Millennium Witch

Book 3: Chapter 274: Practically a Miracle!

The next afternoon, Yvette ended her brief rest at Snowmist Lodge and stepped onto the vast Snowfields together with Shuanghua.From a safety standpoint, it would probably have been wiser to first digest and understand her newly acquired divine-realm abilities, to refine and complete the domains she could now construct. But just thinking about those conjectures Shuanghua had quoted from Tertia left Yvette too restless to stay in the warm inn.

She didn’t even have time to savor the mysteries of the divine realm before she immediately dragged along this newly acknowledged grand-disciple of hers and set out.

Unlike her previous solo explorations—where she’d had to rely on a sketchbook to record landmarks and carefully avoid getting lost in the monotonous landscape—this time, with Shuanghua leading the way, the journey went unusually smoothly. In less than half a day, they passed through the blizzard belt, pushed into the deep-freeze zone of the Cold Abyss, and finally emerged onto a vast glacier shrouded beneath eternal polar night and a blazing river of stars, looking ahead.

What lay before them was an unbelievably vast basin, much larger than any geological formation they had seen before.

Under the gray-blue sky, the entire basin was wrapped in dense, unbroken white frost-mist.

It writhed and rolled like a living creature, emanating a chilling pressure that made one’s heart tremble. It was like a gigantic, pure-white planetoid embedded in the frozen earth, stretching so far to either side that its ends were lost to sight.

Yvette watched quietly for a while, the hem of her gray cloak fluttering lightly in the cold wind. Then she turned into a gust of wind and drifted down to land right in front of the wall of mist.

Shuanghua followed as wind and snow. The two of them were about the same height—one with brilliant silver hair refracting seven-colored light, the other with pure white hair flowing like moonlight. Under the dim starlight, they looked almost like real sisters, even their outward temperaments not all that different.

“So this is the barrier created by a True God?” Yvette said as she walked toward the mist.

As if sensing her approach, the flow at the edge of the mist suddenly intensified, sending out ripples of invisible waves, perhaps as a kind of warning.

“Grandmaster, please be careful,” Shuanghua said nervously.

She had already explained to Yvette what made this barrier special—the extreme cold, the extreme corrosiveness. Once inside, you would be subjected to unending erosion. It put even divine-realm powerhouses under enormous pressure, let alone someone at the Saint Realm or an Archmage. A high-tier mage would probably turn into an ice statue within seconds of entering.

Yvette gave a slight nod. Red runes that hadn’t appeared in a long time began to flow and flicker across the surface of her body—the signal that she was under constant attack. Her “Crimson Armor” hadn’t been iterated on for four or five hundred years, but that didn’t stop its defense from being terrifyingly strong—after all, it wasn’t that she didn’t want to upgrade it, just that there had never been any need.

Shuanghua at once cloaked herself in divine arts and followed, but just as they were about to step into the thick fog, she saw Yvette suddenly turn slightly and reach a hand toward her.

A warm, soft hand closed around her slightly chilled fingers. Feeling the heat from the other’s palm, Shuanghua’s emotions gradually calmed.

From past experience, she and Tertia had found that the corrosion and cold were only the most superficial traits of this barrier. Once you went inside, the disorientation and space-warping sense of getting lost were what truly gave people headaches.

To avoid being separated, holding hands was the simplest solution—and exactly what she and Tertia had done on their expeditions.

Only, now that it was her Grandmaster instead, it really did feel a bit different.

She didn’t know whether Grandmaster could actually lead her through this fog, but in her teacher’s stories, Grandmaster was omnipotent. After being “brainwashed” with that image through her entire student days, it had sunk so deep into her mind that trusting Yvette had become a reflex.

“Has Tertia ever tried attacking this barrier?” As the world around them was gradually swallowed by endless, depthless mist, she heard her Grandmaster’s calm question from ahead.

“No.” Shuanghua shook her head.

They had tried to break through the barrier, but neither she nor Tertia had ever been reckless enough to attack it outright. Every expedition over the past four hundred-plus years had been an attempt to pass through, not an assault.

Otherwise, Tertia could have tried to incorporate this entire region into her Knowledge Divine Realm already—assuming it would even fit.

“Good thing she didn’t. The rune structures here are very advanced—complex yet orderly. There’s firewall-style design, and it also incorporates trace amounts of divine power and faith anchors as part of several counterattack mechanisms. If you’d tried to pull this into your divine realm, the True God would’ve been able to leave a hidden spatial anchor inside it,” Yvette said.

Shuanghua didn’t know what a “firewall” was, but she understood what anchors meant.

Turning that word over in her mind, she felt a chill in her heart.

For a divine-realm powerhouse, an externally deployed divine realm was a tool for fighting others of the same level. When withdrawn, it was the safest secret base in the world.

It was anchored to reality by a hidden coordinate, allowing the user to enter their divine realm from anywhere and then quietly exit from that anchor point. As long as the anchor’s coordinates weren’t exposed, a divine-realm powerhouse was almost unkillable in any permanent sense.

That was also why Eldritch Gods could keep clinging to life for so many years even after provoking the True Gods.

—It was already very close to a flesh-and-blood marker.

But if a secret anchor was left inside the divine realm, that greatest advantage would be gone. Even Tertia could end up being killed.

“There’s also a monitoring module here. Anyone who stays longer than five minutes will come under surveillance,” Yvette continued walking calmly forward. The red runes on her body gradually settled down, no longer flaring as intensely as before. “Have any of your and Tertia’s explorations ever gone past that time?”

“Of course they have,” Shuanghua said haltingly.

She didn’t even need to think about it to know the answer. Every attempt to breach the barrier had her and Senior Sister studying it here for many days in a row. There was no way they were going in and out within five minutes.

“Then it seems the True God has always known what you two were up to,” Yvette said.

Shuanghua fell silent, feeling even colder.

She had no reason to doubt Grandmaster’s judgment—but didn’t that mean the True God had been deliberately letting them research?

If one day, she or Tertia couldn’t hold back and decided to try forcibly breaking through by incorporating the barrier into their divine realm—wouldn’t that be planting a time bomb inside it?

“Then, Grandmaster, what about us now…” She immediately grew nervous again, her fingers subconsciously tightening slightly in Yvette’s grip, transmitting her anxiety.

They had been inside this barrier for several minutes already. Didn’t that mean they were about to come under the True God’s surveillance as well?

“It’s fine. This barrier belongs to us now,” Yvette said.

Shuanghua blinked, not quite understanding.

But soon, she saw the mist ahead automatically part, revealing a white tunnel.

Her mouth slowly opened again into a little triangle, her face frozen in a slightly dopey expression of shock, and she instantly understood everything.

Grandmaster had taken control of the barrier!

This True God’s barrier that had given Senior Sister headaches for four hundred years had just been taken over by Grandmaster like that!

This was practically a miracle!