Chapter 1624 — Bing Tang's Origins, Part Two

But when she truly beheld that letter, Bing Tang discovered that, in the depths of her heart, she still could not let it go! She wanted to know -- wanted to know who her parents were, wanted to know why they had abandoned her! To bear her and then not raise her -- why had they done such a thing?

And the letter had been written by the Hidden Tang family, which only deepened Bing Tang's confusion and fury. The Hidden Tang family, though its influence did not rival the Ice Palace's, was still a colossus in the mundane world, mightier by far than any ordinary great clan!

Such a clan, and yet they could cast away a child? Had they done it deliberately, or without meaning to? And now that they knew she was the Ice Palace's palace master, they thought to claim her back? Where had they been before?

Yet for all her anger, Bing Tang still found herself pleading her parents' case. Perhaps back then they truly had lost her by mishap; or perhaps they had not failed to search for her -- they had been searching, but she dwelt within the Ice Palace; how could they ever have found her? They could never have found her at all!

"Aunt Qing, you and ** raised me, taught me my martial arts; you are the ones dearest to me! But my birth parents, for whatever reason they abandoned me, are my parents after all, and it is impossible to say I do not care. Still, I only wish to understand what happened back then, to understand my origins... Aunt Qing, you have never once spoken of how you and **, that venerable one, found me. Now... will you tell me?"

"Ah!" Xiao Qing sighed. "It was not that I would not speak, but that I feared speaking would disturb your heart and delay your **. You were small then, your nature still unsteady. But now you are a fine hand at the peak of the late Heaven tier, and there is no need to fret over such things any longer. Yet since you never asked again, I never brought up those sorrowful old matters of my own accord. Now that this has come to pass, I may as well tell you how it was!"

"Very well, Aunt Qing, speak." Bing Tang gestured for her to go on. Her feelings had already settled back into calm; her face was perfectly placid, betraying neither joy nor sorrow.

"In those days I was not yet a Heaven tier expert -- but I was only a hair's breadth from breaking through from the peak of the late Earth tier into the Heaven tier. Seeing this, the old palace master took me out to travel, that I might break through to the Heaven tier in one stroke..." Xiao Qing said. "You know as well as I do that in most cases, everything before the Earth tier depends on effort, and everything after it depends on fortune. The Heaven tier is no easy threshold to cross. Back then the Ice Palace's strength was not yet as overbearing as it is today; one more Heaven tier expert was naturally a good thing! So the old palace master took me to roam the mundane world... and the place we roamed to was none other than where the Hidden Tang family makes its home..."

"What! It really was where the Hidden Tang family is!" Bing Tang's expression shifted a little. She had harbored doubts about the letter's credibility, but hearing Xiao Qing's words, her heart clenched at once. Could it be that everything written in that letter was true?

"It was indeed where the Hidden Tang family makes its home... It was a night of driving snow. The old palace master and I were going out to seek insight, to see whether there might be some opening for breakthrough," Xiao Qing said.

Bing Tang nodded. In their Ice Palace lineage, the ** methods all took ice and cold as their foundation; the colder the land and the weather, the more favorable it was to **!

"And when I and the old palace master came to a stretch of open wilderness to prepare for **, we suddenly heard an infant's cries, rising again and again," Xiao Qing said. "Curious, I and your ** followed the sound, and there on the snow we found a swaddling bundle..."

"That infant... was me?" Bing Tang had already guessed it; the baby in the swaddling clothes on the snow could be none other than her.

"Yes. By then your little face was red with cold, Palace Master, and yet you had not died -- which left the old palace master and me deeply puzzled!" Xiao Qing said. "When we came to that wilderness, there was no one near at hand. The perception of a Heaven tier expert such as your ** could reach far in every direction; which is to say, whoever abandoned you had been gone at least half an hour. And in that half hour, you, a newborn infant, on that desolate stretch of wild hills under a snowstorm of goosefeather flakes, had somehow not frozen to death. Truly astonishing!"

Bing Tang's face fell a little. A desolate wilderness? Had it been a bustling market town, it might yet be explained as a careless loss; but this wilderness, in the dead of night -- plainly she had been abandoned!

"There was no one there, no sign of human life?" Bing Tang asked.

"No... Otherwise I and your ** could not have ** there!" Xiao Qing said. "We knew the Hidden Tang family was in that town, so we deliberately kept far from their dwelling, precisely so that we would not be sensed by them while **! You must understand that when one **, one calls upon the spiritual energies of heaven and earth all around one; at close range, others will sense it..."

"Mm. Aunt Qing, go on," said Bing Tang, offering nothing more, only gesturing for Xiao Qing to continue.

"At first, the old palace master's thought was that since we had come upon you, it was a stroke of fate; she meant to take you back to the Ice Palace, find some ** to raise you, and keep you in the Ice Palace thereafter," Xiao Qing went on. "But you had gone so long without freezing to death that the old palace master grew curious, and on impulse examined your body to see whether you had suffered frostbite -- and discovered that yours was a pseudo Ice Heart Jade Bone constitution! That is a rare constitution second only to the true Ice Heart Jade Bone constitution, and it suited our Ice Palace's ** exactly. So the old palace master was overjoyed; she had never expected such a stroke of fortune. You should know that the Ice Heart Jade Bone constitution appears only once in a hundred years; even the old palace master herself does not have it!"

"Back then, if not for ** and Aunt Qing, then even with a pseudo Ice Heart Jade Bone constitution, I would have frozen to death..." When Bing Tang said this, there was little expression on her face, but Xiao Qing heard the fury beneath it, and could not help smiling bitterly to herself. The Hidden Tang family, truly -- they had thrown the child away, and now they came looking for her!

"Afterward, the old palace master and I carried you, Palace Master, back to the inn; and on your swaddling clothes we found a single character, 'Tang'. So we guessed that your true surname might well be Tang!" Xiao Qing continued.