Chương 254: 48. Dragon Soul 1

Aeternitas spoke lightly from ahead, without turning around.

"Don't stare too long." I blinked.

"…Is there a problem with that?"

"Some of those aren't carvings." She kept walking.

"It's simply been so long since anyone came down here that they've started to look like stone."

"…" Wonderful. Thank you for informing me, in that perfectly placid tone, that the walls of this corridor may currently be paved with an unknown number of her distinguished ancestors, pressed flat and waiting. I snapped my gaze forward at once, my posture correcting itself in the same instant. Jokes aside, anyone who dared to gawk around like a tourist in a place like this was either a certified hero or a corpse-in-waiting, and I had no ambitions of qualifying for the latter category today.

The passage kept sloping downward. I couldn't have said how long we walked before the space ahead finally opened up. It wasn't a normal "room." It was a hollow buried in the deepest, most abyssal reach of the underground — a cyclopean cavern that looked as though some unfathomable force had reached into the mountain's core and simply scooped it clean. Looking up, there was no ceiling, only tier after tier of darkness climbing out of sight.

The surrounding rock walls were embedded with countless tiny points of light, like stars, but heavier than stars, older than stars. Right at the center sat a stone platform so plain it bordered on shabby — no throne, no ritual vessels, none of the extravagant "Age of Gods relic" set dressing I'd half-expected. And sitting beside that platform was an old man. My footsteps stopped dead. … Wait. An old man? Not a mountain-sized ancient dragon. Not a glowing ancestral phantom.

Not some ultimate, world-ending presence whose mere entrance would rearrange the laws of physics and leave me face-down on the floor begging for mercy. Just an old man. He wore a robe so grey it had apparently given up on having a color, his white hair and beard scattered loosely, entirely unbothered. In one hand he held a wooden staff that looked like it had been picked up off the side of a road.

He sat there with the idle posture of a man sunning himself on his own back porch — assuming this place had ever seen anything as frivolous as sunlight. The most absurd part was the teacup sitting neatly in front of him. My brain flatlined for two full seconds. Then the first thought that surfaced was: … Excuse me, does the deepest sanctum of the Ancestral Lands come standard with the interior design sensibilities of a retired grandfather's back porch? The old man acted like he'd known we were coming all along.

He didn't even look up, just slowly blew across the non-existent steam rising from his cup.

"Oh, you're here." His tone was as casual as the old man who runs the stall at the end of the alley. I stood there completely dumbfounded. My expression must have been doing something spectacularly stupid, because he finally lifted his eyes to me, one eyebrow arching.

"What's with that look, boy?"

"…Uh." I genuinely didn't know which part to be shocked by first. He gave a short, dismissive sound.

"Look at you, expecting some earth-shattering spectacle. What, did you think this old man had to transform into a ten-thousand-foot true form and make you roll across the floor three times before this place would deserve to be called a trial ground?" … There it is. That particular brand of commentary — I wasn't entirely sure it qualified as teasing, but its precision was lethal all the same. For some reason, it actually produced a faint, bizarre sense of relief in my chest.

At least this one didn't look like he'd flatten me with his opening line. Assuming I didn't manage to flatten myself first. Aeternitas stepped up to the platform and inclined her head slightly.

"Lord Pangu." He waved a hand as if shooing away the formality.

"Spare me. I've heard that title enough for three lifetimes." … Pangu. My heart gave a quiet, single lurch. That name was too heavy. Heavy enough that even spoken this casually, the countless star-like specks embedded across the cavern walls seemed to shiver, all at once. The old man — no, Pangu — finally let his gaze settle fully on me. For one instant, I was certain I'd been seen straight through. Not my clothes, not my flesh, not my expression. Something further in.

Every scrap of hesitation, unease, wounded pride, and desperate bluffing I hadn't even sorted through myself lay bare in those clouded, impossibly clear eyes, with nowhere left to hide. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. He studied me for a few seconds. Then he smiled.

"Mm. Passable."

"…That's it?"

"What else did you want?" he shot back.

"Did you expect this old man to drag out your ancestors and audit your bloodline eighteen generations back?" That won't be necessary, truly. Just remembering how Aeternitas had nearly settled my father's tab with my own throat twenty minutes ago was enough to tell me the Rosa family's current standing was sitting somewhere near rock bottom. Pangu seemed to read this straight off my face and scoffed.

"Relax. Your father's debts don't go on your tab." He paused, then added, with the unhurried timing of a man who had all of eternity to land a punchline: "At least, not yet." My mouth twitched. That sentence contained zero reassurance. Genuinely none.

"Come here, boy." He tapped the ground in front of the platform lightly with his staff. I glanced at Aeternitas on instinct. She didn't nod, didn't hurry me — just stood quietly to one side. But since she wasn't stopping me either, that probably meant walking over wouldn't kill me on the spot. Probably. Clinging to that spectacularly unreliable hope, I took a few steps forward. The moment I crossed within three paces of the platform, the dragon scale on the back of my left hand seared with heat.

"—Ngh!" Not the faint warmth from outside. Something beneath the scale had woken and was surging straight up through my veins. At the same instant, the countless points of light embedded in the cavern walls began to ignite, one after another. One. Ten. A hundred. A thousand. In the span of a breath, the darkness was silently set alight. I lifted my head, and my breath stopped completely. Those weren't points of light. They were eyes.

Pair after pair of colossal draconic pupils, opening slowly across walls too high for any human architecture to have any business reaching. Burning gold. Pale silver. Deep teal. Searing white. Dark violet — every color different, every shape different, even the specific quality of dread each gaze pressed into my ribs entirely different. But they all shared one thing. Age. Age so absolute it felt as though it had existed before history ever learned how to spell its own name. My throat dried out.

