Chapter 1213: Danton’s First Weakness

For a little over an hour, Phei followed Danton deeper into the realm he had privately decided deserved a much simpler name than whatever ancient scholars had probably written across forbidden maps:

The Dead Winter Realm.

The name was accurate, effficient and difficult to misunderstand too.

Unfortunately, the farther they travelled, the more Young Dragon began to suspect even that name was being charitable.

The cold at the outer reaches had already been murderous, but here, near what seemed to be the very epicenter of the forbidden land, winter had stopped behaving like weather entirely.

It possessed violence.

’Malice almost.’

Frost did not simply gather across the ground anymore but it now devoured whatever surface remained uncovered, growing in enormous crystalline forests before being ripped apart moments later by storms fierce enough to pulverize the formations back into airborne blades— blades that sang as they flew, as if the realm itself were sharpening its teeth on the corpses of mountains.

Danton had finally stopped pretending the cold was beneath his notice.

He might be powerful and all, but the Dead Winter Realm was no more frozen land either and only True Divine and Ascendants could be casual in just like how his army of World Transcendent army were<anno data-annotation-id="e87d9ddc-0bc1-f9db-29cd-6a208ea6bc00" data-title=".">.¹</anno>

Now golden fire now wrapped around Danton’s body in a slow-burning mantle, the Flames of Beginning flowing over his shoulders, arms and back before gathering beneath his feet in brilliant coils. Each tongue of fire pushed against the cold with enough heat to warp the air, yet even those primordial flames occasionally flickered beneath the pressure of the frozen realm— as though the winter here had learned how to hunger for fire itself.

Phei found that particularly interesting.

A Saint Stage cultivator who had walked through the outer wasteland as though winter were merely an opinion now needed his flames simply to remain comfortable.

The eleven Chained surrounding him endured differently.

They simply walked through the storm, relying upon physiques that had long since crossed beyond mortal understanding. Their chains dragged through the snow behind them, occasionally disappearing beneath the blizzard before resurfacing several meters later with frost growing over the links— frost that looked less like weather and more like the realm trying to claim them as permanent decorations.

’World Transcendents are absurdly durable.’ He thought looking at them.

They needed to be.

The wind here could probably peel an ordinary human apart before the poor bastard finished realizing his coat was insufficient.

Great gusts came screaming between the frozen mountains in long, curved blades, carrying ice particles so fine and fast that entire cliffs were being shaved away layer by layer. One storm struck a half-buried formation of ancient metal somewhere ahead of Danton’s group, and Phei watched the metal bend inward beneath the pressure before snapping with a shriek that barely survived the wind.

The steel folded before the stone cracked.

Ice mountains ate one another.

The cold was worse than all of it.

Phei could feel it trying to enter things rather than merely freeze their surfaces. It pressed against essence, power and blood, seeking deeper places where warmth could be strangled before the body realized it was dying.

And Phei?

Phei walked through it smiling.

Void-Ice—Infinity Control.

That was the beautiful answer.

The entire realm was ice and every storm carried ice, so was every frozen ridge, every shard screaming through the air and every glacier buried beneath thousands of years of accumulated winter belonged to an environment so saturated with his element that Phei almost felt spoiled.

He did not need to overpower the storms.

He merely told them what to do.

A gale approaching him divided before reaching his body... frozen debris curved around his shoulders while needles of ice that should have torn through his skin slowed until they drifted past him like harmless snow.

’Let’s be honest my body is weak compared to what this place would’ve done to me without the Void-Ice.’

And once Phei realized just how absolute his authority over the surrounding ice had become, restraint naturally started experiencing employment difficulties:

His eyes settled upon Danton.

The bastard floated several dozen meters ahead, golden fire blazing around him while the procession crossed a wide basin of fractured ice.

Phei smiled. "Let’s see something."

Eira glanced toward him. "Master?"

Phei raised one finger:

The ice beneath Danton answered.

