The scorching heat of the artificial sun was supposed to be her end. Baiheng remembered the blinding light, the sheer force of her Starskiff tearing through the monstrous flesh of Shuhu, and the absolute certainty that her sacrifice would buy her friends the future they deserved. She had closed her eyes, ready to embrace the long, dreamless sleep.

Instead, she awoke to a biting, unfamiliar chill.

There was no battlefield. No roar of the Xianzhou fleet, no desperate cries of the High-Cloud Quintet. Baiheng found herself kneeling on the frozen stones of a desolate, moonlit ruin. She was entirely intact—her beloved recurve bow still slung across her back, her Foxian ears twitching in the dead silence of the night. Disoriented, she pushed herself to her feet, her cyan eyes scanning the shadows.

Then, she saw her.

A solitary figure stood a few paces away, bathed in the pale, unforgiving moonlight. The silhouette was devastatingly familiar, yet profoundly alien. Her silver hair flowed like a frozen waterfall, but a stark black blindfold now concealed her eyes. The air around her was suffocatingly cold, thick with the scent of frost and an ancient, barely contained malice. It was the terrifying aura of someone walking the razor’s edge of the mara-struck, held together not by sanity, but by an obsessive, all-consuming vow to sever the roots of The Abundance.

In the woman's hand rested a blade of pure, unyielding ice.

"Jingliu...?"

The name slipped past Baiheng’s lips as a fragile whisper, but in the dead silence, it sounded like a thunderclap.

The blindfolded swordmaster stopped dead in her tracks. The temperature in the ruins seemed to plummet instantly. Jingliu's knuckles turned stark white around the hilt of her icy blade, her posture rigid. For centuries, she had heard that voice in her nightmares, a phantom haunting her descent into madness. But this—the cadence, the breath, the unmistakable heartbeat of a Foxian—was real.

Baiheng took a hesitant step forward, her heart pounding against her ribs. She didn't know what year it was, nor where the others—Dan Feng, Yingxing, Jing Yuan—had gone. All she knew was that the aloof, peerless champion she once called her dearest friend had been replaced by this broken, solitary phantom of vengeance.

"Jingliu, it’s me," Baiheng called out again. This time, she forced her voice to steady, lacing it with that same warm, audacious spark she always used to drag the stoic swordmaster out of her shell. She offered a small, tentative smile, stepping into the moonlight. "I don't know how... but I'm here. Jingliu... what happened to you?"