The blue letters hung right in front of Kiran’s nose.
Host…
recognize this?
Kiran blinked, shaking his head.
“Recognize it?
How could I recognize it?
It’s just scratches on a rock.”
The blue screen went quiet for two long seconds.
The light flickered, the sharp edges blurring slightly, before snapping back into its usual flat, calm text.
[JYOTI]
Visual match failed.
Host memory registers no connection.
Query dismissed.
“Wait, don’t dismiss it,” Kiran whispered, leaning closer to the rough pillar.
“Why did you ask me that?
Do you know what this mark means?”
[JYOTI]
Host does not have enough authority to access that archive.
Kiran groaned under his breath, dragging a hand down his tired face.
“Of course.
Not enough authority.
Why did I even ask?”
“Quit muttering to the dirt, ape,” Vaelgor’s voice scraped across the cave floor.
The dragon hadn’t stood up, but his head was turned toward the pillar.
One bronze eye was cracked open, watching Kiran through the dim shadows.
“I was looking at this carving,” Kiran said, pointing with his wrench at the chisel marks in the stone.
“You said humans worked here five hundred years ago.
Did they leave this?”
Vaelgor gave a slow, bored blink.
“Who else would waste time scratching words into a pillar?
Dragons do not write on walls.
If a dragon wants to claim a mountain, he burns the face off it or leaves deep claw marks in the stone.
Only humans spend hours with tiny metal picks, scraping little lines.”
“Can you read what it says?”
“No,” Vaelgor grunted, closing his eye again.
“Why would I learn the language of cattle?
Dragon lords didn’t care what the miners whispered.
They only cared how many baskets of red ore came up from the deep cracks.”
“It says they buried something,” Kiran murmured, running his thumb over the jagged split in the carved circle.
“It says, We dug until the fire spoke.
We buried what was left.”
Vaelgor’s ear slits gave a tiny twitch, but the rest of his massive grey body remained completely still.
“Then they were fools,” the dragon rumbled, his voice muffled against his front claws.
“Down in the deep cracks, the fire does not speak.
It just melts your boots.
Now stop poking old rocks and sit down.
My shoulder feels like a hot nail is driven into the bone, and your pacing is giving me a headache.”
Kiran opened his mouth to reply, but before a word could come out, a loud, hollow noise echoed through the cavern.
Grumble-groan.
It sounded like an old metal pipe rattling in the basement.
Vaelgor’s golden eye snapped wide open.
His head lifted three inches off the ground, teeth bared.
“What was that?
Did something crawl through the vents?”
Kiran felt his face turn hot.
He wrapped his arms around his stomach.
“It was me.”
The dragon stared at him, bewildered.
“You make that sound with your throat?”
“No,” Kiran said, looking down at his ripped shirt.
“My stomach.
I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday morning.
Back home, I had half a slice of burnt toast.
That’s it.”
Vaelgor looked at Kiran’s belly, then back at his face, and let out a dry, hacking snort that kicked up a puff of dust. Find the original chapter at novelping.com.
“You hairless runts are pathetic,” the dragon said, resting his chin back on the stone.
“A young drake can go two months without tearing meat.
One day without dried grain, and your insides scream like a dying calf.”
“I’m sorry my body needs fuel to run,” Kiran snapped, leaning back against the cool stone of the pillar.
“If I don’t get water soon, I’m going to pass out.
You said there was water dripping back here.”
Vaelgor flicked the tip of his long tail toward the dark, narrow tunnel at the very back of the shelter.
“Go look.
But don’t drink anything that looks green or smells like sulfur, unless you want your guts to turn to water before dawn.”
Kiran pushed himself off the pillar.
His legs felt stiff, like cold wood, and his cloth-wrapped shoes were thick with yellow grit from the trail.
He walked carefully into the dark at the back of the cavern.
Away from the cave mouth, the air got cooler and lost that harsh, rotten-egg bite of the outside fog.
The only sound was the steady, rhythmic drip…
drip…
drip of water falling onto stone.
Kiran turned a corner around a stack of fallen rock slabs and stopped.
In a small hollow against the back wall, clear water was seeping out of a crack in the dark stone.
It dripped steadily from a pointed stone hanging from the ceiling, pooling in a hollowed-out stone basin on the floor.
The basin wasn’t natural.
Someone had chiseled it into the rock centuries ago to catch the drops.
Beside the basin lay a pile of rotted, black timber—the remains of an old wooden supply bench that had collapsed into splinters long ago.
Scattered among the wood rot were a few rusted iron hoops and the cracked grey bones of an old leather canteen.
Kiran knelt by the stone basin.
He didn’t plunge his face into it.
He leaned close, sniffing the surface.
It smelled clean.
No sulfur.
No sour vinegar like the ash worm.
A faint blue box appeared at the edge of his vision.
[JYOTI]
Water Analysis:
Mineral Content: High iron, low calcium.
Contaminants: None.
Status: Potable.
“Thanks,” Kiran muttered.
[JYOTI]
You are welcome.
Try not to drink it all in one gulp.
Your stomach will reject it.
Kiran cupped his dirty hands, rinsed them in the overflow on the floor, and then scooped up a handful of the clear, ice-cold water.
It was freezing.
It made his teeth ache, but when it hit his dry, scratched throat, it tasted better than anything he had ever had from a tap.
