The inn, 'The Chattering Shard,' was a place of gloom and thin ale. Damien paid for a week in a tiny attic room with a sliver of his silver. It was cold, drafty, and perfect. He needed no comfort, only privacy.
From his window, his Mana-Vision swept the town. He tracked the source of the scanning gaze. It led to a well-kept, two-story building near the palisade wall—the Factor's House, home to the representative of Lord Edric Ferros, ruler of the Frostscar Vale. The aura within was a controlled, humming silver, like a tuned blade. 2nd Order, 4th Rank. A cultivator of the Argent Mirror school, likely a former guardsman or low-ranking scion. The Factor. His scan had been professional curiosity, not immediate hostility. He was watching.
Damien turned his attention north, toward the mine. Even from this distance, he could see it: a stain on his senses. A plume of sickly, cyan-colored cold energy leaching from the mountain side, twisting the natural mana flows around it like a cancer. The Frost-Touch.
He spent the night planning. The System cross-referenced his sensory data with its sparse archives on frost-based spiritual maladies.
[Analysis: 'Frost-Touch' is a degenerative spiritual curse. Spreads via ambient mana contamination and physical contact with infected matter (silver ore).]
[Core Principle: Not true cold, but 'Entropic Stasis'—a magical force that halts energetic processes, leading to metabolic and spiritual cessation.]
[Hypothesis: Source is likely a 'Frost-Wraith' spawned from a mass-death event in a cold, metal-rich environment, or a corrupted geomantic node.]
[Counteragent: Requires application of 'Pure Kinetic Cold'—the host's Primal Frost—to overwrite the entropic stasis, or destruction of the source core.]
In simpler terms: his frost was real winter; this was magical freezer burn. He could fight it, but the source had to be destroyed.
At first light, he left the town, heading north along a disused cart track. The forest grew silent again, the usual life absent. The air grew colder, but it was a dead, sucking cold, not the vibrant chill of his power. Hoarfrost on the trees had a brittle, grey quality.
The mine entrance was a black maw blasted into the mountain, sealed by a crude barricade of logs and rusted iron. Warning signs were nailed to the wood, painted with a flaking symbol of a frozen skull. The toxic cyan aura wafted from the darkness.
Damien didn't break the barricade. He found a fissure twenty yards up the slope, a natural crack too small for anything but a child or a determined predator. He focused his Frost-Skin meridians, making his body pliable yet resilient, and slithered inside.
The tunnel was tight, then opened into a larger excavation. His Mana-Vision adjusted to the absolute dark. The mine was a ghostly negative image. The walls glowed with the residual, fading heat of the earth, but veined through them were pulsing, cyan lines—the contaminated silver veins. The air was thick with the entropic energy. Where it touched him, his natural frost aura hissed, actively repelling it. He was immune, but the effort cost a trickle of mana.
He moved deeper. The tunnels branched. He followed the strongest pull of corruption, a path leading down. He passed abandoned tools, ore carts, and then—bodies.
Miners, frozen in place. Not beautifully iced, but desiccated, grey, with a dusting of weird cyan crystals growing from their eyes and mouths. Their thermal signatures were absolute zero, not even the background radiation of decay. Total stasis.
The corruption was stronger here. His mana drain increased. [Ambient Entropic Field: -2 MP/minute.]
The central shaft opened into a vast cavern—the main silver lode. In the center of the cavern, the source of the plague was revealed.
It was not a wraith. It was a heart.
A massive, pulsating organ of crystal and frozen corruption, the size of a wagon, hung from the cavern ceiling by thick, vein-like strands of cyan energy. It was rooted directly into the richest silver vein. At its core, visible through semi-transparent layers of diseased crystal, throbbed a dark, ugly light. Around it, in a kneeling circle, were a dozen more frozen miners, their bodies connected to the heart by thinner strands, like a macabre battery or a grotesque cultivation array. The heart was feeding on their trapped life-force, converting it into more entropic energy.
[Entity Identified: 'Geomantic Frost-Canker'.]
[Classification: Eldritch Spiritual Tumour. Formed from concentrated death-anguish in a metal-rich, cold environment. Order 2, Rank 9 (Peak).]
[Ability: 'Stasis Field', 'Life-Drain', 'Crystal Spike Volley'. Weakness: Its core is the dark light at its center. Physical disruption of the core will cause catastrophic feedback.]
A Peak 2nd Order entity. One rank below the threshold of the 3rd Order. Stronger than him, in its home territory, surrounded by its field.
