Chapter 2

**Chapter 2: The Elder's Prophecy**

The ice flames on the altar suddenly turn a ghostly green.

Twelve barefoot girls twitch and dance on the ice steps, the silver bells on their ankles exploding into powder with their distorted movements. The Grand Elder's withered fingers dig deep into the beast-head armrests of the ice throne, a turbid wheezing sound emerging from beneath his bronze mask—this is the once-a-century "Coffin Audience Grand Sacrifice," but the fluctuations coming from the core of the ice coffin are a hundred times more violent than when the infant was born ten years ago.

"The star rail has shifted by three inches and seven parts."

The Third Elder grips his astrolabe tightly, the "Heavenly Mechanism Bone" embedded in its surface blackening and cracking at a visible rate. "The Greedy Wolf devours the moon, the Seven Killings pierce the sun; that child's destiny is devouring the fortune of the entire Northern Wasteland..."

Before he can finish, the ten-thousand-zhang ice coffin in the center of the altar suddenly emits a shrill scream. The new cracks on the coffin body slither like living snakes, crawling over the seventy-two soul-suppressing pillars in the blink of an eye. The sealing runes on the surface of the pillars, written in the blood of immortals, melt and drip away like honey being licked.

"He is coming."

The Grand Elder rises abruptly, the Burial Coffin bells hanging at his waist ringing without wind.

As if responding to his whisper, the crisp sound of chains snapping comes from the direction of the dungeon. At first, it is only a sporadic few, but soon they converge into a tidal wave. Beneath the ice layer of the entire clan grounds, rustling sounds emerge, as if countless white bones are scratching at coffin lids.

The young man walks through a pool of blood.

The ice patterns in his right eye have spread to his neck, each step branding burning blue marks onto the ice surface. The Burial Coffin guards who attempt to block him often find themselves covered in frost before they can even get close—the curse marks in their bloodlines are backfiring on their hosts, ice crystals drilling out from their eye sockets and between their fingers, twisting the living into ice sculptures.

"The Prophecy Stele..."

The young man wipes the ice shards from the corner of his mouth, his left eye reflecting the green flames soaring toward the altar. The fragments that flew out when the ice coffin exploded ten years ago are now swimming through the blood vessels beneath his skin, weaving into a light-net that guides his path forward.

Above the altar, the Grand Elder slits his wrist, splashing black blood onto the floating ice mirror. The mirror reveals the figure of the young man approaching; the winding bloodstains behind him actually bloom into eerie red flowers on the ice surface, each petal a miniature coffin shape.

"The third rule of the Burial Coffin teachings!" the Grand Elder suddenly bellows.

The surviving clansmen below the platform shudder, chanting in unison like machines: "Whenever one encounters a Heavenly Coffin devouring its master, one shall gouge out its eyes, sever its limbs, and burn its soul in the Eternal Ice Abyss..."

The chanting is interrupted by the roar of the ice coffin.

The instant the young man steps onto the altar, the seventy-two soul-suppressing pillars explode simultaneously. The flying ice spikes pierce the twelve dancing girls, their flesh and blood congealing in the air into an archway of gore. The ice patterns in the young man's right eye suddenly surge, his hair turning frost-white, and countless ghostly blue chain shadows pierce into the void from behind him, as if connecting to some unspeakable dimension.

"Isn't this the prophecy you wanted?"

The young man raises his hand and presses it onto the surface of the ice coffin, the trembling of the woman's eyelashes in the coffin intensifying abruptly. "I will tell you what the true Heavenly Coffin prophecy is—"

His voice suddenly changes into a mixed resonance of male and female, and a massive destiny wheel totem appears on the altar floor. Under the terrified gaze of the crowd, the pitch-black pupil of the young man's left eye begins to flow with a galaxy, while the ice patterns in his right eye project terrifying illusions:

The woman in the ice coffin stands atop a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, with giants clad in star charts kneeling at her feet;

The Northern Wasteland cracks, and countless coffins surge from the fissures, devouring the sun and moon;

Finally, it is the young man himself—a broken half of an ice coffin fragment is pierced through his chest, behind him are the collapsing heavens and ten thousand realms, and the woman he holds in his arms is sucking on the ice patterns at the corner of his eye...

"Shut up!" The Grand Elder's bronze mask explodes, revealing half a face of rot and exposed bone. His withered-claw-like right hand stabs into his own chest, pulling out a beating ice-crystal heart. "In the name of the Burial Coffin First Ancestor, awaken the Eternal Night..."

The woman in the ice coffin opens her eyes.

Time is sliced into fragments at this moment. The young man sees the Grand Elder's movements infinitely elongated, with dense tooth marks appearing on the surface of the ice-crystal heart—they are clearly the tooth marks of an infant. Shadowy chains emerge from the bodies of everyone on the altar, and the other ends of these chains all sink into the scar on his own palm.

"So that's how it is."

The young man chuckles in the space-time rift, letting the ice patterns crawl onto his cheeks. "The so-called Burial Coffin clansmen are nothing but the scraps between her teeth."

The sigh of the woman in the ice coffin transforms into a tangible cold tide.

When time flows again, the ice-crystal heart in the Grand Elder's hand has already appeared in the young man's palm. He gazes at the shadowy infant figure frozen deep within the heart—that is the "Life Fetus" stripped away from every Burial Coffin clansman at birth.

"The prophecy says I will bring the Eternal Night?" The young man crushes the heart, the infant shadow lets out a wail, and the ice coffins across the entire Northern Wasteland explode in response. "Wrong."

He swallows the flying ice crystals, his right eye completely transforming into a shattered blue hole:

"I am the Eternal Night itself."

Three days later, the surviving clansmen find half an ice stele in the ruins of the altar.

The stele records the tampered prophecy, and the new line of text in the final row is still seeping blood:

**"When the key gnaws at the chains, the feeder eventually becomes the sacrifice."**

In the reflection of the ice stele, one can vaguely see the young man walking through the air, carrying a shrunken ice coffin on his back. Behind him is the collapsing Northern Wasteland, and before him is a scarlet long staircase paved with countless star coffins.

And in some forgotten fold of time, the woman in the ice coffin is chuckling.

Her fingertips are wrapped around a wisp of frost-white hair, and tied to the end of the hair is the young man's beating heart.