The stone pegs stuck out from the dark shaft like rotten teeth.
Kiran stood at the bottom of the chimney, craning his neck until his collarbone clicked.
The opening was barely four feet wide, cut straight up through the solid mountain ceiling.
Thirty feet overhead, the shaft disappeared into a black plug of fallen rock, choked with grey web-rot and dry dirt.
A foul, warm draft was leaking around the edges of the blockage, smelling of bad sulfur and burnt hair.
“Don’t pull on the fifth peg,” Torven warned from across the forge.
The old, wingless drake was lying near the glowing orange seam, his chin resting flat on his front paws.
“A human miner slipped on it two hundred years ago.
The iron spike underneath is rusted down to a needle.
It snapped his heel clean off.”
“Good to know,” Kiran muttered.
He reached down and tied his shirt hem tight around his waist so it wouldn’t snag on the rocks.
“Anything else I should know about the death ladder?”
“If the whole ceiling falls on you,” Vaelgor rumbled, not opening his eyes, “try to land outside the forge.
I just got comfortable, and I don’t want to sweep up ape bones.”
“Your concern warms my heart, Vaelgor.”
Kiran jumped, caught the first stone rung with both hands, and hauled his feet off the ground.
Two days ago, pulling his own body weight up a sheer wall would have left his shoulders burning within ten seconds.
He was just a high school kid who spent his afternoons bending over scooter carburetors.
Now, as his fingers wrapped around the cold, notched stone, his hands didn’t slip.
His grip locked shut like an iron vice.
The heat sitting deep in his gut—that strange, dense warmth he had pulled from the ember seam—stirred awake, flowing smoothly into his forearms and down his spine.
The stone didn’t feel freezing; it just felt solid.
[JYOTI]
Climb initiated.
Handhold integrity: Variable.
Bone density reinforcement: Active.
Advice: Do not look down.
It adds nothing to your balance.
I know how to climb a ladder, Jyoti, Kiran thought, stepping his left foot onto a narrow ledge.
He climbed steadily, hand over hand, testing each notch before putting his full weight down.
The air grew hotter and thicker as he rose above the forge.
The heat from the glowing seam down below rose into the narrow shaft like smoke up a chimney, baking his back.
Dust fell into his hair, stinging his eyes, but Kiran kept his breath slow, dragging the hot air through his nose and pushing it straight down into his belly.
Every time his chest expanded, his ribs felt firmer, like an iron cage holding his lungs safe against the foul draft.
Ten feet.
Twenty feet.
Down on the floor, Ignis looked the size of a green lizard, sitting nervously on his haunches with his crooked horn tilted up toward the dark hole.
Vaelgor and Torven were just two dark mounds of scale by the orange glow.
At thirty feet, Kiran’s head bumped against the blockage.
He wedged his boots firmly onto two stone pegs, threw his left arm over an iron bracket bolted into the shaft wall, and looked up.
It wasn’t just fallen gravel.
A massive slab of black slate, as wide as a tabletop, had slipped from the upper shaft and wedged itself diagonally across the chimney.
Behind it, tons of loose river stones, dry mud, and rotten wooden support beams had piled up into a solid, suffocating plug.
The weight of it was terrifying.
If he hit the wrong spot, the entire pile would drop like a loaded dump truck, crushing him against the wall before carrying him thirty feet down onto the anvil.
[JYOTI]
Structural Scan:
Blockage weight: Approximately 1,400 kilograms. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Keystone identified: Upper-right slate fracture.
Clear the pressure wedge first.
Do not strike the center.
A faint, pale-blue outline flickered against the dark stone, highlighting a long, narrow crack along the right wall.
Jammed into the crack was a thick wedge of petrified oak, wedged tight beneath the main slate slab.
Kiran reached into his waistband and pulled out his steel wrench.
“Okay,” Kiran whispered, his knuckles aching against the cold steel.
“Just like an old radiator bracket.
Remove the pin, let the rust drain.”
He slid the flat, hardened end of the wrench into the crevice right behind the wooden wedge.
He didn’t hammer at it wildly.
He braced his feet against the stone pegs, leaned his shoulder into the shaft wall, and shoved down on the long handle, using the tool’s leverage to pry the wood loose.
The old oak groaned.
A shower of dry, black dust poured down Kiran’s neck, blinding him for a second.
“Hurry up, boy!” Torven’s raspy voice drifted up from the floor, echoing hollowly in the pipe.
“The sulfur is backing down through the vents!
I can smell the yellow smoke!”
“I’m working on it!” Kiran yelled, wiping his eyes with his shoulder.
He shoved the wrench harder.
His breath hitched in his throat, and for a second, his boots slipped on the grit.
