Dex's footsteps were slow but deliberate, his leather boot grinding dead pine needles and rotting branches beneath it with each measured stride. The cold forest air bit at his face, yet his mind burned with feverish activity. Having ruled out the first path-the Holy Empire-on account of the insurmountable barriers of distance and time, the internal compass of his thinking now swung away from the frozen, sanctified north, and turned southward... toward the south: murky, violent, and seething.
Far beyond the raging oceans and the eternal tempests that shred ships to splinters lay the continent of Kayrot. A land of volcanic peaks exhaling black ash into the heavens, and of bottomless valleys through which rivers of molten lava ran in place of water. There, no complex politics existed, no councils of nobles, no Papal seals. There, the only law acknowledged was the most merciless law of nature: survival of the strongest, and the strongest ruled as a god.
The second path that surfaced in the Reader's mind bore a single name-a name whose mere utterance was enough to make the kings of men stumble over their words and feel their throats run dry: Dragassos.
Dragassos was no mere beast. He was the supreme ruler of the Great Dragon Clan-the entity that the continent's wisest men classified in hushed, terrified whispers as the most powerful living creature to walk the face of Ekarthas, enthroned at the legendary Rank SSS+. Ancient legends, passed down by old women as bedtime stories to frighten children, and sung by wandering bards in cheap taverns, held that dragons were immortal beings, and that "a single drop of the great dragon's heart-blood is enough to raise the dead from their ashes."
Dex smiled with faint sarcasm as he ducked beneath a dangling branch that resembled a gnarled claw. "The fools of this world take it for myth, or a poet's flourish... but I know it to be an absolute biological and chemical fact."
The novel had explained the composition of dragon physiology in precise detail. An ordinary dragon's blood contained concentrated Mana, but the heart-blood of the Dragon King was something else entirely. It was not blood in any literal sense; it was the crystallised essence of life-a pure distillation of vital energy and regenerative properties that surpassed, by light-years, the finest elixir ever produced by the greatest human alchemists. A single drop of Dragassos's heart-blood would be sufficient not merely to vaporise the demonic poison of Beelzebub's Tear from Lord Marcus's veins, but to reconstruct his Mana channels entirely-and perhaps even push his power beyond the Rank SS plateau at which he had stalled for years.
But the obstacles that had confronted him on the first path now reared their ugly heads once more, wearing different and still more terrifying faces.
First: the distance. The continent of Kayrot lay even farther than the Holy Empire, and reaching it required crossing the Sea of Drowned Souls-a suicidal voyage of at least half a year. Second, and more critically: the problem of Pride. Dragons were creatures of staggering arrogance who regarded even the most powerful human sorcerers as bothersome, short-lived insects. For a weak human standing at the very bottom of the food chain-as Dex currently was-to approach the Dragon King and ask for a drop of his heart-blood was not merely a swift form of suicide. It was a cosmic insult, the kind that would compel the dragon to wipe the entire city of Seron off the map with a single breath of flame as punishment for the sheer audacity.
"But..." Dex whispered, his footsteps slowing until he stopped entirely, leaning his back against the trunk of a massive tree. He raised his eyes toward the darkened sky through the dense canopy above, a strategically cunning gleam flickering in their depths. "I possess the key to tame that beast and shatter his pride."
His mind began to reconstruct an entire chapter-deeply tragic-from the second volume of the novel, a chapter that bore the title: "The Ice Flower in the Heart of the Volcano." The key to Dragassos's impenetrable heart bore a gentle name that stood in stark contrast to the nature of her blood: Draghora, the beloved daughter of the Dragon Clan's lord.
Draghora had been the miracle of her clan from the very day of her birth. She was no ordinary dragon-she was a child born with a singular gift that had left the clan elders wide-eyed with awe and dread. She had displayed absolute, terrifying mastery over pure Mana from her earliest years, and a physical power in both her human and dragon forms that had moved the clan's elders to weep with joy, comparing her to Draghao-the legendary ancestor and founder of the Dragon Clan who had once vanquished the ancient gods. The clan had poured every resource, every treasure, and every repository of knowledge it possessed into this child. They were preparing her to be the queen of the future, anticipating the birth of a new war goddess who would stand at the apex of the known world.
But, as was always the case in the dark fantasy worlds Dex had read, fate-or rather the author-had been hiding a cruel and painful irony.
When Draghora reached her twentieth year-barely early adolescence by dragon standards-the golden dream collapsed into a bloody nightmare. Without any prior warning, her development began to regress with horrifying speed. Her legendary command over Mana started to crumble, like a sandcastle struck by a hurricane. Worse still, and far more agonising, her powerful body began to reject her own strength. She had developed what could only be described as Inverse Mana Hypersensitivity. Whenever she attempted to use magic-or even breathed deeply to absorb the energy of nature-the Mana boiled in her veins like acid. The vessels beneath her scales would rupture. Her body would tear itself open, spontaneous bleeding wounds splitting across her flesh, accompanied by unbearable neural agony-a pain so profound that the volcanic mountains of Kayrot trembled and cracked from her wretched screams. Within months, the singular genius-the awaited goddess of war-had been reduced to a helpless girl, paralysed, and imprisoned within a rebellious body that was slowly killing her from the inside.
