"Let's go. We'll talk inside."
Patriarch Shen, Shen Mingyuan, spoke calmly, then raised his hand slightly. A vast, white mist of ice abruptly condensed around his palm.
The mist gathered and thickened, spreading for several yards around him. The air suddenly turned chillingly cold, even more bone-piercing than the dead of winter.
As he slowly pointed forward, the icy mist seemed to possess a Spirituality of its own. It slowly gathered, forming fine ice crystals that gradually solidified into blocks.
In just a few breaths, it had transformed into hard blocks of ice. They stacked themselves neatly atop the walls of the Ice Castle, merging seamlessly with the ice wall.
On the once-smooth walls of the Ice Castle, a flight of icy steps now appeared.
Anyone who didn't know better would have assumed these ice steps had been there since the Ice Castle's construction.
