As morning light pierced through the morning mist of Yunzhou City, Shen Mingyue was leaning over to examine half a footprint beside the assassin's corpse. On the soft earth stained with dark red blood, the edge of the footprint was jagged, entirely unlike ordinary military boots, and tiny shards of ice crystals were embedded in its depressions. Carefully, she used a dagger to lift half a withered, yellowish blade of grass beside the footprint; the fine ice crystals on its surface had not yet melted—this was ice fern grass from the Cangwu Valley a hundred miles away, whose leaves form ice crystals within three days of encountering blood, a characteristic unique to the Northern Frontier.
"Prepare horses; our destination is Cangwu Valley." As she stood up, her blood-stained skirt hem swept across the ground, dragging an dark red shadow in the morning sun like a winding trail of blood, foreshadowing the unknown dangers ahead. The silver patterns that emerged across her waist when her Holy Tribe Bloodline awakened suddenly grew burning hot, as if warning her of the perilous realm she was about to enter.
Deputy Commander Zhang Meng tightly gripped the long saber at his waist, the bronze ornaments on the scabbard growing hot in his grip, his face filled with anxiety. "Princess, that valley is shrouded in mist year-round, and rumors say soul-devouring ghosts dwell there. Entering it means nine deaths and barely a chance of survival..."
Chapter 122