Ryu made a leisurely path through the forest.
From what he understood about Ninth Heaven's layout, there wasn't necessarily a single region to go in order to run into beasts of ice. All nine regions, each controlled by their own Powers, had both regions of extreme hot and extreme cold.
Separating the regions, there were what they called the Nine Flood Dragons, a winding path of nine rivers that split the regions and connected around the outside of the Ninth Heaven in the very same vast ocean that Ryu had once been stuck beneath.
Some of the most powerful Ice God Beasts were located near the bottom of that ocean.
One had to remember the layers of the ocean were separated into tiers. The first few tiers were simply dividing tiers of pressure. However, when the pressure increased to an extreme, the ocean became a slab of ice. It was above this slab of thick ice, and honestly also the few tiers above that the strongest creatures of ice were located.