The rock was weeping.
Not tears, but a slow, cold sweat of condensation that beaded on stone untouched by any sun. Damien's fingers, pale as cave-fungus, found purchase in these damp hollows. His feet, bare and already calloused from the sterile floors of the Moros facility, pressed against jagged lips of granite. With each movement, a phantom pain echoed from the runic inscriptions still faintly glowing beneath his skin—the Moros Clan's failed attempt at a leash.
He climbed.
It was not a conscious thought, but a primal imperative. Up. Away from the bone-sea. Toward the faint, teasing whisper of moving air that spoke of a world beyond this mountain's gut.
His world was a map of sensation. The Frost-Touched Perception granted by his stolen Constitution painted his surroundings in gradients of thermal memory. The rock wall before him was a tapestry of blues and deep purples—ancient cold. Where his hands gripped, a splash of vivid, swirling white spread like ink in water, the heat of his living touch stark against the stone's eternal chill. High above, the air current was a shimmering ribbon of slightly warmer grey, a lifeline in the sensory void.
He heard the scrabble of tiny, blind arthropods in crevices, the endless plink… plink… of water from unseen stalactites. And beneath it all, the silence. The deep, resonant silence of a place that had forgotten time.
[Conqueror's Paradigm Online.]
[Host: Damien Karyon. Status: Critically Depleted.]
[Physique: Primal Frost Constitution (Base Layer Unlocked - 0.1%). Integration: 3%.]
[Cultivation Base: 1st Order, 1st Rank (Mortal Shell - Fractured).]
[Vital Signs: Elevated. Caloric Reserves: Catastrophically Low. Mana Reserves: 5/100 (Frost-Locked).]
[Primary Directive: Ascend. Probability of Success (Current Trajectory): 11.7%.]
The System's voice was not a sound. It was data, etched directly onto the darkness behind his eyes. Cold, clean, and utterly without mercy. It confirmed what his body screamed: he was dying. The climb was an impossible marathon for a body starved and tortured for months.
His arms burned. His breath came in ragged, misty plumes that froze in his white hair. A foot slipped on a slick patch of lichen. For a heart-stopping second, he dangled by one hand, his small body swinging out into the empty blackness of the cavern shaft. The fall would not kill him instantly. It would break him, leave him crippled and alone in the dark, a slow feast for whatever smaller scavengers still lived in this crypt.
A snarl, silent and ferocious, tore from his throat. The frost in his core, that sleeping, chained beast, twitched.
Without thought, he pushed.
Not with muscle, but with will. He demanded the cold within him become a tool.
A spike of jagged ice, sharp and clear, erupted from the rock wall beside his dangling hand. He grabbed it, hauling himself back to the wall. The ice held his weight for a crucial second before shattering, but it was enough. He clung, panting, sweat freezing on his brow.
[Mana Expenditure: 3 Units. Mana Reserves: 2/100.]
[Skill Manifested: 'Cryogenesis' - Primitive Shaping (Provisional).]
[Analysis: Host utilized innate Constitution as a crude mana-surrogate. Efficiency: 2%. Risk of Spiritual Backlash: High.]
He had used his life force, the very energy that kept his heart beating, to forge a handhold. It was the most desperate of trades. But it was a trade he could make.
He resumed the climb, slower now, each movement a calculated agony. The System's probability ticked down to 10.1%.
---
An hour—or three—later, the character of the shaft changed. The rough-hewn rock gave way to worked stone. Massive, perfectly fitted blocks formed a cylindrical chimney, ascending into gloom. Carvings emerged under his seeking fingers: scenes of vast battles, of robed figures summoning storms, of great beasts being slain. The art was sublime, but the stone was cold in a way that went beyond temperature. It drank the faint warmth of his touch greedily, leaving his fingers numb.
He was climbing through a monument. A tomb-shaft.
His frost-perception showed him ghostly imprints on the stones—not heat, but the fading echoes of immense mana expenditures. Spells that had cracked mountains. Curses that had boiled seas. This was not just a crypt for bodies; it was a ossuary for dead power.
A new sound reached him, filtering down from far above. Not wind. A low, rhythmic scraping. Like stone on stone. And with it, a smell cut through the crypt's dust: wet fur, musk, and a sharp, coppery pungency.
He froze, clinging to a carving of a fallen giant. His senses stretched upward.
The scraping grew louder. Closer. He felt a displacement of air, a slow, heavy exhalation that stank of carrion.
Something lived up here. Something big.
[Sensory Data Input: Large Bio-thermic Signature detected. Approximate Proximity: 30 meters above.]
[Cross-referencing with Geologic Mana-Residue Archives…]
[Probable Identity: 'Crypt-Gorgon' - Subterranean predator. Feeds on residual mana and mineralized bone. Classification: Low-tier Spiritual Beast. Estimated Threat Level: 4th Order, 1st Rank.]
A 4th Order beast. To a healthy, armed 1st Order cultivator, it would be an instant, gruesome death. To Damien, it was an extinction-level event.
The scraping halted directly overhead. He heard a deep, wet sniffing. It had caught his scent. The living warmth. The tiny flicker of mana in his veins.
A guttural, grinding growl vibrated down the shaft, shaking loose dust and pebbles.
Flight was impossible. He couldn't descend faster than it could drop. Fighting was a sick joke.
