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?”
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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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