"How many fragments of the Green Seer's Mark did you obtain from the Night King?" Bran asked.
"That's mine," Dany said coldly.
Although the Night King had been rescued by the Cold God, before fleeing he had already had nearly half of his soul burned away by the Dragon Queen.
"The Green Seer's Mark belongs to the Three-Eyed Raven. It was lost while in my hands, and I cannot feel at ease. We have cooperated several times now and can be considered fairly reliable allies. Can't you help me?"
Unable to seize it by force and possessing no treasure valuable enough to tempt the Dragon Queen in a trade, Bran had no choice but to play the emotional card.
The problem was, did the Dragon Queen feel any affection for him?
"Too late. I've already transformed the Green Seer's Mark into pure soul essence," Dany said.
"Soul essence is fine. Strengthening my soul would be equivalent to restoring the Green Seer's Mark. When I die in the future, I will also become part of it," Bran said urgently.
"I've already fused the soul essence into my own soul," Dany replied.
"I can sense that you haven't—gah!"
Bran stopped mid-sentence because the Dragon Queen swallowed the soul essence of the Green Seer's Mark right in front of him.
"What can you sense? What haven't I done yet?" Dany asked solemnly.
Bran fell silent.
Dany sighed. "Another 2% increase in control over the Heavenly Dao. The connection between the Seven Gods and their believers is becoming clearer and clearer. So many voices, so many prayers. I can hardly keep up."
Crack, crack, crack. The eight-hundred-meter-thick ice layer was about to be burned through, and the ice tunnel reached the pile of rubble at the city gate that had been used to suppress the Night King.
"Help!"
Dany was startled. The voice came from within the rubble. There were still living people inside?
"Who's out there? Help~~"
Though faint as the buzz of a mosquito, the pleading voice carried immense pain, enough to stir pity even in the hardest of hearts.
"Ser Richard, you're not dead?" Dany sensed the mental fluctuations within the rubble and froze for a moment.
The rubble at the city gate was different from the crypt.
The crypt had been converted from a natural underground cavern, with cracks connecting to deeper tunnels. Air circulation had never been an issue.
That was why, after the wight army had retreated, Dany had not immediately set the glacier ablaze.
But the rubble pile had been completely covered by the ice mountain. Oxygen should have been limited. After such a long time, it ought to have been exhausted. No, that was not quite right. Richard was no longer an ordinary man.
Only then did Dany recall that Richard had not undergone a perfect resurrection like the High Sparrow. The yin-type soul essence within him had not been completely removed.
Before long, a squad of soldiers entered and moved aside stone slabs, bricks, wood, and other debris, revealing a small space between two slabs. Inside were two bodies.
Their flesh was ice-cold, like black ice, clearly corpses. Yet one of the bodies slowly opened its eyes and gently took several breaths of frigid air.
"Ahh! The corpse has come back to life! Quick, kill it! It's a wight!" A wildling soldier carrying the body howled as he reached for his dragonbone blade.
"I told you long ago, he is Ser Richard. He's not dead," Dany said with a darkened expression.
"But he's ice! Colder than ice!" the soldier cried.
"Do his eyes glow blue?" Dany reminded him.
Everyone looked carefully and finally let out a long sigh of relief. Ser Richard's blue eyes were like extinguished candle flames. Not only did they not shine, they were nearly completely dim.
When Richard was carried out of the frozen debris and placed beside a fire to be warmed, everyone gathered around to stare in fascination.
"Why didn't he die?" Jon asked in surprise.
"Well, when he was resurrected last time, he accidentally brought back a holy garment from Heaven."
The lie came effortlessly.
"Oh, I remember," Jon said thoughtfully. "At the time, Ser Richard even chanted some incantation about 'Mighty Heavenly Dragon' or something. His body swelled a circle larger, and he had the strength of an ox, forcibly driving his sword into—"
At this point, Jon's face turned three shades paler, his brows twitching. "The Night King's vitality is too strong. After being treated like that, a normal person would have died long ago, but it was completely fine."
"It wasn't completely fine." Arya seemed to appear from a crack in the rocks. No one had noticed where she had been standing before.
"The Night King can be injured too. Its chest, eye sockets, buttocks…" Arya paused awkwardly for a moment. "The wounds hadn't fully healed. It limped when it walked. Beneath the ice armor, there was still a hole in its chest. I stabbed through that gap to pierce its heart."
Squatting beside the bonfire, Dany checked Richard's pulse and organ functions as she said, "The Night King is also a living being. Of course it can be injured. It's just that it can draw icy power from the Long Night to repair minor wounds.
"It's similar to the healing arts of the Seven Gods' clergy. Treating superficial injuries is simple, but regenerating severed limbs consumes immense time and energy."
"How is he?" Arya asked, leaning closer.
"Very peculiar. A layer of frost covers his body, yet the fluids inside him have not frozen. Instead, they remain in a state of extreme cold hibernation," Dany said excitedly.
In her previous life, scientists had struggled for more than half a century without successfully developing technology to freeze living humans. Yet here, in an environment with medieval productivity and scientific understanding, Richard had perfectly achieved their goal.
"The yin-type soul essence within his cells seems able to draw energy from extremely cold environments. That energy makes breathing a nonessential physiological activity.
"Perhaps Richard could also survive in a high-temperature, arid environment. We can try it if we have the chance.
"If we can prove his ability to survive in extreme conditions, there's no need for him to remain a knight. That would be a waste of talent. He could change professions and become an interstellar explorer!"
