Anastasiya tries to force him out of the academy with withdrawal papers, and Ilya answers with a promise so grotesque that it cracks her armor: if she drags him home, he will slit his own throat in front of the entire family. She tears the papers in half, shoves him, and walks away, the first face-slapping reversal in their frozen sibling war. That rebellion becomes the foundation of Vera's training. Night after night Vera batters him with telekinetic boulders, mocks his Iron Reinforcement, and throws him into a magically frozen bath until morning. She promises to reshape him in three months, warning that his body must learn to endure the cold before his Domain stops devouring him. The training feels like abuse, but it changes him. His mana circulation hardens, his pain tolerance expands, and when Vera finally commands him to forget the sword, his Domain answers by instinct: a mountain-sized boulder freezes into crystal shards a fraction of a second before it can crush him. Frostbite nearly kills him, but Vera has found his limit, and limits can be expanded. By the time Knight Department practicals begin, the academy's punching bag becomes an impossible A on the endurance exam. He survives pressures that eliminate a dozen students, chooses ruthless answers in tactical trials, and walks through the Burden Trial without complaint. In the sword evaluation against Sir Fritz, the old tutor dismissed because of his decline, Ilya feels every attack before it happens: the frozen inner world ripples like his own skin, and he learns his Domain has become an early warning system. He loses the duel but gains a weapon no one else can see. Later, in Vera's apartment, he creates a snowflake, not through a spell but by projecting a fragment of his Domain into reality. Vera pats his head and tells him he is a natural-born talent for becoming a wizard. For the first time in years, someone looks at him and says he has value. Then the academy bulletin board assigns him to the Crown Prince's joint expedition, and Ilya recognizes the name of the protagonist who is supposed to live forever. The story has already started to bend, and Ilya is no longer watching from the sidelines; he is walking toward a crack in the plot.

On Mount Serebryany, the joint expedition begins with ordinary tensions. Gilbert and Jerome treat Ilya as a liability, Elise hovers between worry and distance, and Siegfried insists on trusting him, revealing flashes of a warm soul. They gather crates, lose the first objective because Ilya's sword breaks, and laugh around a campfire before the mountain turns to blood. An Orange Labeled Distortion forces professors to order every student to the summit. Ilya collapses at the mention of Rabelle, dragged back to the moment his mother Diane died in the snow after a final performance. Then the team stumbles onto a clearing littered with shredded professors, and Siegfried begins saying impossible things: next run, I lose my powers every time, I will save you Ilya. The truth appears as a towering white figure with black hair and a smile beneath its face. It is a Black Labeled Distortion. Siegfried's golden barrier shatters, and before Ilya can freeze the creature for more than a second, the Crown Prince's torso is torn away. The nightmare then hunts movement. Jerome and Gilbert are obliterated trying to stand. Lucie runs, is impaled, and dies calling for her mother. Ilya knocks Elise unconscious to keep her motionless, then flees, using his Domain's ice as skates. He cannot outrun a Black Labeled Distortion. A strand of hair slices his shoulder, his footing fails, and he falls off the cliff into a frozen whiteness. He wakes in the endless winter of his own Domain, and there stands Vera beside the frozen corpse of Sir Fritz, proof that the old knight died trying to reach him. She tells him she ordered him never to come down the mountain. Somewhere above, the narrative cuts to the imperial palace: Crown Prince Siegfried Tobias Bismarck is dead, the funeral is being prepared, and Ilya carries a secret that breaks the original novel entirely.

After the mountain, the academy smothers the incident in official silence. Rumors say the Distortion was the daughter of Baron Beckjord, but Ilya knows the truth is called Helene Neidhardt. The girl who used to laugh with him behind the academy, steal his cigarettes, and ask whether Northerners wrestle bears has vanished. In the original novel she was never a major villain: she was a talented noble daughter whose father owned the Crimson Lily brothel, raised on the promise that her magical gift could lift her family out of shame. At Holy Trinity Academy she discovered she was not exceptional, and that discovery became a slow, patient poison. The academy's reality check broke her belief in her father's promise, and she chose to return to the only path she believed remained. Ilya finds her in the Red Lantern District, in a brothel room perfumed with expensive lies. She is already becoming something inhuman, but she still smiles, still whispers his name, still puts a finger to his lips. His anger turns to frost, and the room freezes, yet Helene refuses to be saved. She tells him to close his eyes and let her take care of everything, because he has already paid her more than any client. That unbearable kindness is the last thing he receives from her. Weeks later, the Crimson Lily burns to the ground, and Helene Erika Neidhardt's body is never found. Ilya never asks about her again. He busies himself with training until the grief is buried under fatigue, but he learns a harder lesson: knowing a future does not mean being able to change it. Vera tells him he is in no position to change anything, and Ilya accepts the cruelty of that truth. He still files his transfer application to the Magic Department, and the department head stares at a contradiction. A Knight Department student with no formal magical education somehow possesses a fully formed Domain. The application is not a hope. It is his last island in a frozen sea.

Winter in the North is where Ilya's buried past finally thaws. He travels two weeks across the Northern Krai, accompanied by knights who still measure him by his failed childhood, and enters the Grand Ducal Palace for the Winter Assembly. A cousin named Aleksei challenges him on the training grounds, and Ilya, who abandoned the sword months ago, beats him with a wooden blade through pure contempt and instinct. By morning every young Belozersky wants to test him, yet he refuses every challenge; Aleksei underestimated him, and that mistake will not be repeated. Then the Grand Hall convenes for the succession. Anastasiya and Ilya are pushed into a sibling duel, and for the first time in six years they face each other with steel. Standing across from her, Ilya realizes she used to be taller, and flashes of their childhood surface: the tutor Miss Ellen beating Anastasiya's posture, a six-year-old Ilya begging his father to lighten her burden, and the warmth of a woman who was not Mariya. That woman was Diane, his biological mother, lost to the Rabelle catastrophe when her carriage was swallowed by a blizzard after a final performance. The grief of that memory explains the hatred in his father's eyes, the distance between brother and sister, and the reason the Crown Prince's death triggered him so violently. The duel is not finished, but the memory is. Ilya visits Diane's grave in the hidden burial ground with Ekaterina, and the truth of his illegitimacy no longer shames him; it only makes him more dangerous. When he reunites with Mariya, he tests her honesty before trusting her enough to call her Mother, and the embrace that follows is the first warmth the winter allows. The Winter Assembly ends with the succession reaffirmed, and the same family that once wanted him buried now has to accept that Ilya Valentinovich Belozersky is not a failure but a survivor. During that frozen season, the Academy records his cumulative standing as Fourth Rank. The story has changed too much to ever return to the original, and Ilya looks toward the Magic Department with a dead prince's impossible promise in his ears and a Domain that still wants to kill him.