The morning arrived not with the sun, but with a suffocating blanket of white. A sudden mountain blizzard had swept through the peaks overnight, burying the villa in two feet of fresh, powdery snow. The air was a crystalline void, so cold that every breath felt like inhaling a thousand tiny needles.
Wang Fan stood in the center of the courtyard, his boots sinking deep into the drifts. He was stripped to his waist, his skin pale and puckered by the biting wind. Opposite him stood Cuihua. She looked untouched by the elements, her breathing so calm it barely stirred the frost on her collar.
"Yesterday, you learned to move through the void," she said, her voice cutting through the howl of the wind. "But the world is not always a void. Sometimes, the space you occupy is the space a fist wants
