Chapter 315 – The Enigmatic Far West, A Marriage Alliance with the Ice Folk - Part 2

Two months passed in the blink of an eye.

Li Yuan had kept busy, setting up a flurry of

business talks

between the Flying Nimbus Group, Windfall Group, and every other major merchant guild in the region. During those polite exchanges, he’d quietly shackle people, one after another.

By the time he was done, more than 50 executives, accountants, and guards across the big merchant guilds were wearing human-skin manacles and answering only to him. They would not go hunting for secrets on purpose. But whatever the enemy tried to dig up, he would now hear about it as well.

With that net in place, Li Yuan took Xue Ning home back to Cloudpeak Province.

The Flying Nimbus Group was compromised; fine, he’d let it keep turning a profit and act as an open switchboard.

Every scrap of news Li Yuan learned, the enemy’s spies would learn too. And every scrap the enemy learned would flow straight back through his own spies.

It was a stalemate. Nobody would get the upper hand.

Currently, a carriage rattled toward the borders of Cloudpeak Province.

Inside, Xue Ning still looked dazed. Leaning against Li Yuan’s chest, she lifted the shade and watched a brittle yellow leaf spin past.

“Autumn already... I wonder how that foolish son of ours is getting on.” Her sigh was barely audible.

Li Yuan squeezed her shoulder. “Ping’an was born extraordinary. He’ll be alright.”

After a pause, Xue Ning said quietly, “This time, when we reach Cloudpeak Province, I want to become an undying husk—together with the four maids, Mei, Lan, Zhu, and Ju. If I trigger Yan Yu’s killing rule and buy our soul pouches from her general store, we can all transform. Then at least I can defend myself.”

Li Yuan fell silent, then shook his head. “The Yin energy would eat away at you. You’re already frail; becoming an undying husk would shorten your life even more. I can’t allow it.”

“I’ll obey my husband,“ Xue Ning said, closing her eyes and resting against him. “But you shouldn’t refuse the four maids. They’ve already made up their minds.

“In times like these it’s safer to be an undying husk than a servant. Besides, Yan Yu and I once talked about founding our own faction of undying husks. We never settled on it, but now that the Flying Nimbus Group has collapsed under husk infiltration, I’d rather focus on building one myself.”

“No.” Li Yuan still shook his head.

“Why?”

“Money. The ghost domain here in Cloudpeak Province earns almost nothing. Yan Yu would be supplying our undying husks by draining her own resources. Unless our faction is strong enough to sustain itself, it’s better to wait,” Li Yuan explained.

Xue Ning sighed and yielded. “Very well. I’ll behave like a proper, quiet wife.”

“You can still keep an eye on the Flying Nimbus Group from afar and funnel information to me, just no more running yourself ragged.”

Li Yuan brushed a hand over Xue Ning’s hair. He could feel the soul inside her aging; a few decades and she would be gone.

“What is it?”

“When we’re home, focus on your health.”

“Mhm.” Xue Ning nestled closer, gentle and trusting.

Li Yuan’s gaze, however, sharpened on the distant horizon. A single legend echoed in his mind—Deathless Tomb.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

A few days later.

After dropping Xue Ning off at Tang Nian’s lodge, Li Yuan returned to the black market ghost domain.

Yan Yu examined the three ghost items Li Yuan had taken.

“First, the bronze mirror. Aim it at someone and it drags the target toward the glass. The moment they touch the surface, their reflection hauls the real body inside while the reflection steps out and takes its place. It only works on anyone sixth rank or lower.

“Second, the sack. Put a sixth rank or lower inside, and they lose their strength until you let them out.”

She paused over the last item, her expression darkening.

“As for the soup, it can alter memories but only for targets below sixth rank, and it can only alter one thing.”

Li Yuan’s face tightened. Memory-altering soup, it was even more effective than Granny Meng’s legendary soup of forgetfulness. One sip, and a target would immediately believe what you wanted. He didn’t even want to think about what would happen if that guard had gotten to Xue Ning.

But now, he had relocated her to the far western fringe of Cloudpeak Province, a stretch of wasteland no great power bothered to reach. Every faction’s resources were stretched too thin already.

With Xue Ning settled, Li Yuan turned his full attention to the Deathless Tomb.

