The dragon and the man looked toward the same spot. The air churned violently. Whatever was approaching was clearly far from ordinary.
A chill.
An eerie aura spreading rapidly in all directions.
Rustle! Crack!
The silence of the forest shattered in an instant.
Something was walking toward them, parting the vegetation and snapping branches underfoot. A wet squelch rang out occasionally. It was accompanied by a strange noise, hard to distinguish between heavy breathing and air escaping from a puncture. It was likely breathing. The sound of breaths. Breaths. The tall grass rustled. A wet squelch. A heavy exhale.
It was coming from the direction of his master's grave.
It drew closer, inch by inch.
'No way?'
'It can't be!'
Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—he had a good idea of what it was.
He felt conflicting urges: the desire to crush his own suspicion, and the desperation to cling to it.
Its outline gradually emerged. The slowly moving entity was massive. As the clouds shifted, moonlight shattered across its back, inverting the shadows of the forest.
A familiar scent of blood pierced his nose.
It finally stepped into full view.
"...You."
A reptile with a familiar shape poked its head through the brush.
It was the dragon he had been searching for all this time.
But it was not in the 'condition' he had expected.
"Grrrrrr!"
Adkiel bared his teeth. It was not the sort of attitude a guide dragon should show to one of its own kind. This went far beyond threatening a troublemaking stray back to the herd; he looked ready to tear the intruder to pieces the moment a command was given.
He had sensed it too.
The man stared near the heart of the newly arrived dragon. He could sense no life force from it. Yet it had still made its way here. It had walked all this way dead, even mimicking the act of breathing. It was active in death.
Just as it had when it was alive.
He questioned himself in his confusion.
'Did it grow in the meantime? But this isn't the direction I intended...'
Furthermore, the sockets where the dragon's eyes should have been were hollowed out. Something black squirmed inside those empty pits.
Fwoosh!
It looked like an extremely dense, condensed shadow... or pure darkness.
"Grrrgh."
The dead dragon's mouth parted. A black energy slithered out, writhing like tentacles. He was now certain that the dragon had been completely consumed. At the same time, he had a very good idea of what kind of monstrosity was controlling the carcass.
He had seen this thing before.
A very long time ago.
Back then, it had been nothing more than a speck of dust, much smaller than it was now.
"...!"
He readied a spell. He had to capture it. He had to get his hands on that...!
Fwoooosh!
At that moment, shadows erupted from the dead dragon's entire body. They flailed like a living creature, washing over the area. He immediately tried to order his guide dragon to flee back to the pens...
"No!"
"Kyaaaaargh!"
His companion's desperate shriek echoed through the forest.
Like a fish caught in a net, the gold dragon was tangled in the darkness, thrashing wildly. Adkiel's face twisted in sheer terror. While holding him in an inescapable bind, claws forged of shadow slowly dug into the gaps between his gold scales.
The dragon herder leaped forward without a second thought. Right before his eyes, the fifty-sixth Adkiel—the one he had personally named—was being eaten alive.
Riiip!
Snap!
In an instant, the gold dragon's wing snapped and tore right from the root. A red gash opened between its torso and the wing, and blood poured out in a torrent.
His face contorted like a demon's as he roared.
"Adkieeeel!"
Impact.
The boiling darkness churned, forming sharp edges. It lashed out, trying to repel him.
The dragon herder continuously chanted spells to save the dragon from the swirling shadows. But the darkness acted like a mire, only swallowing the gold dragon. His companion was steadily being dragged deeper into the black fog.
He refused to lose him like this.
That dragon was his.
"...!"
Tearing through the darkness, he soon found his answer.
It was a way to save his companion, and a way to seize control of the monster.
He could tell what the monster wanted—why it had consumed the stray dragon, and why it was now trying to devour his companion on top of it.
It became obvious once he observed what the monster was doing to the dead dragon and the dying gold dragon.
'Life force!'
The monster was coveting life force.
The dynamic energy that moves living creatures. It hungered for fresh vitality.
Gritting his teeth, he raised his right hand. His blunt fingernails rapidly lengthened into sharp claws. Just like that...
