2025-12-15 20:35:04Asta stood up slowly, still feeling like the floor was swaying under him.
“I… I really appreciate you telling me all of that, even if it feels like someone just dropped a mountain on my head.”
He said, his voice low.
Old Man Kael was already at the door, wrestling with an ancient iron key that looked older than the academy itself.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s fine.”
He grumbled, jiggling the key left, right, up, down, then left again.
“I just need to lock this damn door before the rats throw a party in my scrolls.”
The key refused to turn, Kael muttered curses under his breath, shook the handle like he was trying to choke it, then kicked the bottom of the door so hard the whole frame rattled.
“Come on, you rusty piece of…”
Asta pressed his lips together so hard they hurt. A tiny laugh was trying to escape and he was losing the fight.
Kael whipped around, one white eyebrow raised so high it nearly touched his hairline.
“What’s so funny, boy?”
“Nothing, sir!”
Asta squeaked, his eyes wide and innocent.
Kael narrowed his eyes, turned back and gave the door another furious jiggle.
“Stupid thing’s been broken since the third Empress, I swear…”
Asta bit the inside of his cheek.
“Uh… sir? Let me try.”
“I got it.”
Kael snapped.
“I insist. Please.”
Kael froze, key halfway twisted. He stared at the door like it had personally insulted his mother. Then he let out a long, dramatic sigh and stepped aside with a grand sweep of his arm.
“Fine. Be my guest. There’s no way you can even make it shift an inch. This door is forged from star-forged obsidian iron, tempered in the breath of a volcano wyrm, and enchanted by the Fourth Flame Emperor himself. It weighs more than three warhorses and laughs at normal human strength.”
Asta stepped forward, rolled his shoulder once, grabbed the handle, and slammed the door shut.
CLANG.
It closed perfectly. The lock clicked like it was happy to finally behave.
Silence.
Kael’s mouth actually fell open. His cloudy eyes went round as coins.
Asta turned, looked at his own palm, then back at the door.
“That… didn’t seem like something to struggle over.”
Kael blinked. Once. Twice.
“How in the nine hells…”
“I just pulled.”
Asta said as he shrugged.
“And pushed. That’s it.”
Kael scratched his scarred cheek and muttered.
“That door has humiliated generals, archmages, even a prince once. He cried.”
Asta gave a tiny, sheepish grin.
“So… am I strong now?”
Kael barked a laugh that echoed down the tunnel.
“Strong? Boy, you’re still as weak as a wet kitten. That wasn’t your muscle. That was the dragon strength leaking out and mixing with your blood. A single drop of its power is worth more than a thousand normal men.”
Asta’s grin faded.
“Leaking?”
“Exactly. And if we don’t teach you how to control the leak, one day the whole dam breaks and the empire drowns.”
Kael started walking.
“Come with me. I want to show you something.”
They walked deeper than Asta had ever gone. The torches grew farther apart, the air colder, the stone older. A rusty iron sign hung crooked from the ceiling:
HIGHER SENIORS ONLY—DEATH TO TRESPASSERS.
Asta swallowed hard.
“We’re allowed down here?”
Kael didn’t answer. He just lifted one gnarled hand. A small, steady flame bloomed in his palm,pure golden-white, clean and bright like a sunrise on snow.
Asta stopped walking.
“Wait. You can make fire?”
Kael rolled his eyes so hard it was a miracle they didn’t fall out.
“What, you thought I was just a retired janitor? Didn’t you listen to a single word of my story upstairs?”
Asta rubbed the back of his neck.
“I… might have zoned out a little when you got to the part about slaying the lava titan. Sorry.”
Kael snorted.
“This is Dawn Lotus Flame, pride of the ancient Kael clan from the Eastern Isles. One of the purest healing-support flames in the world. Also excellent for lighting dark hallways when rude boys don’t pay attention.”
He waved the flame ahead like a lantern. The golden light danced on wet stone walls and made the shadows retreat.
Asta jogged to keep up.
“So… what’s my flame called? Dragon something?”
Kael’s flame flickered. He stopped walking and turned, giving Asta the most sarcastic look imaginable.
“Boy, do you ever stop asking questions?”
Asta took one dramatic step back, hands raised.
“Sorry! Sorry!”
Kael shook his head, but there was a tiny smile hidden in his beard.
“I don’t know yet. First I have to figure out exactly which dragon is sealed inside you. There were nine Legendary Dragons in the old myths, each with its own flame, personality, and favourite way to destroy continents. Until we know which one chose you as its jail-slash-partner, we can’t name the fire.”
Asta opened his mouth,then closed it fast when Kael’s eyebrow threatened to launch into orbit again.
They kept walking. The tunnel sloped down, down, down, until the air felt thick and humming with old power. Finally they reached a pair of enormous double doors,black wood bound with crimson steel, carved with phoenixes and dragons locked in eternal battle.
Kael placed his palm on the door. The Dawn Lotus flame flared bright, traced a complicated symbol in the air, and the doors swung inward without a sound.
Asta’s breath caught.
The space beyond was impossible.
A cavern so huge he couldn’t see the ceiling,just endless darkness lit by floating rivers of pure fire that flowed like upside-down waterfalls. Bookshelves taller than palace towers rose in perfect rings, connected by bridges of living flame. Students,real students, seniors in different crimson-and-gold robes,were flying.
