By midnight, the dragon was going cold.
A dragon was supposed to be a walking furnace, but as the hours dragged on, the heat coming off Vaelgor’s scales began to thin out like the warmth of a dying heater.
Kiran woke up shivering so hard his teeth clicked together.
The wind outside the stone slit had stopped howling, leaving behind a dead, heavy silence that felt even worse.
A thick frost was creeping over the black rocks at the cave entrance, turning the stones white and slick.
Kiran shifted his legs.
His feet were completely numb inside his burnt sneakers.
He pressed closer to Vaelgor’s flank, but the dragon’s iron-grey scales only felt lukewarm now.
“Hey,” Kiran whispered.
Vaelgor didn’t move.
His long tail lay limp across the rocky floor.
His chest rose and fell in slow, shallow jerks.
“Hey, lizard.
Wake up.” Kiran reached out and tapped the thick scale along the dragon’s side.
A low, dry groan rumbled through Vaelgor’s throat.
One eye opened a fraction of an inch, dull as unpolished brass.
“If you poke me again…
I will chew your fingers off,” Vaelgor rasped.
His voice sounded paper-thin.
“Your heat is dropping,” Kiran said, tucking his hands under his armpits to keep them from freezing.
“You feel like an engine that’s been left out in the snow.”
“A dragon’s fire…
lives in his blood,” Vaelgor muttered, his heavy eyelids sliding shut again.
“I have left half my blood…
across three mountain ridges.
If the core goes cold, the flesh turns to stone.
That is how drakes die.”
“Well, don’t die yet,” Kiran said.
“I don’t know how to walk down a mountain in the dark, and I’m not keen on freezing to death next to a giant corpse.”
[JYOTI]
Warning: Ambient temperature has fallen to -12°C.
Target’s internal heat generation: Declining.
Host core temperature: Declining.
Estimated time until frostbite: 42 minutes.
Can’t you do something about the temperature?
Kiran thought at the blue text.
Give me a heating skill or something!
[JYOTI]
Host does not possess energy manipulation skills.
This is not a toy shop.
Power must be cultivated, not handed out like dry bread.
Then what is the point of you being here?
[JYOTI]
To point out reality.
Currently, the dragon’s wound is blocked by fractured bone and crushed rock.
His energy cannot circulate to his chest.
Clear the obstruction, or both of you will freeze.
Kiran blew out a shaky breath that formed a cloud of white fog in the darkness.
He crawled around Vaelgor’s massive shoulder, keeping low so his head wouldn’t scrape the jagged ceiling.
The smell near the beast’s left wing was terrible.
The dark, thick blood had mixed with black grit and sharp slivers of rock from when Vaelgor dragged himself under the overhang.
A piece of jagged basalt, as long as Kiran’s forearm, was wedged deep into the torn flesh right beside the wing joint, pinning a flap of scale back and keeping the wound wide open.
“There’s a rock stuck in your shoulder,” Kiran said, kneeling in the dirt.
Vaelgor gave a weak twitch.
“Do not touch it.
The pain will make me thrash, and the noise will bring the hounds.”
“If I leave it, you bleed out, your fire dies, and we both turn into popsicles,” Kiran retorted.
“Hold still.”
Kiran took a deep breath, reached into his back pocket, and pulled out the old steel wrench he had carried from the repair shed on Earth.
It wasn’t a weapon, but the cold metal felt familiar and solid in his grip.
He slid the flat end of the tool against the jagged stone wedged in Vaelgor’s flesh.
“On three,” Kiran warned.
“One.
Two—”
He didn’t wait for three.
He shoved the tool down and levered the stone out with all his weight.
Vaelgor’s entire body went rigid.
A muffled, strangled hiss tore through the dragon’s clenched teeth, shaking the whole stone ledge.
His tail whipped sideways, smashing a boulder into rubble with a sickening crack.
Kiran tumbled backward into the dirt, clutching his wrench, his heart in his throat.
The black stone fell away with a wet thud.
Fresh, steaming blood welled up from the tear—dark as ink and burning hot.
As the foul, clotted dirt drained out, a faint orange glow flickered beneath the broken scales around Vaelgor’s ribs, like dying coals buried under ash.
Vaelgor lay shuddering, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
“You…
miserable ape…
I told you…”
“You’re not dead,” Kiran muttered, wiping soot and a speck of scalding blood from his cheek.
“Now close the wound.
Can’t you dragons do that fire thing?”
“It requires…
focus,” Vaelgor growled, his eye glaring at Kiran with pure exhaustion.
“My blood is wild.
It does not obey.”
“Listen to the engine,” Kiran said without thinking.
Vaelgor paused, his slitted pupil narrowing.
“What?”
“My dad used to say that when the old generator seized up,” Kiran said, sitting cross-legged on the frozen ground.
“When things break, you don’t fight them.
You have to feel where the air wants to go.
Stop fighting the pain.
Just pull the heat from your belly into your chest.”
Vaelgor stared at him as if Kiran had grown a second head.
