The deep pool was dead and silent, the water a profound, heavy black that did not permit even the tiniest ripple to break its surface. The bottom of the pool was encased in ten-thousand-year-old black ice, and the cold was condensed into a solid substance. At the center sat an ice dais, upon which Lin Moyu was cross-legged like a withered tree with severed roots. A gray robe draped over his skeleton-like frame, a millennia of wind and frost frozen into the ash-white folds. Where his right arm was severed at the shoulder, a thick layer of viscous black ice completely sealed the stump. The pitch-black ice layer throbbed faintly, revealing a tiny speck of deep blue, cold starlight embedded deep within his flesh and blood—that was the Mystic Soul Ice Crystal.
He opened his eyes.
The pool water remained motionless. Only the pupils buried deep within his eye sockets no longer boiled with the violence that had once burned away the world a thousand years ago. In their place was something far more terrifying: complete, burned-out ashes. The depths of his pupils were pitch-black, swallowing all light, reflecting nothing. His parched skin clung tightly to his skull, bearing no scars, only the extreme desiccation of time-eroded jade weathering into stone. No vitality flowed within this withered skeleton; there was only the purest, thousand-year-frozen silence.
Chapter 216