"Your Majesty, what are you talking about?" Old Barr and the others were utterly bewildered.
The Dragon Queen's string of wild remarks left everyone else completely dumbfounded.
"Song Ge, is Song Ge still alive?" Richard, whose body temperature was rising as he slowly regained strength by the campfire, turned his head and asked in a hoarse voice.
"He has gone to heaven," Dany comforted him.
"Why didn't the Night King kill you?" Jon asked curiously.
"It hates us too much. It deliberately wants us to suffer slowly in despair," Richard said through clenched teeth.
Everyone fell silent. After what you did to the Night King, you deserved to suffer slowly, but Ser Song Ge had simply been unlucky, dragged into it as collateral damage.
Starting at the city gate, they burned their way inward. Along the road, they encountered hundreds of Northerners frozen in black ice, their expressions fixed in place. They melted the ice and carried the corpses out.
This delayed them for a long time. It was not until midnight that Dany reached the entrance to the crypt.
"This is bad. It was so crowded at the time that the crypt doors were never closed. The cold air must have rushed inside," Jon said, his heart sinking halfway as he saw the anxious, terrified ice sculptures lining the stairwell.
"Ah, this is Jeyne Poole. She was always at Sansa's side."
The crypt was very deep, extending thirty meters underground. The narrow staircase wound downward in a zigzag pattern. At the very bottom of the stairs, Jon saw an ice sculpture that seemed to freeze his very soul.
His eyes reddened, and he nearly burst into tears.
"I told you long ago, Sansa is fine," the great raven on his shoulder said calmly.
"Not only is she fine, you will also see an old friend you would never have expected," Bran's voice sounded strangely eerie in the narrow passage.
After clearing away another layer of ice, the worry on Jon's face instantly turned into astonishment. The thick oak door at the upper entrance had not been closed, yet the door at the lower entrance to the crypt was tightly shut.
He turned back to examine Jeyne Poole's body more carefully. Her face was filled with despair, her body curled into a ball, her right hand clenched into a fist as if she had been pounding on something.
"Jeyne was kept outside. She struggled for a long time before freezing to death."
Jon shuddered.
With a crack, the iron-plated oak door, thicker than Dany's waist, was slowly opened from inside the crypt.
As soon as a slit appeared, several soldiers holding torches cleared the ice shards from the gap so the hinges could turn freely.
When the door was fully opened, a strikingly red-clad woman stood gracefully in the firelight. Her mysterious crimson eyes fixed on the Dragon Queen, who held aloft a fireball. She said calmly, "Why did you take so long?"
"You're not dead?" Dany kept her composure, but Jon cried out first.
A red gemstone once again hung at Melisandre's neck, glittering brilliantly in the dim crypt.
"When I had one foot inside the divine kingdom of the Great Lord of Light, He told me that certain people had failed to fulfill the promises they once made."
The red-robed woman cast a deep glance at Dany. "The Long Night has not ended, and the mission is not complete. I could only step back, leave the heaven of light and fire, and return to the world of mortals."
"Welcome back. It is good that you have returned. The world still needs a great mage like you." A shadow flickered in Dany's eyes, yet her face broke into a radiant smile.
"Where is Sansa? She is safe, right?" Jon was only briefly shocked by the red woman's resurrection before craning his neck to peer into the crypt.
"She is fine." A middle-aged man with a square jaw and a bald head stepped out from the shadows.
His pale blue eyes seemed veiled by black smoke flickering with sparks, less pure than before, carrying a depth that did not belong to Stannis.
The second stag had also been resurrected.
His face was pale as a corpse, and the exposed skin lacked the luster and smoothness of the living, resembling pork rind soaked in water for two hours.
From his appearance, it was not a perfect resurrection. Yet on him, Dany sensed an aura similar to when Jon had first been revived.
His body seemed to have been refilled and nourished once more by immense power.
In short, R'hllor had invested far more in him than in the Lightning Lord or Lady Stoneheart, though less than in Jon.
Clearly, R'hllor had not casually abandoned the Long Night. He intended to continue stirring events through his agents.
The crypt was warmer than expected. After burning the remains of generations of Stark ancestors, Jon had deliberately transformed the crypt into an underground fortress.
The hot springs from the godswood had been diverted from underground and led into the crypt. At the center of the subterranean hall stood a brick-lined pool. The hot spring water flowed into the pool, traced an arc through the crypt, and after the steam dissipated and the temperature cooled, entered cracks along the stone walls.
Perhaps it would eventually flow into an underground river. The White Knife lay right beside Winterfell.
At the entrance to the hot spring channel, shrouded in rising steam, Jon found his sister.
It was somewhat damp there, yet the warmest place of all, like spring.
"I did not expect the crypt to be so large. It might even connect to Gorne's Way beyond the Wall. The Builder Brandon chose a good location back then."
Feeling the icy air pouring in through cracks and fissures at the far end of the crypt, Dany sighed with emotion.
"There is no need for you to return to the surface. Spend the winter here. It is quite warm."
A Northern woman washing carrots by the hot spring channel glanced at the Dragon Queen with reverence and said softly, "Everyone says there is a magical dragon hidden beneath Winterfell."
Dany shook her head. "There is no magical dragon. There is a fissure in the earth. Perhaps tens of millions of years ago there was a volcano nearby, but now it has long fallen silent. Across the world, volcanoes are becoming fewer and fewer."
(End of chapter)
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