2025-12-15 20:35:50Asta’s neck hurt from looking up, his mouth was still open but he didn’t care.
Rivers of fire floated above him like liquid stars. Shelves taller than the imperial palace stretched into darkness. Students flew between them on wings of flame, on boots of flame, on nothing but raw power and laughter.
Books the size of doors glided past on glowing rails. Somewhere far away a phoenix made of pure light screeched, and the sound turned into golden musical notes that rained down like petals.
Asta finally found his voice. It came out a squeak.
“How… How is something like this in an underground cave?”
Old Man Kael folded his arms, looking annoyingly proud.
“This isn’t a cave, boy. This is the Grand Crimson Library, built two thousand years ago inside a hollowed-out heart-crystal geode the size of a mountain.”
“The First Flame Emperor and the Nine Dragon Sovereigns themselves carved the walls with living starfire and bound the whole thing with Aetherial Voidstone. It can’t collapse. It can’t burn. It can’t even be found unless you already know the way.”
Asta spun in a slow circle, his eyes huge.
“So… the academy knows about this place?”
Kael snorted.
“Of course they know. Who do you think keeps the words fresh every century?”
“Then why have they never told us? Why isn’t this in the brochures? ‘Come study at Crimson Flame Academy,free flying included!’”
Kael gave him a flat look.
“Because the official story is that the lower levels are ‘structurally unstable’ and might collapse on students’ heads if we let first-years down here.”
He rolled his eyes so hard Asta worried for his health.
“Truth is, they’re terrified of what would happen if a thousand hormone-filled teenagers with god-level flames had unlimited access to forbidden knowledge. Last time they tried an open policy, someone summoned a minor void prince in the cafeteria. It took three archmages and a very angry lunch lady to put it back.”
Asta barked a laugh before he could stop himself.
“You’re kidding.”
“Wish I was.”
Kael jerked his chin toward a cluster of floating tables near the center.
“Sit. Don’t touch anything that glows red. I’ll be back once I find the volumes on sealed primordial dragons. There are… a few.”
He shuffled off as he muttered about
“Organized chaos” and “kids these days.”
Asta wandered toward the tables, his head still tilted back, trying to take it all in. He was so busy staring at a boy doing barrel rolls on crimson flame wings that he walked straight into someone.
Books exploded everywhere.
“Oh,crap,sorry!”
Asta dropped to his knees, scrambling to gather scrolls and heavy tomes before they rolled into a nearby fire-river.
“I didn’t see you, I was looking at the ceiling and…”
A soft laugh stopped him.
“It’s okay. I’m the one who wasn’t watching where I was going… again.”
Asta looked up.
Red hair with gold streaks, tied in a messy ponytail. Emerald eyes. A small, shy smile. Freckles across her nose like someone had sprinkled cinnamon on cream.
He knew that face.
“Flora…?”
“Hey, Asta.”
She crouched to help, stacking books with quick, practiced movements.
“Guess we’re making a habit of bumping into each other.”
“Yeah.”
He grinned despite himself.
“Third time’s the charm, right?”
One of the books he picked up had a black leather cover embossed with a coiled dragon. The title was in old runes, but he could read it clearly enough: Draconomicon Arcanum – Volume VII.
He turned it over in his hands.
“You read about dragons?”
Flora’s cheeks went pink, but her smile got wider.
“You could say I’m kind of a dragon nerd. I’ve read every public volume twice and bribed three librarians for the restricted ones.”
Asta’s eyebrows shot up.
“Wait. So you actually know dragons?”
She laughed, soft and warm.
“More than is probably healthy.”
He glanced around,no sign of Kael yet. He gestured to the nearest floating bench.
“Can you… tell me? Everything you know? I mean,if you have time.”
Flora hesitated, then shrugged.
“I owe you for earlier. Those two idiots would’ve…”
She shook her head.
“Yeah. I have time.”
They sat. The bench hovered two feet off the ground and wobbled gently, like a boat on calm water.
Flora tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and started talking, her voice low but excited.