His mind, honed in the Moros labs where every second was a puzzle of pain and survival, raced. The beast was above the exit. It blocked his only path. The walls were sheer. His mana was nearly gone.
Think. See what is not seen.
His perception swept the carved walls around him. The ghostly mana-echoes. The scenes of ancient violence. One panel, just to his left, depicted a robed mage with hands raised, unleashing a torrent of light upon a horde of shadowy forms. The residual mana here was different—a sharp, latent potential, like a coiled spring.
The Crypt-Gorgon's head, a nightmare of blind, puckered stone-like flesh and a lamprey-like mouth lined with grinding teeth, began to descend into the shaft, blotting out the faint thermal draft from above.
Damien did the only thing he could. He pressed his small, freezing hand directly onto the carved image of the mage's outstretched palm.
He poured the last of his conscious will, not into his own frost, but into a plea. A trigger. He was a Karyon. His blood, however diluted, remembered command. He demanded the echo to awaken.
For a second, nothing.
Then, the ancient stone sang.
A vibration, deep and resonant, hummed through the block. The carved lines of the spell flared with a blinding, golden-white light—a light Damien could not see, but could feel as a wave of searing, holy heat against his skin. It was the polar opposite of his frost. It was Purifying Dawn Mana, a bane to all subterranean corruption.
The Crypt-Gorgon shrieked—a sound of absolute, primordial agony. The light washed over it. Where it touched the stony flesh, cracks appeared, glowing from within. The beast recoiled, thrashing, its massive body slamming against the shaft walls in its blind, painful retreat.
The light faded as quickly as it came, the ancient spell exhausting its last stored power. But the path was clear. The beast was gone, its pained scrabbling fading into the depths above.
Damien clung to the wall, trembling. The interaction had cost him. Using his will as a catalyst had scraped his spirit raw. His mana was at 1/100, a guttering candle-flame.
[Mana Reserves: 1/100. Spiritual Integrity: Strained.]
[External Mana-Trigger Utilized. Host acted as Conduit/ Catalyst. Risk: Catastrophic. Reward: Survival.]
[Primary Directive Viability Updated: 24.3%.]
He climbed. The final hundred meters were a grey fog of pain. His muscles trembled uncontrollably. His mind threatened to unravel. But the air grew steadily fresher, colder in a clean, sharp way. The scent of pine and frost and open space grew overpowering.
And then, his seeking hand found not more stone, but empty air. A ledge. He hauled his body over the lip, collapsing onto a flat, windswept surface.
He had reached the top.
The wind here was a living thing. It howled, scouring the mountain peak, carrying the clean, bitter scent of high altitude and endless space. He rolled onto his back, gasping, his chest heaving.
His Frost-Touched Perception flared, mapping his new world.
He was on a shattered plateau, the flat top of a monstrous needle of black rock that thrust out of a sea of roiling, grey cloud far below. The sky above was not the black of the crypt, but a deep, violent indigo, strewn with more stars than he had ever imagined could exist—points of cold, distant heat that painted a breathtaking tapestry across his senses. Two moons, one large and bone-white, one smaller and tinged blue, cast competing, silvery light.
And before him, in the center of the plateau, stood the reason for the crypt, the tomb-shaft, the carvings.
It was a throne.
Carved from a single block of jet-black stone veined with pulsating silver mana, it was sized for a giant. It sat upon a dais of fused bone and shattered weaponry. On the seat lay a skeleton, twice the size of a man. Its skull was crowned with broken horns. One skeletal hand still gripped the hilt of a sword, the blade driven deep into the stone of the throne itself. The other hand lay open on its lap, cradling a single, faintly glowing orb the size of Damien's fist.
This was the king of the crypt below. The Devourer. The being for whom the mountain was a coffin.
And the throne, the corpse, the entire peak… thrummed with a low, deep, hungry resonance. A resonance that called to the frost in Damien's veins. A resonance of Endless Winter.
[Alert: Detecting Supreme-Grade Mana Source: 'Heart of the Fell-Wyrm, Yggdrassil's Bane'. Attribute: Absolute Frost/Destruction.]
[Warning: Source is bound to Sovereign Remains. Approaching without proper cultivation base will result in soul-annihilation and physical dissolution.]
[Paradigm Analysis: Host Constitution shows 99.8% Resonance Compatibility. Survival Probability if Bonding Attempted: 0.0001%.]
Damien pushed himself to his knees, facing the throne. The wind ripped at his thin clothes, threatening to hurl him off the mountain. He was free of the crypt. But he stood on a pinnacle at the roof of the world, starving, frozen, with a god's corpse as his only companion.
He was not safe. He had simply traded one prison for another, grander one.
A new notification, in stark, bloody glyphs, burned in his vision.
[New Primary Directive Generated.]
[Survive the Night (Temperature will drop to flesh-shattering levels in 2 hours).]
[Harvest Resources (Locate sustenance and shelter within 500-meter radius).]
[Do NOT approach the Throne.]
Damien Karyon, eight years old, turned his back on the lure of the dead king's power. Survival first. Always first.
Shivering violently, he began to crawl on hands and knees, his frost-perception scanning the barren plateau for any crevice, any shelter, any sign of life he could possibly eat.
The Conquest had ascended from the dark. Now, it faced the sky. And the sky was vast, uncaring, and infinitely cold.