The Frostbite Realm was cold.
That's not a descriptive flourish. That's the closest word the English language has for what I felt stepping through that gate. Cold as in "my teeth hurt when I breathe." Cold as in "my eyeballs are telling me they want to quit." Cold as in "I have lived in Scotland and this is worse."
"You are shivering," Lin Mei observed.
"No shit."
"Caelan shivers," Han said, his voice muffled by the collar of his robe, which he had pulled up over his nose. "That means it's cold. That means we should find shelter."
"I am not cold."
We both turned to look at her.
Lin Mei stood in the middle of the frozen wasteland like she'd been carved from the same ice as the ground. Her white robes barely moved in the wind. Her expression was serene. Her hands weren't even in her sleeves.
"I possess a Foundation Establishment cultivation base," she said. "My body regulates temperature through qi circulation. The cold does not affect me."
I looked at Han. Han looked at me.
"The cold does not affect her," I repeated.
"That's what she said."
"Lin Mei. Are you telling me that in two hundred years of existence, you have never once been cold?"
"It is beneath a cultivator of my station."
"Beneath your station."
"Yes."
I turned to Han again. "Han. I'm going to explain layering to a woman who has never needed a jacket."
"I'll document this for posterity," he said, pulling out his logbook. His hands were shaking so badly the pen scratched across the page in jagged zigzags. "Day... I don't know anymore. The cold lady is learning about clothes from the insane man who adopted me. This will go in the historical record."
"I am not a 'cold lady,'" Lin Mei said.
"You're a lady, and we're in a cold realm," I said. "You're a cold lady. Accept the nickname."
"That is not how names work."
"It is now."
Lin Mei opened her mouth to respond. Closed it. A small puff of frozen breath escaped. She stared at it as if it had personally insulted her.
"That was involuntary," she said.
"Cold lady."
"Stop calling me that."
"Cold lady learns about her own breath. More at eleven."
I was already shrugging off my outer layer. My polyester shirt, miraculously still intact after twenty chapters of abuse, was underneath a travel cloak I'd picked up in the debug village. It wasn't much — coarse wool, uneven stitching, smelled faintly of the goat it came from — but it was warmer than what I'd been wearing.
I held it out to her.
"Put this on."
Lin Mei stared at the cloak like I'd offered her a dead fish.
"I do not require—"
"You do. Your qi might keep your core temperature stable, but your extremities aren't getting the memo. Your fingers are white. That's not a good color for fingers. Fingers should be pink. Or brown. Or whatever your natural pigment is. They should not be the color of a dead fish's belly."
She looked at her hands. She seemed surprised to find them attached to her body.
"Cultivation can counteract—"
"Cultivation can counteract a lot of things. But your body still follows basic thermodynamics. If the ambient temperature is below freezing and you're not generating enough heat to offset the loss, your blood vessels constrict and your fingers go numb. That's how frostbite starts. Frostbite is when your fingers fall off. Do you want your fingers to fall off?"
"I have never lost a finger to cold."
"There's a first time for everything."
She took the cloak. Held it at arm's length. Something flickered across her face — not disgust, but confusion. Like she was holding an object she'd seen a thousand times but never had a reason to touch.
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"How does one wear this?"
I closed my eyes and counted to three.
"You put it over your shoulders and tie the cord at the front."
She attempted this. The cord ended up around her neck. She had managed to put the cloak on backwards. The goat-smell was now pressed against her face.
"No," I said. "The other way. The seams go on the inside."
"The seams are ambiguous."
"Seams are not ambiguous. Seams are the part where the fabric was sewn together. That goes on the inside."
"Why?"
"Because that's how clothes work."
"That is not an explanation."
"That is the only explanation you're going to get."
Lin Mei turned the cloak around. The cord was now trailing on the ground. She gathered it in her hands and looked at it with the same expression I'd use to defuse a bomb.
I looked at Han. Han was still writing.
"Entry forty-seven," he read aloud. "Caelan attempted to teach the concept of 'jacket' to a two-hundred-year-old cultivator. Progress is slow. She put it on backwards twice. I am beginning to understand how she has survived this long."
"I can hear you," Lin Mei said.
"That's the point."
Lin Mei eventually got the cloak on properly. It took four minutes and three attempts. By the end, she looked like a woman who had been draped in a rug by forces she did not control. The cloak was too large for her — it hung past her knees and the sleeves covered her hands entirely. She looked less like a jade beauty and more like a child wearing her parent's coat to go play in the snow.
"This is... not what I expected," she said, looking down at herself.
"Is it warm?"
She paused. Her eyes widened slightly. Just barely. A fraction of a millimeter.
"...Yes."
"Then it's working."
We started walking.