He took small, steady sips, forcing himself to wait between swallows until the dry burning in his chest faded into a cool, clean ache.
After four handfuls, he sat back against the rock wall and splashed cold water over his face and neck.
The soot and grime ran down his chest in black streaks, but his head felt clear for the first time since the fire in the shed.
He looked down at the rotted wood near his feet.
Half-buried under the black dust and crumbled timber was a small, round shape made of dull reddish stone.
It was about the size of an apple, worn smooth at the edges, with tiny, hair-thin lines of orange light frozen deep inside the rock like cracked glass.
Kiran reached out and picked it up.
It was surprisingly heavy, and the moment his fingers closed around it, a faint, gentle warmth seeped into his palm.
It felt like holding a river stone that had been sitting in the summer sun all afternoon.
[JYOTI]
Item: Low-Grade Ember Pebble (Depleted).
Type: Residual Fire-Ore.
Quality: Very poor.
98% of elemental energy has leaked away over centuries.
Remaining Energy: Minimal.
Kiran turned the warm pebble over in his fingers.
“Even almost empty, it still feels warm.”
He slid the stone into his front pocket next to his steel wrench, took one more sip of water, and walked back to the main cavern.
Vaelgor hadn’t moved an inch, but his breathing had slowed down.
The heat radiating off his scales was more steady now, like a campfire that had settled down into hot red coals.
Kiran walked over and sat cross-legged on the dirt, three feet away from the dragon’s snout.
“Find water?” Vaelgor asked, not opening his eyes.
“Yeah.
“I found this by the rotted wood.”
Vaelgor opened one golden eye, glancing at the small rock.
He gave a quiet, unimpressed grunt.
“A scrap of coal-grade ember rock,” the dragon muttered.
“The miners probably dropped it when the ceiling gave way.
In the Iron King’s city, a beggar wouldn’t even bend down to pick that up.”
“It’s still warm,” Kiran said.
“Because fire-ore holds heat until it turns to white dust,” Vaelgor said.
“A real warrior dragon eats high-grade fire cores the size of your head to feed his inner flame.
A scrap like that couldn’t warm a teacup.”
“Well, I’m not a warrior dragon,” Kiran said.
“I’m a human who doesn’t want to freeze.”
He wrapped both hands around the smooth red stone, letting the gentle warmth soak into his cold fingers.
Then, remembering the heavy feeling of the ash outside, Kiran closed his eyes.
He didn’t think about systems or quests.
He thought about what his dad always said when they were fixing the old water pump in the backyard: Don’t force the lever.
Let the weight do the work.
Kiran drew a slow, deep breath through his nose.
He didn’t pull the air into his upper chest.
He pushed it down, deep into his gut, holding it right below his belly button.
The warmth from the small red stone in his hands seemed to answer—a tiny, faint prickle of heat traveling from his palms, up his forearms, and directly into his chest.
That small spark beneath his ribs caught the warmth.
It didn’t flare like an explosion.
It turned slow and steady, like an old iron wheel beginning to roll.
The cold stiffness in his shoulders melted away.
The ache in his scraped knee dulled into a faint throb.
For ten minutes, the only sound in the cave was Kiran’s steady, deep breathing and the slow rise and fall of Vaelgor’s heavy chest.
When Kiran finally opened his eyes and let out a long breath, a tiny, faint ring of pale grey mist puffed out of his lips, vanishing into the air.
[JYOTI]
Cultivation Progress: 0.8% (Iron Breath).
Inner Heat: Stable.
Lesser Fire Energy absorbed from depleted stone: Negligible, but foundation established.
Kiran looked down at the red stone.
The faint orange lines deep inside it had faded, turning a dull, chalky grey.
The warmth was gone.
It was just an ordinary rock now.
Across from him, Vaelgor was staring at him.
Both of the dragon’s bronze eyes were wide open now, glowing with an intense, quiet light in the dark cave.
“What?” Kiran asked, suddenly self-conscious.
“Did I do it wrong?”
Vaelgor didn’t speak for several seconds.
His long tail gave a slow, thoughtful thump against the dirt floor.
“You pulled the heat out of the stone,” Vaelgor said, his deep voice very low.
“It was just a little warmth,” Kiran said, tossing the grey pebble onto the dirt.
“It felt nice on my hands.”
“Humans cannot pull energy from an ember stone with their bare skin,” Vaelgor said, his gaze fixed directly on Kiran’s chest.
“Human bodies do not have fire veins.
To take energy from ore, your people use silver needles, boiling pots, and crushed herbs to force the heat into their blood.
If a normal human tries to suck fire from raw ore, their fingers blister and turn black.”
Kiran looked down at his palms.
His skin was dirty and scraped from the rocks, but there were no burns.
No blisters.
His hands just felt pleasantly warm.
“Maybe the stone was just too old to burn me,” Kiran suggested, though his heart gave a nervous flutter.
Vaelgor slowly lowered his massive head back onto his paws, but his golden eyes stayed locked on Kiran, unblinking.
“Maybe,” the dragon murmured into the shadows.
“Or maybe whatever spirit dropped you on this mountain didn’t pull you from an ordinary nest.”
Outside the cavern, down in the thick yellow mist of the gorge, a low, deep thud vibrated through the stone floor.
It was followed by another.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Heavy footsteps.
Massive footsteps.
Moving slowly through the fog below, climbing up the narrow ledge toward the shelter.