The Dragon Heir

Everyone was tired, scraped raw by the winter itself, bodies aching and nerves flayed thin, and now they were forced to spend the night in absolute darkness. Wrapped in a lethal fog that carried bizarre, shrieking things which sounded perfectly capable of killing them over a single misplaced breath. Being cultivators bought them time, but not safety.

They were not at red core yet, where the body changes enough to shoulder the full abuse of the cold without complaint, but neither were they helpless, empty-handed mortals. Even with their mana crippled by the chains biting into their limbs, they could endure more than most. That limit had not been reached yet. Not tonight.

Using the cover of darkness, I slipped free of my own chains, the faint noise swallowed whole by the fog and the unhinged screeches rolling through it. I lingered for a while instead of leaving, choosing to watch over my fellow prisoners.

They did not see me, and even if it had been broad daylight, they would not have.

For all their despair, I could still feel something stubborn burning inside them. They were not ready to fold. Not today, at least.

I sighed, my thoughts circling back to the beginning, as they always did. What exactly was my trial here? Was I meant to save these people? It did not feel like it, considering every trial I had read about had been obsessed with survival and little else.

And yet my gaze drifted back toward the Waryn camp. The fog choked my senses, but I knew where they were all the same. I doubted I would have survived this fog if I had chosen to butcher them all at the start.

Irony had teeth, it seemed, because my jailors were the reason I was still breathing.

They understood this world far better than I did. It was nothing like the future I remembered, where no one above gold core was allowed to exist on the continent, where gods no longer answered prayers, and where dragons had faded into half-forgotten nonsense.

How had it all gone wrong… or right? That question gnawed at me, and now the answers finally felt close enough to taste. I might actually be able to dig them out, one by one, and put them to rest. None of that changed the truth that this world was more dangerous and far less predictable than I would have liked.

Without their knowledge, I would have died already.

The trials were supposed to be cruel, there was no arguing that, but they were not unfair. Staring into the swirling fog and listening to the distant screams, I realized that I, too, held pieces of the puzzle. Now I just had to recognize each one and use them carefully. Preferably while keeping everyone here alive, if that was even possible.

I was not generous enough to gamble my life for strangers, but who knew what waited for me in the remaining trials. As I straightened, the thought settled in with an uncomfortable clarity: the trial had always been survival. The difference was that simply surviving, without looking ahead, would cripple me in the long run. And I had no intention of limping through the future if I could help it.

Standing close to the fog, I channeled my mana and shaped my clone. She manifested beside me and immediately bent the ice beneath her feet into a crude but serviceable tunic. This one was the curious one, which made her perfect for what I intended.

I had come to understand that my clones were not merely fractured slivers of my personality. They were that, certainly, but more than that, each of them carried a singular way of viewing the world, born from parts of my own being pushed to their absolute extremes. The curious one was not simply inquisitive; she was also obsessed with the unknown. She drifted closer to the fog at once, eyes wide, the wheels behind her thoughts audibly turning as she studied it from a different angle, a different point along the invisible circle enclosing us.

I set to work as well, focusing on the fog itself and dissecting its nature. For something wielding such immense power, it looked disappointingly ordinary, at least on the surface.

What it lacked was far more interesting: intent. There was no will to harm me, no hostility aimed in my direction. What I felt instead was indifference. To it, my presence meant nothing at all, which, if I was being honest, was exactly what I was to it. That indifference also explained the monsters roaming within the fog. To the fog, they were irrelevant, unworthy of notice, let alone correction.

So what stopped us from simply walking into it and finding our way through? That answer came second. Incompatibility. A fundamental rule that forbade coexistence. When I allowed an arm to pass into the fog, my clone’s arm, not mine, I was not suicidal, I felt resistance at once. A biting cold surged upward, seeping into the body like a creeping verdict.

It did not feel like an attack, nor even resistance in the conventional sense. It felt like law. The sensation stripped away my freedom to move, as though motion itself had been revoked. For the first time, my considerable strength meant nothing. This was not something that could be bullied aside with brute force.

However, there was one attribute I possessed in equal measure. Willpower. And in that moment, I finally grasped how higher powers might truly function. Whatever rule declared me incompatible with the fog was enforced by its own will, a will far greater than mine. Even so, my own will eclipsed that of most others who stood here.

Stolen from NovelFire, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

So instead of commanding my muscles, I commanded myself. I pushed with will alone. It felt wrong, deeply unnatural, but in that instant of refusal, my will pressed back. The invisible law faltered, and my arm moved, briefly freed from the freezing grip that had locked it in place.

It was far from easy. It felt as though my entire body had rusted solid, all while bearing the constant pressure of a platinum core god’s presence, indifferent or not. And yet, I succeeded.

That small victory pulled a smile from me. I could work with this.

The clone’s timer was nearing its end, so I reeled her back in and began laying out my plan. The sensible choice, the one anyone else here would have made, was to trust my jailors. They were experienced, hardened by this place, and charging headlong into the unknown sounded like a well-documented method of dying stupidly. But perhaps that was precisely the point. They could not explore because they physically could not.

