Trevor's expression remained cold. "I'll gather the remaining followers in the north. However many are left, they're yours. The plan's changed. They're all we have now."
Malrik raised an eyebrow. "And you want me to give up my grand finale? You're tossing out the biggest sacrifice stage your Dark God ever handed you?"
The original plan would've let them sweep across Wintermaw Domain and beyond. Trevor would drown the world in divine flame. Malrik would create the masterpiece of his twisted career.
Trevor's face darkened again. "…The Dark God simply gave us new guidance. This is how fate works," he muttered.
Malrik stared at him, unusually serious. "Did something fry your brain?"
"Now that the Draegarn Empire has the Ice Spirit's favor, we can't move like before. Some of our placements are worthless now."
And it was only getting worse.
It wasn't just Draegarn. Other factions had taken notice of the ritual. They were closing in, picking apart its structure. The beast wave had drawn far too much attention.
Strong fighters from across the region were beginning to strike back. Some of them, no doubt, had been twisted by Malrik himself, fed lies and promises that warped their sense of purpose.
Trevor was furious, but he wasn't a fool. He couldn't take on the world head-on. Not yet. So before the final step, he'd need to vanish for a while.
Originally, the ritual was meant to roll over the land like an avalanche, gaining momentum as it swallowed soul after soul. By the time anyone caught on, it would've been far too late.
"I get it... So, what now?" Malrik asked.
Trevor didn't answer right away. His eyes darkened.
"Now… it's not just the Ice Spirit returning. There's also that damn dragon."
That beast had wrecked everything. The Ritual altar was fragile. Trevor had made backups, of course, but the Ice Spirit's unexpected awakening had already forced him to rewrite half the process.
He even tried to turn it into a sacrifice. As long as the target knew they were being offered, the ritual could still function, barely.
But what he didn't expect...
Was that the first thing to collapse wouldn't be the fragile altar, but the bedrock, the beast horde itself.
That monster of a dragon annihilated everything. Without the beasts, the ritual couldn't continue. The entire mega-scale plan fell apart.
And it didn't stop there. Night after night, the dragon kept coming back, sabotaging new sites, destroying remaining altar, and leaving nothing behind.
It was like spending years planning the perfect heist, blueprints drawn, failsafes in place, only for someone to kick down the vault door and shout, "SURPRISE!"
That's when Trevor understood: You can patch a cracked spire. But if the foundation collapses… There's nothing left to fix.
"Another dragon… how entertaining." Malrik chuckled to himself. It was just an old white dragon, ancient and worn down. And yet it had made it this far? Now that was interesting.
He thought back to the creations he'd released earlier. They were rough drafts at best, pieced together with whatever he had on hand, but some had climbed to near gold-rank just by absorbing strong donor materials.
Combat wasn't their true purpose. They were just pieces of his "art tools designed to maintain the ritual network, extend his influence, and twist the minds of any survivors who refused to yield during the beast tide. At the very least, they were meant to hold the line.
So what went wrong?
Malrik's will sank into the shadows, weaving through the fractured souls and fading memories left behind by his creations.
All around him, dozens of eyes blinked open in the dark, his hidden surveillance points. Each one replayed the final moments of his beasts, frame by frame.
Most scenes looked the same: an icy storm, freezing wind, followed by total destruction. Some were flash-frozen from above.
Others were shattered by sheer force, crushed under massive claws, wings, or tails like bugs under a cartwheel. Before they died, many witnessed magic circles lighting up the sky and a blizzard tearing through everything. Forests of ice rose from the ground. Surviving beasts were wiped out in the blink of an eye.
One of the tougher ones, built with regeneration and splitting abilities, had pushed forward to attack another city. But even that only bought a bit of time before the dragon caught up and tore it apart.
What caught Malrik's attention most was how fragmented the memories were, cut up like someone had edited them. Normally, his constructs came equipped with memory-recording magic, especially the ones that used partial brains.
He wanted those recordings for study. But now? All that data was gone. No traces of his magic remained in most of them.
Only one usable piece came from the lower half of a bisected corpse. The rest? Blank. Wiped clean.
That could only mean two things.
"Either it figured out how I recorded the memories… or it just ate them."
Yes, every trace of mana, every bit of spiritual imprint he left behind had been devoured. Not destroyed out of malice. Just consumed, like food.
It had happened to every beast touched by that dragon, drained dry like bones stripped of marrow.
Malrik's eyes gleamed with excitement. That dragon wasn't just strong. It was perfect.
"A mutated white dragon that can eat mana like that? No wonder its magic feels so strange and powerful."
He grinned. "A Masterpiece. All my years of artistic buildup, I could make something incredible from this!"
Mana might be a common power, but everyone's mana carried a unique "signature", a spiritual fingerprint, a trace of who they were. Absorbing someone else's mana could mess with your mind, even destroy it.
Yet this dragon had consumed not just a few, hundreds of thousands of beasts' mana. Different kinds. Different levels. Including his own.
That should've driven it insane. Especially since it had also absorbed something even worse, corrupted power that come from flame of decay.
"That explains everything," he muttered, flipping through broken memories with growing confidence. "Still using ice magic, huh?"
He pieced it together. The dragon must've stumbled upon a fragment of the Ice Spirit's, a leftover piece buried somewhere.
It tried to absorb it with its own power. But thanks to their ritual, which had nearly tainted the Ice Spirit entirely, the corruption bled into the dragon too. The result? Mutation.
The dragon lost its mind. Couldn't talk. Couldn't cast spells like a proper dragon.
It only roared and destroyed, like an animal. Yet somehow, it had gained power beyond normal understanding. From what Trevor had seen, it never spoke or acted rationally. It just attacked anything corrupted or carrying ritual fragments.
The corruption had turned it into a walking converter, sucking in mana, refining it, and blasting it out in unstoppable spells. That had almost ruined Malrik's plans.
Still, he didn't care about the losses anymore. This dragon, this half-mad, half-divine beast, was worth everything.
To Malrik, it wasn't a monster. It was raw inspiration.
"Looks like it was you in those old battle records after all…" he whispered.
He replayed a scene where one of his creations had wounded the dragon, tearing its scales and revealing blackened flesh underneath. That confirmed it.
The dragon had absorbed his magic, and the corruption. But it wasn't invincible. It could be hurt.
"…It won't be easy, but I've got the upper hand," Malrik said with certainty.
He weighed his remaining forces, his backup plans, and his own strength. Just one blow, one perfect strike, that's all he needed.