Chapter 1311: Favorable Odds

Yet there was something Phei had been noticing throughout the year, something the Dragon Lady either had not considered or simply did not care about nearly as much as killing the beasts who had been feeding upon her throughout her imprisonment.

Something was wrong with the Zone Lord.

Very fucking wrong.

Phei narrowed his eyes upon the abyss.

"Why didn’t you ever come out?"

The Dragon Lady glanced back toward him again, but Phei was not speaking to her.

His attention remained fixed on the three presences beneath them.

For nearly an entire year, Phei and the Dragon Lady had butchered the Zone Lord’s thralls.

They had not killed dozens or hundreds:

—they had killed thousands upon thousands.

Entire hunting packs disappeared, nests that had existed across the Frozen Zone for generations were emptied, strong sentient thralls were destroyed, armies once spread throughout the region had been reduced piece by piece until enormous stretches of frozen land that previously crawled with enslaved beasts had become silent plains filled with corpses, shattered ice and the scars of battles large enough to reshape portions of the terrain.

The Zone Lordhad answered by sending more.

Every time Phei and the Dragon Lady destroyed one wave, another eventually came.

Stronger thralls appeared, creatures Phei had never seen during his first months inside the Primordial Frozen Zone began emerging from remote territories and converging upon them.

Yet the three beings at the bottom of the abyss had never personally come out.

Not once.

That made no fucking sense.

Phei and the Dragon Lady had not hidden themselves.

If anything, they had spent months announcing their location by turning armies into weather.

Entire horizons had glowed from Dragon breath, mountains had collapsed under battles and the Void tore through battlefields, blood flooded valleys and pieces of dead monsters froze into the landscape while the Dragon Lady’s roars travelled for ridiculous distances.

The Zone Lord knew where its prisoner had gone.

It knew who had stolen her.

And if it had emerged with both World Transcendents besides it, there had been multiple points during the previous year when all three could have overwhelmed them while Phei fought hundreds.

Especially early on when the Dragon Lady had still been catastrophically weakened.

Phei had been nowhere near his current strength; a single attack from the Zone Lord and its two strongest servants during those first months might have ended everything before either Dragon grew dangerous enough to become a serious problem.

Yet the three strongest existences remained below.

Always.

"They could’ve taken you back months ago," Phei murmured while the Dragon Lady lowered her head slightly beneath him. "And killed me while they were at it."

His fingers moved slowly along his chin as he stared downward.

There was only one explanation he kept returning to.

They could not leave.

Or perhaps they technically could, but whatever existed beneath the abyss mattered enough that abandoning it was worse than losing the Dragon they had spent centuries feeding upon, worse than sacrificing thousands of thralls and apparently worse than leaving alive the idiot responsible for stealing their most valuable prisoner.

That possibility bothered Phei considerably more than a simple territorial limitation would have.

From the looks of it; the Zone Lord had been preparing for something.

Once he started thinking about it properly, the evidence seemed embarrassingly obvious.

Why enslave this many creatures?

Why gather an army numbering in the thousands inside a frozen wasteland where there were no kingdoms to conquer, no civilizations to invade and no obvious enemy waiting beyond some border?

Why preserve a captured Dragon for centuries instead of simply killing her and consuming everything at once?

The Zone Lord had not merely tortured her.

It had cultivated a resource.

It siphoned her Dragon Essence slowly enough that she survived. It fed upon her Life Force without completely extinguishing it and grew its army from her Dragon Core and even reached into the far more dangerous foundation of her Dragon Heart Scale, yet always stopped short of destroying the source entirely.

The creature had kept her alive so she could continue producing more.

Phei’s expression hardened.

That was farming.

’A revolting, monstrous version of it, but farming nonetheless.’

The bastard had been building strength.

And it had not been doing so for a decade or two.

This had been happening for centuries.

A God being had spent centuries gathering power while keeping two World Transcendent servants beneath it. Thousands upon thousands of enslaved monsters had been accumulated into an army, and all of them had benefited in one way or another from the strength stolen from a Dragon imprisoned beneath the ice.

Yet despite all of that, even the World Transcendents still remained below.

Guarding something and refusing to leave even after its most valuable living resource escaped.

