Chapter 102 (Part 1): The Breath of Forgotten Gods
Threshold of the Storm
The Forgotten Ice Plains stretched before them like a crystalline hell. What had once been a blurred line between snowfield and glacial waste now loomed as a razor's edge between survival and annihilation. Bennett's breath crystallized midair as Master Eldrin—the aged sorcerer whose name now carried the weight of their collective hope—raised his gnarled staff.
"Stay close," the old mage rasped, silver runes flickering along the staff's length. "The storm remembers intruders."
They crossed the boundary.
The world erupted.
Sky and earth fused into a maelstrom of razored ice. Eldrin's barrier groaned like a living thing, the translucent dome buckling under gales that sang with the voices of dead gods. Bennett flinched as a windblade scored the shield, its shriek vibrating in his molars.
"Faster!" Eldrin barked, though his trembling hands betrayed him. By dusk, frost clung to the sorcerer's eyebrows like diamond cobwebs.
The Calculus of Exhaustion
Day two dawned with Eldrin's face encased in an icy mask, his labored breaths puffing white through nostrils rimmed with rime. Hussein—the golden-armored paladin—now carried the mage cradled like brittle firewood, his divine aura radiating faint warmth.
"Take the staff, boy." Eldrin thrust the flickering artifact into Bennett's hands. "I need… to meditate."
Gurgash the Rat Vizier whimpered as he channeled his meager magic into the barrier. Even Medusa, her serpentine hair hissing in the cold, kept her petrifying gaze locked ahead—a queen refusing to acknowledge defeat.
"The storm's stronger," Eldrin croaked later, revived by the dregs of a mana potion. "Two centuries past, I crossed alone. Now, with three mages… we're failing."
Bennett followed the sorcerer's gaze upward. The cloud layer churned like boiling lead. "You think the dragons control this?"
"No." Eldrin's cracked lips twisted. "This tempest was forged to cage them. A divine leash to keep wyrms chained to their mountain prison."
Of Chains and Keepers
As Hussein trudged onward, Eldrin unraveled the bitter truth:
The Ice Plains' eternal storm served dual masters. To mortals, it barred passage north. To dragons, it enforced their role as jailers. Even airborne, the wyrms couldn't breach these winds—a failsafe against their ancient wanderlust.
"But why intensify now?" Bennett pressed. "Magic should fade with time, not grow!"
Eldrin's silence spoke volumes.
By nightfall, calculations turned dire. The barrier's decay outpaced their progress. At current rates, their magic would gutter by noon tomorrow—stranded halfway to salvation.
The Paladin's Burden
"Enough." Eldrin gripped Hussein's pauldron. "Take the boy. Your divine shield might… might…"
The paladin's helm tilted. Gold eyes burned through the visor. "A day's sprint. Maybe thirty leagues. Not enough."
"But a chance!" The old mage turned to Bennett, desperation cracking his voice. "You carry Aurion's legacy. The world—"
"—can rot," Bennett interrupted. "We either all live or all die here."
A snort came from the rear. QQ waddled forward, beak lifted in disdain. "Dramatic little thing, aren't you? Has anyone considered asking the storm nicely to stop?"
The Whisper in the Gale
As arguments swirled, Bennett's mind snagged on Eldrin's earlier words. The storm remembers.
Memory.
Magic.
Semele.
His hand drifted to the pendant hidden beneath furs—the prison of a spirit who'd walked these plains when gods still breathed.
"Wait." Bennett's voice cut through the howling dark. "What if we don't fight the storm? What if we… negotiate?"
Eldrin stiffened. "Child, even Aurion at his prime couldn't—"
"Not Aurion." Bennett's fingers tightened on the amulet. "Someone older. Someone who might've watched the gods weave this tempest."
The amulet grew warm.
Somewhere in the maelstrom, something ancient stirred.
Chapter 102 (Part 2): The Storm's Calculus
The Algebra of Sacrifice
Eldrin's voice cracked like thin ice. "Useless. Even with Semele… this version of her is a shadow of the sorceress I knew." His gaze swept over the huddled group—Hussein's stoic silence, Medusa's coiled tension, Gurgash's trembling paws. "The storm consumes magic exponentially. At this rate, only one of us might survive."
Bennett's jaw tightened as the old mage laid out his grim equation: Hussein's golden aura shielding Bennett until the knight's divine flame guttered out. Semele's diminished magic sustaining the barrier afterward. A pyramid of sacrifices with Bennett as its reluctant apex.
"No." Bennett's refusal was a blade unsheathed. "I didn't crawl out of the Dragon's Maw to become a king of corpses."
Medusa's serpents hissed in approval. Hussein merely adjusted his grip on Eldrin—a paladin's answer to mortality.
The Penguin's Heresy
QQ's flippers slapped the ice. "Preposterous! Comparing that overgrown lizard to Lord Aurion? Blasphemy!" The penguin's monocle fogged with outrage. "When Aurion crossed these plains, the storm stripped nine-tenths of his power! He fought the Patriarch at one-tenth strength and still carved its name into the Mountain of Shame!"
