Don't spiral.
I pressed my fingers to my temple, forcing my breathing to slow.
Don't turn this into obsessive fan theory nonsense.
But the thought had already taken root.
The Black Dragon.
Back in my world, I'd consumed every scrap of information about it. Everyone had. The final wall. The ultimate calamity. A monster so ancient it predated most historical records—escaped from the Dungeon, vanished without trace, never resurfaced.
That alone had never sat right.
Now, standing inside this world, it felt even wronger.
An empty laugh… self-mockery.
Because I may face it one day… a possibility!
"An escaped monster," I muttered to the empty street. "That no one can track. No corpse. No territory. No confirmed sightings."
Not in the deep floors.
Not on land.
Not in the skies.
Too clean. Too convenient.
My hand drifted unconsciously toward my back, where that faint warmth pulsed steadily.
A thought slid into place—cold, precise, and unwelcome.
What if the Black Dragon has a falna?
A ghost falna.
Not granted by a god. Not maintained by one. A system without an owner.
The Dungeon produced monsters endlessly, but the Black Dragon was different. Singular. Persistent. Almost… adaptive. If something like my falna could exist without divine oversight, then a monster—ancient, abnormal, outside the established rules—could carry a variant of it.
That would explain everything.
Why it could hide so completely.
Why it could move without being detected by divine senses.
Why even gods spoke of it with frustration instead of certainty.
Not invisible.
Unregistered.
If a falna could anchor to existence itself rather than to a deity, then growth wouldn't require updates. No ceremonies. No limits imposed by heaven's bureaucracy.
Just accumulation.
Excelia without supervision.
Power without permission.
My stomach tightened.
"And if that's true," I whispered to no one, "then it's not just the Dragon."
My thoughts flickered—too fast, too sharp—toward dangerous territory.
Stop.
Not me. Not Bell Cranel. This wasn't about heroes or chosen ones.
This was about exceptions.
I straightened, forcing the speculation back into its mental cage. Wild theories were poison in Orario. Gods smelled curiosity like blood in water.
For now, all I knew was this:
I had a falna with no god.
The Black Dragon existed with no leash.
And somewhere between those two facts lay a truth the heavens didn't want examined.
I slowed my breathing, grounding myself in the present. My wild theories were useless without structure.
The Black Dragon wasn't just powerful. It was unaccounted for.
Monsters had patterns. Territories. Traces of destruction. Even escaped monsters left scars on the world.
The Black Dragon left absence.
If my falna existed without divine authorship—then the concept itself was real:power systems that operated outside divine administration.
A monster born in the Dungeon but no longer bound by it.A being that grows without updates.Excelia without a god to record or limit it.
That wouldn't make it invisible.
It would make it untrackable.
And what about shapeshifting? A missed possibility.
That wasn't fantasy—it was adaptation. A survival response from something that learned the gods were watching.
I exhaled slowly.
"If that thing exists," I murmured, "then it's not just a calamity."
It's proof.
Proof that the rules can be bent.That divinity isn't mandatory.
My hand brushed my back again—warm, quiet, patient.
I didn't need answers yet.
But one thing was clear now:
The Black Dragon wasn't just the endgame boss of this world.
It was an exception.
Just like me.