Leaving the shadows of the cellar and stepping back out under the eternal twilight of Valyria, the look in Ying Mo’s eyes had completely changed.
He held Comet, who had fallen back into a deep sleep.
His slender figure looked small and lonely against the warped silhouettes of the ruins, but his stride was remarkably steady.
Every step struck hard against the vitrified ground, ringing out with crisp clarity.
He had a clear goal and drive to match, like an engineer about to tackle a new project.
And in truth, he was.
Project Name: *Valyrian Dragonlord Fortress Resource Exploration and Extraction*.
Ying Mo framed his actions in his mind.
Project Objectives: First, acquire sufficient metallic resources to secure the energy supply for the core unit (Comet); second, locate any potential subterranean magma forge, leveraging the high-temperature environment to suppress his greyscale while preparing for subsequent material processing.
This was his survival code as a scholar holding a doctorate: transform the unknown and terrifying into a problem that could be analyzed, executed, and overcome.
First, he needed to solve the navigation problem.
From the noble manor where he stood to the central Great Keep, the straight-line distance was only a few kilometers.
But in Valyria, a straight line was never the shortest path.
Rolling clouds of visible purple mist and invisible toxic miasmas warped the very air over certain patches of ground—deadly traps all.
Ying Mo did not rush ahead recklessly.
He began to read the wasteland.
His gaze swept across barren stretches of obsidian ground, smooth as mirrors.
In those areas, the air had a thick, painterly texture.
He knew that signaled lethal concentrations of toxic substances; any carbon-based lifeform stepping into them would meet an obvious fate.
Indeed, the bleached animal skeletons lying within stood as grim warnings of the danger.
Soon, his attention was drawn to a few tenacious clinging lives.
On the shadowed sides of certain structures or in shallow depressions, patches of dark, felt-like moss were growing.
They clung tightly to the melted rock faces, greedily absorbing the only abundant nourishment in this land—free-floating chemicals in the air.
Chemoautotrophs, Ying Mo immediately deduced.
Similar ecosystems existed around Earth’s deep-sea hydrothermal vents.
These organisms did not rely on sunlight; instead, they derived energy by oxidizing sulfides and other chemical compounds.
Their very presence served as an environmental indicator.
This meant the air in these zones contained higher concentrations of sulfides or other metabolizable substances, but conversely, the concentration of corrosive or neurotoxic poisons fatal to higher organisms was bound to be lower.
He had found his safe path.
Ying Mo began advancing along the distribution belts of these black mosses.
His path was tortuous—sometimes passing through collapsed arches, sometimes weaving around massive pillars of melted stone—yet he never strayed from those unassuming ribbons of black life.
Doing so allowed him to seamlessly bypass one invisible death trap after another.
During his doctoral studies, he had researched structural mechanics and material stress distribution to design shock-absorption systems for high-precision instruments.
Now, that knowledge became his ultimate survival tool.
He gave a wide berth to the solitary spires towering in the distance.
To an untrained eye, they looked grand and majestic, symbols of Valyrian glory.
But in Ying Mo’s eyes, those towers were like trees hollowed out by termites—standing tall for now, but ready to collapse in a light breeze.
Any minor disturbance, like a gust of wind or a bird landing, could trigger a chain reaction that would bring them down in an instant.
He chose instead the semi-collapsed building complexes that had fused with the mountainside.
The rubble of these structures had formed new, stable triangular supports with the earth, making them far safer than those seemingly intact buildings.
In Ying Mo’s eyes, this silent wasteland was no longer a chaos of destruction, but a massive, decipherable labyrinth governed by logic and the laws of physics.
Just as he crossed a ruined plaza, Comet stirred on his back and woke up.
A wave of hunger, far stronger than before, flooded into Ying Mo’s mind like a tide.
*Hungry…
metal…
need…
energy…* Comet’s thoughts were fragmented, filled with anxiety and weakness.
Ying Mo paused and gently set the creature down.
He emptied his pockets, pulled out his completely dead smartphone, and held it out.
The phone’s circuit boards and casing contained trace amounts of precious metals.
Comet eagerly snapped it up and swallowed it whole, his throat making a crunching sound like chewing steel.
A few seconds later, he let out a burp.
A faint red light flickered at the tips of his wings, but quickly dimmed again.
Clearly, a drop of metal like this was just a drop in the bucket.
Comet lay limply on the ground, nuzzling his head against Ying Mo’s trouser leg, his obsidian eyes filled with longing and aggrieved need.
Ying Mo’s heart tightened.
He looked down at his ankle.
The grey patch seemed to have expanded another ring.
A sickening, numb itch ran beneath his skin, as if countless ants were gnawing at his flesh, seeking to assimilate it into cold, dead stone.
Time and resources were running out.
He raised his head and looked toward the Dragonlord Fortress drawing steadily closer.
The massive black tower stood like a silent monarch overlooking its apocalyptic domain.
Most of it had collapsed, but what remained stood firm, almost mocking the cruelty of time.
To others, it was a synonym for death and taboo.
To Ying Mo, it was an enormous, untapped deposit of resources.
He inhaled a deep breath of filtered air, his eyes gleaming with rational focus.
He couldn’t wait any longer.
He bent down, picked Comet back up, and spoke in a low but crystal-clear voice.
“We need to find a deep pocket…
and clean them out.” Without another moment of hesitation, he set off, striding briskly toward the fortress that represented the pinnacle of Valyrian power.