered the sound of something heavy being dragged across stone.
The thing that lived in this mine had lived in the cold for sixty years. Its whole body must be made for cold. Its skin, its flesh, everything about it.
If he could kill it, and hollow it out, he could put the flower inside it. The body would hold the cold. It might even hide the flower’s power, the way a thick coat hides body heat.
It was a crazy idea. He knew that.
But he also knew something else. The thing came down here to feed. And if he were a creature that lived on cold, this cave was exactly where he would come to eat.
He blew out the candle. He sat down with his back against the frost-covered wall, a few steps away from the flower. He pulled his Qi all the way in, the way he had learned to do in this very tunnel, until there was nothing left showing at all. And he held his knife in both hands.
He waited.
Then, from the dark tunnel behind him, he heard it.
A long, dry sound. Something heavy being dragged across the rock.
Forty-eight black bulls appeared in the darkness, faint and small, walking in a slow circle. They came closer. And closer.
The creature came into the cave. In the blue light of the flower, Han Jiu saw it for the first time.
It was a snake. A huge, pale snake, as thick as his waist and longer than the storeroom. Its scales were white and looked like frost. It had no eyes at all, only smooth white skin where the eyes should have been.
It slid right past him, the same way it had slid past him before. It didn’t know he was there.
It curled around the flower and lowered its head toward the petals.
Han Jiu stood up.
He let out all of his Qi at once.
For the first time in his life, he let everything out. Three iron bulls blazed above his head. Forty-eight. Exactly the same as the snake.
The snake felt it instantly. Its head whipped around toward him.
But he was already moving. He put every bit of his strength into his legs and jumped. He landed on the snake’s neck, just behind its head, and drove his knife down into the soft place at the base of its skull with both hands.
The snake went wild.
It threw him against the wall. He felt something in his side crack. It threw him against the ceiling. It threw him against the floor. He held on to the knife and did not let go. Every time it smashed him into something, he pushed the blade in deeper, and poured more Qi into it.
He lost count of how many times it hit him.
Then the snake shuddered, went stiff, and lay still.
The forty-eight bulls above it faded away.
Han Jiu slid off its neck and lay on the frozen floor. He was breathing in short, sharp gasps, because it hurt too much to breathe deeply.
He had done it.
Cutting it open took almost everything he had left.
The snake’s skin was so thick and so cold that his knife kept sliding off. Every time his hands touched the scales, frost started crawling up his fingers, and he had to push Qi into his hands to stop it. He cut along the snake’s belly. He pulled out everything inside, until there was nothing left but a long, empty tube of white scales.
By the time he was done, his Qi was almost gone.
He could feel it. He was down to the last few drops. And he still had to pick up the flower, which would take even more Qi to hold, and he still had to climb all the way out of the shaft.
He opened the inventory.
One pill.
It was the last pill. He had saved it for his cultivation. He had been planning to use it to push further, to get stronger before the Whitegrass alchemist arrived.
He took it out and swallowed it.
He didn’t use it to grow. He used it to refill. The pill’s energy rushed through him and filled his empty body back up, like water pouring into a dry bucket. There was no breakthrough. There was only just enough to keep going.
’That was my last one,’ he thought. ’Stop thinking about it. Move.’
He wrapped all his Qi around his hands, as thick as he could make it. Then he reached for the flower and pulled it out of the rock, roots and all.
The flower’s power exploded outward.
A huge wave of pure ice energy tried to burst out of the cave in every direction. Han Jiu felt it pushing out through the rock, pushing up the tunnel, pushing toward the surface.
’No. If this gets out, they’ll feel it in the valley.’
He didn’t let it.
He grabbed the flower’s power with his Qi, and he pulled it back. All of it. He forced it down into his own hands and held it there, so that none of it could escape.
His hands screamed.
Then they stopped screaming. Then he couldn’t feel them at all.
He pushed the flower inside the empty snake skin and folded the skin closed around it. The power went quiet. The blue light went out. It worked. The snake’s body was holding it in.
He lifted the whole thing up in his arms. It was heavy and cold, and it pressed against his chest. The bag of thirty frostmarrow bumped against his leg.
Then he started to climb.
...
He put the boards back over the shaft with his forearms, because his hands wouldn’t grip. He pressed the wax seal back into the middle and held it there with his wrist until it stuck.
Then he walked home, carrying the snake.
He didn’t notice anything strange about his hands. He didn’t feel them at all, so there was nothing to notice. He only knew that the snake was heavy, and that his side hurt every time he breathed, and that he had to get back before dawn.
The storeroom door opened before he knocked.
Yun Qingshuang had been standing right behind it. She looked at him, all wrapped up in layers of clothes, carrying a dead white snake in his arms. Then she looked down at his hands.
Her face went white.
"Han Jiu," she said. "Your hands."
"Later." He walked past her into the room. "There’s a flower inside. Inside the snake. You need to use it right now, before its power fades."
"Han Jiu—"
"It’s the strongest thing I’ve ever felt. It’ll push you straight past Qi Gathering. You can reach Body Tempering tonight, in one go. But you have to do it now—"
He tried to set the snake down on the floor.
There was a sharp crack, like ice breaking on a frozen pond.
His arms broke off at the elbows.
Both of them. His forearms and hands fell to the floor together with the snake. They were white and hard, frozen all the way through, and they were still wrapped around the snake’s body.
Han Jiu stood there and looked down at them.