Chapter 225: Waiting for Death
"So you're saying there are many creatures like that?" Drogon asked. "All of them as powerful as the naga?"
Adins shook his head.
"The six-armed naga is already among the strongest. Legends even speak of eight-armed naga, creatures even larger and more terrifying."
"Besides the naga, I've also encountered sea dragons, ice serpents, monstrous fish, and mutated creatures similar to myself."
"They all possess the ability to breathe freezing frost."
As Drogon listened, a strange sense of familiarity crept over him.
The mention of sea dragons immediately reminded him of Viserion, who had once become an undead ice dragon.
If these creatures were similar to what Viserion had become...
Then wasn't it possible they had all been transformed through methods similar to those used by the Night King?
The more he thought about it, the graver the situation seemed.
"They don't leave the Frozen Sea, do they?" Drogon asked hurriedly.
"I've observed them carefully."
"They rarely venture far beyond its waters."
"It's almost as if ordinary seawater is unbearable to them."
"But while they remain within the Frozen Sea..."
"The Frozen Sea itself continues expanding."
"The icy mist spreads a little farther every day."
"At this rate, it won't be many years before it engulfs the Thousand Islands, turning them into part of the Frozen Sea."
Drogon had only just begun to relax after hearing they rarely left its waters.
Adins's next sentence immediately shattered that relief.
A disturbing thought surfaced in his mind.
Could the Frozen Sea itself be killing marine life...
Only to transform their corpses into these frost creatures?
If so...
Then the birth of the Night King...
"What about the land nearby?" Drogon asked gravely.
"The Frozen Sea wouldn't spread onto the continent... would it?"
Adins answered with a single sentence.
"The land bordering the Frozen Sea... is the Shadow Lands."
"What?!"
Drogon's pupils contracted.
The Shadow Lands belonged to the great unknown.
Legends claimed demons wandered there.
Even powerful sorcerers and practitioners of the mystic arts avoided entering that cursed place.
If the Frozen Sea bordered the Shadow Lands...
And the Frozen Sea continued expanding...
Then the Shadow Lands themselves would also continue growing.
Little by little...
They were consuming the known world.
The realization sent a chill through Drogon despite his body of living fire.
No wonder the Night King created by the Children of the Forest with a dragonglass dagger had ultimately spiraled out of control.
His origin couldn't possibly be as simple as the legends claimed.
There had to be some deeper connection between him and the Frozen Sea.
The similarities were simply too numerous.
Drogon had only intended to ask Adins about the sinister force haunting Daenerys.
Instead...
He had stumbled upon a threat of terrifying proportions.
Compared to the vast size of the known world, the expansion of the Frozen Sea and the Shadow Lands was painfully slow.
But that didn't make it any less dangerous.
Turning back to Adins, Drogon asked,
"R'hllor and the other gods must know about the Frozen Sea and the Shadow Lands."
"Have none of you ever found a way to deal with them?"
Adins sighed.
"It was precisely because we discovered those abnormalities that I ventured into the Frozen Sea."
"R'hllor likewise sent followers into the Shadow Lands."
"But almost everyone we sent disappeared."
"Only one person ever returned..."
"And by then..."
"He had completely lost his mind."
"We couldn't learn anything from him."
Drogon's gaze turned mocking.
"So after that..."
"You simply ignored both places and devoted yourselves to fighting the dragonlord families instead?"
Adins looked rather embarrassed.
"Our intention was to accumulate enough strength first..."
"Then deal with the expansion of the Frozen Sea and the Shadow Lands."
Drogon found the explanation utterly unconvincing.
He didn't even know whether their investigations had taken place before or after the fall of the Valyrian Freehold.
Judging by their current strength, Drogon found the gods' talk of "accumulating power" nothing more than self-deception.
A more accurate description would be...
Waiting to die.
That was his final assessment of R'hllor and the other gods.
Completely unreliable.
Leaving Blackwater Bay, Drogon began pondering how to deal with the malicious presence haunting Daenerys.
The sinister force couldn't be seen or touched.
Only his divine domain could detect it.