Dragassos-the most powerful being in the world, the creature who could cleave the sky with a glance-lived through a humiliation and helplessness he had never known in centuries of existence. He stood before his daughter's blood-soaked bed and watched as the life drained slowly from her golden eyes. In a state of desperate madness, he broke every taboo. He summoned the finest healers on earth, sorcerers of the highest healing ranks, and even struck a temporary and deeply humiliating truce with the Holy Empire to bring the previous Emperor, Milos the First-grandfather of the current Emperor Augustine-to personally attempt her purification.
But every last one of them stood defeated and with bowed heads. The final verdict delivered by the earth's foremost sage was nothing less than a death sentence: "Her body is consuming itself, my lord. There is no magic and no medicine that can alter the nature of a body that rejects its own soul. Death is inevitable. She has one week."
In that moment, the great dragon's pride died. Dragassos trampled the dignity of his clan underfoot and knelt-yes, knelt-before the kings of the Elf race in the deep forests of Silvana, begging them to employ an ancient and forbidden technique as old as the world itself: the Absolute Ice Coffin.
This terrifying magical technique did not cure the affliction; it froze the victim's biological time at absolute zero, placing them in a perpetual artificial coma in which cells neither aged nor died. But the cost of sustaining the Coffin was immense. It did not draw upon the Mana of nature; it required an enormous, pure, and inexhaustible supply of vital energy-donated by a living being who shared the same blood.
And so, from that day forward-for fifty unbroken years-Dragassos had performed a bloody and agonising annual ritual in the vaults beneath his volcanic palace. On the same day each year, the Dragon King drove his claws into his own chest, tore open the scales that no sword could pierce, and extracted a single complete drop of his beating heart-blood, placing it upon the crystal of the Ice Coffin to sustain his daughter's life for one more year. He risked his own foundational power, arrested his future growth, shortened his prospective lifespan, and endured a pain that shredded the very soul... all of it, because in his eyes, nothing in this cold universe was worth more than the faintest hope of one day seeing the smile of his daughter-a smile he had not witnessed in half a century.
"Five full decades have passed, and a solution has continued to elude the greatest minds on the continent," Dex thought, as a wide smile-bordering on predatory-split his face in the darkness of the forest. "But I... I know the cure."
As the Reader who had absorbed every secret the novel held, Dex understood precisely what afflicted Draghora. It was no disease, and no failed mutation. She had been born with a Dual Dragon Core-an exceptionally rare condition that required a specific ritual performed at a precise temperature to fuse the two Cores into one. The healers of the world had been unable to diagnose it because none had ever dared to examine a dragon of the royal bloodline from within.
"Draghora is my absolute golden ticket," Dex whispered, closing his fist tightly as though gripping the fate of the world in his hand. "If I could reach Dragassos and offer him the true cure... if I restored his daughter to him, living and breathing... then a single drop of his heart-blood would be a pitifully cheap price. More than that-I would make the most powerful being in all of Ekarthas personally indebted to me for the life of his princess. I would gain an ally capable of crushing the Shadow Organisation and my uncle Silvester with a single sweep of his tail."
The vision was intoxicatingly tempting. Dex saw the future laid out before him: himself standing victorious, the Dragon Clan arrayed like a fortress wall at his back.
But... a gust of cold air slapped his face and dragged him back with brutal abruptness to bitter reality. The smile faded from his lips, and the cold, pragmatic look returned to settle across his features. He raised his hand and looked at his smooth fingers, still lacking any real strength.
"This will be my grand strategy for the future... yes. I will keep this card close to my chest. But..." Dex exhaled bitterly and bit his lower lip. "The future is not now. My father-Lord Marcus-cannot afford the luxury of waiting for my epic journey to the continent of Kayrot. His poisoned body will begin to fail within sixty days."
With genuine pain, Dex set aside this second option, locking it away in a sealed compartment at the back of his mind for a day yet to come. He could not rely on the Holy Empire in the north. He could not rely on the dragons of Kayrot in the south.
"Only the third and final option remains," Dex said to himself in a firm, resolved voice, resuming his walk away from the cave's vicinity and pressing deeper into the denser and more perilous thickets of Falus Forest. "The third method..."
But as his mind prepared to analyse the third option, his footsteps stopped dead.
The prisoner's instinct-that sixth sense which had warned him of danger time and again before it struck-fired like a blaring alarm in his skull. The sounds of the forest's insects cut off completely. A heavy, lethal silence descended.
Dex felt hot breath-laden with the stench of rotting flesh-strike the back of his neck from the shadows.