Sword and Snow

Daily life at the Frozen Mountain Sect was…well, to put it mildly: boring. Sure, there were a good number of Elders here and most of them were good teachers. Even better, several of them were good people. I hadn’t spent a ton of time in other Sects, but even I knew that many, many Elders were selfish at best and actually evil at worst. Unfortunately, there’s only so much anyone can do to fight against people like that when they could be, quite literally, swatted like a fly.

Putting all that aside, though, I did learn a bunch at the Frozen Mountain Sect, having joined when I was fourteen. Many of their standard water and ice focused Qi techniques were the foundations that I had grown upon, and now my skills were more than proficient for my level in the Earth Realm.

After being in the Earth Realm for somewhere around nine years, I felt like I was beginning to stagnate somewhat. I had learned what the Elders were willing to teach - at least technique-wise - and most of my time was spent Cultivating through meditation instead of learning these days.

And that was just horribly boring.

I was getting antsy to do something. This deep-seated need to get out and learn or improve was what had spurred me, nine months ago, to leave the sect for some field training. I had traveled around the Floral Hills doing odd jobs and trying my best to learn or otherwise improvise some of my own original techniques.

The trip had been worth it. I did improve myself a fair bit while traveling. Sure, the Qi and Core improvement from regular meditation while on the road was great. But I was really able to dig deep and tweak some of the Frozen Mountain techniques more to my own personal taste, as well as develop my own abilities more.

I was particularly proud of my Hoarfrost Armor. While the Frozen Mountain Sect taught a simple version of using hardened ice Qi to create a layer of armor, I was convinced that it was more for aesthetic purposes than function. It may show real use at higher Realms, when your Qi could readily deflect lesser blows, but against equal opponents the Frozen Mountain version was effectively just another layer of cloth and easily shattered. The Elders had said it was designed that way to be light and agile, which, fair, it was that. But it wasn’t practical for Earth Realm fighters, who were regularly either of equal level, or outclassed by their opponents.

So, while I was gone, I developed the technique into something a bit more substantial. Yes, while using it, I would be less mobile. However, the layered sheets of frost were actually incredibly good at deflecting not only weapon blows, but even Qi-based attacks. As the armor was essentially made of many thin layers of ice, most Qi-based attacks would shave away layers but the ice Qi within them would suffocate and extinguish the offending technique.

That same trip had also been my second time meeting with one Emery Vale. The woman was incredibly intriguing, though I still couldn’t quite figure out why. Sure, there was all the normal ‘she’s incredibly attractive’ nonsense, but anyone would be hard-pressed to find a Cultivator who wasn’t stunning. That sort of beauty just came standard with the whole package.

The whole situation that I had run into that day could have been a factor, if it wasn’t for our first run in at the tournament. I suppose it was fully possible that her willingness to just throw away her spot in the bracket had left an impression on me, as it was something that no Cultivator from a Sect would do. They would almost uniformly fight tooth and nail to argue that they had come out on top. Or at least demand a second bout to rule out the draw.

As I had spent the last decade inside a fairly standard Sect, maybe her unusual actions just immediately had left an impression because they were so different from my everyday expectations? It stood to reason that it could easily be just that.

But then after our second meeting, I was convinced that Miss Vale was something special. Walking into the site of an absolute one sided massacre, just to see the cause of it all collapsed on the ground crying over a young girl had definitely left an impression, no question about it. Even after the couple of hours we had spent getting the area cleaned up and Cierra a little cleaner, I couldn’t really get Miss Vale out of my head.

In the intervening eight months since we met, I had returned to the Sect, and gone back to regular training.

With the addition of nightly time set aside to work on new techniques to try to contain my burn out. I had developed better control over my ability to control manifested Qi - mainly my Dancing Snowflakes and Blizzard Dragon. While my Blizzard Dragon was already an incredibly precise but destructive technique, I had improved its maneuverability a great deal.

My Dancing Snowflakes, however, had seen the greater improvement. Not only were they faster to react to incoming attacks, but they were getting quicker at recovery too. When I had first learned the technique, I could create ten individual flakes easily enough, but reconstructing them after they were destroyed took more time than was usually feasible in a fight. Now, though, they would reform in seconds. Which could still be too long in a fight but it was still an improvement.

