“Sir…” The single syllable left Jared’s cracked lips like a plea whispered through dust-dry lungs. Relief flared, then fled. His chest caved inward, knees turning to water, and the world pitched. The breath he forced out carried flecks of bright blood—royal lifeblood he had burned without hesitation, leaving his body hollow, spent, trembling on the edge of collapse.
“You have done wonderfully,” the Tower Spirit said, his timbre deep and gentle, as if every word were a hand steadying Jared’s faltering soul.
A current—pure, verdant, unmistakably alive—surged from the phantom’s upraised palm. It poured through Jared’s veins, knitting shredded flesh, stitching torn meridians, filling the hollows that pain had carved inside him with liquid sunrise.
“The wretch sealed on the upper level spent centuries corroding my mind, hoping to seize the tower and drain every drop of Draconian strength to break free. Had you not come, had your Golden Dragon Bloodline not awakened me, all would be lost.” The old phantom’s eyes burned with renewed clarity as he spoke.
With the true Tower Spirit awake, every berserk ward within the Beast-Subduing Tower fell silent. Snaking black energy that had haunted each tier thinned, then vanished like smoke in a gale.
Far below, Cyanna and Coall straightened. The crushing force that had gnawed at their bones dissolved, leaving only stunned relief ringing in their chests.
“Now…” the Tower Spirit murmured, resolve sharpening each syllable, “We finish what was begun above.”
A hard glint lit his gaze. “Child, follow me to the tower heart. To quell this upheaval and claim full command of the tower, I will need every spark of your strength.”
Silver-white light unfurled from the spirit, enclosing Jared like the petals of a moonlit blossom. Light closed over them, and the world folded.
The next heartbeat found them standing inside a boundless void whose borders shimmered with wheeling constellations and silver threads of space itself.
At the center hovered a crystal heart, forever shifting form, shedding rolling coronas of colorful radiance. It was the Beast-Subduing Tower Core: the very font of spatial nascence.
“Place your hand upon the tower heart and pour in your Golden Dragon Bloodline and divine soul imprint,” the spirit directed, voice low with ceremonial weight.
“Whether it accepts you depends on fate. Beware, its power can sunder flesh and spirit alike if you falter.” The warning echoed like distant thunder across the star-bright void.
Jared’s stare never wavered. Determination glinted in weary eyes that refused to yield even to exhaustion’s pull.
Step by measured step, he approached it, drew one breath to steady the quake of his heart, and pressed his palm against its prismatic surface.
A detonation, greater than any thunder, shook creation’s bones. It felt as though a million volcanoes erupted inside him at once, every eruption a sun, every sun a furnace roaring to melt his mortal shell.
Unfathomable torrents of dimension law, raw data of distance and direction, flooded his limbs, his marrow, his very consciousness field, threatening to drown thought itself.
Body and spirit stretched toward rending, pain so vast it eclipsed vision. Oblivion beckoned at the edge of every heartbeat.
“Hang on! Guide the power. You are a Golden Dragon sovereign; this heart is yours to command!”
The Tower Spirit’s proclamation boomed through Jared’s mind like a cathedral bell, steadying his flickering consciousness.
Teeth bared, Jared summoned the imperious will entwined within his exalted blood. He seized the wild current, bent it, forced it to flow, and branded the depths of the crystal with the indelible mark of his soul, stroke by agonizing stroke.
The trial became an anvil where pain was the hammer, striking without mercy, forging resolve from molten anguish.
Skin split, healed, split again. Fresh blood soaked his tattered robes, yet Jared’s eyes—clear, unwavering—never once left the radiant heart that now answered to his command.
At last, the raging tide of power began to ebb. What had moments ago been a cosmic maelstrom now smoothed into quiet, laminar currents that circled Jared like a docile sea.
In that hush, he felt the tower breathe with him, bone to bone, vein to vein, responding to a single thought as naturally as his own hands.
A shard of crystalline light, its very tower heart, folded itself into a streak, slid between his brows, and came to rest inside his consciousness field, pulsing in solemn harmony with the Golden Tome suspended there.
Success—undeniable, thundering success—flashed through him like sunrise over black water. He had tamed the Beast-Subduing Tower.
The moment the tower heart yielded, every level, corridor, and rune within the ancient edifice fell under his absolute command.
With a mere flicker of will, he saw its interior as though standing in each chamber at once.
On the seventh floor, he met the slow, slumbering breath of an ancient dragon, a creature so vast it seemed to wrap the whole floor in its sleeping coils.
The eighth floor held only bones—titanic, silvered, belonging to a Time-Space Dragon that had once dared to wrench history backward and paid for its heresy with eternal chains.
On the ninth floor, there raged the source of every earlier tremor: a colossal Devourer Dragon, scales the hue of tarnished gold, eyes swirling crimson like twin whirlpools of blood. Born to feast upon its own kind, the Devourer Dragon battered the final seal, screeching its refusal to accept a new master.