The thought slowly became much less amusing.

What the hell required that much preparation?

What existed in this Primordial Zone that made a God being believe centuries of stolen Dragon Essence, two World Transcendent servants and building army of enslaved monsters? More importantly, what was it that the Zone Lord remained down there even while everything it had built above was being systematically destroyed?

Phei felt that familiar itch of curiosity crawl through him.

The unhealthy one.

The one responsible for a truly impressive percentage of the worst decisions he had ever made.

His mouth began curving again despite himself; every refusal from the Zone Lord to emerge and every strange reaction from the deeper abyss only added another one.

Now he was finally going down there.

Maybe the answers would be terrible.

They probably would.

There was a decent chance at least one of those answers would attempt to eat him.

That had become disappointingly common in Phei’s life.

Still, answers were answers.

He lowered his gaze toward the Dragon Lady beneath him. Her vast crystalline wings remained spread across the darkness, holding them motionless above the abyss while streams of frost poured from their edges and disappeared into the depths below. Phei felt the old fear still buried inside her, something carved too deeply by centuries of imprisonment to vanish simply because she had become stronger.

Beneath that fear, however, was something far greater.

’Resolve.’

The same resolve that had kept her inside the Primordial Frozen Zone for an entire year when leaving would have been easier, through every battle. Phei smiled and rested one hand against the crystalline ridge before him, his palm pressing gently against the cool scales of the Dragon who had become his little sister.

"Ready?"

The Dragon Lady answered with a roar.

It exploded across the abyss with enough force to tear apart layers of frozen mist and send loose ice tumbling from distant cliffs. The sound plunged downward in enormous waves, striking one wall after another before returning as overlapping echoes until the entire abyss seemed to roar with her.

There was hatred in it, challenge, memory and the promise that the prisoner who had once lain helpless beneath this place had returned willingly.

Phei’s grin sharpened as he felt the sound descend toward the beings below.

"Good."

He pointed downward, and the Dragon Lady folded her enormous wings against her sides.

For the smallest moment, her colossal body seemed suspended over the black chasm without anything holding it there.

Then she dropped.

The fall became violent almost instantly.

Wind screamed around Phei as the Dragon Lady plunged headfirst into the abyss, her crystalline wings drawn close while gravity and her own strength dragged them faster and faster through the darkness. Phei remained standing upon her back without shifting, long hair snapping behind him while frozen cliffs raced past on either side.

The blue-white glow of the upper Primordial Frozen Zone began disappearing above them.

Jagged shelves of ancient ice flashed past.

Frozen structures that would have seemed enormous from the ground became brief shapes in the darkness as their speed continued climbing, while the Dragon Lady adjusted her body with subtle movements that sent them tearing through twisting sections of the abyss without losing momentum.

Phei stopped suppressing himself.

Void gathered around him first, silent and hungry, it curled along his body and the Dragon’s back without producing so much as a spark of light. Primordial Blood awakened beneath his skin immediately afterward, a deep crimson force beginning to move through him while his flesh, bones and Essence prepared for battle.

Beneath him, the Dragon Lady answered.

Void-Ice came alive throughout her enormous body.

Blue-white radiance travelled beneath each crystalline scale until her entire form began glowing inside the abyss, turning the Dragon into a descending streak of pale frozen light while frost exploded in her wake.

Far below, something finally changed.

The three presences stirred.

This time Phei felt them clearly.

The first World Transcendent rose within his perception like an ancient mountain waking beneath the ice, followed by the second presence, different but no less immense. Both powers had once felt so distant from him that sensing them alone had been enough to remind Phei how insignificant he was within the deeper layers of cultivation.

Now he could feel their outlines.

Their weight.

The pressure gathering around them as they realized what was descending toward their home.

And beyond both of those World Transcendents rested something vastly deeper.

The Zone Lord.

Its presence filled the lowest reaches of the abyss with a depth that made the darkness itself feel heavier.

Phei’s eyes brightened as he looked downward, his excitement finally escaping through the smile spreading across his face.

A year ago, he had entered this abyss hiding every trace of himself and praying that nobody powerful enough noticed the thief slipping through their territory.

This time, Phei hoped every bastard down there was watching.