Chapter 760: Master of the Mortal Realm
There were things Eira feared when it came to Phei Ryujin Tiamat.
The cathedral hollow now buried under a black-white shroud of ice was not, by any stretch, was on her list.
She had run.
She had run because she was an Original Void-Ice Fairy, the living embodiment of the element seated in two forms: hers, and now his—his alone, a cosmic parasite that had just learned how to bite the hand that once fed it.
She did not run because it could harm her or freeze her like the Titans.
She had run because every instinct had screamed, in the same heartbeat the apocalyptic wave crossed the perimeter, that the boy at the center of the wave was no longer operating in any form of his element a fairy could survive at low altitude.
Even now—wave abated, hollow retracted into obedient stillness—she hovered at distance.
Not chosen by reason but by something older than reason.
Every fiber of her frame was howling at her to stay outside the field of his attention, and she had learned, over ages, to obey what her body screamed.
She feared could have frozen her into a pretty ornament and left her there dangling for at least a minute, just to see if she’d crack under the weight of his boredom.
That was not what had terrified her.
What had terrified her were his eyes.
The flat amethyst eyes that had opened in the chains and looked out at the cathedral hollow had no emotion for absolutely nothing.
No rage or triumph, exhaustion, neither relief.
Only the precise emotional vacuum.
The hollow had paid the price for ten full minutes while the wave settled.
Without Maya—sweet Maya her role yet to wake and leash him—no one in the upper world could have stopped him in that emotionless
Eira flew closer... cautiously.
Usually, she would have drifted in for a long, appreciative stare at the godly almost-naked body before her, the regeneration had restored—that magnificent, dangling cock his ruined tunic could not entirely hide, resting like a threat and a promise above the black-white snow.
She loved that body, that cock especially.
Two of her three favorite perks of her Cosmic Dragon master.
She had spent the last three weeks or so worshipping them with the lazy hunger like she had waited millennia for such a weapon to call her own.
She did not approach now though and just hovered at distance.
Phei knelt on one knee in the center of the powdered hollow. He scooped a handful of the black-white snow, packed it absently in his bare palm.
Balanced it... he considered it like he was weighing whether to swat a fly or level a city.
A small flicker of his element folded the collected snow and the snowball hardened, he then it hardened again.
Then it kept hardening, compressing under casual intent through three orders of density the powdered snow had no right to achieve.
The marble in his palm now weighed what a small cannonball weighed, surface shifting from black-white to the deep mirror-black of Void-Ice at its uttermost peak, core compacted until the cathedral hollow’s air itself felt the localized gravitational tug when his hand moved.
A casual flex that made the very fabric of existence of the domain he had created, whimper and beg for mercy.
He hurled it so fast, it broke a sonic barrier.
The cathedral hollow’s substrate cracked—a long horizontal corridor of distortion ripped open along the projectile’s path, reality unable to part fast enough, splitting with a sustained sonic scream that tore the length of the hollow in the same heartbeat the snowball crossed it.
Frost-spires along the flight path shattered outwardly from the shockwave alone. Three. Five. Nine. Their black-white columns folded in slow, majestic collapses, dumping fresh ice-powder across the floor in unbroken sheets.
"You asshole!" Eira fled.
Her crystalline frame torqued sideways at a velocity she had not used in years—instinctive, ancient, the survival posture.
The snowball passed through the airspace her wings had occupied a quarter-second earlier.
It continued forty yards.
It unmade the spire behind her.
The spire stood for half a heartbeat with a perfectly cylindrical absence carved through its core—forty feet of black-white substrate erased as if it had simply deleted the section.
Upper and lower halves connected by nothing.
Then physics remembered itself. The upper section fell, the lower sagged inward.
A crater forty feet wide bloomed in the far wall.
The stone fissured outward in long radial lines that kept fissuring for a full three seconds, like cracks spreading across the face of a dying god.
Eira’s wings stuttered. In that half-second the fairy hovering before Phei Ryujin Tiamat fully understood she was staring at a being whose casual projectiles operated on a scale her bonded service had no precedent for hosting in the upper world. This was not power. This was extinction wearing a handsome face and pretending to play catch with the bones of reality itself.
