Chapter 1307: Riding A Dragon!

A/N:Get your minds out of the gutter! Its not sex 😂😂 Also after this Chapter carefully the next Chapter, it holds a huge chunk of the things that would determine an important arc of Phei’s journey and life.

Clearing the remaining road toward the abyss became almost embarrassingly easy.

The Zone Lord had possessed an enormous number of thralls throughout this region of the Primordial Frozen Zone, enough that Phei had spent most of the past year wondering whether the bastard simply grew monsters beneath the ice whenever nobody was watching.

Every glacier seemed to conceal another nest, every cavern another pack, and whenever Phei and the Dragon reduced their numbers to something remotely reasonable, another swarm would crawl from the frozen dark and volunteer itself for extinction.

There had always been a limit, though. The Zone Lord could enslave a horrifying number of creatures, but even a God Being could not simply claim every living thing scattered across an entire Primordial Frozen Zone.

This region only contained so many beasts within its reach, and over the course of a year, Phei and the Dragon had killed almost all of them.

What remained closer to the abyss was considerably stronger.

Rime Wardens here carried cold dense enough to twist the storms around their bodies, Glacier Maulers were several times larger than those Phei had fought months ago, and some of the Glacial Skyrays crossing their path possessed armor so thick that his earlier weapons would probably have bounced off with a painfully embarrassing sound.

None of it slowed them much anymore.

Phei and the Dragon had fought together for so long that their attacks seemed to understand one another before either of them deliberately coordinated. The Dragon froze formations and Phei’s Void-Blood spears appeared among the trapped enemies before the ice finished spreading; Phei tore open passages through swarms and the Dragon followed with claws, wings and a tail capable of turning frozen bodies into glittering debris.

When enemies tried surrounding them, Phei drowned their senses beneath a hollow of Void and simply let the Dragon maul creatures that could no longer understand where death was coming from.

The truly ridiculous part was that Phei barely needed to step onto the battlefield anymore.

Phei Ryujin Tiamat was currently riding on the back of a Dragon!

A real, enormous, white Dragon.

’How fucking cooooool is that?’

Gods, it was fucking incredible.

The Dragon had enlarged herself until her body approached her true size, and the difference was obscene. Her back stretched wide enough that Phei could probably have invited several people along without anyone feeling particularly crowded, while rows of crystalline scales overlapped beneath him in immense blue-white plates fading toward translucent blue around the edges.

Primordial frost gathered along those edges in delicate patterns before breaking apart whenever she accelerated.

Her long neck rose majestically ahead of him, elegant despite the terrifying strength packed beneath every movement, while two sweeping horns curved backward from her crowned skull and smaller crystalline ridges continued all the way along her spine.

Her wings folded against her sides, they already resembled vast white cliffs laid along her body.

Once they opened, the sky seemed to become considerably smaller.

Blue-white veins of frozen brilliance travelled through the immense membranes stretched between the wing bones, frost pouring from their edges in long streams as the air compressed beneath them. When those wings finally came down, the atmosphere exploded beneath their strength and hurled the Dragon forward fast enough to split the surrounding storm apart.

Snow scattered for kilometers below, clouds broke around her shoulders, and a deep concussion followed through the frozen heavens while distant mountains vanished behind them with absurd speed.

Phei’s grin had been growing for the last several minutes.

Flying?

’Fuck flying.’

Flying was something people did because they needed to get somewhere.

’This is riding a fucking Dragon.’

Maddie would never believe him!

None of his women would, actually. He could already imagine returning home and casually explaining over dinner that he had spent a year inside some ancient frozen death region, learned several increasingly questionable ways to slaughter Half-Divine monsters and eventually rode a gigantic blue-white Dragon toward the abyss of a Lesser God.

Maddie would probably stare at him for several seconds before accusing him of deliberately leaving out the most important details.

Naturally, Phei immediately decided that riding a Dragon required the correct posture.

Standing normally seemed painfully inadequate for such a majestic and sacred honor!

So Phei clasped both hands behind his back and raised his chin while his long white hair streamed behind him. For perhaps twenty seconds, he looked every bit the distant Ice Prince travelling toward the lair of some ancient monster with the composure of a man who had already decided how the battle would end.

Then he decided the pose was too serious.

One hand stayed behind his back while the other rested loosely beside him, his gaze becoming faintly bored as though a God waiting ahead had personally inconvenienced his afternoon. That felt better until Phei wondered whether crossed arms might look cooler, tried that for several moments and noticed one of the Dragon’s enormous eyes turning slightly backward toward him.

He pretended not to notice.

A minute later both hands disappeared into his pockets.

"Yeah," Phei murmured to himself while examining absolutely nothing except the quality of his own imagined image. "This one’s definitely better."

A low rumble travelled through the immense body beneath him.

Phei’s eyes narrowed. "Was that a laugh?"

The rumble came again, deeper this time, and his expression immediately became offended. "You are laughing. I’m trying to establish MAJESTIC image here."

The Dragon continued flying as though completely innocent, although another vibration passed through her chest.

Phei pointed accusingly toward the back of her head and told her that if she had human eyes right now, she would absolutely be rolling them. The slight tilt of her head answered with enough clarity that he muttered; "Disrespectful," before trying one final pose by sitting sideways with one knee raised and an elbow resting upon it.

The wind ruined that almost instantly.

Rather than an ancient prince travelling upon a mythical Dragon, Phei looked suspiciously like someone waiting for public transportation on the back of a divine reptile.

He gave up.

Eventually he sat cross-legged between two great ridges of crystalline scales and allowed his breathing to settle while the Dragon carried them onward.

Her flight became smoother as they travelled deeper, but the surrounding world gradually changed. The pale brilliance filling the upper reaches of the Primordial Frozen Zone dimmed until distant glaciers became blue-black shapes beneath frozen cloud, while the storms thickened and began carrying particles sharp enough to scrape along the Dragon’s scales like countless blades of glass.

The cold deepened too.

Phei noticed because very few places in this region could still make him notice cold at all.

They were approaching the abyss.

The Dragon felt it as well.

The playful ease that had followed his ridiculous attempts at posing gradually disappeared, her muscles tightened beneath him while each wingbeat became more measured. Her enormous gaze remained fixed upon the darkness ahead, and through the faint connection inside his soul Phei could feel something old stirring beneath her calm.

Phei had come this way once before.

Alone.

Back then there had been no intention of confronting the Zone Lord or it’s thralls.

True Void Steps had carried him quietly from hollow to hollow while True Void Sense searched farther into the region, following something he could feel but could not understand. The sensation had not resembled Eira’s Familiar bond, his Living Soul Marks or anything else he possessed. It had simply been a distant tug somewhere inside his soul, so faint that Phei initially suspected the Primordial Frozen Zone itself was doing something strange to him.

Naturally, he followed it.

Leaving suspicious supernatural invitations unanswered had never been among Phei’s stronger qualities.

He slipped beyond the last large concentrations of thralls and eventually reached the abyss, where curiosity, questionable judgment and one True Void Step farther than he probably should have taken sent him descending into the darkness.

Looking back, the memory still amused him.

A bottomless abyss ruled by some unknown monster had sounded considerably more manageable before gravity became personally involved.

The pull inside his soul strengthened as he descended.

That was where he found her.