Chapter 2

The agony of my finger bones grinding into the rock crevice had anchored my slipping consciousness and forced it to hold.

I tilted my head back and swallowed the blood foam rising in my throat. The light at the top of the abyss was long gone, swallowed along with those carefully plotted betrayals and self-righteous decrees by the thick, suffocating miasma.

Not shattering me on impact when I hit the bottom was their biggest mistake in this game.

The suffocating sensation of mud flooding my nose forced me to steady my breathing. I loosened my bloody, mangled fingers, shifted my body, and began to take stock of what this broken carcass still had to work with.

My right eyeball had been slashed by sharp stones during the fall—my vision was now a blur of blood-streaked double images, nearly blind. My left arm, crushed repeatedly against the rock face, was a shattered mess of joints, hanging limply at my side like a rag. The "F"-grade brand Zack had pressed into my chest was still oozing yellow fluid, the pain repeatedly assaulting my nerves.

My beast-spirit affinity had been drained; I couldn't even sense a beast's presence ten meters away.

But strip away that lofty supernatural title, and I was still a soldier who'd crawled out of a pile of corpses.

The next three days were survival stripped of all dignity.

Dragging my useless left arm and broken ribs, I used my remaining right hand to grip rocky outcroppings, crawling across the blade-sharp stone surface. A long, dark red trail of blood smeared behind me. When hunger gnawed at my stomach, I chewed on the foul-smelling toxic moss clinging to the rock walls. When thirst burned my throat, I tilted my head back to catch drop by drop of the murky water that had accumulated on stalactites.

As long as I had breath, every pore of this body was fighting to survive.

Day four.

In this place where even the sound of living breath could be swallowed by darkness, a faint rustling came from the mud ahead.

I lowered my body, hugged the stone wall, and crept forward, squinting with my one remaining good eye.

In a low, shadowy depression ahead, three bone-eating rats—each the size of an adult hunting dog—were circling a small white shape, tearing at it. It was a juvenile frost-mane wolf cub. Its hind legs were bent at a grotesque angle, its white fur covered in festering mange and frostbite. It bared its teeth on its forelegs, but the rats kept knocking it down, pinning it into the mud to tear at its flesh.

Bone-eating rats—the abyss's bottom-feeders.

In the past, even if I hadn't released a single shred of aura, these creatures would have trembled at my presence. But now, stripped of my affinity, I had lost my protective coloration. To them, I was just another fresh hunk of meat.

One rat stopped tearing at the cub. Its blood-red eyes rolled toward me.

It flexed its hind legs, ready to pounce.

I didn't retreat. I didn't even change my breathing. My left arm was useless—but my right hand was still alive.

My fingers plunged into the cold black mud, gripping a sharp-edged piece of slate. My leg muscles coiled—I launched myself low to the ground, driving straight into the pack.

The first rat lunged with its barbed teeth, sinking them into my right calf.

Fangs pierced muscle, tearing away a chunk of flesh. Pain signals screamed up to my brain, but I ignored the wound on my leg. My right hand swung the slate high and drove it down into the rat's skull.

A muffled crack—greenish fluid burst outward. I pulled the stone free, used the carcass as a shield, and slammed the second rat, still midair, against the stone wall. Using the momentum of my fall, I dropped my knee and crushed its spine.

The last one let out a screech and tried to squeeze into a crack ahead.

Running away? I stomped after it, my right hand clamping around the back of its neck. My fingers closed, my wrist twisted, and I snapped its cervical spine.

Three tumor-ridden corpses lay in the mud.

I pulled a few broken teeth from the wound on my calf and tossed them aside, then turned to the corner.

The wolf cub cowered against the rock wall, baring its still-growing teeth at me. Without the transcendent ability to command beasts, it saw me as just another dangerous predator.

I knelt on one knee, not moving closer. My right index finger pressed against the bleeding wound on my calf, smearing the torn flesh until it was soaked in warm blood.

Then, I held out my bloodied fingertip, stopping just before its mouth.

"Drink," I said, meeting its eyes.

The wolf cub panted, frozen for a few seconds—then its barbed tongue finally reached out and licked the crimson from my fingertip.

The moment the blood touched its throat—

An icy blue light flared in the cub's dull eyes. A savage, ancient frost power erupted from its center, surging through the blood-contract channel forged between us, violently tearing through my meridians.

The long-dried channels of my bloodline were suddenly filled, flooded with this berserk power like rain on parched earth.

But this ancient power was picky. The moment the frost energy reached my left shoulder, it clashed violently with the repeatedly crushed, necrotic muscle and stagnant blood. Like fire doused from above—scorching pain exploded along the nerves of my left arm.

I clenched my right fist, held my ground, and made not a sound—swallowing the purging force that would have crippled an ordinary man.

Nerve endings in my left arm snapped under the freezing burn, turning it into a dead limb beyond feeling. One arm lost—but the ancient contract with the Frost-Mane Wolf King was now etched into my bone and blood.

That was a good trade.

Over the next two weeks, the abyss became my whetstone.

Without weapons, I scraped rat bones against stone until they were sharpened into spikes. When wounds festered, I slapped mud from the abyss floor over them to stop the bleeding. My daily tasks were stripped to their essence: hunt, eat, survive.

Together with the wolf cub, I fought the abyss's swarms of predators in that lightless hell. In repeated close-quarters battles, the cub's hind legs healed rapidly under the frost power, and it grew into a lightning-fast second blade—whenever I threw a bone spike, it would accurately rip out the target's throat.

One man, one wolf—we'd developed a beast instinct that required no signals.

Now, the air was thick with blood.

The wolf cub padded lightly out of the shadows, dragging half a howling wolf's carcass and dropping it at my feet.

I crouched in the middle of a heap of still-warm monster corpses, gripping a polished bone spike in my calloused hand. I tore a strip of bloody raw meat with my one good hand and chewed it expressionlessly. The blood-mixed flesh went down my throat, turning into fuel for the next fight.

From the surrounding darkness, dozens of glowing eyes watched—but none dared step within ten paces of this pile of carcasses. They had sensed something more dangerous than any beast.

I swallowed the last piece of raw meat, wiped the residue from my mouth with the back of my hand, and lifted my face.

That one good eye pierced through the dead stone walls, past the narrow gray fissures above, and fixed on the clifftop beyond.

The air up there was clean. The lofty inheritors up there were carving up my throne.