Chapter 1310: Back Into the Abyss

Phei had seen it before, but memory had done a terrible job preserving the scale.

From above, the chasm looked less like a crack in the Primordial Frozen Zone and more like someone had taken a blade large enough to wound a world and dragged it through the frozen earth. Its opposite edge was barely visible through the darkness, an uneven blue-black line buried beneath storms and rising mist, while the length of the opening vanished beyond sight in both directions. Great shelves of ancient ice hung over its lips, some stretching kilometers outward before breaking away into the emptiness below, and every few breaths another portion of the cliff groaned beneath its own weight and fell.

Phei watched one such mass disappear but no impact followed; the abyss simply swallowed it.

Cold poured upward from the depths in vast currents, carrying thin frozen clouds with it before the winds above tore them apart. Even this high in the air, Phei could feel a pressure beneath that cold that did not belong to the Primordial Frozen Zone itself. Something lived down there.

Several somethings, in fact, and True Void Sense had known that long before his eyes ever reached the chasm.

The Dragon Lady gradually reduced her speed until the violent rush of frozen wind around them softened, her enormous crystalline wings spread wide as she brought them into a slow hover above the very center of the abyss.

Neither of them descended and Phei remained standing upon the vast blue-white expanse of her back, while the wind tugged relentlessly at his clothes and threw his long hair.

Beneath them waited that familiar darkness, so deep that even the blue-white light covering the upper reaches of the Primordial Frozen Zone seemed reluctant to enter. The abyss stretched open beneath the Dragon like the mouth of something ancient enough to have forgotten hunger, and as Phei stared into it, he felt something dangerously close to nostalgia.

Which was fucking ridiculous when his first visit here had nearly gotten him killed.

Back then, the lips of the abyss had been crawling with monsters and countless other thralls had guarded it; some mindless, others disturbingly intelligent, all connected in one way or another to the creature ruling beneath them.

Phei had been far weaker then.

He had barely understood several of the abilities that had begun appearing around that period, and even True Void Steps had felt more like a terrifying advantage he was still learning to trust than something he could throw around casually. He had hidden his presence as deeply as possible and slipped between monsters through whatever tiny openings their senses gave him, constantly moving before anything could properly understand what had disturbed the surrounding space.

All because something had been pulling at his soul.

He had not known what waited beneath the ice.

So he had done what Phei apparently did whenever common sense and curiosity began fighting inside him.

He followed it, he found the thing all those creatures had spent centuries guarding and feeding upon, then stole her right out from beneath them before most of the abyss understood what had happened.

Phei’s lips slowly curved as those memories returned.

"Gods, I really didn’t know shit."

The Dragon Lady’s immense head shifted slightly at the sound of his voice. One pale eye angled backward toward him for a moment before returning to the darkness beneath them.

Phei looked around the enormous rim of the abyss again, and the difference between then and now became almost insulting.

There were hardly any thralls left.

A handful remained scattered over distant shelves of ice, each powerful enough that the younger Phei would have spent time carefully studying before deciding whether fighting was worth the risk. Today several became frozen corpses after being caught by the edge of the Dragon Lady’s breath and locked inside thick pale ice where they stood. More had disappeared beneath a Void-Blood spear before they fully reacted to their arrival.

A year ago, this place had looked impossible.

Now it looked empty after killing even the remaining few.

That realization amused Phei more than it probably should have.

He found himself wondering what would have happened if the version of him standing here today had been the one who first arrived at the abyss. Would he still have hidden himself, creeping between guards like some overly handsome thief while following the strange pull inside his soul toward an unknown prisoner beneath the ice?

’Probably not.’

Phei knew himself well enough to answer that honestly.

He would have arrived at the entrance, discovered that several thousand beasts were standing between him and wherever his soul wanted him to go, and eventually decided that murdering everything along the route was faster.

He would have descended openly, found the Dragon Lady chained beneath the abyss, seen what they were doing to her and become angry enough to slaughter whatever survived the first attack on his way back out.

The end result for most of the thralls would have been identical.

The important difference was that Phei himself probably would not have survived such confidence.

That thought slowly erased part of his smile.

There were still three presences below.

They had been there during his first descent too, although he had barely been capable of sensing them then. They existed so far beneath the other thralls and carried such ridiculous concentrations of life and power that even True Void Sense had struggled to grasp anything beyond the outermost pressure surrounding them.

One presence belonged to the Zone Lord.

The other two were weaker.

’Only comparatively.’

Either of those two still possessed the horrifying depth of a World Transcendent, while the being beneath them stood higher still in a true Divine Realm existence.

If those three had emerged together during Phei’s first escape with the Dragon Lady, there would have been no dramatic miracle waiting for him.

He would have died.

’It really is that simple.’

The younger Phei would simply have become an extremely handsome smear somewhere beneath several kilometers of primordial ice. Even now, after everything he had gained, the thought of fighting all three together was enough to stop excitement from turning into stupidity.

Phei was vastly stronger than he had been when he first entered this abyss.

The Dragon Lady had recovered enormously as well.

Neither of those facts meant they had suddenly become impossible to kill.

That distinction mattered, especially here.

Phei’s gaze lowered toward the Dragon beneath him, he knew the difference between what this place meant to him and what it meant to her.

For Phei, the abyss had become something strange in memory. It was the place where he had discovered a really young Dragon trapped beneath ice and somehow escaped with her; creating a bond between them, and where beings that once seemed incomprehensibly powerful now felt far less untouchable after a year of training.

For her, this was not some dangerous landmark attached to an exciting memory.

This had been her prison.

This was where centuries had been taken from her.

Her strength, her freedom; her Dragon Essence, Core even the Dragon Heart Scale were steadily consumed and she would’ve soon died while she remained imprisoned beneath the ice, unable to stop creatures from drawing from everything of what made her a Dragon.

Phei still did not know the entire story.

He had never forced her to give it.

He understood only the pieces she had allowed him to see, but those pieces were more than enough to explain why her entire body changed whenever they approached the abyss. The tension along her spine, the way her claws curled slightly beneath her whenever the darkness appeared, the controlled fury buried beneath emotions she rarely expressed openly, all of it passed through their bond strongly enough that Phei never needed words.

Most of all, he knew one thing with absolute certainty.

She wanted the Zone Lord dead.

That desire had never weakened.

Even shortly after Phei freed her, when the Dragon Lady had been so damaged that remaining upright for long periods exhausted her, that hatred had survived inside her. As her strength returned, it sharpened instead of fading. When Phei eventually suggested leaving the Primordial Frozen Zone once she recovered enough to travel safely, her answer had been immediate.

She would not leave while the Zone Lord lived.

Phei had considered the decision wonderfully suicidal.

The Dragon Lady had clearly understood the danger too, but understanding it had not changed her answer.

Centuries of being drained had destroyed too much of what she once possessed. The Zone Lord had fed on her Dragon Essence, stolen power from her Core and reached even deeper toward the Dragon Heart Scale tied to her soul and continued existence. Although she had recovered enough over the past year to become healthy again beside Phei, charging directly into the abyss alone against a true Divine being would still have been suicide decorated with excellent determination.

The problem was that she did not seem especially concerned about the distinction.

Phei understood that feeling better than most.

Some enemies became personal enough that survival instinct stopped sounding persuasive.

So after enough arguments, enough silent refusal and enough understanding passing through their bond, Phei eventually arrived at the wonderfully responsible conclusion of: "Fine. I’ll tag along."

Apparently one suicidal Dragon required another Dragon with even worse judgment to supervise her.