Silence fell, deeper than the snow.
Eldrin's staff trembled. "Scaling resistance… The tempest adjusts to the intruder's power. Aurion faced a hurricane. We face a squall."
Bennett's mind raced. "Then why's it stronger now than during your last crossing?"
"Because," QQ interjected with theatrical solemnity, "you carry his legacy. The storm smells Aurion's blood in your veins."
The Windbreak Gambit
Gurgash's squeal shattered the revelation. The rat mage collapsed, his magic spent. Eldrin caught the staff mid-fall, veins bulging as he funneled his ebbing power into the barrier.
"Aurion left something!" Bennett yanked QQ up by its bowtie. "In the sarcophagus. What?"
The penguin's eyes rolled skyward. "A… a pointy thing. Tall. Collapsible. The Windbreak Spire, I believe he called it."
Frantic, Bennett dumped Aurion's relics onto the ice—a compass weeping mercury, a dagger etched with dead constellations, and finally, a slender rod no longer than his forearm.
"That's it!" QQ pecked the artifact. "Plant it! Plant it and pray!"
Echoes of the Godslayer
The spire unfolded like silver origami, thrumming with harmonics that made Medusa cover her ears. As Bennett drove it into the ice, the storm… hesitated.
Eldrin gasped. "Resonance! It's tuning to Aurion's frequency!"
For three heartbeats, the blizzard parted—a corridor of calm stretching south. Then the spire cracked.
"Run!" Hussein roared.
They ran.
The spire shattered behind them, buying minutes. Hours. A lifetime measured in howling darkness.
The Patriarch's Shadow
Dawn came as a rumor.
Bennett's lungs burned. Semele's snakes lay frozen against her scalp. Even QQ's endless commentary had dwindled to wheezes.
Then the ice screamed.
A mile behind, the Dragon Patriarch descended—not as flesh, but as a living storm. Its wings were cyclones. Its eyes twin voids drinking the light.
"Faster!" Eldrin croaked.
But Bennett had stopped. His hand closed around Aurion's dagger. The compass in his pocket spun wildly, its needle pointing… up.
Chapter 103: Festival of Falling Stars（part 1）
The Masquerade of Omens
Three days after the chaos of the ice plains—the windbreak spire's fragile promise, the Dragon Patriarch's looming shadow—the Rowland Empire's capital shimmered like a jewel beneath a blood-orange sunset.
Yanjing, the northern colossus, sprawled across the banks of the Lanjiang Grand Canal. Centuries of imperial ambition had transformed the waterway from a moat into a serpentine artery, cleaving the empire from the frostbitten north to the spice-scented south. Its thirty-meter walls, raised during the Augustinian Dynasty's rise, bore scars of rebellion and the weight of history. Tonight, atop the highest watchtower overlooking the canal, the empire's elite gathered for a ritual older than the stones beneath their feet.
Royal guards in gilded armor flanked the stairs. Above them, under a sky deepening to indigo, the Chairman of the Mage Guild stood apart from the murmuring nobles. Yargo-Daugen's obsidian eyes—a rarity in a land of blue and green irises—glinted with thinly veiled disdain. His robe, woven from southern goldensilk (a misnomer for threads spun by raven-hued silkworms rarer than dragon scales), marked him as a man who traded in power, not platitudes. Behind him, five white-robed archmages stood sentinel, their triple-clover pins winking in the twilight.
The court astrologer, swaddled in ceremonial robes thicker than his wisdom, squinted at the stars. Yargo suppressed a scoff. Charlatans and their celestial theatrics. To him, the night's true magic lay not in the sky but in the unspoken alliances thickening the air—nobles feigning concern for "imperial fortunes" while calculating how to weaponize the ritual's hollow prophecies.
Cold Comfort
As dusk surrendered to night, the astrologer's theatrics crescendoed. He swayed, moaned, and finally collapsed—a performance worthy of a traveling troupe—before scrawling gibberish on parchment. Yargo stepped forward, lips twitching. With a flick of his finger, he cast a preservation spell on the scroll, its contents destined to rot in some archive. Another year, another farce.
Yet tradition demanded more than scorn. The chairman's gaze drifted to the canal below, where temple acolytes waited to escort the prophecy to the palace and the Basilica of Light. This year, however, the Basilica's delegation was threadbare—a single high priest and an eighth-tier paladin replacing the absent Holy Knights. Three grandmasters gone: one traitor, two corpses. Yargo's smile deepened. The Church's humiliation warmed him better than any fire spell.
A breeze hissed through the battlements. Yargo shivered. Why must we freeze for this nonsense? His mind wandered to rumors of the Patriarch's pursuit, to Bennett's band fighting for breath in the ice… until a sound snapped him back.
Thunder.
In midwinter.
Heaven's Defiance
All eyes turned northeast. A crimson star, trailing a fiery tail longer than the Lanjiang itself, tore across the heavens. Gasps rippled through the nobles. The court astrologer fainted.
