Chapter 1301: Void-Ice Evolution

Phei floated high above the ruined expanse of the Primordial Frozen Zone with both hands resting lazily against his hips, staring across the devastation below with the composure of some ancient Immortal who had wandered out of seclusion and found the end of the world mildly disappointing.

Except there was very little about him that resembled the old Immortals Phei had imagined from cultivation stories.

If anything, he looked more like some terrifying Ice Princewho had spent far too long letting winter spoil him.

His face had changed subtly over the months, sharpened by hardship without losing the almost unfair youth and beauty out of this world still clinging to it. Frost dusted one cheek where a wound had already healed, catching the frozen light in tiny crystalline flecks, while several loose strands of white hair drifted across his forehead.

His hair had once been black but now it fell far beyond his shoulders in long white rivers, whipping around him whenever the primordial winds screamed past, every strand carrying a faint brilliance beneath the snow.

His amethyst had not simply disappeared beneath Void-Ice anymore.

Something far colder glimmered through them from within, pale blue-white brilliance shining deep behind the pupils as though a frozen heaven had been trapped somewhere beyond the surface.

Tiny crystalline lights moved inside that glow whenever his gaze shifted, while threads of black-white radiance occasionally appeared near the edges before sinking away again.

From a distance, they were beautiful.

Up close, they looked profoundly wrong.

Phei rather liked them.

The air around him crackled.

At first, one might have mistaken the sound for ice forming within the storm. Then a thin black fracture appeared several inches from his shoulder, stretched perhaps the length of a finger and vanished again before another opened beside his hair.

Krrrk.

Another crack.

Then two more.

Space itself was splitting around him.

Phei’s lips slowly curved.

He would be damned.

It really was.

Nearly a year ago, something like that would have required him to deliberately reach into the Void. Now he could stand perfectly still and the surrounding space struggled to remain smooth beneath the power and raging Void and Void-Ice what rolled naturally from him.

The Primordial Frozen Zone had done far more tempering him, fighting and making him so powerful or his Void-Ice too.

His Void-Ice had evolved!

For most of Phei’s life with the power, Void-Ice had been exactly what the name implied to him: an exceptionally strange and monstrously powerful ice element carrying the elements of the void within it and he could even bend space with it, create portals and Infinity Control had eventually pushed his mastery so far that ice answered almost as quickly as thought he could practically freeze and entire town if he so wished, at least that’s what it felt like, but even then, Phei had understood the Void inside his Void-Ice more as a mysterious depth than something he could truly touch.

The Void had always been there:

He simply had not been capable of reaching deeply enough into it.

That changed after Sienna.

Their first time had stirred something beneath his Void-Ice that had remained beyond his grasp, and from that first touch came powers he had never possessed before: Hollow Touch. Void Step. Minimal Void Sense.

At the time, Phei had thought he had begun learning new abilities reaching beyond just just the Void-Ice and touching the Void.

He had been wrong!

They belonged to something much greater.

Well, he wasn’t exactly wrong... he’d just not been right to what had actually happened!

Those first powers eventually grew when he upgraded them; Void Step becoming True Void Steps and Minimal Void Sense becoming True Void Sense, but even those evolutions had only prepared him for what happened later in Anarctica.

When Phei reached the edge of death beneath the assault of the World Transcendents and Eira merged with him right before death; something deeper inside him had finally awakened completely enough for the System itself to acknowledge it.

The memory returned everytime with ridiculous clarity when he thought about it, it happened right before he gave up control of his body:

[Ding! New Element Awakened!]

[Element: Void!]

Phei had stared at that notification afterward for far longer than he cared to admit.

Void.

As an element.

His third element.

That revelation should have simplified everything.

Instead, the damned thing had made the whole thing more confusing: When the Void element appeared, his Powers had looked something like this on the system:

[Powers: Void (Void-Ice — Infinity Control, Hollow Touch, Void Step, Minimal Void Sense), Primordial Blood]

Void-Ice had been placed beneath the Void element.

Simple enough.

Phei had assumed that answered the question once and for all:

The Void was the greater whole, and Void-Ice was one path growing from the Void alongside the abilities that allowed him to touch hollows, cross impossible distance and perceive things at a great distance and even see through spaces itself and spatial threads weaved through the world.

Then the months inside the Primordial Frozen Zone shined yet another light onto his powers!

Phei cultivated until the idea of sitting on ice capable of freezing his marrow became boring. He allowed Primordial Frozen Essence to enter him until the same cold that had once threatened to destroy his flesh barely earned a raised eyebrow. He fought until entire regions of this frozen hell began feeling less like forbidden deathlands and more like particularly unpleasant neighborhoods while he tempered himself and the Void-Ice like the system had told him too.

And Void-Ice continued changing.

At some point, Phei began feeling something strange whenever he summoned it.

The Void remained there—

—Void-Ice still came from that ancient darkness, and Phei could feel the relation between them with every breath. Yet the ice no longer felt like something merely tucked beneath the Void.

It was growing outwardly from the Void’s encompassing cage.

Separating itself without the Void severing it—

—becoming complete enough to stand by itself.

The Void-Ice continued evolving beyond and beyond the more he tempered it, the more Primordial Essence he cultivated and allowed the Void-Ice fight it and devouring it!

The System eventually reflected the same change:

[Powers: Void, Void-Ice (Infinity Control), Primordial Blood]