Chapter 1306: Blood Essence & a Shy Dragon

As Phei drew the richest Blood Essence into himself, every blood without essence in it left over began flowing toward the waiting Fiend.

Crimson seeped out from beneath thousands of corpses, peeled itself from broken ice and climbed from wounds that had already begun freezing shut. Blood flowed uphill when necessary, creeping across the white ground in branching veins before gathering into thicker rivers around the kneeling monstrosity.

The Blood Fiend drank it all.

Each stream vanished between its plates with a wet inward pull. Dark-red armor deepened toward something almost black while grotesque veins swelled beneath the surface, carrying fresh essence through the huge body.

The slow contractions became heavier.

A muted thump passed through the armor and another.

The Ice Dragon watched without moving.

Gradually, the battlefield whitened again.

The corpses remained scattered everywhere and dismembered limbs still littered the frozen plain, yet almost every trace of spilled blood had been stripped away and consumed either by Phei or the kneeling horror beside him.

Something inside Phei shifted.

Every remaining current of Blood Essence snapped toward him.

A deep pulse travelled outward through the ice.

The blood entering the Blood Fiend surged at the same moment, and for several breaths Phei and the twelve-meter abomination seemed caught inside one vast sanguine heartbeat. Each pulse passed through his body, entered the frozen ground and answered from the Fiend beside him.

The Dragon Lady’s eyes narrowed.

Phei felt the difference immediately.

Primordial Blood had not suddenly awakened some unfamiliar power; nothing new announced itself inside his soul. The change was quieter and somehow more intimate.

His blood felt closer.

Every beat of his heart reached his awareness with impossible clarity. Every current moving through his veins carried a distinct sensation, and the old distance between deciding what he wanted Primordial Blood to do and feeling it respond had become frighteningly thin.

Phei could hear his blood.

The thought sounded ridiculous.

It was also the only description that felt right.

He tested the connection.

The Blood Fiend collapsed.

Twelve meters of pulsing dark-red armor lost shape in an instant and poured downward into a vast flood of blood and darkness. The wave rushed toward Phei, circled him once in a thick crimson ring and then divided into ten separate streams with the smallest movement of his finger.

Phei thought again.

Ten became hundreds.

Hundreds became thousands.

Fine crimson threads filled the air around him, perfectly suspended and unnaturally still, each one thin enough to resemble strands pulled from some enormous arterial web.

Phei opened his eyes.

He watched them for several breaths before a pleased smile tugged at his mouth.

"Nice."

The blood returned to him.

Rather than immediately jumping up to discover how many terrible things the improvement allowed him to do, Phei remained seated and continued cultivating. A year inside the Primordial Frozen Zone had taught him patience in a way peaceful training probably never could. Every time he rushed some new improvement, the Frozen Zone eventually produced a creature enthusiastic enough to explain why unfinished control was an excellent route toward getting eaten.

Several minutes passed before Phei finally stood.

Only then did he properly notice the enormous Dragon waiting nearby.

He blinked. "Oh. You’re here."

The Dragon lowered her head once.

"Done already?"

Another nod.

Phei looked at her properly; even after a year, the sight still did something embarrassingly childish to him.

She was a Dragon.

An actual fucking Dragon. ℴ

Calling her enormous barely helped. Buildings would have looked stupid beside her, yet none of that size carried the lumbering awkwardness Phei might once have imagined:

Crystalline blue-white scales flowed beautifully across her body, each catching the pallid light differently. Her neck rose with graceful strength, her wings could swallow whole portions of the sky when fully spread, and the frost breathing from her scales blended so naturally with the Primordial Frozen Zone that from certain distances.

Phei had spent his whole life surrounded by the idea of Dragons.

The System called him one.

His family were Dragons themselves!

Dragon powers, Dragon Regeneration and enough strange bloodline nonsense filled his Status Window that the word had become almost ordinary whenever written down.

’All that system panel is full of shit.’

Standing beside one remained different.

A year later, Phei still caught himself staring occasionally.

The Dragon noticed.

Her head tilted.

Phei smiled. "You’re so beautiful, you know."

She blinked.

Then turned her head away.

His smile immediately widened. "Are you shy?"

The Dragon turned farther.

Phei laughed. "You are. Gods, that’s so adorable."

A low grumble rolled through her throat.

"All right, all right." He raised both hands briefly. "But seriously, we’ve been together for a year and you still almost never willingly let me see your humanoid form. How come?"