But nothing dramatic happened at first before a faint crack appeared beneath the Jörmungandr Prince’s feet; the crack widened and the entire frozen plain exploded upward:

A winter cyclone erupted from directly beneath Danton, a spiraling pillar of sharpened ice, compressed snow and screaming wind twisting upward with enough force to swallow his golden figure completely. The storm rose several hundred meters into the air before curling inward, creating a grinding vortex whose interior became a white blur of cutting frost— like a living grinder of pure winter and sharp ice swords that tried to flay the Saint alive for the crime of floating above its domain.

The eleven Chained stopped.

Eira’s eyes widened slightly before sliding toward Phei.

He looked innocent.

Very handsome too.

A tremendous burst of golden fire detonated inside the cyclone before the entire storm split apart and Danton emerged from its center with one lazy sweep of his hand, golden flames had tore through the vortex open before dispersing it across the wasteland in a rain of glittering ice.

He descended several meters.

Phei’s smile faded into genuine surprise.

There were cuts all over him and a thin crimson lines crossed Danton’s cheek, throat and hands, while several longer wounds had opened through his clothing along his arms and ribs. Blood appeared briefly before his regeneration began closing the injuries almost immediately.

’Huh, so your body is weak too despite your high cultivation base! Nice to know.’ He smiled finding Danton’s first weakness.

Danton looked down at himself.

For several seconds, Phei wondered whether Danton had realized the storm had not been natural.

Then Danton simply brushed several fragments of ice from his shoulder without a grimace, anger not to mention any visible pain before he glanced once toward the cracked ground beneath him, narrowed his eyes faintly, and continued forward.

Phei stared.

"Okay."

That was mildly terrifying.

Eira floated beside him with the smallest smile: "You attacked a Saint from hiding merely to see what would happen."

"I tested the climate."

"Of course, Master."

"Did you realize, the climate happened to dislike him." he joked.

"An extraordinary coincidence."

Phei ignored the fairy’s complete lack of faith in his innocence and looked around at the endless ice.

Still...

His gaze became thoughtful.

The storm had cut Danton.

A Saint!

Phei had not shaped some special technique, forged a weapon or spent an obscene amount of essence. He had simply taken what already existed in the environment and told it to become more unpleasant.

Infinity Control made the difference between environment and weapon almost meaningless here.

Phei looked across the frozen realm and felt his grin returning.

In this place, his greatest limitation might genuinely be his own imagination.

That thought stayed with him as they continued deeper.

Eventually, the terrain changed.

The enormous flat glaciers disappeared first, replaced by mountain ranges so vast that even Phei’s expanded perception struggled to appreciate their scale. Frozen peaks rose through the storms like the broken teeth of dead gods, their highest points vanishing completely into the cloud layers above.

Between them stretched chasms whose opposite edges could barely be seen, colossal wounds splitting the land open and descending into blue-black depths filled with drifting frost.

Some rifts glowed, others seemed to breath:

One released a slow plume of pale mist every few minutes, enough to make Phei wonder what exactly was sleeping beneath several kilometers of ice and whether curiosity truly deserved feeding tonight.

There were frozen rivers suspended along cliffsides, waterfalls that had somehow solidified while still appearing mid-collapse, and enormous circular depressions resembling impact craters left behind by objects large enough to ruin continents.

Then the mountains parted and Phei stopped walking.

His eyes widened.

"Oh..."

Eira glanced toward him but said nothing.

She had clearly been waiting for this reaction.

At first, Phei thought he was looking at another mountain but then his True Void Sense corrected the mistake.

That was not a mountain.

It was a body!

A body of a Titan lay was entombed within that ice.

<annotations style="display: none;">Master, Grandmaster, Archmaster, Transcendent, Mortal Emperor, Mortal Sovereign, Sky Sovereign, Half-Divine, Demigod, Divine Being, Saint, Divine Lord, Divine King/Queen, Divine Emperor/Empress, True Divine, Ascendant, World Transcendent (The staged from Phei’s to Consort’s and other World Transcendent’s)</annotations>