Chapter 5859

“Not in the water.” Aurora shook her head, then lifted one gloved hand toward the tallest of three jagged ice spires.

“There.”

Following her gesture, Jared squinted up the sheer wall of frost. Halfway to the summit, a cavern of blue ice yawned, its mouth obscured by swirling mist that never dispersed.

That mist carried a presence-subtle, ancient, and vast. It seeped out in slow breaths, coiling round them with the oppressive majesty of something that had ruled these wastes long before mortal memory.

Cold, feral, imperious-the aura rumbled with a bestial violence barely held in check, like winter itself deciding whether the intruders were worth sparing.

“What… is that?” Jared’s pupils constricted, heartbeat thundering inside his ears.

“The ice soul blood lotus guardian spirit beast,” Aurora answered, every syllable turning the freezing air brittle. “One of the original natives of Eternal Ice Plains. For more than a thousand years, it has watched over the lotus. The two exist in symbiosis: the flower drinks in venomous chill and iron-rich lifeblood from the earth, while the beast cultivates on the lotus’s distilled frost essence. If we wish to harvest the lotus, we must secure its permission—or defeat it outright.”