The Jade Wolf's Bloom

Chapter 6: First Blood in the Frost

The colossal iron chains groaned beneath the descent of six men.

Two miles down into the throat of the Bone-Freezing Abyss, Commander Gui adjusted the grip of his spiked climbing gauntlets, his breath clouding thick and white against the frozen iron links.

Behind him, five seasoned enforcers from Elder Cang’s private guard slid down the ropes like heavy black spiders. Each man was armed with serrated gutting-blades, heavy crossbows, and leather jars of corpse-dissolving quicklime slung across their chests.

"Watch your step, you idiots," Gui hissed over the howl of the wind. "One slip and the fiends down there won't leave enough of you to fill a thimble."

"Commander," a younger guard muttered, shivering inside his wolf-pelt parka. "Are you sure we need to go all the way to the floor? The fall was three thousand feet. Even an Alpha’s bones would be powdered chalk by now."

"Elder Cang doesn't pay for assumptions," Gui growled, spitting into the fog. "He wants the girl’s skull. A clean, recognizable head to burn in his private hearth so he knows she won't crawl back as a vengeful wraith. Now shut your jaws and draw steel."

The six boots struck the permafrost with muffled thuds.

They fanned out, crossbows raised, backs pressed together in a defensive wedge.

Gui sniffed the air.

His thick, scarred nose twitched. Then he paused, his brow furrowing beneath his iron helm.

Something was wrong.

He had hunted along the northern crevasse for twenty winters. He knew the stench of the abyss: the suffocating miasma of rotting carcasses, dried entrails, and the foul, sulfurous musk of starving abyssal drakes.

It was gone.

The air rising from the glacial floor was... sweet.

It smelled of clean mountain snow, chilled lotus blossoms, and the pure, sharp bite of winter starlight. It was the fragrance of an ancient temple buried beneath a thousand years of untouched ice.

"Commander..." the scout breathed, his voice trembling. "Where are the beasts?"

Gui looked into the fog.

The silence was unnatural. It wasn't the silence of an empty tomb—it was the breathless, petrified silence of a forest holding its breath before a lightning strike.

Through the drifting blue mist, towering silhouettes loomed along the jagged cavern walls fifty paces above them.

Massive, horned quadrupeds. Armored shadow-beasts that could swallow a horse whole.

They weren't prowling. They weren't roaring.

They were lying on their bellies.

Hundreds of glowing red eyes peered down through the gloom, unmoving, pinned in absolute, reverent stillness toward the center of the cavern floor.

"What in the hells..." Gui muttered, his thumb tracing the rune on his heavy cleaver. "Why aren't they attacking?"

"Because," a voice drifted through the fog, "they have better manners than the men who raised them."

The words were smooth, cool as melting jade, vibrating with a subtle, melodic clarity that made the hair on the back of Gui’s neck stand straight on end.

The mist parted.

In the clearing before the thousand-foot black God-Stele, a solitary throne had been carved directly out of the glacial permafrost.

Sitting upon it was a girl.

Gui’s breath hitched in his throat.

She was not dead.

She was not broken.

She wore no burlap. Swirling around her slender, statuesque silhouette was a flowing shroud of pale green moonlight and frost-silk that shifted like smoke with every breath. Her long, ink-black hair cascaded past the armrests of the ice throne, glittering with delicate diamond dust.

Her skin possessed the flawless, unearthly translucence of polished river-stone.

Her right wrist—the wrist Gui’s enforcer had shattered with an iron baton barely four hours ago—was whole. Flawless. Encircled by a slender, intricate cuff of dark frost-jade that hummed with ancient, terrifying authority.

And between her brows—

The Nine-Leaf Sovereign Crest burned with steady, celestial emerald fire.

Beside her bare left foot, a horned shadow-beast the size of a war elephant lay sprawled on the ice like a lazy lapdog, its massive jaws resting peacefully beneath her fingertips as she idly stroked the armored plate between its eyes.

"Mei... Lin?" the scout stammered, his crossbow shaking so violently the iron bolt rattled against the groove. "She's... she's alive?!"

"Impossible!" Gui snarled, though a cold, greasy drop of sweat trickled down his temple into his beard. "She was an Omega! Her bones were shattered! This is an illusion—a spirit-demon taking the dead b***h’s shape to play tricks on our heads!"

He stepped forward, his heavy steel cleavers rasping from their leather sheaths.

"Form line!" Gui roared, desperate to drown out the primal panic clawing at his chest. "Fire the poisoned bolts! Chop the phantom into pieces!"

Thwip-thwip-thwip!

Three heavy iron bolts, their broadheads dipped in black viper venom, tore through the mist straight toward Mei Lin’s throat, heart, and eye.

Mei Lin didn't flinch.

She didn't even look at the oncoming steel.

She simply lifted her right hand—the hand Cang had tried to destroy—and flicked her index finger against the air.

Ping.

A circular ripple of emerald frost expanded from her fingertip.

The three iron bolts froze in mid-air ten feet from her face. Not slowed. Stopped.

