The wall of ice loomed in front of Li Yuan—not like a rough rock cliff but a smooth and vertical surface, sparkling with the light of the low sun. Hundreds of meters high, it stretched to the left and right with no visible end.
This was not just a large ice formation. This was the edge of a continent—a landmass completely covered in ice, hidden from the human world, untouched by civilization.
Li Yuan swam closer, the package containing his belongings floating beside him. The water here was so cold that even the molecules moved more slowly—viscous, almost like oil in the way it flowed.
Within five centimeters around his body, he felt a water different from anything he had ever touched. Not just the temperature but... a quality. As if this water had surrendered to transformation, ready to become ice at any moment.
He touched the ice wall with his hand.
The cold was so intense that even his awareness body, which wasn't supposed to feel cold in a painful way, felt something. Not pain but... an awareness. As if this body remembered what it meant to be human, what it should feel when touching something that could kill in seconds.
And through that touch, Li Yuan heard.
Not with his ears. Not with his Water Comprehension in the usual way—hearing the stories carried by liquid water.
But in a new way. A way he had been learning for the past year but which now, here, at the source of all ice, became perfectly clear.
A reflected resonance. An echo that returned with information stored in the crystal structure.
Memory.
Water that froze two hundred thousand years ago, when the world was in a greater ice age. Water that fell as snow, piled layer by layer, compressed into ice so dense that the air within it—air from an ancient atmosphere—was still trapped in microscopic bubbles.
Li Yuan closed his eyes and listened more deeply.
And he heard... silence.
Not the absence of sound but the presence of an active stillness. A silence that was not passive but which reflected, which stored, which remembered.
This is what I was looking for, he mused with a quiet awe. Not just to get here, but to understand this. Water that has stopped flowing but has not died. Which has become silent but has not lost its essence.
Ice is a phase of water that I have never truly understood until now.
Li Yuan swam along the wall, looking for a way to climb.
It wasn't difficult to find—the ice surface was not perfectly smooth. There were cracks, crevices, formations that jutted out. And with the strength of his awareness body, he could climb with ease.
He climbed slowly, his hands and feet finding holds, his body moving with an efficiency that knew no fatigue.
After a few minutes, he reached the top—a vast, flat surface, stretching endlessly to the south.
Li Yuan stood at the edge and looked.
The continent of ice.
Nothing living was visible—no trees, no grass, no sign of plant life. Just white that stretched as far as the eye could see, with varying ice formations: some flat as a plain, some undulating like frozen hills, some towering like crystal mountains.
The sky above was different too. Paler, vaster, with thin clouds that were almost invisible. The sun was low on the horizon even though it should have been midday—a sign that he was very far south, where the sun never rose high even in summer.
A wind blew with a steady force—not violent but constant, carrying small ice crystals that danced in the air like shining dust.
And most striking of all: the sound.
Or rather, the absence of familiar sounds. No waves hitting the shore. No birds. No wind through trees. Just... a silence so profound that Li Yuan could hear his own heartbeat—if he had a heartbeat.
Within the ten-meter radius around him—the radius where he usually heard the intentions of living creatures—he heard nothing. There was no life here. Not within this distance.
I am truly alone, he mused. For the first time in... how long? Thousands of years? Even in my deepest meditations, I was always close to life—birds in the trees, fish in the river, humans in a nearby village.
But here, there is nothing. Only me and the ice.
Li Yuan took the first step on the ice surface.
His feet touched with caution, testing the stability. The surface was hard and solid—not as slippery as he might have expected but textured with small crystals that provided traction.
He walked further inward, carrying his package of belongings.
Every step made a strange sound—a subtle creak of the ice shifting slightly under his weight, an echo that bounced off the hard surface.
And with every step, Li Yuan listened.
Not just with his ears but with his Water Comprehension which now—after a year of learning—was beginning to adapt to hearing ice in a different way from liquid water.
He heard layers. It was like reading a book with thousands of stacked pages, every layer of ice was a page that told of a moment in time.
The top layer: ice that formed last year, from snow that fell and was compressed. Inside, small air bubbles that still carried the composition of the atmosphere from that year—oxygen, nitrogen, traces of carbon.