The Canker sensed him. The dark core pulsed. The kneeling miners' heads turned in unison, their crystal-filled eyesockets pointing at him. A dozen mouths, frozen in silent screams, opened. From them, with a sound like shattering glass, shot a volley of cyan crystal shards, faster than arrows.
Damien didn't dodge. He raised a hand. Glacial Shield.
A wall of deep blue, rune-etched ice erupted from the floor. The crystal shards impacted and stuck, their entropic energy trying to freeze the shield in place. Cracks spiderwebbed through it, but it held.
The direct attack gave him data. The crystals carried the stasis effect. Physical contact was to be avoided.
The Canker' main body shuddered. The vein-strands connecting it to the miners glowed brighter. The frozen corpses began to stand up, moving with jerky, horrifying grace, their bodies cracking. It was raising a zombie workforce.
Damien's mind raced. A direct assault on the core was suicide. The stasis field weakened him. The zombies would overwhelm him. He needed to change the battlefield.
He looked at the silver veins in the walls. Silver was a conductive metal. For mana, especially this corrupted, cold-aligned mana.
He had an idea. A terrible, risky idea.
He retreated back into the tunnel, the shambling miner-zombies giving slow chase. He positioned himself at a junction where several silver veins converged in the wall.
He placed both hands on the stone, on either side of a thick, cyan-pulsing vein. He took a breath, centering himself. He reached into his dantian, to the Glacial Seed, and to the sliver of the Fell-Wyrm's power he had conquered.
He didn't attack the corruption. He did something more audacious.
He offered it a merger.
He pushed a thread of his own pure, sovereign frost mana into the corrupted silver vein. Not to fight, but to sympathize. To show it a higher order of cold. The entropic energy recoiled at first, then… hesitated. It was mindless hunger, but it recognized a king.
"This is stagnation," Damien whispered into the stone, his will carried by his mana. "A slow death. I am motion. I am ending. Join me."
He poured more power in, a river of pristine blue frost energy flooding the corrupt cyan network. He was trying to hack the geomantic tumor, to overwrite its control with his own.
The Canker shrieked, a psychic scream of outrage. The zombie miners froze. The dark core blazed. It redirected all its power to fight this internal coup.
The cavern became a warzone of conflicting cold. Cyan and blue energies fought in the silver veins, making the walls crack and spark with frozen lightning. Damien gritted his teeth, his mana plummeting. He was a 2nd Order, 1st Rank, trying to mentally dominate a Peak 2nd Order entity on its home turf. It was a battle of wills through a medium of conductive pain.
He was losing. His mana pool was draining faster. The Canker's mind was simple but vast, a howling void of hunger.
Then, he played his final card. He reached not for his power, but for the memory he had buried. The frozen diamond of the Fell-Wyrm's hatred for all that was not its perfect winter.
He touched it. And let a single, razor-sharp splinter of that apocalyptic will bleed into the stream of his power.
It was the tiniest fraction, but it was the will of a being that had poisoned world-trees. It was Authority.
The flood of Damien's mana in the veins suddenly carried not just cold, but the concept of ending.
The corrupt energy of the Canker didn't just fight; it broke. The higher will shattered it. The cyan light in the veins flickered, then was swamped by devastating, royal blue.
In the cavern, the Canker's heart gave a final, convulsive pulse. The dark core cracked. The vein-strands connecting it to the miners turned blue, then transferred that pure, killing cold back into the heart.
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-BOOM.
The crystal heart exploded inward in a silent implosion of frost. A wave of pure, clean cold, now under Damien's residual command, washed through the cavern. The zombie miners shattered like glass sculptures. The entropic field vanished.
Silence. Then the groaning of stressed rock.
Damien slumped against the tunnel wall, utterly drained, his mana reserves in single digits. He had won not by force, but by subterfuge, audacity, and a carefully measured drop of cosmic malice.
The mine was purged. The Frost-Touch was gone, replaced by a lingering, benign chill that was, unmistakably, his.
[Directive Complete: 'Purge the Silver Vein Mine'.]
[Reward: 500 XP. 'Geomantic Frost-Canker' core fragment acquired (Corrupted/Purified). Reputation in Hearth's Watch will shift to 'Awe/Suspicion'.]
[Warning: Use of Fell-Wyrm authority fragment has drawn minute attention from related cosmic entities. Scans will be intermittent.]
He had his foothold. And he had made his first, real mark on the world. As he stumbled back toward daylight, he knew the Factor in the fine house would have felt that explosion of power. The game in Hearth's Watch was about to get much more interesting.