I had also been working on a way to make them deadly weapons in their own right. Making sharp ice was easy; making sharp ice that could also intercept small incoming blows was less so. Thinning the ice down to a point at the edges would ultimately render the flakes too thin and brittle to be good shields. I still needed to work on the balance between offense and defense in the technique, but my stop gap solution was to just alter the snowflakes’ shape as needed. But even as a stop gap, learning to alter the shape, durability, and sharpness of the flakes was a useful trick.

It was during one of my late night training sessions that a letter slipped under my door. The knock that accompanied its delivery had startled me out of my focus, and as I went to grab the letter, I noticed that my ‘late night session’ had turned into an ‘all night session’.

“Guess that explains the middle of the night delivery.” I muttered to myself, stretching down to pick up the little piece of paper. “It just wasn’t.”

As I body unfolded back to standing, I stretched this way and that as I walked to my small, Sect appointed living space. The furnishings of my living-room-dining-room-kitchen combo was simple. There was a stove, reasonable space for cooking prep, a water-dispensing Array, and a small table with a cushion to eat at.

I took a seat and opened my apparent mail. The letter was one I had been thinking about receiving for a while by that point; correspondence from Miss Emery Vale. With my interest piqued, I began to read.

“Hello Miss Axies,

I hope this letter finds you well. Or, finds you at all, I suppose. You didn’t really give me any explicit instructions on where and how to send it, so hopefully your Sect and your name is enough for it to find its way to you.

In any case! I’ve been busy for the last seven? months. I enlisted a bit of help from my family after Cierra and I left you. We’ve got something of a home now, although I’m not sure you can feasibly visit. We live in the mountains near the Dragon Peaks, if you’re familiar with it. It’s not exactly near the Floral Hills, after all.

It took a bit of time to get ourselves settled. We had to build everything from scratch after all. We’ve got a nice big house - far too big for just the two of us, if I’m honest. It helps that my sister and uncle are staying with us for now. Keeps everything feeling cozy and warm.

We’ve also got a fully functional farm and basically all the extra building you could need. I never expected I’d live in a home with a detached, full-sized bathhouse, but here we are. My sister has been studying Arrays for years now, and my uncle has long since been an expert in them. With their help, even this deep in the mountains has been a comfortable place to live, as we creep into the deep part of the winter months.

There’s actually a nearby town too. A place called Flowing Dragon City, at the base of the Dragon Peak of the same name. We’ve been buying all our necessities there for now so we can start farming after the winter passes. I think by then the land should be more than fertile enough for it.

In any case, I mostly wanted to write to you now that I found some time to let you know that we are, indeed, ok, as promised. I don’t really know if we’re likely to meet again, given we’ve settled well outside the Floral Hills, but if we do, I hope it will be on good terms.

Just do me a favor; Don’t do anything Demonic.

Best wishes,

Miss Emery Vale”

“Well, I suppose that’s that, huh?” I asked the empty room. As I settled back onto the floor, sprawled out wide, I began thinking. Emery’s letter was pretty short, but she had put in more than enough information for me to find her if I had wanted to. And I was getting stir crazy in the Sect’s compound.

Maybe it was time for a trip?

Not even a month later, I was ready to leave. I had put all the paperwork together for an extended leave from the Sect. They weren’t helping me as much these days as they used to, anyway, and continuing to pay the fees to stay was a drain on my wallet. The extended leave was essentially a way to leave the Sect without really ‘leaving’. You would still be considered a member of the Sect in name, and would be let back in if or when you returned, but for all practical purposes, you were no longer housed within the Sect.

In my almost twelve years within the Sect, I had gathered a small amount of my own belongings. There was enough that carrying everything in a traditional pack would have been a major annoyance to deal with. So, I took all of my contribution points to the Sect that had piled up over the years and bought myself a small storage ring. Even though it was small, it was enough to easily contain all of my possessions, as well as some minimal camping gear.

Thus prepared, I set out from the Sect’s compound, heading West toward the Blooming Wilds Province. While I had not been anywhere near the Dragon Peaks myself, they were mentioned in multiple stories I had read, and their location was not exactly a mystery. Yes, I would need to travel through two other provinces to reach them. But I had time, and caravans traveled both the Emerald Expanse and the Dying Lands. I could probably even make some money on my way out there by volunteering to help protect the caravans I rode with.

Resolved, I took a deep breath of the mountain air that I had lived with for years and said goodbye to my home, for at least a while.