My knees dipped, almost on reflex. No one was forcing me down. It was simply that, standing beneath a gaze like that, something in you understood without being told: the only reason you were still upright wasn't strength. It was permission. Pangu struck his staff against the stone. Thud. The sound wasn't loud. It landed directly in the center of my chest.

"Look closely, boy." His voice had lost its lazy edge. Still old, but weighted now — weighted enough to press time itself back into the dirt.

"These are not complete souls. Nor are they hollow shells the dead leave behind."

"This is the blasphemous persistence of will — the resolve of Dragon Kings who have refused to go dark across a stretch of time long enough to be maddening. It is the heat that lingers in ash after the fire has finished burning. It is the stubbornness of a name that still remembers why it guards this land, long after the world has forgotten how to say that name aloud."

"You call it — the Dragon Soul." I couldn't move. From every direction at once, a low, vast, unfathomable resonance rose, like countless sleeping dragons rolling over at the same instant. There were no words in that sound, yet it pressed against my chest with the weight of things I had no vocabulary for. Fury. Grief. Pride. Solitude. Vigil. All of it crashed over me like a tide, hard enough that I nearly lost my footing. This was nothing like some glorious "receiving power" scene.

It was closer to an entire era standing in front of you and asking one direct question: Can you hold this up? I bit down and forced myself to stay standing. Pangu watched me, and for the first time something like real approval crossed his eyes.

"Not bad." He raised one hand. The light from the dragon eyes above began flowing inward — one stream, two, ten, a hundred — currents of different colors cascading down like rivers falling out of an eldritch sky that had never once known daylight. They twisted, braided, and compressed above the platform until they had condensed into a sphere of light no larger than a closed fist. The light held no fixed color. Gold, one heartbeat. Fire, the next. Then something deep enough to be mistaken for night itself.

I stared at it, the scale on my hand burning nearly to the point of pain, my pulse doing things a pulse shouldn't do. The sphere hung there in absolute silence, and yet I couldn't shake the abyssal certainty that if it slipped, even for a fraction of a second, it would erase me from the world without leaving anything behind to explain where I'd gone. Pangu simply reached up and plucked it from the air. As naturally as picking fruit off a low branch. Then he held it out to me.

"Take it." I froze.

"…J-just like that?" His eyebrow shot up.

"What else did you expect? I'm not going to chase you around the room with it. I'm an old man."

"No, I mean — shouldn't there be some kind of confirmation first? A check on whether I'm actually qualified?" He gave a short laugh.

"The fact that you walked in here and didn't get flattened by the stares of those old fossils is qualification enough." He glanced at my left hand.

"Besides. They've already had a good look at you." My heart lurched. He didn't elaborate, just pushed the sphere an inch closer.

"Cedric Rosa." The first time he'd spoken my full name.

"What you're taking today isn't a weapon. It isn't a gift."

"It's a trust." In that instant, every dragon eye in the cavern seemed to go still. I looked at the light and felt my throat tighten for reasons that had nothing to do with the pressure in the room. Honestly, I didn't feel ready. If anything, the longer this day went on, the more I doubted anyone could ever truly feel ready for something like this. But my hand didn't shake when I reached out. The sphere touched my palm without weight.

In the next instant it dissolved, sinking straight into the dragon scale on the back of my hand.

"—!" White roared across my vision. Roars. Low growls. Fields on fire. Winter nights that refused to end. Wind tearing across mountain peaks. Dragon shapes crossing over ranges of stone. Banners falling before empty thrones. Gold, slit-pupiled eyes that had refused to close even in the last breath before the long dark took everything — all of it crashed in at once. I nearly lost consciousness. My knee buckled; I went half down.

Right as I was certain my skull would come apart under the sheer volume of it, a staff cracked lightly against my shoulder. Tap.

"Don't be greedy." Pangu's voice, very close, pulled me back from the edge.

"This is all you can carry right now." I dragged in several ragged breaths before my vision reassembled itself. The cavern was still the cavern. The dragon eyes still hung above in the dark. But something had changed. The scale on my left hand was clearer than before, its fine lines threaded now with a faint, steady glow — not dazzling, more like the last stubborn ember buried deep inside a bed of ash. I stared at my own hand.

Pangu leaned back against the platform with the air of a man who'd just finished a moderately convenient errand, his tone sliding right back into its half-lazy drawl.

"All right. You've got it." …Wait. That's it? I looked up at him before I could stop myself. He read the look immediately and scoffed.

"What, boy — were you expecting a nice speech about 'congratulations on becoming the chosen savior'?"

"…Not really."

"Good." He waved a hand, sounding thoroughly bored.

"That's the cheapest kind of talk there is." I had nothing to say to that. Then, whether it was imagination or not, I felt something close to a laugh trying to surface. Not from relief. Not from joy. But because, for the first time, a very specific weight settled into place — the understanding that I had, at some point along the way, walked past the place where turning back was still an option. Pangu watched me a moment longer, then added, almost as an afterthought:"One more thing. Boy from the Rosa line."

"…Yes?"

"Don't die too fast." He lifted his teacup again, his tone as flat as a remark about the weather.

"It'll be a real hassle explaining you to the girl who shoved you in here." I went still. Then something in my chest was touched, very lightly, by something I couldn't quite name. I looked down at my still-warm hand and let out a slow breath.

"…I'll do my best." Pangu didn't answer, just waved me off, as if I'd exhausted his patience quota for the day. Above, the great dragon eyes went on watching in silence. No longer like judgment. More like memory.