It couldn't be destroyed—
Only driven away.
Fortunately, it only appeared at night while Daenerys slept.
Otherwise, maintaining his divine domain around the clock would eventually drain even his mental strength dry.
That morning, after Daenerys woke up, he had attempted to trace the source of the evil presence.
Unfortunately, it retreated with astonishing speed.
Even the expansion of his divine domain couldn't keep up with its withdrawal.
He would have to continue experimenting the following night.
With that decided, Drogon returned to Daenerys's bedchamber and finally caught up on the sleep he had sacrificed.
By noon, Daenerys had finished half a day's work without seeing him.
Curious, she asked Jhiqui where he was.
Only then did she learn that Drogon was fast asleep in the bedroom.
Smiling, she decided not to disturb him.
That evening, feeling much more refreshed, Daenerys read for a while before sleepiness overtook her.
Meanwhile, Drogon forced himself to stay fully alert.
Before she even fell asleep, he expanded his divine domain around her, carefully waiting for the strange presence to appear.
Two hours later...
At the very edge of his divine domain, he finally sensed it.
A wisp of black smoke-like malice.
Blocked by the invisible barrier, it wandered restlessly outside, unable to enter.
It circled the divine domain once, searching for an opening.
Finding none, it drifted back to where it had first appeared, hovering quietly against the boundary—
As though patiently waiting for the barrier to disappear.
When Drogon deliberately shrank the domain, it immediately advanced another step.
When he expanded it, the dark wisp retreated by exactly the same distance.
It behaved almost entirely on instinct.
After confirming once again that the evil presence truly couldn't penetrate his divine domain, Drogon finally relaxed.
Looking at the peacefully sleeping Daenerys, he focused his consciousness inward.
Floating upon the surface of his white divine core was the fiery crimson divine rune.
Originally, he had intended to use it to forge a divine artifact for Daenerys once the divine power gained from devouring the Night King's godhood had fully stabilized.
Now...
He changed his mind.
Perhaps implanting the divine rune directly into her mind could prevent the malicious force from invading her dreams.
As for the divine artifact...
He would simply wait until another rune fully emerged.
Fortunately, a new rune had already begun forming within his divine core.
It would surface completely before long.
Long ago, Drogon had thoroughly questioned Adins about how to implant divine runes into ordinary mortals.
The process carried no danger.
Nor would it cause any pain.
Using the halo surrounding his divine core, he created a tiny void passage extending toward Daenerys's head.
His divine power gently carried the dragon-shaped rune through the passage.
Just before it reached her...
He gave it the slightest push.
The rune slipped effortlessly into her mind.
As it entered, Daenerys merely frowned faintly in her sleep before relaxing once more.
After confirming the rune had settled within her, Drogon slowly withdrew his divine domain from around her.
He wanted to see whether the rune alone could stop the malicious presence.
As the barrier receded...
The black wisp immediately drifted closer.
The moment it touched Daenerys...
It paused only briefly—
Then slipped directly into her mind.
Drogon instantly expanded his divine domain again, forcibly squeezing the invading presence back out.
It hadn't worked.
The experiment had failed.
Though disappointed, he wasn't particularly surprised.
The sinister force was simply too strange.
A single divine rune clearly wasn't enough to keep it out.
For now...
The only solution remained the same old, brute-force method.
Since protecting Daenerys required maintaining his divine domain all night, Drogon began testing whether he could keep it active while asleep.
If he could make sustaining the domain an unconscious instinct...
He might finally be able to sleep properly himself.
More than an hour later, drowsiness finally caught up with him.
He cautiously experimented with maintaining the divine barrier while hovering between wakefulness and sleep.
At first, every time he drifted off, the divine domain rapidly collapsed inward.
The moment he woke, he immediately expanded it again before slipping back into a light doze.
He repeated the process over and over.
Gradually...
He began to get the hang of it.
Even while half-asleep, he could now barely maintain the barrier, causing it to contract only very slowly.
That alone was enough.
At least now, he could steal short naps throughout the night instead of forcing himself to stay awake until dawn with sheer willpower alone.
(End of Chapter)
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