Some had wings made of fire sprouting from their backs, beating slowly and gracefully. Others wore boots that left trails of sparks as they skate through the air. A girl shot upward like a rocket, laughing, trailing a tail of blue-white flame, and snatched a book from a shelf a hundred metres up.
The smell of old paper, smoke and magic was so strong Asta could taste it.
He stood frozen in the doorway with hi
s mouth open.
Kael stepped beside him, arms folded, looking proud and a little smug.
“Welcome.”
He said, his voice low with something like reverence.
“To the Grand Crimson Library.”
The doors boomed shut behind them…
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Chapter 596
The forest at this hour was its own thing.Not the daytime forest, not the layered light and the visible depth of it. The night forest, the closed-down version, the one that operates on different senses because the visual ones have been mostly removed. The specific sounds of it. The specific smell, the cold version of the forest smell, the one that comes when the temperature drops and the damp rises from the ground and the trees breathe their different night-breath.Asta moved through it with Flora on his left and Mira on his right.They moved in the specific way of people who need to be quiet and know how to be quiet,not the slow, overcautious movement of people trying to be quiet, the practiced movement of people for whom quiet was a thing they had learned to do properly. The camp behind them was still. Nothing had shifted. Nothing had called out.The trees thickened.And then, in the small clearing that the thick trees made between themselves,the specific organic clearing of a for
Chapter 595
The space that was not quite dark and not quite light but had its own specific quality of illumination, the source of which was the dragon himself, the vast, scaled presence that occupied the far end of it the way certain things occupy far ends, with a completeness that made the far end feel closer than it was.The Emperor Dragon was looking at him.Not the patient look. Not the measured look of their usual conversations, the look of something that has been waiting, that has been in the specific frustration of a thing that cannot move on its own and has been waiting for the thing that can to become available again."You're awake.” The dragon said."What happened." Asta said."What happened." The dragon said. "Is that a man put his hand on your throat and spoke seven words of the Dimming Incantation into you, and your body received those words and acted on them because that is what bodies do when the Dimming Incantation is applied correctly, which it was." He looked at Asta with t
Chapter 594
Not running to get there, simply there, the arrival so fast that the between had not been visible, the specific movement of something that had been given its full expression and the full expression was this.His hand found Asta's throat.Not the grip that Asta had used on Eren,something more deliberate than that, more positioned, the hand of someone who knows exactly where they are putting it and why. The specific placement of fingers that has been practiced until the practice has become automatic.And then his lips moved.Low,barely above breath, the volume of something that was not meant for anyone standing at a distance, only for Asta at the distance of the grip. The words were not language in the conversational sense, they were the older version, the incantation version, the words built for function rather than meaning. Ancient and rhythmic, the cadence of them specific, the specific cadence of a technique that required the words in a specific order at a specific pace.They took
Chapter 593
He stopped. "When I made contact with Loki directly, when I tried to reinforce Jabber's resistance and give him the leverage to push back…" He looked at his hands again. "Loki looked at me. That is all. He looked at me. And he told Jabber,in the voice that things use when they speak inside someone's consciousness, the voice that is felt rather than heard, he told Jabber to remove me."The clearing was quiet."And Jabber.” Eren said, his voice going lower."Threw me out. Not because he wanted to. Because when Loki said it with the full weight of what Loki is, the full ancient weight of a god-class dragon speaking to the vessel it has possessed,the vessel does not have the capacity to disobey. Not at this stage of the possession. Not yet."He looked at Asta."I'm sorry." He said.Asta stood there.He looked at Eren for a long moment. At the expression on his face, the genuine, specific sorrow of someone who has tried and has not arrived at the outcome the trying was for and is stan
Chapter 592
The pallor of it. The eyes, not red, not wet, not any of the conventional expressions of grief, just hollow, the specific hollow of someone who has had something taken from the inside rather than the outside, the particular empty quality of a space that was occupied recently and is not occupied now.He was looking at Eren.Eren was looking back at him.The Elf Chief's expression had the quality of someone who has been waiting for this arrival and has been carrying the weight of the waiting in the knowledge that the arrival was going to be this. The specific expression of someone who knows that something that happened was partly a consequence of their involvement and is standing in the presence of the person who has paid the most for the consequence.Asta looked at him.And then his hand came up.Fast, the specific speed of something that had been building in him the whole walk back and had arrived at the expression of itself without the mediation of decision, the body acting on what
Chapter 591
He looked at Jabber's name the same way everyone looked at Jabber's name when they said it now, with the specific quality of a word that used to mean one thing and currently means something else and the transition between the two meanings had not been clean.Flora looked at him.Something moved in her face.Something that knew, the way certain parts of a person know things before the knowing has been delivered properly, that what came next was not something she was going to want to receive.………………….Cassian told them.He did not build to it, he did not arrange the telling for effect or find the gentle approach. He looked at Flora and Elara and Sera and Garrett and he told them what had happened in the forest the same way you tell people things when the things do not have a version that is easy to deliver and you have decided that the slow version is not more kind than the direct version, only slower.He told them about Jabber.About the clearing and the crater and the smoke and Jabber
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