The Frostbite Realm was not a subtle place. The ground was cracked ice that crunched under every step like breaking bones. The wind came in gusts that sounded like someone screaming through a pipe. The sky was a permanent bruise-purple, lit by no visible sun, casting everything in the wrong color. Shadows stretched in directions that didn't match the light source. The horizon was a flat line of white with nothing to break it.
Except the palace.
The ice palace dominated the landscape like a middle finger to the concept of humility. It rose from the ice plain at least a mile ahead, its spires catching the purple light and scattering it into rainbows that flickered and died in the wind. It looked like something that had been grown rather than built — organic, crystalline, wrong.
"That is our destination," Lin Mei said.
"It's very... pointy."
"The Frost Lotus is held in the central chamber. We must cross the ice plain, navigate the labyrinth beneath the palace, and bypass the guardian."
"How long?"
"At current pace, three days."
"Three days of this?"
"Yes."
I looked at the plain. The endless, featureless, freezing plain. No trees. No rocks. No landmarks. Just ice and wind and purple sky.
"Do we have supplies for three days?"
"I packed rations for four."
"That's surprisingly responsible of you."
"The Frost Flower Program includes a module on expedition logistics."
"Of course it does."
We walked in silence for the next hour. The wind picked up. The temperature dropped. My face went numb. My fingers went numb. My toes went numb. I couldn't feel my ears. I was pretty sure my nose was actively trying to secede from my face and form its own independent nation.
Lin Mei walked beside me, her new cloak wrapped tight around her shoulders. She had stopped trying to look dignified. The cloak had shifted sideways, exposing one shoulder, and she hadn't fixed it. She was too busy staring at the landscape with an expression I couldn't read.
"What are you thinking about?" I asked.
She didn't answer for a long moment.
"I have read about this place," she said. "In the sect archives. Descriptions of the Frostbite Realm. The purple sky. The ice palace. The labyrinth below. I have memorized the geography. I know every chamber and corridor from documents written by cultivators who came before me."
"Okay."
"I have been preparing for this for thirty years."
"Okay."
She stopped walking. I stopped too. Han nearly walked into me.
"Thirty years," she repeated. "I have studied. I have trained. I have cultivated techniques specifically designed for the cold. I have read every account of this realm that exists in the Azure Frost Sect's library. I have prepared for every possible scenario."
"And?"
She looked at the horizon. The purple light caught her face. For a moment, beneath the cloak and the cold and the cracks in her programming, she looked very young.
"And I did not prepare for the fact that it would just be... cold."
I didn't laugh. I wanted to, but I didn't.
"That's the thing about reality," I said. "It doesn't care how prepared you are. The description in a book and the actual experience of standing in it are different things."
She nodded slowly.
"Is that true for your world as well?"
"Yeah. It's true for every world."
She was quiet for a long moment. The wind howled. The ice crunched beneath our feet.
"This one—" She stopped. A visible wince. She started again. "I think I understand. Some things cannot be learned from a description."
"That's the whole point of living them."
Lin Mei looked at me. Her expression was unreadable. But something behind her eyes shifted — a crack in the mask that had been there for two centuries.
"I think," she said slowly, her words forming carefully, like she was testing each one before she spoke, "that I have spent a very long time reading descriptions of things instead of experiencing them."
I didn't have an answer for that. So I just nodded, and we kept walking.
Behind us, a figure watched from the shadows of an ice ridge.
It had been following the trio since they entered the realm. It had seen the argument about the cloak, the backwards attempts at dressing, the discussion about cold. It had been a realm guardian for six hundred years. It had seen countless cultivators enter the Frostbite Realm — determined, fearful, arrogant, prepared.
It had never seen anyone spend twenty minutes teaching a Foundation Establishment cultivator how to put on a jacket.
The guardian consulted its internal directives.
[DIRECTIVE 1: DETERMINE THREAT LEVEL OF ENTRANTS.]
[THREAT LEVEL: INCONCLUSIVE.]
[DIRECTIVE 2: INTERVENE IF ENTRANTS POSE DANGER TO REALM INTEGRITY.]
[ASSESSMENT: THE TALL ONE HAS BEEN ARGUING WITH THE ICE FOR FORTY MINUTES. THE SHORT ONE KEEPS WRITING IN A BOOK. THE FEMALE ONE IS WEARING A CLOAK BACKWARDS. REALM INTEGRITY IS NOT AT RISK.]
[DIRECTIVE 3: REPORT TO CENTRAL GUARDIAN IF NOTABLE ENTRANTS DETECTED.]
The guardian paused.
[NOTE: THESE ENTRANTS ARE NOTABLE FOR HOW LITTLE THEY RESEMBLE ENTRANTS.]
It watched for another moment as the trio disappeared over a ridge. The tall one was gesturing at the sky, explaining something about "wind chill factor." The short one was writing. The female one was adjusting her cloak — still backwards.
The guardian turned and walked the other way.
Some threats were not worth the paperwork.