The Dragon went still.

Her eyes returned to him briefly before drifting away again, and Phei’s amusement softened almost immediately. Trust had grown between them, but trust was rarely one door that opened all at once.

She trusted him enough to fight beside him, rest near him and swallow the Cores he handed over without apparently suspecting that the suspiciously cheerful Young Dragon had developed some elaborate poisoning hobby.

Her humanoid form remained different and far more vulnerable.

Phei knew enough about what had happened to her in the Primordial Frozen Zone to understand why vulnerability did not come easily to her.

He had seen that humanoid form before by mistake.

She looked around fifteen in it, although appearance and existence told completely different stories; hundreds of years rested behind those eyes, yet calling those centuries a life would have been cruelly generous.

The Dragon had survived them yes but living them was something else entirely.

Phei’s gaze drifted toward the distant abyssal chasm.

He understood enough about what the Zone Lord had done to recognize the fear still buried inside her. That thing beneath the abyss had spent years feeding upon the Dragon Lady’s pure essence, drawing strength from her and and using her to feed and power its armies infesting this frozen region.

There were still pieces of the story Phei did not know.

He could learn them later.

After the bastard responsible was dead.

Phei looked back toward the Dragon. "You got all the Cores?"

She nodded.

"Good. Eat more."

The Dragon stared at him.

Phei pointed toward the collection gathered beside one enormous claw. "Seriously. Take your time. We’re going into the Zone Lord’s abyss afterward, and I’m not dragging you down there half-fed because you suddenly decided manners are important."

Her stare continued, Phei crossed his arms: "Don’t argue with me."

Her eyes narrowed.

"What?" His expression became perfectly innocent. "I’ve been making excellent decisions lately."

The Dragon’s stare flattened.

Phei considered the previous year: "...Mostly excellent."

A sharp breath escaped her nostrils and coated his chest with frost.

Phei wiped crystalline dust from his face. "Rude."

The Dragon lowered her huge body onto the bloodless snow, though Phei immediately noticed the stiffness in the posture. Even while resting, she kept herself partly upright, never allowing the enormous body to truly relax.

He sighed. "Get comfortable."

Her eye shifted toward him.

"I mean it. I’ll leave." Phei smiled and turned away. "Take your humanoid form if it’s easier. I’m not watching."

Phei lifted one hand without turning, space split, a dark opening unfolded before him.

"I said I’m not watching."

He stepped into the Void and disappeared.

This time, he meant it completely.

True Void Sense would remain away from the area. Curiosity would not drag him to stoop as low as hiding somewhere beyond her sight and pretend distance somehow made spying respectable.

Phei had already done that once.

The guilt occasionally returned to bite him.

He had never seen anything inappropriate, and that was never the part that bothered him.

He had watched someone who believed herself alone.

During the first weeks after encountering the Dragon, Phei had known almost nothing about her. The Primordial Frozen Zone was filled with creatures capable of thought, deception, transformation and enough murderous instinct to turn misplaced trust into a very short educational experience.

A frightened creature could still be dangerous.

Finding a captured Dragon inside territory ruled by monsters had raised enough questions that even Phei’s usual recklessness had briefly discovered caution.

So he watched and studied how the Dragon behaved when she believed nobody nearby was observing her. He followed her through parts of the Zone, watched how she reacted to weaker creatures and noted how often she avoided unnecessary fighting. Bit by bit, he gathered enough small truths to decide whether ever turning his back toward her qualified as trust or attempted suicide.

What he discovered made the entire exercise feel filthier with every passing day.

She was frightened of far too much and her habits belonged to someone who had learned through repetition that being noticed usually ended in pain.

Yet underneath all that fear, something soft had survived.

Something innocent.

By the time Phei trusted her, he mostly felt like an absolute bastard for secretly following a frightened kid through frozen hell.

That was why he had made himself a promise.

He would never do it again.

Trust had to begin somewhere.

Phei emerged from the Void far enough away that even his ordinary senses could no longer reach the Dragon’s resting place.

Ahead of him, beyond corpse-strewn fields and glaciers mangled by his advance, the abyssal chasm waited; beneath that darkness waited a God being that had spent centuries feeding upon a young Dragon.

Phei stared into the abyss until the faint smile returning to his face lost every trace of warmth.

"Enjoy the Cores, kid. When you’re done, we’re going monster hunting."