"You have completed the trial of ice.
You may have completed the trial, but you haven't conquered ice.
May the fiery and unforebearing be damned in eternal ice."
As those runes disappeared from Kayn's vision, he returned to the room inside the temple, still sitting in one of the ice chairs around the pure ice glacier.
'What a nice message to remind people to not get cocky.'
Kayn then remembered his own reflection at the final trial, its whole body froze from ice despite being an ice demon itself.
'Well, I guess it's a necessary reminder for demons who've inherently believed they are the strongest until proven otherwise.'
Kayn then stood up from his seat and took a good look at his body.
As he had guessed, he looked exactly like his ice reflection in the third trial now.
Four arms, two wings, a snake-like tail, and grey skin from head to toe.
Moreover, he also felt that the fire swirling in his mouth, the one he got from his transformation, had turned into the ice affinity instead.
'I guess I can't cook my food using my own fire now…'
It felt like a loss, remembering how useful the fireball was, and how it's pretty much been there for him ever since he turned into a demon.
'Ah, who am I kidding, I eat souls, souls don't need to be cooked.'
Kayn then started walking away from the middle of the temple, his eyes looking at the pure ice glacier once more.
'It really felt different. The ice affinity inside that glacier was clear, untainted by the demons' mana.
Maybe… It was intentionally placed here so that the demons could gain ice affinity…?'
Shaking his head, Kayn turned his body completely and walked out of the ice temple.
There were so many things that he still didn't know about the demons, even after he had gained basic knowledge of the demons.
There were even things that he was given knowledge about, but he didn't know what they were since Kayn didn't even know where or what to look in the jumbled knowledge of the demons.
Kayn just didn't think about it and instead focused on his goal.
Now that he had gotten the ice affinity, Kayn was ready to beeline his way towards the tower to reach the deeper level as soon as possible.
Well, he still needed to saturate his body by eating enough souls so that he could evolve in the tower and reach the second level of the demon realm, but he could just do it along the way.
As Kayn's feet stepped out of the temple, showing his grey skin to the other demons outside the temple, the ones who had failed the trial, he got all kinds of looks.
Some looked at him in fear, some looked in jealousy, while the minority gave him a demeaning look.
And in that minority, one of the demons, who had just arrived at the ice temple, chose to speak aloud his words.
"Don't look down on me just because you simply completed the ice trial!"
Kayn didn't even notice the demon who had just come from the narrow gap of the ice glaciers before he spoke, but now that he had, Kayn turned to look at the demon and stared at him.
Kayn just stared at the demon, not a single word came out of his mouth as he looked down at the demon from the top of the stairs.
"You! You dare ignore me!?"
Wondering about a certain thing in his mind, Kayn decided he wanted to test out something and responded,
"Why should I reply to a vermin? You don't hear any words when the weak newborn demons are talking, do you?"
Kayn just spoke slowly as if it were a matter of fact instead of an insult. And the result brought Kayn into a smile.
"I will fucking kill you!"
All the other demons around the temple just shook their heads in ridicule as they knew what was about to happen next, but Kayn looked forward in anticipation.
The demon, who had a long tail on his back, coiled the tail and kicked his feet off the ground as he charged towards Kayn.
Kayn still stood silently on the top of the stairs, casting an ordinary ice shield just in case the demon could actually pack a punch, but he did nothing else.
He didn't want anyone or anything to think that he had an intent to fight.
The demon's charge was surprisingly fast, not fast enough that Kayn had lost track of him, but it was at least as fast as when Kayn ran in full speed when using his self-strengthening spell.
The demon soon flew up the stairs and arrived in front of Kayn.
Kayn, still smiling, looked at the demon as its fist was aimed towards Kayn's face, but of course, it was blocked by his ice shield.
When the ice shield and the fist made contact, the shield trembled slightly before going still once again, and not a crack was found on the surface of the shield.
On the other hand, the demon fell down the stairs, clutching his arm that was used to punch Kayn.
Not only was he in pain due to clashing with the rigid ice shield, but his fingers were locked in place due to the cold freezing them.
"Just because of some ice, you think you're undefeatable? I will eat your soul today!"
The demon prepared another attack using his other arm, and he planned to use his tail to launch himself from point-blank range, straight to Kayn's face.
But the attack never came.
Kayn felt an unusual cold wind blowing towards him, and he glanced towards the mountain-like ice glaciers, which he felt were the source of the cold wind.
But he didn't find anything on the walls of the glaciers, he only felt a faint trace of mana gathering on the walls of the glacier before quickly disappearing.
When he looked back at the long-tailed demon, Kayn was surprised to see that he had stopped moving.
His whole body just stopped in place as if someone had put him in a time stop.
But Kayn felt a dense amount of ice mana inside the demon's body and knew that the demon was frozen by ice mana.
Before Kayn could even examine the demon, another wind blew, an ordinary wind this time.
The demon's body had been frozen so thoroughly that it made him very brittle, and that ordinary wind was more than enough to crumble into pieces.
The pieces of the demon's body were scattered by the wind. Not a single part of the demon's body, or even his soul, remained as if they all had been turned to pure ice.
Kayn gulped when he realized this.
'Whatever froze the demon wasn't something any demon could deal against…'
Patting himself on the shoulder for not doing anything stupid so far, Kayn quickly got out of the area of the temple, afraid that it might be going for him next just because he provoked the fight.
Fortunately, Kayn was able to get out of the ice temple and the mountain-like glaciers just fine, and he continued his journey towards his ever-present north star, which was the Tower.
Kayn remembered that he needed to pass one more area, another region from the ice region to reach the tower, so he decided to do his hunt of souls there.
His body still needed many more souls to be saturated enough for the evolution process in the tower, but he would rather be close to the tower first to minimize any kind of mishap that might happen.
With that in mind, Kayn decided to use his self-strengthening spell and flew towards the rocky mountains region, the region of earth.
It took Kayn a few hours of constant flying, refreshing his self-strengthening spell every 5 minutes, for him to finally reach near the border of the two elemental regions.
However, before he could go past the border, Kayn found a familiar face standing in the snow.
"Oh! Look at what we have here!"