Unfortunately, probing the Ice Folk’s territory in the far west proved brutally hard; a whole year passed with no word from the expeditions.

Still, it wasn’t a total loss. Tang Nian quietly mobilised Tang Clan agents and, combing through old family records, local gazetteers, and half-forgotten myths, began to unearth scraps of promising lore...

The Zhang Clan’s record in Cloudpeak Province told a familiar tale.

An ancestor had chased a bandit gang westward and suddenly found the sky fixed in eternal night. Far ahead, a razor-sharp boundary split the land; bright on the eastern side, pitch-black on the west.

While the clan and brigands were still locked in battle, riders appeared out of the darkness. Men astride enormous white wolves, long spears in hand, bellowed that strangers were not welcome.

Neither side heeded the warning, so the wolf riders charged and slaughtered bandits and clansmen alike. Only two survivors staggered home to record what they had seen.

Local ghost stories echoed the same motif, tales of figures wreathed in whirling snow, snow maidens, a god-forsaken realm that rejected all outsiders. Every legend pointed to the Ice Folk and to one unchanging fact. Foreigners were not welcome.

Li Yuan flipped page after page, absorbing every scrap.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Several days later.

Though it was still autumn on the calendar, snow was already falling. The western scouting parties had once again been turned back.

Li Yuan began to suspect that sending ordinary people was pointless; only blind luck might reach the Ice Folk.

After weighing the risks, he decided to go himself. None of the records mentioned any individuals at fifth rank or above. The author of Tales From The Frozen River was a sixth rank disciple of the Holy Tree Temple, and he had returned alive. So why couldn’t Li Yuan?

Blizzard wind erased the world to blank white.

Standing on a desolate plain, Li Yuan produced a vivid crimson rebirth blossom. He pressed it into the snow and waited.

After a day, the flower sent out a single blood-red thread into the gale, pointing west.

Li Yuan followed the red thread. Wherever he walked, the blossom’s scarlet line spread beneath his feet; no matter how deep he ventured, the path home would always be there.

The further west he flew, the thicker the storm.

After three days and nights, all light vanished.

The spectacle described in those old books lay before him, a stretch of frozen rock as flat as a floor marking the edge. East of it glimmered faint light; west of it, unbroken dark.

He glanced at the rebirth blossom, still creeping onward, and at the level tundra and the jagged glaciers lurking deeper in the night, then stepped across the boundary.

Several days passed by.

Li Yuan circled back after making no discoveries and encountering no danger either. In this winter wasteland, everything was frozen stiff; what could possibly pose a threat to him?

“Perhaps I took the wrong route,” he muttered.

Li Yuan named the border of light and dark the Evernight Line and began probing inward at different points along it.

Time passed, and two full months slipped away.

In this world of ice, Li Yuan’s range of sight and senses shrank from five kilometers to less than a kilometer, dwindling further the farther west he went.

Even worse, his shadow blood was faltering.

The first day, his shadow blood began cooling down. Two days in, his strength had fallen to sixth rank. Here, even White Serpent’s heavenly thunder was useless.

Fortunately, Li Yuan had hoarded fasting pills and fire-fuel pills, goods he’d swiped from the Holy Tree Temple in his days as Master Li. The first kept hunger at bay; the second kept his body warm.

On the fourth day of a deeper push, he stood atop a glacier. His shadow blood was almost inert and his power had slipped all the way to eighth rank. Yet the rebirth blossom still clawed its way through the snow beside each footstep.

“What a mysterious land,” Li Yuan breathed. “How can a place like this exist? Is it really impossible to reach the Deathless Tomb?”

He clenched his jaw. “No, I’ll keep going.”

Li Yuan had to find the Deathless Tomb. He would not accept a world where the people he loved could simply die forever...

As long as the Deathless Tomb truly preserved whatever was sealed inside it, Li Yuan would keep his dying relatives there.

Later, once he was strong enough and had unraveled the secrets of eternal life, he might even be able to bring them back.

Another two months slipped by, and Li Yuan’s luck was abysmal.

All that searching, yet not the faintest trace of the Ice Folk or the Deathless Tomb.

Li Yuan began to suspect the tribe did not dwell in any

normal

territory at all but inside something like the pocket realms he had read about before in his previous world—places invisible unless one actually stepped through the boundary. Brush past the entrance and you could wander forever without glimpsing what lay inside.