“Okay, so in the known realms there are twenty greater dragon bloodlines still active. You’ve got your standard elemental ones,Fire, Ice, Storm, Earth, Light, Shadow. Then the rare ones: Void, Time, Dream, Blood, and Soul. Each bloodline has sub-branches.”
“For example, Crimson Inferno dragons are pure destruction, while Phoenix-kin dragons focus on rebirth and healing. Storm dragons love riddles and collect sky-islands. Void dragons…”
She lowered her voice.
“They say if a void dragon looks at you too long, pieces of your shadow just… disappear.”
Asta was leaning forward, totally hooked.
“Then there are the ancient ones.”
She continued, her eyes shining.
“The Primordial Nine. They’re not bloodlines,they’re individuals. Each one is basically a walking apocalypse. The empire’s founding myth says the First Emperor only won because the Nine were asleep. If even one wakes up angry, countries vanish.”
She counted on her fingers.
“There’s Aurion the Golden Dawn, father of light dragons.”
“Nyxara the Star-Eater, queen of void.”
“Glacira, the Eternal Winter.”
“Terravox, who sings earthquakes.”
“Tempestus, lord of all storms.”
“Hemoria the Blood Moon.”
“Somnus, who rules dreams and nightmares.”
“And Oblivion, the dragon that erases names from history itself.”
Asta swallowed hard.
“And the ninth?”
Flora’s voice dropped to almost a whisper.
“The ninth one… the records are torn out of every book. Even the forbidden ones. People only call it ‘the Ash-Bringer’ or ‘the End-Flame.’ They say its fire doesn’t burn flesh,it burns possibility. Entire futures. They say when it roared the first time, three kingdoms were never born.”
She leaned closer, her eyes bright with excitement and fear.
“Some scholars think the ninth dragon isn’t asleep. They think it was sealed inside a human bloodline so it could never wake up fully. A living cage. And if that seal ever…”
Cough! Cough!
A loud, fake cough came from behind them.
Flora jumped so hard she nearly fell off the bench.
Old Man Kael stood there, three ancient books under one arm, giving her the most dramatic disapproving-grandpa stare in history.
“Young lady, some of us are trying to do research, not gossip about bedtime monsters.”
Flora went bright red.
“S-sorry, Head Labourer Kael! I was just…I have to go!”
She scooped her books and flashed Asta a quick smile.
“See you around, Asta. Stay safe.”
And she was gone, red ponytail bouncing as she darted between floating shelves.
Kael dropped into the seat with a grunt and slammed the biggest book onto the table. Dust exploded outward in a gray cloud that made Asta cough.
The cover was black dragon-scale leather, title burned deep with real fire:
The Ledger of the Nine Primordial Beasts
Kael opened it carefully. Pages crackled like dry leaves. He flipped past beautiful illuminated paintings of dragons,gold, white, violet, each more terrifying than the last.
Then he stopped.
The next page was torn out. Not cut,ripped. Jagged edges, like someone had been in a hurry or angry.
Kael’s finger traced the empty space where the chapter should have been.
“Well, that’s inconvenient.”
He muttered.
Asta leaned over.
“What’s missing?”
The old man’s voice was quiet, almost reverent.
“The chapter that would tell us e
xactly which of the Nine is inside you, boy.”
He looked up, his eyes sharp as broken glass.
“Someone went through a lot of trouble to make sure no one ever finds out.”
He closed the book slowly.
“Someone tore out the only record of the dragon sealed inside the Xavier heir…but who?”