"Mhmm."
Phei’s hum was low, almost amused... a smile blooming on his face... finally, he’d made her run for the first time.
He had not even stood from his kneeling position.
He had only flexed his throwing hand once, slowly, the way an athlete checks the recoil of a new instrument and finds it satisfactory.
He had grown stronger.
That fact sat in his body the way the warmth of a fresh kill sits in the stomach—already integrated, no calculation required.
The snowball had moved at a velocity his old body could not have produced: the element too had answered before he asked.
The hardening had compiled in his palm before the thought finished forming.
[Ding! Void-Ice Element fully awakened.]
[Ding! Congratulations, Host, for breaking through into the Master rank of the Mortal Realm!]
The system arrived blue across his inner vision, but it did not stop at text.
The space around him itself re-weighted around him.
He felt it—a slow, committed re-tightening of the substrate around his vessel, the upper world’s ledger acknowledging a threshold-crossing that had, until this heartbeat, been theoretical.
His body sat fractionally heavier in his own awareness.
Gravity tugged at a different angle.
His amethyst eyes registered ambient light at a marginally deeper, more murderous hue... The Master rank of the Mortal Realm was not a title.
It was a seat at the table, and the table had just made room for a monster.
He had jumped from Awakened to Master, skipping Adept and Elite entirely—two full ranks devoured in the acknowledgement that his body had finally tasted the true essence of his element.
After enslaving Kyle, he had crawled from Initiate to Awakened thanks to the excess energy.
Now this...
Two ranks burned away in a single afternoon of barbed chains, unhealable wounds, consciousness shattered open to admit his mother’s death into the core of his being and then rising from that wreckage with the entire cathedral hollow already entombed beneath his apocalyptic answer.
"So, tapping into the true essence of an element is a cheat code that lets you skip ranks," he murmured, half to the system and half to the void wearing his skin.
The system offered no reply to the rhetorical musing.
Truthfully—given what he had just survived—cheat code was a generous description.
He had been cooked alive by his own element. Two ranks of progression for reliving the worst afternoon of his life and walking out the other side was not a cheat. It was a transaction. A steep, blood-soaked transaction.
He hurled a bigger snowball at Eira.
This one was the size of a melon.
It compressed in his palm with a casual cosmic gravity the cathedral hollow’s air could feel two yards away—small ambient flakes lifting toward his hand as the projectile compiled, the element folding matter into densities physics had never signed off on.
By the time it left his hand it was Void-Ice at its uttermost peak shaped like a melon and accelerated at a velocity the substrate protested with an audible groan.
The shockwave preceded it—a circular pressure-front of compressed air that hit Eira half a second before the projectile and rippled her crystalline form like a stone skipped across a lake.
She did not dodge.
She volley-kicked it back at him.
The kick was a middle finger with intent and mockery—her foot met the incoming death-ball in mid-air with a sustained ringing crack that rolled across the hollow like a struck temple bell.
The incoming velocity flipped to outgoing in a single clean transaction.
The projectile now screamed back toward Phei at almost twice the speed, breaking the sound barrier properly this time.
A long rolling sonic boom shook the entire cathedral hollow at a scale the substrate had to flinch to absorb, forcing the frost-spires of the foren trees along the return path exploded sideways.
The distant western root-wall fissured visibly from base to canopy, while the frozen birds in the upper canopy rattled off their branches and fell in slow, unhurried arcs, cosmic ornaments finally remembering they were dead.
Phei did not dodge... he just stood up fully.
The cathedral hollow’s gravity adjusted to the rising.
Every loose flake of powdered ice within fifty yards lifted fractionally with him, the substrate of his first element registering its master’s sovereignty and bowing in the small, obedient gesture an element offers the being it has accepted as its god.
He faced the snowball head-on, amethyst eyes flat, expressionless, the casual promise of annihilation wrapped in the body of a man who had just learned the universe was finally small enough to fit in his palm—and crush it for the sheer hell of it.