Slaaash!
The dragon herder slashed his left arm with his claws. Human blood poured out.
In that instant, the churning mass wrapped around the gold dragon froze. Even though the air over there was already thick with the scent of dragon blood, the dense shadow monster had found a far more appetizing target.
Thick blood... condensed with a vastly superior life force.
"Look over here! How about this? I have something far more tempting... than mere dragon blood!"
This was prey of a far higher caliber, and there was no way the monster could mistake its priorities.
It was only natural. After all, this wasn't the first time it had tasted the dragon herder's blood.
Fwoosh!
The shadows, like the gloom of the abyss, clumped together and surged toward the wound on the dragon herder's left arm.
He offered no resistance.
*
The dragon, Adkiel, opened his eyes.
"Kyuuu?"
His vision swam before gradually coming into focus. His eyes were met with a deeply familiar face. His master, wearing a look of concern.
"Kyuu! Kyuuu!"
The gold dragon immediately lunged at him. This time, his master wasn't knocked over by the weight. Without even pausing to wonder at that fact, the dragon burrowed into his master's embrace. Even knowing there was no room for his massive body to fit, he rubbed against him.
The dragon understood the concept of death. A moment ago, he had truly believed he was going to die.
What in the world was that pitch-black monster?
He knew it hadn't been the lost dragon he was supposed to guide. In fact, it hadn't been a dragon at all... the thing had been different on a more fundamental level.
No, rather than different, it was simply wrong.
"There, there. Good boy."
Feeling the hand stroking his head, Adkiel calmed his startled heart. Only then did he have the presence of mind to look at his surroundings.
Where was the monster?
The surrounding area had been completely devastated. The dragon had seen a landscape like this only once in his life. When they had moved the pens, they had passed through a stretch of land where not a single tree grew, just like this.
At the time, his master had called that land... Ah, right. He seemed to have called it a 'Desert'.
But wasn't this definitely a forest?
An expanse that would have taken him a minute of flight to cross—even with his wings, the fastest in the pens—had been gouged out entirely and transformed into a lifeless wasteland.
The forest had vanished, as though a hole had been eaten away.
It was a landscape that couldn't be dismissed as a mere wildfire. With Adkiel's intellect and knowledge, he could not comprehend the phenomenon. He merely assumed his master had done something.
The monster was nowhere to be seen. Had his master eaten it? He might get a stomachache if he swallowed something like that recklessly. The dragon felt genuine concern for him.
Having just escaped terror, the dragon first worried about his master.
"Kyuu?"
Soon, his attention shifted back to himself.
And he became intensely bewildered.
Flap!
Both of his wings moved flawlessly.
Due to this phenomenon contradicting his memories, the dragon felt extreme confusion.
Just a moment ago, when he was caught by that pitch-black monster, back then... hadn't his left wing been completely torn off and severed?
It was a memory as intensely vivid as the clear pain. He couldn't be mistaken.
Even the small scratches left on his neck had disappeared.
"You're unharmed, right? You can move well?"
"Krrng!"
Adkiel purred in agreement. His contemplation did not last long. Anyway, being unharmed was all that mattered. There were already plenty of other things in this world that a dragon couldn't understand.
For example, his dead kin sprawled out over there.
"Sniff, sniff!"
He sniffed the remains of the Fire Dragon, which had turned into something like a shredded rag. Then he confirmed that the Dragon Heart inside it was gone. In that instant, Adkiel lost interest in the Dragon Corpse.
Meanwhile, an uncomfortable blur marred the man's vision as he watched to confirm his companion was unharmed. The shadow-like monster had been half-fused with the Dragon Corpse, and during the process of tearing it away, a smudge mixed with flesh and shadow seemed to have splattered onto his eyeball. He had cleaned what got on his body perfectly, but he couldn't exactly burn his eye to purify it.
"Wait here for a moment."
It was so sticky that it clung to the surface of his cornea, refusing to fall off. Blinking a few times did nothing to help.
"Kyuu?"
The dragon grew anxious and tried to follow him, but he commanded sternly.
