Chapter 3

**Chapter 3: The Young Master Lin Jin's Forbearance; The Great Elder of the Temple Comes to Take an Apprentice**

In the 972nd year of the Burning Frost Calendar, the snow in the Northern Wasteland turned the color of rust.

Lin Jin kneels on the three-thousand ice steps in front of the Temple, his right eye wrapped in gauze soaked with medicinal dregs, his left eye lowered to gaze at his palm—that chain scar is devouring the falling snowflakes, and every snowflake reveals a miniature coffin pattern the instant it touches his skin. This is a new trick he learned after the destruction of the Burial Coffin clan grounds: hiding murderous intent within his wounds.

"Look up."

The ancient voice presses down, laden with divine might, and the soul-suppressing lamps on both sides of the ice steps explode in unison. Lin Jin's spine emits a groan under the unbearable weight, but he uses this pressure to look up, letting just the right amount of panic seep through the gaps in the gauze.

On the nine-zhang-high ice-crystal throne, the robes of the Great Elder of the Temple flow with starlight. What he toys with in his hand is not a scepter, but a melting fragment of an ice coffin—it is precisely the core fragment that flew out when the Northern Wasteland altar collapsed.

"Do you know why I am taking you as my apprentice?" The Great Elder flicks his fingertip, and the fragment turns into a stream of light that pierces Lin Jin's brow.

The instant excruciating pain sweeps through his consciousness, Lin Jin sees an illusion: seventy-two star-remnant ice coffins float outside the Twelve Heavens, each coffin extending chains that wrap around his own heart. And at the end of all the chains sits the same woman as the one in the Northern Wasteland ice coffin, gnawing on a beating heart—the surface of that heart is clearly engraved with the emblem of the Temple!

"Because you are the best coffin." The Great Elder's voice drills into his eardrums like a venomous snake. "The Burial Coffin clansmen use their bodies as coffins, and your body..."

He reaches out through the air toward Lin Jin's right eye, the gauze exploding into powder: "Is serving that unspeakable existence."

The ice-blue cracks in Lin Jin's right eye writhe frantically, but are suppressed by force the instant they are about to go berserk—he bites down on the "Seal Soul Jade" hidden between his molars, a forbidden drug refined from a single tear of the woman in the ice coffin.

"This disciple is dull-witted." Lin Jin bangs his head against the ground, the shackle totem unique to the Burial Coffin clansmen appearing behind him. "I only seek to feed the Ancient Demon beneath the Eternal Ice Abyss for the Temple."

A sneer comes from beneath the Temple. Those divine servants hidden in the star mist know clearly that the so-called "feeding the demon" is merely the work of the lowest-level menial laborers: gouging flesh and stripping bone every day, using blood and flesh to appease the roars of the Ancient Demon.

Yet the Great Elder's pupils shrink to pinpricks.

He sees that when the young man kneels, the ice patterns vaguely appearing on the back of his neck form the ancient character "Slay," and the berserk aura that should have been triggered by the ice coffin fragment is perfectly curled up deep within his destiny palace. Even more eerie is that the causal lines wrapped around the young man all lead to nothingness, as if an existence of a higher dimension is playing chess on his behalf.

"Enter the Ice Prison tomorrow." The Great Elder waves his sleeve, and Lin Jin falls down the ice steps like a kite with a broken string. "If you survive three days, this seat will bestow upon you the *All Heavens Burial Divine Scripture*."

On the ninth level of the Ice Prison, Lin Jin curls up in a pile of bones gnawed on by the Ancient Demon.

The ice patterns in his right eye have spread to his collarbone, every breath bringing out frost mist. Three meteorite chains pierce through his shoulder blades; this is the Temple's standard treatment for "dangerous goods." But at this moment he is laughing, because the Ancient Demons are crouching a hundred zhang away, hissing—what they fear is not the Temple's restrictions, but the bone ring polished from an ice coffin fragment in his bosom.

"The seventh test."

Lin Jin licks the wound on his wrist, where a wisp of frost-white hair is hidden. Under the infiltration of blood, the hair reveals text, a maxim from the woman in the ice coffin across time and space:

**"When the divine servant drinks star marrow, the third lamp from the right will cough."**

At midnight, when the Temple messenger comes to pour the star marrow, a ghostly light flashes in Lin Jin's single eye. He sees the divine servant, the third from the right, tremble slightly in his throat as he swallows, and the starlight in the lamp turns into tiny ice coffins that drill into his seven orifices—that is an anomaly that only appears when the *All Heavens Burial Divine Scripture* is cultivated to the seventh level.

"Found you..."

Lin Jin buries his face in the shadows, letting the Ancient Demon's drool drip onto his spine. This person who is pretending to be a low-level divine servant is the true direct disciple of the Temple's Great Elder.

Three days later, when a blood-covered Lin Jin crawls out of the Ice Prison, he has a blood-stained star earring in his hand. And in the distant ruins of the Northern Wasteland, the woman in the ice coffin is using this drop of blood to sketch a new destiny track on the coffin lid, countless ice-crystal chains extending from beneath her skirt, each one connecting to a "Lin Jin" of a different time and space.

"Good child."

She kisses the distorted reflection of the young man on the coffin lid, while Lin Jin, who has just received the *All Heavens Burial Divine Scripture* in reality, suddenly trembles—deep within the cracks of his right eye, there is an extra ice-crystal teardrop that cannot be wiped away.

On the day he worships his master, Lin Jin sees his own life lamp in the Soul Lamp Hall.

The lamp flame is an eerie ice-blue, and the lamp oil is actually flowing coffin fragments. When he reaches out to touch it, the lamp wick suddenly explodes, revealing half of the Great Elder's rotting face: "You think she is helping you?"

Lin Jin prostrates himself submissively on the ground, but his fingertips stab into his palm, using the chain scar to devour the spilled lamp oil: "This disciple only believes in Master."

A chuckle comes from the darkness, from the woman in the ice coffin.

On the causal sand table in her palm, the ice sculpture representing the Temple is being wrapped by billions of frost hairs. And at the edge of the sand table, one can vaguely see the figure of Lin Jin carrying an ice coffin, walking alone through the heavens—the size of that ice coffin is exactly consistent with the destiny of the Temple's Great Elder.