Ember woke him up. She was salivating on him. It was a day dreamNicolas walked out of the association hall with the hunter license still warm in his hand. That is to say the plastic card felt lighter than the empty altar and heavier than every laugh Daniel had thrown at him. The clerk had stared at the mixed-blood name and the sudden growth of his body, but the system records did not lie. License approved. Rank: provisional. The Domain had already rewritten enough of him that no pure spirit could look at him the same way. Well, it could be said that this could be considered his prize.
He went straight to the Epic dungeon gate on the lower branches of Ragnar.
A small crowd of licensed hunters tried to stop him at the entrance. Voices rose. Someone grabbed his arm. Someone else stepped in front of the gate and shouted that a newly licensed mixed-blood had no business walking into an Epic gate alone. Nicolas did not raise his voice. He simply walked forward. Nothing to have. Nothing to fear. He was more than ready for this day. Nothing could stop him from succed. NO ONE WILL EVER DO IT. The hands on his arms could not hold him. The bodies in front of him could not move him. In that way the tectonic weight of Victoria’s Dao and the quiet certainty of Ember’s true fire had already settled into his bones. They parted around him the way soft earth parts around a mountain that has decided to move.
He stepped through the gate. Nicolas breathed deeply. He inhaled the air.
The Epic dungeon opened into a wide stone cavern thick with the stink of goblin nests and the heavier musk of giants. Five hundred goblins. Three hundred hobgoblins. Five giants. Fifty shamans already beginning their chants. The thing is the numbers meant nothing once the Dao answered.
Nicolas raised one hand and called Ember’s true fire.
White-gold flame did not simply erupt. It rewrote. The first wave turned the nearest goblin ranks into black ash before their screams could finish. The second wave rolled outward and the shamans’ water and nature wards boiled into nothing. At the same moment he let Victoria’s Prime Earth rise through his feet. The dungeon floor convulsed. An 8.0 earthquake tore through the cavern, splitting stone, collapsing side tunnels, and throwing the five giants to their knees. What is more the earthquake did not stop at the floor. It climbed the walls and brought the ceiling down in controlled, merciless sheets of rock that crushed hobgoblin packs by the dozen.
Ember’s true fire followed every crack. Goblins burned. Hobgoblins burned. The shamans tried to scream final curses and found their tongues already ash. The five giants rose once, roaring, and Nicolas stepped into the largest one’s shadow. He drove a single fist wrapped in white-gold flame and tectonic force straight through its chest. The giant’s heart cooked and ruptured in the same instant. The other four fell under the combined weight of fire that transformed and earth that refused to break.
When the last body stopped moving, the dungeon fell silent except for the soft crackle of cooling stone and the slow drip of molten blood.
Nicolas collected everything.
Five hundred thousand crystals. Relics still warm from the giants’ corpses and the shamans’ broken staves. He stored them without expression and walked back out of the gate. The same hunters who had tried to stop him were still standing there. None of them spoke. After all there was nothing left to say once the Epic dungeon had been emptied by a single mixed-blood who had been dismissed less than a night ago.
The clerk’s eyes widened at the volume. Five hundred thousand crystals and the relics converted cleanly into forty million rublos. Nicolas then placed fifty thousand Domain gold on the counter. The system exchange rate held. Another forty million rublos. Eighty million in total. The clerk’s hands shook while the transfer completed. Nicolas took the digital confirmation and left without another word.
He walked home along the upper branches of Ragnar while the artificial sun still hung in the same position it had held when he first vanished into the Domain. That is to say less than a handful of real-world minutes had passed since the empty altar, yet his body already carried the weight of years.
The door of the family house opened before he could knock.
Lili stood there first. Her crimson eyes went wide. The faint scent of night-blooming flowers around her trembled as she took in the new height, the denser muscle, the deeper metallic luster of his golden skin, and the quiet mountain weight that now lived under the sunset aura. She stepped forward and touched his face with both hands as if confirming he was still the same son.
“Nicolas… your body…”
Behind her, his father froze the way he had frozen the night of the failed awakening. The older Sun Elf’s golden eyes traveled from the license still in Nicolas’s hand to the quiet certainty in his posture. The Epic Colossal Goblin spirit flickered once behind the father’s shoulders and then settled, as if recognizing something it had never expected to see in mixed blood.
Nicolas did not waste words.
“I cleared an Epic dungeon. Alone. Five hundred goblins. Three hundred hobgoblins. Five giants. Fifty shamans. The association paid forty million for the crystals and relics. Another forty million for the gold I brought. Eighty million total.” This story is hosted at novelping.com.
Silence held for a long breath.
Then his father’s shoulders straightened. The earlier helplessness that had made him sob in the living room was gone. Pride settled into the older hunter’s face like a new foundation. He stepped forward and placed one heavy hand on Nicolas’s shoulder. The grip was firm, steady, and no longer broken.
“You did this… after they threw you out. Oh my baby! You did not deserve what they did to you. Oh come on! this cannot be left as if it were nothing. But at least, we already know that you are the best. Come huge dad and mom.”
Nicolas nodded once.
Lili’s eyes shone. She pulled him into her arms the same way she had the night of the empty altar, only this time her hands measured the new breadth of his back and the quiet power under his skin. What is more the hunger that had once whispered of cold blood now rested quiet and full, rewritten by fire and earth and the first real climb.
Outside, the branches of Ragnar continued their slow turn under the artificial sun.
Inside the house, the mixed-blood son who had been declared a nobody stood taller than both of his parents and no longer empty.
That is to say the Domain had only been the beginning.
Alright! Nicolas. Get the dick ready.
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