Panic spiked in his chest—a sudden, cold rush that made the hairs on his neck stand up.
Don’t panic, he told himself, locking his jaw.
Breathe.
He pulled in a deep lungful of the hot chimney air, dropped it into his navel, and drove the heat straight down into his arms.
His forearms flared with that deep, heavy ache.
His fingers tightened around the wrench until the steel handle felt warm in his grip.
With a low grunt, Kiran shoved his entire weight onto the lever.
CRACK.
The petrified wedge snapped in half.
The main slate slab tilted, scraping against the chimney walls with a horrific shriek of shearing stone.
“Look out below!” Kiran roared, throwing both arms over his head and pressing his face flat against the stone wall.
THUNDERRRR-CRASH!
The entire plug gave way.
Tons of slate, river gravel, and rotten beams tore past Kiran, missing his back by inches.
The rush of falling stone kicked up a blinding storm of grey grit, deafening him with the roar of falling rock.
Down in the forge, a massive BOOM shook the bedrock as the debris slammed into the empty stone trough next to the anvil, exploding into a cloud of pulverized dust.
Ignis shrieked like a scared chicken, scrambling under Vaelgor’s tail.
Up in the chimney, Kiran hung from his iron bracket, coughing violently, his shirt white with powder.
Then came the air.
With the plug gone, the chimney acted like a massive vacuum.
A huge, freezing draft of fresh mountain air came tearing down from the upper shafts, rushing past Kiran’s face with the force of a winter storm.
It smelled clean.
It smelled of snow, pine needles, and high, open sky.
The foul yellow sulfur and stale smoke were sucked straight up the pipe in a matter of seconds, leaving the shaft clear, cool, and breathable.
[JYOTI]
Side Quest Complete: Forge Vent Cleared.
Cultivation Progress: Iron Breath (First Stanza) reached 12.0%.
Bone density increase: Substantial.
Host grip strength: +30%.
Kiran let out a long, ragged laugh, his chest expanding with the clean mountain air.
“I’m alive!”
“Stop screaming like a gull,” Vaelgor called up, shaking a layer of white dust off his snout.
“Come down before you fall and make a mess.”
Kiran shook the dust from his hair, turned around on his stone pegs, and prepared to climb down.
Then something caught his eye.
Where the slate slab had been wedged against the shaft wall, a small, square hole had opened up in the rock—a hollow space carved into the granite that had been hidden behind the wooden beam for hundreds of years.
Inside the hollow, resting on a bed of dry stone chips, was a heavy iron box.
It was barely the size of a shoebox, covered in dark brown rust, but the corners were sharp, true, and welded together with clean, perfect seams.
Stamped right into the center of the iron lid was the familiar split circle with three dots on each side.
Kiran reached into the hollow.
His fingers touched the cold metal, and the box slid out easily.
It was heavier than it looked, solid and silent, with a small iron latch that had rusted shut.
He tucked the box under his left arm, grabbed the rungs with his right hand, and climbed back down the chimney.
When his feet touched the flat stone floor of the forge, he felt the difference immediately.
His knees didn’t buckle.
He didn’t even stumble under the extra weight.
He simply dropped to the floor with a quiet, solid thud, his boots planted firm on the rock.
Torven shuffled forward on his chained legs, coughing up a small puff of dust.
The old drake looked up at the chimney, where the clean draft was humming steadily, then looked down at Kiran.
“You cleared it,” Torven rasped, his cloudy green eyes blinking in shock.
“An ape…
with no claws…
pried a two-ton plug out of the stone.”
“Tools do the work,” Kiran said, wiping soot from his cheek.
He set the heavy iron box down on the anvil with a dull, metallic clink.
“And I found this up there.
It was behind the support beam.”
Torven froze.
The old dragon’s snout lowered until his nostrils were an inch from the rusted iron box.
He looked at the split-circle symbol stamped into the lid, his long, scarred neck trembling with an old, deep fear.
“The miners’ strongbox,” Torven whispered, his voice barely louder than the hum of the draft.
“They hid it before the soldiers came to collapse the shafts.”
Vaelgor stood up, limping over to the anvil.
His bronze eye narrowed, glowing with sharp interest as he looked at the rusted latch.
“Can you open it, old smith?” Vaelgor asked.
Torven shook his head slowly.
“The lock is inside the iron.
It was sealed with human mechanics.
A dragon’s claw would only crush the box and break whatever is inside.”
All three dragons turned their heads, looking down at Kiran.
Kiran looked at the rusted latch, pulled out his wrench, and gave the flat end a small, thoughtful tap against his palm.
“Let me see,” Kiran said.