“H-How did you find my spatial node?” The Veil Dragon cultivator, once so certain of victory, stared at Jared as if beholding a ghost.
“Your grasp of space is still a child’s game,” Jared said, the Dragonslayer Sword hovering a breath from the boy’s brow. “So, shall we talk, or will you follow that Demon Dragon Soul into oblivion?”
Sword intent and the pure golden dragon aura rolling off Jared quenched the boy’s arrogance in a single breath, leaving only tremors of fear across his pallid face.
He could sense that Jared had returned remade, each breath thrumming with a weight that pulled the timbers of the cell toward him like iron filings. That pressure, half raw power and half ancestral dragon blood, shattered every scrap of bravado in the Veil Dragon cultivator who called himself Thousand Faces.
Shivering, Thousand Faces lowered his head and began to speak.
He said the Beast-Subduing Tower held nine tiers. The lowest three were no more than prison blocks for common Draconians and lesser hybrid breeds whose crimes were petty compared with what lay above.
The middle three levels were harsher. There, the tower caged rare bloodlines, older wyrms of formidable talent, and changelings like himself who could mimic any scale or skin.
The upper three levels were legend wrapped in iron. Even Thousand Faces knew little beyond rumor. Those floors were reserved for ancients who had insulted primordial sages, for Draconians drenched in millennia of karmic debt, even for those who committed the greatest sins.
According to him, the sudden violence of the tower’s restraints came from above.
Something old had stirred on those forbidden tiers and was now siphoning strength from every captive below. Its goal was simple and terrifying: to batter the final seal and break into the world beyond the tower walls.
“Break the seal?” Jared whispered, tasting the words like ash.
He tightened his brow. “If it succeeds, what happens?”
“I do not know,” Thousand Faces admitted, voice thin as reeds.
Fear flickered behind his eyes. “But disaster is certain. Nothing harmless lives on those top floors, and the way it drains us now is destructive in itself.”
A chill crawled along Jared’s spine. The crisis was larger than one rescue. He still had to free Cyanna and Coall. Yet he must also stop the waking monster upstairs, or, if it broke free, the consequences would be unthinkable.
“Can you open the wards that bar the sixth floor and beyond?” Jared asked.
Thousand Faces grimaced. “I cannot… The strongest seal lies between the central and upper sectors, bound directly to the tower heart. Unless someone reaches, or commands, that heart, no gate will yield.”
“Then where is the tower heart?” Jared pressed.
“No one knows,” Thousand Faces said. “Legends claim it drifts inside the tower, sometimes a full floor, sometimes a hidden seam between floors.”
Jared fell silent, then closed his eyes and inhaled. Golden Dragon Aura rolled off him in shimmering concentric ripples, each pulse carrying amicable intent rather than conquest as it seeped through mortar and bar.
“Beast-Subduing Tower,” he called, voice lined with draconic power, “I am Jared Chance, descendant of the Golden Dragon. I sense disorder within these walls and have come to restore it. Show yourself to me!”
The declaration rang along every beam and chain.
For a breath, nothing answered; then the entire tower lurched, stone groaning like a ship in a sudden gale.
An intelligence colder than glacier water flooded the fifth floor, vast and emotionless. Its presence pressed against bone and thought alike.
“Golden Dragon… Bloodline… Intruder… Disrupting… Order… Must be destroyed!” The words landed in shards, jagged with rage.
Power heavier than any foe Jared had yet faced coiled behind that fragmented decree—wild, chaotic, and immeasurably strong.
The entire floor trembled as an ear-splitting boom tore through the gloom.
At the center of the fifth level, the very air twisted like molten glass. From that fracture rose a colossal silhouette, half-transparent and woven from countless runes and swirling spatial energy.
It had no fixed form. One heartbeat, it coiled like an ancient dragon; the next, it stacked into the shape of a tower, each shift radiating an authority that threatened to crush all beneath it.
This was the Tower Spirit of the Beast-Subduing Tower—or to be precise, the spirit that was controlled by the ancient will on the upper three levels.
No greeting came. The corrupted spirit lashed out the instant it appeared.
