Snow Soul Dragon's Roar

The north wind keened like a blade, and secrets lay hidden in a frozen coffin. During the Zhizheng era at the end of the Yuan dynasty, Lin Zhen Yang, chief escort of the Qingyang Escort Agency, was transporting a coffin marked with the Seven Stars of the Big Dipper when the Xuan Yin Sect ambushed him at Luofeng Slope. Amid the swirling snow, a crying infant was discovered inside the coffin. Lin Zhen Yang entrusted the child to a Shaolin monk at the cost of his own life, plunging into an abyss of ice thousands of feet deep. Twenty years passed through storm and hardship. The infant had grown into Lin Han, a young man living in an ancient temple. A Qingyang secret manual he had deciphered by chance proved to complement the Yin and Yang of the Mysterious Ice Palm wielded by Bai Shuang Hua, a mysterious young woman he encountered in the mountains.

A fire in Qingyang Town reduced the old escort agency to ashes. Among the charred ruins appeared a fragmentary map to the imperial jade seal of the previous dynasty. A masked figure broke into Shaolin's sutra library at night to steal the Tendon-Transformation Classic of Bodhidharma, and half of a golden-scaled jade pendant was discovered hidden between its pages. When the pendants worn by Lin Han and Bai Shuang Hua joined together, an ice coffin that had lain dormant for twenty years deep beneath a cold pool burst open. The woman inside bore a mirror image of their faces, while the dragon pattern between her brows shone blood-red beside the cinnabar mole on Bai Shuang Hua's forehead.

Turmoil erupted throughout the martial world. Leng Qian Qiu, the Xuan Yin Sect's leader, resumed training in the Nine Netherworld Ice Art, bringing June frost wherever he went. The cavalry of Prince Ruyang's Mongol estate surrounded Shaolin, apparently seeking the whereabouts of the imperial jade seal. Others spotted elders of the Western Regions' Vajra Sect sneaking into a secret passage in Qingyang, where they wrote the word "Hongwu" in poisoned blood on a stone wall carved with blazing Yang energy. Meanwhile, the blazing Yang energy inside Lin Han grew increasingly uncontrollable, until, guided by Bai Shuang Hua's Cold Jade Technique, it became a clear dragon's cry amid the snow.

From Miaojiang's poisonous sorcery to the Sword Graveyard in the East Sea, from Mount Emei's golden summit to Kunlun's sheer cliffs, the twin jade pendants reveal a tangled mystery of three identities: the Hongwu Emperor's secret guards, survivors of the previous dynasty's royal family, and a century-old secret of the martial world.