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 858
They didn't have the luxury of celebrating the bridge's outcome for long.Word reached them two days later, carried by a rider Sera's remaining trusted contacts had sent ahead, Emberfall, the border city they'd once saved from a single feral Choir fragment weeks earlier, was burning again, and this time the scale dwarfed anything the squad had faced there before."How bad." Asta asked, already moving toward the horses before the messenger had finished catching his breath."Bad." The rider said. "Whatever hits the city isn't one fragment anymore. Reports describe multiple sources of uncontrolled flame, civilian casualties climbing by the hour, and Council forces either unable or unwilling to intervene effectively.""Unwilling." Roderick repeated, sharp. "Why would they be unwilling?""Because the soldiers on the ground are saying it looks exactly like what happened at the bridge." The rider said, grimly. "Except nobody stabilized this one. It's still spreading."Vex's expression
Chapter 857
The light and dark flame collided in a violent, churning column above the shattered carriage, and Mira, thrown backward by the shockwave along with half the squad, watched in horror as the eleven fractured voices continued screaming, no longer coordinated, no longer speaking as one, a cacophony of grief, confusion, and raw, remembered pain pouring out of eleven bodies that no longer knew how to be a single harmony and hadn't yet remembered how to be separate people again."It's destabilizing." Emrick shouted over the chaos, having insisted on accompanying the strike team despite his weakened condition, his eyes fixed on the churning light with grim, focused intensity. "Exactly as theorized, but faster, more violent than I predicted. The resonance broke all eleven bonds at once instead of gradually.""Is that good or bad." Roderick shouted back, blade raised against the chaos while trying to keep the reeling, disoriented Council soldiers from regrouping around them."I don't know ye
Chapter 856
They reached the convoy's projected route on the fourth day, cresting a ridge that overlooked a long, winding stretch of road cutting through a narrow valley, the kind of terrain, Yuki noted grimly, that made for excellent ambush ground and equally excellent killing ground, depending entirely on who controlled the higher elevation first."This is it." Lucien confirmed, studying the road below with the particular certainty of a man who'd memorized this exact route during his months of forced service. "The convoy passes through here tomorrow morning, assuming the schedule hasn't shifted. There's a narrow bridge crossing about two miles further along, the only viable route through this section of terrain. Everything funnels through that point.""A bottleneck." Roderick said, already assessing the tactical shape of the ground with a soldier's eye. "That's our best chance to isolate the transport carriage from its full escort.""It's also the most heavily guarded section of the entire
Chapter 855
The next two days blurred into a grinding cycle of riding, planning, and stolen hours of sleep, the squad pushing hard toward the convoy's projected route while Yuki and Emrick refined their theory into something that might actually survive contact with reality."Resonance isn't a weapon." Emrick said, for what felt like the third time, sketching another diagram in the dirt as the fire burned low around them. "It's a condition. You can't simply throw fire at eleven merged voices and expect coherence to shatter. You need something that speaks to what's holding them together in the first place.""Which is what, exactly." Roderick asked, patience visibly thinning after two days of theory without a clear plan of execution."Shared trauma." Emrick said. "That's the foundation every successful bond I studied was built on. The Choir isn't eleven separate people cooperating. It's eleven fractured identities that found it easier to stop being separate at all. The harmony holds because sep
Chapter 854
They rode through the morning in near silence, the weight of Emrick's revelation pressing down on the whole company harder than exhaustion or the dwindling clock on the convoy ever had. Kael rode near the back, alone, refusing the company even Asta offered, and Emrick kept his distance at the opposite end of the line, watching the old man's back with an expression Mira couldn't quite name, not forgiveness, not yet, but not pure hatred either. Something unsettled in between.They made camp at midday out of necessity, the horses needing rest and Seris still weak enough that Sera insisted on a proper stop rather than pushing straight through toward the convoy's projected route.It was Yuki who finally broke the uneasy quiet, approaching Emrick with the same careful, methodical curiosity she brought to every piece of the puzzle they were still assembling."You said you studied for twenty years." She said. "Do you know what they were trying to learn? Specifically?"Emrick considered her
Chapter 853
Roderick's blade met the first guard's with a screech of metal, driving the man back into the second before either could raise a full alarm, and for a handful of desperate seconds the narrow corridor became nothing but steel and breath and the grim, practiced economy of a soldier who'd learned, the hard way, exactly how to make three seconds last as long as thirty.He dropped the first guard with a strike to the temple, disarmed the second before he'd finished raising his blade, and was already turning to follow the others when a third voice, not a guard's, called out from a cell further down the block, low and urgent."Wait. Please. Whoever you are, wait."Roderick hesitated, torn between the escape already underway and the desperate plea echoing off stone, and something in the voice's raw, worn quality stopped him from simply running past.He found the source in the block's last cell,an older man, gaunt, scarred along both forearms in patterns that looked disturbingly familiar, eyes
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