“You speak of blood circulation like a blacksmith talking about an old bellows.
Dragon cultivation is not—”
The dragon stopped.
He grimaced, letting out a slow, shuddering breath through his nostrils.
A dull rumble started deep within Vaelgor’s ribcage.
The faint orange light beneath his scales grew brighter, shifting from the dull red of dying wood to a sharp, copper glow.
The heat returned.
It washed over Kiran like the blast from an open furnace.
The thick blood around the torn wing began to sizzle and dry, crusting over into a hard, black scab that sealed the exposed flesh against the freezing air.
Vaelgor’s head slumped heavily onto his front paws.
The shivering stopped.
[JYOTI]
Target’s condition: Stabilized.
Host action evaluated: Rough, unrefined, but marginally effective.
Relationship with Vaelgor: Improved from ‘Annoying Insect’ to ‘Tolerable Pest’.
Progress: 3%
Thanks for the high praise, Kiran thought, leaning back against the dragon’s warm side.
The heat soaking through his thin clothes was heaven.
His frozen toes began to prickle with painful pins and needles as the blood returned, but he didn’t care.
“You have strange thoughts in that hairless skull, human,” Vaelgor murmured, his voice stronger now, though still heavy with fatigue.
“I have a name,” Kiran said, closing his eyes.
“It’s Kiran.”
“Kiran,” Vaelgor repeated slowly, tasting the syllables.
“It sounds soft.
Like something that breaks under a claw.”
“It means ray of light,” Kiran murmured.
“A ray of light cannot stop a spear,” the dragon grunted.
“Sleep, Kiran.
When the moons drop, the sky turns clear.
That is when the real hunters take flight.”
Kiran didn’t need to be told twice.
The sheer exhaustion of the last few hours hit him all at once—the fire in the warehouse, the terror of the leap between worlds, the freezing cold, and the giant beast beside him.
He pulled his torn jacket tightly around his shoulders, pressed his back against the warm, steady rise and fall of Vaelgor’s flank, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Light woke him.
It wasn’t the soft, yellow morning sunlight that filtered through the curtains of his bedroom at home.
It was a harsh, silver glare that cut straight into his eyes.
Kiran sat up abruptly, rubbing his face.
The cave opening was filled with bright, sharp dawn.
The two moons were gone, replaced by a massive, pale sun that hung low on the horizon, ringed by a faint halo of golden dust.
Beside him, Vaelgor was already awake.
The dragon was lying still, his head raised near the entrance, watching the open valley below.
His broken horn caught the pale sunlight, the jagged edge looking dark and rough against his slate-grey scales.
Kiran crawled to the edge of the rock shelf and looked out.
The breath left his lungs.
The night had hidden the world, but the morning showed everything.
There were no cities.
There were no roads.
There were only colossal, jagged mountain chains of black and red stone, tearing through oceans of grey clouds like the spines of buried giants.
In the far distance, miles across a yawning canyon, huge pillars of carved stone rose out of the mist—ruins of ancient towers so tall they made skyscrapers look like toothpicks.
High above the distant peaks, tiny specks moved against the silver sky.
They weren’t birds.
Even from miles away, Kiran could see the wide, sweeping wings and long, serpentine tails gliding through the clouds in steady, patrol patterns.
“This is the Dragon Waste,” Vaelgor said quietly from behind him.
“The border between the Iron Peak Dominions and the Dead Lands.”
Kiran gripped the edge of the stone, his knuckles white.
His home was not over the next ridge.
His parents were not waiting down the road.
The reality of it slammed into his chest like an iron bar.
He was stranded in a world ruled by monsters, wearing half a shirt, with nothing to his name but a rusty wrench and a strange blue voice in his head.
“Why are they hunting you, Vaelgor?” Kiran asked, his voice shaking slightly.
“What did you do?”
Vaelgor’s bronze eyes hardened, the gold fire inside them turning cold as winter ice.
“I defied the King,” the dragon growled, his voice vibrating with an old, bitter rage.
“He ordered my mother into the front lines of the southern war as fodder to clear an ancient ward.
When the royal guards came to take her…
I broke the commander’s jaw.”
Vaelgor slowly lowered his horned head, staring down at his scarred front claws.
“They shattered my horn, stripped my blood-rank, and threw me from the aerie.
Now, any drake who brings my skull to the capital earns ten bags of spirit stone.”
Kiran looked at the dragon’s broken horn, then out at the endless, brutal expanse of stone and sky.
Before he could speak, the blue screen snapped open in front of his eyes.
[JYOTI]
Main Quest Triggered: The Path of the Exile.
Objective: Escort Vaelgor to the safety of the Sunken Gorge.
Distance: 140 Leagues.
Reward: Cultivation Method (Initial Tier: Iron Breath).
Failure: Death by aerial execution.
Kiran swallowed hard, looking at the distant mountains.
“Vaelgor,” Kiran said slowly.
“What, ape?”
“Where is the Sunken Gorge?”
Vaelgor’s head snapped around, his golden eye wide with shock.
“How do you know that name?”