Yun Qingshuang made a small, choked sound in her throat.
She took one step toward him.
"Don’t," Han Jiu said. "The flower. Use the flower."
"Your arms—"
"Are already gone. The flower isn’t. Not yet." His voice came out much calmer than he felt. "If you wait, its power leaks away, and then I lost my arms for nothing. Please. Use it now."
She stared at him.
Then she dropped to her knees beside the snake. She pulled the frozen forearms away from its body, carefully, one at a time, and set them on the floor. She opened the snake’s skin with both hands.
Blue light spilled out into the storeroom.
She went very still.
"A Frostheart Lotus," she said quietly. "An Earth-rank treasure. The sect had one, locked in the inner vault. I saw it once, from the doorway. Only core disciples were allowed to use it." She looked up at him. "Do you know what you’ve brought me?"
"Something you need."
"Something people kill each other for."
"Then use it before someone comes to kill us for it." He nudged the cloth bag on his belt with his elbow. "And take the bag. Thirty pieces of frostmarrow. Those are yours too."
She untied the bag from his belt and set it down beside her.
She looked at him. Something moved in her face. A hot, sharp feeling rose up in her chest, and she didn’t have a name for it.
She pushed it down. There was no time for it.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, lifted the Frostheart Lotus out of the snake with her bare hands, and held it against her chest.
It didn’t freeze her. Her root drank from it the moment it touched her skin.
The blue light went into her. Frost spread out across the floor around her in a perfect circle, and then stopped, and didn’t go any further. The Deepwinter Canon’s seal was holding. Nothing was escaping.
Han Jiu sat down against the wall.
He let out a long breath. His ribs hurt. It was almost three in the morning. He had made it back with two hours of darkness to spare.
Then he looked down at his arms.
They ended at the elbows now. The ends were white and smooth, frozen shut, with no blood at all. He could not feel anything below his elbows, because there was nothing below his elbows.
A strange, cold fear settled in his stomach.
’My hands.’
He had known. When he forced the flower’s power down into his hands and held it there, he had known this could happen. He had felt his hands die. He had decided to keep going anyway.
But knowing it and seeing it were different things.
Whitegrass was an alchemy sect. What they wanted most of all were hands. People to grind herbs, mix medicine, and tend fires in their pill halls. A man with no hands was no use to them. The alchemist would take one look at him and leave.
And growing hands back was not easy. It needed medicine he had never even heard the name of. It needed money he didn’t have, from people who would ask him questions he couldn’t answer.
He looked at Qingshuang, sitting in her ring of frost, with the blue light pouring into her.
’I had to,’ he thought. ’I couldn’t leave it down there. Not something like that. It was her whole future, growing out of a crack in the rock.’
He still thought that was true.
It didn’t make his arms come back.
Then the world went quiet, and the voice came.
[Genuine Investment Detected.]
[Target: Yun Qingshuang.]
[Investment: 1 × Frostheart Lotus, Earth-rank. 30 × frostmarrow, unrefined.]
[Recipient’s need: critical. No return expected. No witnesses. No leverage sought.]
[Sincerity verified.]
[Risk assessment: Extreme.]
[Base return: fifty-fold. Risk bonus: one thousand-fold.]
[Total return: one thousand and fifty-fold.]
[The return exceeds any single material reward. Rebate issued in special form.]
[You are rewarded with a Top-Tier Heaven-rank Innate Physique: Frostking Icejade Body.]
Han Jiu stopped breathing.
Something poured into him.
It came from nowhere. It didn’t come through his root, or through his meridians. It went straight into his body, into his bones and his blood and his flesh, all at once. It was cold, but it wasn’t painful. It felt like finally stepping into cold water on a very hot day.
His whole body shook.
’A Top-Tier... Heaven-rank innate physique?’
He had read about innate physiques. Everyone had. They were stories. A person born with one might appear once in a hundred years, in some great sect or some great clan, and they were never in a place like Greypine Valley. He had never met anyone who had one. He had never met anyone who had met anyone who had one.
And a Heaven-rank physique was the kind of thing that appeared in legends.
Words appeared behind his eyes.
[Frostking Icejade Body]
[Rank: Heaven, top tier.]
[A body born for cold. The cold does not rule it. It rules the cold.]
[Cold Immunity: Cold can no longer harm you. Cold Qi, cold places, and cold materials feed your body instead of draining it.]
[Cold Retention: Your spirit root is unchanged. It still keeps only half of the Qi it takes in. But cold-attribute Qi is now held by your body itself, not by your root. You keep all of it.]
[Direct Absorption: You can absorb raw cold-attribute materials directly through your body, without refining them first.]
[Icejade Flesh: When you temper your body, cold resources will temper it perfectly, with nothing wasted. Your skin, flesh, sinew, bone, marrow and organs will each become as hard and as smooth as jade.]
[Frost Rebirth: Flesh destroyed by cold can be rebuilt by cold.]
Han Jiu read it twice.
Then he read the last line a third time.
Slowly, he looked down at the ends of his arms.
At the tip of his left elbow, where there was nothing but white, frozen skin, something was starting to grow.
It was thin, and pale, and cold. It looked like frost forming on a window.
It was shaped like the start of a bone.