Then, before the enforcers could blink, the heavy steel heads turned white with permafrost and shattered into a shower of harmless gray powder, drifting to the ice like dead ash.

Gui’s jaw went slack. "What... what kind of sorcery is that?!"

Mei Lin slowly leaned forward, resting her elbow on her knee, her chin propped in her palm.

Her amber eyes were gone. In their place burned two mesmerizing pools of cold emerald, cut down the center by vertical, razor-thin black slits.

The gaze of an apex predator looking at crawling worms.

"You brought quicklime," Mei Lin observed, her gaze sweeping over the jars strapped to their chests. Her voice was soft, conversational, yet it echoed with the weight of an iron bell. "You brought bone-saws. Elder Cang must be having terrible nightmares if he needed six strong men to verify that a teenage girl died properly."

"Shoot her!" Gui screamed, backing up half a step. "SHOOT HER NOW!"

The two remaining crossbowmen fumbled to reload.

"You broke my wrist," Mei Lin breathed.

She stood.

The shadow-beast beside her didn't move, but its massive eyes gleamed with bloodthirsty anticipation.

Mei Lin took a single, barefoot step down from the ice dais.

"You spat on my mother’s memory," she continued, her voice dropping into a register that made the permafrost beneath their boots vibrate. "You kicked my fractured ribs into the dark."

She raised her right hand, palm upward, and curled her slender fingers into a loose fist.

"Now... pay the interest."

The air pressure dropped to absolute zero.

Crack-c***k-c***k-c***k—

The moisture in the cavern did not condense—it flash-froze.

Thousands of razor-sharp, translucent frost-petals—each one the size of a palm, spinning with the lethality of circular saw blades—condensed out of thin air around the five enforcers.

"Wait—!" one man screamed.

Swoosh.

A vortex of emerald blades tore through the clearing.

It lasted three seconds.

There was no drawn-out battle. No clashing of swords. There was only the wet, rhythmic sound of ice slicing through boiled leather, meat, and bone.

Snick. Snick. Crunch.

The five enforcers didn't even have time to fall.

Before their blood could spill onto the flagstones, the extreme cold of Mei Lin’s prana flash-froze the wounds. The five men remained standing in a grotesque circle—their eyes wide with frozen shock, their bodies cleaved by dozens of clean, bloodless incisions, turning into solid, translucent statues of red ice.

A stray breeze from the chasm touched them.

Tinkle.

The five statues collapsed inward, shattering into thousands of singing scarlet crystals that dissolved into the permafrost.

Gone.

Erased from the world without leaving a single smear of warm blood on the ground.

Gui stood alone.

His heavy cleavers slipped from his trembling, numb fingers, clattering uselessly against the stone. His knees hit the permafrost with a sickening thud, his bowels loosening in sheer, unadulterated animal terror.

"Monster..." Gui wheezed, clawing at his throat as the suffocating pressure crushed his lungs. "You're a demon... You're not an Omega... What are you?!"

A pair of small, bare feet stopped inches from his face.

The scent of chilled lotus and sandalwood washed over him, intoxicating and lethal.

Mei Lin looked down at the trembling warlord.

Her right hand drifted downward, her thumb and forefinger catching him beneath the jaw, lifting his head until his terrified eyes met her emerald slit-pupils.

"I am what happens," Mei Lin said softly, "when you throw your true master to the wolves."

Her grip tightened.

A pulse of freezing prana shot from her fingertips directly into Gui’s throat, traveling down his spine like liquid nitrogen.

CRACK.

Deep inside Gui’s abdomen, his warrior core—the source of his strength, the pride of his forty winters—shattered like cheap glass.

Gui arched his back, a silent, bloodless scream tearing through his parted jaws as his wolf spirit was wiped clean from his soul, leaving him a hollow, shivering husk.

Mei Lin let go.

Gui collapsed face-first onto the ice, weeping, his breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps of a man whose life had just been cut in half.

"I’m leaving you alive, Commander," Mei Lin said, turning her back on him and walking toward the dark southern wall of the cavern.

"Why..." Gui sobbed into the snow, clutching his empty gut. "Why not... kill me..."

Mei Lin stopped at the mouth of a massive, subterranean tunnel that plunged southward toward the continental fault lines.

She looked over her shoulder, her profile carved in silver moonlight.

"Because a corpse can't deliver a message," she said, her smile sharp enough to draw blood.

"Crawl back up that chain, Gui. Crawl back to Cang’s warm hearth. Tell him the dead girl sends her regards."

Her emerald eyes flashed in the dark.

"Tell him to enjoy my father’s chair while his bones can still sit in it. Because when I return for the rent... I will burn the house to ash with him inside."

She turned and vanished into the tunnel.

Behind her, the hundreds of shadow-beasts along the cavern walls threw back their horned heads, unleashing a chorus of deafening, victorious howls that shook the mountain to its very roots.

Gui wept, clawing desperately toward the dangling chains in the blinding, freezing dark.