The umpteenth mystery reared its head.
Yun Jieshi had not been able to spot the golden spots of light unless he was at a high vantage point. Since using his ruan to scout their locations, he had been blind as to where he was exactly in relation to them – distance-wise.
But now, even with the snow pouring in his vision, the winds making it difficult for him to open his eyes, he saw the beams. They haunted his sight, pulling on it. Yun Jieshi staggered forward.
Was he being beckoned, or could he simply not resist the brighter, closer look of the lights and the prospect of seeing whatever it was they truly were?
It didn't seem to matter.
Again, reason was cast aside within the little monkey's mind.
'T-they are treasures of some kind. Nothing else would appeal to eyes like mine. If I just manage to reach one of them…' he thought, scowling from the persistent agony pulling at him from within. The idea hardly seemed like his own, but he assimilated it without question.
Just one. If he could just reach that one isolated spot of gold nearest to him…
The little monkey gritted his teeth, suffocating all mortal reasons why this could be a fatal idea.
He had to go.
He to see.
And if he died because of this impulse…
Well, that would be it.
'If this place is real, fate must also be real…'
And thus, Yun Jieshi trudged on.
The winds and cold were an adversary, but the weight of his excruciating agony was wholly an enemy. At that moment, Yun Jieshi hated both himself and the pit growing inside him with blazing passion. It would continue to be so for a while.
He trekked for a full hour until he escaped the field of bowing trees. And then the cold seemed to body slam him and him alone. It must have been biased against Discount Sages, the little monkey assumed. A part of him also began to believe that it was another parting gift from Feng Jie Hong.
The little monkey had been handling the agony from the pit well enough since the cold had been kept at bay by the canopies of the trees, but as he reached a clearing, all hell broke loose. Each cruelly demanding step through the hard and soft flakes of snow was rewarded with a pelting of hail and a gust that nearly stole him away.
Yun Jieshi didn't know if he would have managed to hold his own against the conditions without the effects of Bei Jun's scales. His fur had grown thicker and added to his resistance to the cold. The chill clung to the fringes of his silvery fur, mounting by the minute. Soon, the cold would overpower him.
Another hour later, Yun Jieshi was like a snowman slowly, and sluggishly pushing through great thickets of the ice and snow. The cold had mounted again, the sky turning overcast. Barely any light filtered through the murky film overhead, constantly pouring dense fog.
The whispers in the wind also grew louder. At points, Yun Jieshi had turned sharply to his sides when the voices seemed to be right next to him. But he was all alone in the cold – a monkey against the frost bizarre.
The only saving grace was the bright golden beacon beckoning to him from just beyond.
Even though he didn't necessarily know if it was tied to some form of comfort or safety or intrigue atleast, he marched on.
How far was it?
Yun Jieshi couldn't have told.
Fifty meters?
A hundred?
Another hour passed, but it didn't seem to get any closer.
"Just… a few more meters…" The claws of winter were digging deep into his flesh and cutting him with their lethal blades. Yun Jieshi wouldn't last much longer.
He must have crossed a surprising distance, especially with his luggage, but he couldn't have known. He couldn't have cared.
Along with the hopes that came with finding the source of the light, Yun Jieshi agonized over one other thing.
He was terribly acquainted with the cold by now, one of the enemies that had nearly killed Honghuo.
But what of the monstrosity Hua Dongmei had teased?
The little monkey's memory slid to something odd he'd seen recently: the great, snow-covered feathers as large as a man.
Did they belong to the horror that spooked Hua Dongmei and the other fairies?
Yun Jieshi could only resign himself to the idea that indeed, they likely did. He feared facing such a monster while in this state.
'But I'm almost there!' he thought, encouraging himself.
At this point, he could hardly see anything a mere two meters in front of him. The only thing that threaded through the cold and fog was the beam of light. It furthered his hopes, almost to a detriment.
Had it grown slightly brighter? Yun Jieshi might have invented the notion.
'I suppose I was wrong then. These beams aren't reflecting the light from Wei Fang,' he thought, his jaw chattering as though unscrewed.
It seemed so.
A gargantuan bird's screech came an hour and a half later and the world shook. The fog around Yun Jieshi was disturbed. It spiraled along with the heaps of snow he was soldering through and blinded him completely.
It was time.
The world was thrown into disarray again. Yun Jieshi found himself buried under mounds of frost after the world shuddered violently.
And then there was darkness. Complete and utter darkness.
Yun Jieshi panicked. He tore himself from his snowy grave… and panicked even more. Buried or not, he could see nothing.
Winter could have cared less for the darkness though. It continued to pelt his body thoroughly and mercilessly; its intensity even grew substantially as a result of the darkness. There wasn't any rhyme or reason to it.
Yun Jieshi gnashed his teeth and squinted his eyes.
The beam of gold was still present in his vision, but it was strangled to no more than a very distant candlelight.
But the little monkey couldn't take a step more in its direction.
This was a trap. It had to be.
'I can't do this anymore. I have to go back!' Yun Jieshi finally relented. Anymore of the teasing by the distant gold and he would die in seconds. In fact, even if he stayed in this exact spot, he would turn into an icicle before a minute had passed. 'I fell for it. That light must be a way to trick people like me to their death.'
It was a cruel reward.
However much Yun Jieshi wanted to finally start believing in fate, he couldn't accept death like this.
Exploiting a desperate stroke of imagination, he planted his ruan on the ground, bottom first, and held onto one of the strings with his right hand. He then commanded the ruan to engorge quickly. Indeed, he could dictate how quickly it shrank and ballooned in size.
Yun Jieshi was sent flying into the sky at breakneck speed. He managed to hold onto his ruan's string, but his body whipped to and fro violently. He and the ruan soared high. The snow grew heavier and angrier… and so did the cold.
The little monkey realized right then when and how exactly Honghuo had almost frozen to death, as he had said.
It must have been when he, like the little Sage, tried to escape the snowscape by flying up and past the dense fog.
But Yun Jieshi hadn't been hoping to pierce the source of the heavy snow and emerge somewhere the sky was less vicious. He had only wanted to rise high enough to see which way was back to the Great Gap. From there, he planned to have the ruan force him in that direction by engorging as profoundly as it had done when he used it as a bridge for himself and Feng Jie Hong.
But it hadn't worked according to plan.
His hands began to freeze just like the ruan's head, its pegs, its strings, its neck, and its belly.
The little Sage cursed. He immediately forced the ruan to shrink and he plummeted to the snow with a plo!
Some of his Shuang Fingers fell out of the sack, but he didn't bother to gather them.
'What do I do now? Should I launch myself back blindly?' Yun Jieshi thought as he struggled to a stand, shivering violently. Chips of ice fell from the fringes of his fur. He looked around him desperately.
The darkness was misleading.
The whispers were disorienting.
The wind was uncompromising.
He saw shapes he wasn't sure were real. The cold must have had hands. It was fondling him. Everywhere. He could feel it gripping his wrist tight.
…
Wait. No.
That was not the cold.
Yun Jieshi nearly screamed in fright. Something had grabbed his wrist. It felt like a large hand with way too much skin on its palm.
Instinctively, Yun Jieshi tried to pry it away. It was no use. It wouldn't budge.
The little monkey, turning hysterical, was open to reckless means of escape. He made to order his ruan to launch him back with a sharp explosion in size, but before he could, a strong fragrance met his nose. It smelled a little like jasmine but was far from pleasant. Yun Jieshi remembered the fragrance traveling up his nostrils and then he suddenly felt weak.
Everything around him became darker and then warmer and then he lost consciousness.