I could. And if I could, then I should. The curious clone agreed, too. I could feel her excitement even while I was still directing her movements. She was part of me, after all, so understanding her came easily.

I checked on the prisoners one last time. They were resting despite the snow, huddled and battered, yet strangely calm, almost peaceful for the first time since this nightmare began. I smiled at that and stood. No one was going to start a disaster tonight.

Time to get to work.

I expelled the curious clone again, then slipped fully into her body and stepped into the fog. The unseen rule descended on me at once, locking me in place like an invisible vise, but I pushed back with willpower and forced myself fully inside. My teeth clenched as I took one step, then another. After a few dozen steps, I already hated this place. It smothered everything. My senses dulled, my abilities sagged, and most of what I relied on simply refused to function. I could not dash. I could not slip into the shadows. The fog itself was coldness made manifest, blocking nearly everything I tried to do.

The first priority was simple: identify what kind of creatures lived inside this mess. If possible, learn something useful about the fog along the way.

I could hear them, at least. Gurgles, shrieks, wet sounds echoing from somewhere ahead. I focused on the general direction, and that was when I noticed a subtle disturbance in the fog, like something moving through it rather than with it. A ripple, faint but there.

The comparison clicked the moment I saw it.

“An eel.”

Despite the low visibility, the fog choking my senses and the darkness pressing in from all sides, I could see enough to recognize it. And just like that, another question answered itself. That massive eel-like monster we had encountered earlier had never been out of place. It belonged here. It was a denizen of the fog.

Listening to the overlapping screeches and noises around me, the realization settled in deeper. This was not just a monster-infested mist. It was also an ecosystem. The fog itself functioned like a world. It was self-contained and alive. Maybe that was how the people here understood it as well. If not for my peculiar ability to pit the world against my own soul and gauge its weight, I doubted I would have recognized it for what it truly was.

A living thing.

And a really fucking powerful one at that.

I did not get the luxury of thinking for long. The eel had already sensed me and was coming in fast, moving through the fog the way a real fish cuts through water. There was no resistance or hesitation. That alone raised an ugly question. What made it exempt from the rule that had nearly pinned me in place?

It screeched as it lunged. I tried to snap a tentacle up to intercept it, only to find the movement painfully sluggish. I could not even get it halfway up before the eel was on me, jaws yawning wide, rows of serrated teeth glowing slightly in the gloom. I expelled mana, tried to rob it of momentum, tried to shape and bind it in place. Nothing worked.

The fog did not discriminate between flesh and mana. The moment my power left my body, the fog froze its very concept. It carried a trace of my will, but nowhere near enough to matter. Out here, my mana might as well have been decorative.

For the first time in a while, I was truly powerless. Even my abilities crawled into existence at an infuriating pace. I tried to force scales to erupt over my body, but the fog slowed that too. The eel crashed into me and tore my entire arm clean off at the shoulder. I survived only because I twisted at the last instant, saving my head by a margin I did not care to measure.

Even though it was only a clone’s body, the pain still slammed into me. I hissed and staggered back, watching as the eel wheeled around for another pass. At least I was beginning to read its movements now. It was all physical, brute and direct. I had not seen it use any abilities yet. That should have been comforting. It was not.

The thing was weaker than me, objectively speaking, but this was its domain. I was a guest stripped naked of everything that made me dangerous, standing in the middle of its dining room like an idiot.

It lunged again and again. I dodged, clumsily and desperately, each evasion costing me blood. By then my body was finally encased in durable golden scales, thick enough to keep me alive. I managed to land a few hits in return, my quantum-attuned claws carving bloody gashes along its slick body.

Then, just as it coiled for another attack, it stopped.

And fled.

I blinked.

What the fuck?

A moment ago it had been utterly committed to eating me. Had my stubborn refusal to die somehow intimidated it? I would not complain if my sheer draconic tenacity had scared it off, but—

The thought died unfinished as an overwhelming pressure slammed down on me. It was there for an instant. Absolute. And then it vanished as suddenly as it had come. A heartbeat later, a distant screech echoed from the direction the eel had fled.

Something else was here.

And whatever it was, it had just reminded the eel of its place in the food chain.

The fog churned violently, as if something enormous was moving just beyond the reach of my sight. I understood immediately why the eel had fled.

A massive fin sliced through the fog. It had to be at least fifteen meters long, so large it dwarfed everything around it, and even then I could not see where it ended. The body remained completely hidden, swallowed by the mist as if the fog itself was shielding it. Whatever this thing was, it was a gold core beast.

I did not even have time to curse properly.

Darkness engulfed me as colossal, ivory-white teeth descended, towers of bone closing in from every direction. The last thing I felt was the pressure of them sealing shut, and with it came that familiar, intimate sensation of absolute death. My scales might as well have been parchment. Organs ruptured, bones shattered, my body crushed between teeth the size of buildings.

And yet, in those final moments, I was smiling.

Because I had what I needed now. A real plan. A way to turn this fog from an execution ground into a weapon.

The final puzzle piece had slid neatly into the place.

My eyes opened back among the prisoners, my true body intact, just as a massive explosion thundered somewhere deep within the fog.