"A falling star!" the palace steward shrieked. "A broomstar! The omen—!"
Pandemonium erupted. Yargo watched, amused, as the elite shed their masks: pious hands clasped in false prayer, schemers already drafting accusations, trembling sycophants envisioning their heads on pikes. Only the chairman remained still, his black eyes reflecting the dying light.
History repeats. A century prior, a similar omen had ignited purges. Now, with the Church crippled and the throne aging, this fiery portent would be a torch tossed into a powder keg. Yargo's fingers brushed the olive-leaf pin at his chest—the Mage Guild's answer to imperial crowns and holy relics.
The Jester's Epiphany
As stewards scrambled to revive the astrologer, Yargo-Daugen descended the tower, his archmages trailing like shadows. Beneath his breath, he chuckled. Perhaps I've misjudged these stargazers.
The thought struck him as the star's embers faded:
If the heavens truly speak… what message did Bennett receive tonight, halfway across the world?
Chapter 103 (Part II): The Omen's Sting
A Prophecy Unraveled
The court astrologer's knees buckled. His pallid face mirrored the ashen hue of the parchment clutched in his trembling hands. Moments ago, he had proclaimed the empire's fortunes "radiant as the sun"—only for the heavens to mock him with a blazing broomstar, its fiery tail scorching the night like a divine rebuke. Tradition demanded optimism, but the cosmos had spat on his lies. Now, as the crimson streak faded, so too did the color in his cheeks.
No one moved to steady him. The nobles exchanged glances laced with pity and thinly veiled glee. A century ago, an astrologer who misread such an omen had lost his head to a paranoid emperor. Tonight, history seemed poised to repeat.
Yargo-Daugen, Chairman of the Mage Guild, observed the chaos with detached amusement. Fools and their puppet rituals. He turned to leave, his golden-edged robe whispering against the stones. Let the court drown in superstition; the Guild had no stake in this farce.
Then the world tilted.
Whispers of the Fallen
A harried mage burst through the crowd, his disheveled appearance drawing gasps. Ignoring protocol, he pressed close to Yargo and hissed words that turned the chairman's veins to ice:
"Gandorff is dead."
Yargo's fingers spasmed. Around them, nobles craned their necks, sensing seismic shifts in the chairman's stony composure.
"His Soulstone shattered," the messenger rasped, referencing the enchanted crystals that bound a mage's life force to the Guild's vaults. "The oldest one—his stone."
Yargo's mind raced. Gandorff, the Guild's most elusive archmage, a titan who had tutored two generations of chairmen… gone? And with him, the boy he'd taken under wing—the last scion of House Rolin.
"Find the Rolin heir," Yargo ordered, voice taut. "And track down Gandorff's stuttering apprentice. If that old fox met his end, she'll know why."
As the messenger fled, Yargo addressed the gawking crowd with practiced solemnity: "The Guild mourns. Gandorff, mentor to my predecessor and myself, has departed this realm."
The tower erupted in shock. But Yargo's thoughts were already far from the capital, tracing invisible threads northward—to the ice-locked wilderness where legends crumbled and blood stained the snow.
The Wounded and the Lost
Three days' journey north, deep within the Frozen Wastes, a ragged band trudged through knee-deep snow. Bennett led, his borrowed sword—Hussein's blade, now a jagged relic—serving more as a crutch than a weapon. Behind him, the once-indomitable Holy Knight limped, his left eye shrouded in bloodied cloth. Medusa, her serpentine grace reduced to frail dependency, leaned on a singed and trembling ratman, Grimgrin. Only QQ, the portly penguin, remained unscathed, waddling in resigned silence.
Gone was Gandorff.
"The Valley," Bennett croaked, spotting the jagged rift ahead. "The Evergreen Spring will heal your wounds, Hussein."
The knight halted, his remaining eye blazing. "Save your pity. When I face the Dragon Patriarch again, it'll be with his heart in my grip—or mine in his."
Bennett met his glare. "We'll carve that truth into his scales."
Hussein's lips twitched—the ghost of a smile. Then he staggered, hand slamming against a frost-rimed pine. "Remember, boy. You're all that's left of Aragorn's legacy now. Grow stronger… or we'll all feed the worms."
Three Days Prior: The Storm's Maw
Let us rewind three days, to the hour the storm broke them.
The Dragon Patriarch's pursuit had come swifter than any dared fear. Trapped within a maelstrom of howling winds, the party had huddled around QQ's prize: a long-forgotten chest from Aragorn's trove. Inside lay a sword—its scabbard studded with seven gemstones, each a trophy from a slain primordial beast.
"The Stormqueller," QQ insisted, though Gandorff had trembled at the sight.
"The Kingmaker!" the old mage countered, awe overriding terror. "Aragorn's blade, said to split mountains and shackle typhoons!"
Bennett cared only for survival. "How. Does. It. Work?"
QQ's beak clacked. "Draw it. If you're worthy."
As the storm's fury reached its crescendo, Bennett gripped the hilt…