The layer below it: ten years ago, a hundred years, a thousand years. The deeper, the older, the more compressed.
And in the depths—layers that formed before humans built civilizations, before agriculture, before even many of the species that exist now had evolved.
Ice is an archive, Li Yuan mused with a quiet awe. It not only stores memory but stores time itself. Every layer is a snapshot of the world at the moment that water froze.
And if I can learn to read these layers correctly... I can understand not only water but the history of the world encoded within it.
Li Yuan walked for hours, exploring with no specific destination. Just letting his feet carry him, observing the variations in the ice landscape.
He passed an area where the ice was split—a deep crack that stretched as far as the eye could see, like a wound on the continent's surface. He could see inside: layers of ice stacked like an open book, each layer with a slightly different color due to a different composition.
He passed strange formations—ice pillars that towered due to wind erosion, creating a crystal forest that shone with refracted light.
He passed a frozen lake—a surface so smooth and transparent that he could see into the depths, into the water trapped beneath the thick layer of ice.
And wherever he went, he listened.
To the silence that reflected. To the echoes that carried information. To the resonance stored in the crystals.
He began to understand that ice was different from liquid water in a fundamental way.
Liquid water flows—it carries stories from one place to another, mixing, changing, dynamic. The stories carried by liquid water are living stories, that evolve, that are never the same twice.
But ice stores—it takes a moment and freezes it, storing it without change for thousands or even millions of years. The stories stored in ice are dead stories—not in a negative sense but in the sense that they do not change, do not evolve. They are perfect snapshots of what once was.
Two same phases of the same element, Li Yuan mused. But with opposite functions. Liquid water to carry, ice to store. Flow for dynamic, silence for static.
And both are needed. Both are important.
Without liquid water, there is no life, no change, no evolution. But without ice, there is no long-term memory, no archive, no way for the world to remember what has been.
He stopped on the peak of a high ice hill and looked at the horizon.
In the distance—so far away it was almost invisible—he saw something moving.
Not large. Just a white dot that was a contrast to the ice only because of the way it moved—the distinctive hop of...
Life.
Within the ten-meter radius, there was still nothing to hear. But with his Water Comprehension expanded a little further—not fully, not enough to hear the entire world, but enough to sense a few kilometers away—he felt a presence.
A creature. Not many, but they were there. Creatures that had adapted to live in an environment that would kill almost all other life.
Later, Li Yuan decided. I'll observe them later. But for now...
He looked at the ice under his feet. At the stacked layers. At the archive that held hundreds of thousands of years of history.
For now, I need to learn to read. I need to understand how ice stores memory, how it reflects resonance, how it speaks in a different language from liquid water.
And then—after I understand that with enough depth—I will meditate. A deep cultivation, perhaps deeper than I have ever done.
Because I feel something here. Something that could change my Water Comprehension in a fundamental way.
Not just understanding two phases—liquid and solid—but understanding the underlying rhythm of both. The transition. The transformation. The cycle from flow to silence and back again.
Three breaths, maybe. Solid, liquid, gas. Ice, water, steam. Three forms of the same essence.
But that is for later. After the exploration. After the learning.
Li Yuan sat on the ice surface—not cross-legged in formal meditation but relaxed, open, receptive.
He placed his hand on the surface and listened.
And the ice spoke to him—not with words but with echoes, with resonance, with memory stored in crystals that hadn't changed for two hundred thousand years.
Stories of a different world. Of a colder atmosphere. Of a time when ice covered much more of this planet than it does now.
And Li Yuan, for the first time since leaving the Port of the Southern Winds a year ago, smiled—a thin but sincere smile.
I have arrived, he mused. Not just physically but spiritually. I have arrived at the place where water teaches me something truly new.
And now, the real journey begins.
Not a geographical journey but a journey of understanding.
From flowing water to storing ice.
From dynamic to static.
From a changing story to an eternal memory.
The wind blew, carrying ice crystals that danced in the air.
And Li Yuan sat in the silence that reflected everything, listening to the stillness, beginning a new chapter of a cultivation that had lasted fifteen thousand years.
But which felt, for the first time in a very long time, like it was truly new.