"Stay!"
"Kyuuuu..."
Because of the force laced in his tone, the dragon dared not approach any closer.
It had to be this way. It would do his companion no good to see what was about to happen next. Furthermore, there was no danger in leaving the dragon here alone. His master's grave no longer existed in this place.
He moved in an instant. When he closed and opened his eyes, the surroundings were a normal forest. Dense trees, the cries of wild beasts, and the babbling sound of a small spring flowing could be heard.
Approaching the water, he shoved his fingers into his eye socket and plucked out his left eye. A black, sticky, tough stain clung to its surface. He washed it cleanly in the water. And then.
Fwoooosh!
Something like a black flame flared up from the empty eye socket.
'Adkiel would have a fit if he saw this.'
There was a disciple who lamented his master's death.
He thought he couldn't just let his master go like this. He believed that, one day, their kind would overcome even death. It seemed they only needed to hold on a little longer... but his master, who had lived far longer than he had, could not endure life any longer.
He thought: couldn't everything be suspended, just for a short while?
In the end, after she drew her last breath, the disciple violated his master's dying wish.
Therefore, he considered himself a sinner.
—Let me go... let me go... release me... to where I must go... to flow naturally... let me go...!
The Magic he had prepared for a long time was something no one in history had ever attempted.
The disciple had succeeded in binding his master's soul here instead of sending it to the spirit realm.
A spell to forcefully bind the separated spirit and flesh.
Once they were bound, it seemed they only needed to hold on a little longer. As a temporary measure until a perfect system for eternal life was established... his master only needed to wait while dead for a little while. If he let her soul wash away like this, he would never find it again. He had to prevent that at all costs.
—No... Ah...!
However, the Magic was not perfect. To trap her spirit within her cold body, he had poured his own overflowing life force into the corpse. Such Magic had never existed before. He had been the first to attempt it, and the first to succeed.
A technique that forged a miracle by offering his own life force as a sacrifice.
However, it had not been a perfect success, and it was not a perfect miracle.
Crunch! Crack!
He had tried to stop it, but as his master's spirit and flesh combined, they twisted into a bizarre form. The malformed fusion of spirit and flesh became something that was neither an object nor a spiritual body.
Shrinking and shriveling, she evaporated almost everything that composed her, leaving behind only a single speck of black dust.
Too weak, and too bizarre. He could not resurrect her in this state.
Because even that minuscule speck would evaporate if left alone, he sealed a fragment of what was once his master inside a barrier.
And after that, he had never visited the grave again. He had avoided it out of despair. He barely managed to erase the emotions and memories.
Fwoosh!
And today, after a long time had passed, he reunited with her in an unexpected form.
After a desperate struggle, he subdued her, who had become a more massive and denser darkness, and succeeded in trapping her inside his body using his life force as bait.
She was a master who had already lost her reason and turned into a monster, but he could not neglect her any longer. He decided he would no longer look away.
'I might be able to perfectly compensate for that half-success.'
His master had grown much stronger compared to the past, when she had seemed likely to easily evaporate.
He even wondered if this wasn't a golden opportunity.
It could be undone.
'Just like this, inside of me... you only need to wait a little longer. When the day of perfect eternal life comes, I will resurrect you in a pristine state. Just hold on until then.'
As one with him.
'But... keeping her exactly as she is now is too unsafe.'
Under the premise of trapping her inside his body, a safer measure was needed.
At this rate, she might devour him the moment he let his guard down.
'I'll make my body a prison for her, but it would be better to create a separate dimensional layer within my flesh to isolate her. Just like the spirit realm overlapping with the material world.'
A space for the sole purpose of holding onto her.
It could be considered a type of higher-dimensional subspace. A separate dimensional layer whose door no one could open without his permission.
Making that resolve, he looked at the left eyeball resting in his hand. A man's face reflected in the pupil. The dragon herder was there, a bizarre energy flickering in the place of his left eye. His hair color was a deep black, similar to the shadows. His remaining, unharmed right eye was shedding a very exhausted light.
And, that face...
*
The sinner awoke from his nightmare.
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