Destruction and Rebirth

A blazing white torrent of vitality—high-tier life energy contained within the heartwood of the Tree of Life, enough to make flesh grow upon dry bones.

Yet now, like savage lava, it was being forcibly poured into every inch of Dago's skin, every strand of muscle fiber, even the finest elemental channels.

However, at the core of that scorching current, powerful enough to burst apart any flesh-and-blood body, were countless icy, sharp "grains of sand" that represented ancient laws.

They were the bloodline crystals of the Despair Winter Dragon, Behelet.

Dago felt like an experiment laid upon an alchemy table, undergoing the cruelest kind of "reforging."

Two utterly different, even mutually repellent extreme forces—ultimate heat and ultimate cold, nascent creation and ancient despair—used his body as their battlefield in a brutal tug-of-war.

Tearing, destruction, melting.

His cells collapsed under the wash of high energy, only to be forcibly reshaped the next microsecond.

The pain transcended the flesh and struck straight into the depths of his soul, as though his genes were being brutally cut apart and spliced together.

"Hiss—hiss—"

It was not merely tinnitus, but slick, viscous evil muttering from the depths of his bloodline.

The sounds suddenly swelled, like countless rusty scalpels scraping wildly across an operating table, enough to set one's teeth on edge and drive one mad.

"They" were not merely whispering against Dago's ears; they burrowed directly into his mental sea through his auditory nerves, howling hysterically:

"Despair... Behelet... despair! I am... Behelet! Behelet!!"

This was the Old One will lingering in his bloodline, the spiritual imprint left by this body's true owner.

Dago's mental defense mechanism, Winter's Stillness—that once-indestructible layer of absolute rationality—now gave a cracking sound beneath unbearable strain.

"Crack—"

The ice shattered.

Countless violent, cruel, bloodthirsty primal impulses that wanted to destroy everything surged