Chapter 1: Birth

The snow was a dark blue-black.

They wrapped the bone-piercing gale winds of the Northern Wasteland, layer upon layer plastered across the clan stele cast from ice crystals. The inscription had long since become mottled; only the three ferocious ancient seal characters at the very top could still be faintly made out — **Coffin Burial Clan**.

"Wooo—"

A woman's heart-rending wail pierced through the ice cave, only to be shredded by the howling wind and snow. Two men clad in heavy black iron armor pressed down on her shoulders with all their might; runes flowed along the chains, pinning her entire body before the ice coffin. That casket was no more than three chi long, its whole body a ghostly blue, yet a hairline crack split the coffin lid, aimed directly at the woman's swollen belly.

"The hour has come."

A hunched elder stepped out from the shadows, his bone staff striking the ice surface; the splashed shards froze into twelve blood-colored ice spikes in midair. "The Coffin Burial Clan bloodline bears its young for eighteen years. Today we feed the coffin with the offspring's essence and blood, so that our clan may extend its fortune for another century."

The instant the ice spikes hovered above the woman's head, a muffled thunder suddenly exploded across the vault of heaven.

That thunder was no ordinary sound — it was more like the anguished weeping of ten thousands of gods and demons. The several hundred ice coffins slumbering among the stele forest trembled in unison; thick black mist seeped from the cracks in their lids, weaving together in midair into a twisted human face. The moment that face opened its mouth, every Coffin Burial Clan member present vomited black blood together, the curse marks in their blood burning like branding irons!

"Heaven's Coffin weeps blood… a great ill omen!" The elder staggered backward, and his bone staff snapped with a "crack."

A blue-green light suddenly burst from within the woman's belly.

The vault of the ice cave turned transparent beneath that blue-green light, and the onlookers gazed in horror at the Xīnhé hanging upside down — countless stars trailing crimson tail-flames hurtled toward the earth, yet froze solid the instant they were about to touch the crack in space-time. The stars' surfaces crawled with spiderweb-like ice crystals, like insects pinned in amber.

"Crack."

The sound of ice splitting came from the casket. That hairline crack suddenly widened, and a hand so pale as to be nearly transparent reached out from the coffin, its fingertip lightly touching the woman's belly.

"My child…" The woman suddenly stopped struggling, a strange smile curling at her bloodstained lips. "He's eating the stars."

Boom!

The ice coffin shattered completely, its cold air transforming into a roaring giant dragon that smashed the stele forest apart. When the ice mist cleared, the onlookers saw only an infant curled amid the wreckage at the coffin's base, its umbilical cord having grown together with the ice coffin's fragments. Even more terrifying were its pupils: the left eye was black as Eternal Night, while the right eye was covered in spiderweb-like ice-blue cracks, like glazed porcelain on the verge of shattering.

The elder raised the half-broken bone staff with trembling hands: "The ancient records record that when the ice coffin devours its master, a calamity star is born! This child must…"

Before the words had fallen, chain-like blood marks suddenly appeared on the infant's palm.

A thousand li away, in the depths of the Northern Wasteland's forbidden ground, seventy-two ice peaks that pierced the heavens collapsed in unison. From within those glaciers, where ancient immortal demons were buried, came simultaneously the sound of chains snapping apart.

Ten years later.

"Kneel!"

A bloodstained black iron whip lashed across the young master's back; ice shards hooked up by the whip's tip flew through the air mixed with flesh. The executioner deliberately avoided the vital points — the Coffin Burial Clan's punishment stressed "nine punishments without death," so that one must hang on to a last breath and feel every inch of flesh being stripped away.

Yet the young master laughed out loud.

He licked the ice shards from the corner of his mouth, and the shoulder blade pierced through by the iron chain gave out a teeth-grinding scraping sound: "Didn't the Grand Elder tell you? On the day I was born, the thing inside the ice coffin gnawed through my pain nerves."

The dungeon suddenly fell into dead silence.

Water drops fell from the tip of an upside-down ice spike, freezing into ice flowers the instant they touched the young master's hair. Only then did the executioner notice that the cracks in the young master's right eye had at some unknown time spread to his cheek; those ice patterns glowed with a ghostly blue sheen in the darkness, looking exactly like the patterns on the casket that had shattered ten years ago.

"Monster…" The executioner staggered backward.

The young master narrowed his right eye.

From deep within the dungeon came the sound of chains snapping, followed immediately by the muffled thud of something heavy hitting the ground. By the time the screams rang out, the young master was staring at the chain scars on his palm and humming a tune that was off-key and out of tune — those were the ancient syllables branded into his mind when the ice coffin shattered.

No one noticed that a wisp of black mist was seeping out from beneath his feet, creeping quietly along the cracks in the ground toward the altar at the center of the clan grounds. There stood enshrined a Ten Thousand Zhang Ice Coffin, and the new cracks on its surface were exactly identical to the ice patterns at the corner of the young master's eye.

The woman inside the coffin trembled slightly in her lashes.

The instant a single ice-tear fell, every Coffin Burial Clan member across the entire Northern Wasteland heard that sigh —

"It is time to wake, my… key."