The curse

Memories leaped forward, and time slipped by.

He hid in a corner across the Narrow Sea, listening to fragmented rumors from Westeros.

Targaryen... another family that had barely survived, and now they had crowned themselves kings in some savage land?

What gave them the right?!

A few dragons they had been lucky enough to take with them?

Yet we of Torregar, the true foremost Dragonlords, skulked like rats in a gutter, our glory and power buried deep beneath those cursed ruins!

He refused to accept it!

His family's glory, the Sea Burner's power, should not vanish like this!

He would return to those ruins and find whatever his family might have left behind: Dragon Eggs, Steel Armor, a Steel Sword, or... any legacy that could restore Torregar's splendor!

He thought of a horn, Dragonbinder, which only powerful Dragonlord families deserved to possess, capable of commanding entire hosts of dragons.

This was the place: an underground chamber deep within the family castle.

After countless hardships, evading monsters and defeating traps, he had finally found the family vault that might hold its secret treasures.

Look, the Family Crest embedded in the wall was still there!

He stroked it excitedly, imagining finding a Dragon Egg, hatching it, riding the dragon, making the world tremble beneath Torregar's dragon wings once more...

Suddenly, pain pricked his fingertip—the cut he had accidentally received from a shard of stone while exploring earlier seeped a bead of blood as he touched the Family Crest, and it fell onto the Heraldry.

The deathly silent chamber abruptly came "alive."

It was not the sound of mechanisms turning.

Countless whispers, steeped in unimaginable pain, hatred, and madness, exploded directly in the depths of his soul!

Across the walls, the floor, and the air appeared countless twisted, translucent figures burning with dark, blood-red flames-the souls of those who had once been slaughtered and sacrificed on this land!

They had been imprisoned here all along, sleeping-or rather, waiting.

Waiting for a "key."

Waiting for a trace of... a "familiar" presence.

That insignificant drop of blood, his Dragonlord Bloodline inherited from House Torregar, which had participated in and ultimately benefited from that grand blood sacrifice, was like a torch lit in darkness, like blood dripping into a swarm of sharks.

The dead souls "looked" at him.

In their pupil-less sockets burned the flames of a curse that had endured for centuries.

The roars of countless souls merged into a shriek that tore straight through his soul.

He turned to flee, but an invisible force seized him.

He felt no teeth tearing into his flesh, yet he could clearly "feel" countless cold, clammy, hate-filled beings frantically ripping apart and devouring his consciousness, his memories, his soul. It was as though the suffering of the sacrificial victims he had once witnessed had been magnified millions of times and inflicted upon his soul.

His final awareness was of indescribable agony and eternal, freezing darkness, along with a single, utterly clear realization branded in blood into the depths of his soul:

Your blood is the horn that wakes us.

Your soul is the sacrifice that appeases our wrath.

All those of... Dragonlord Bloodline... who tread here... must... repay!

"Aaargh!"

Aegon jerked his hand back as though burned by a branding iron, staggering backward until his back slammed into a cold stone pillar.

The torch slipped from his grasp and rolled across the dusty floor, stubbornly refusing to go out.

He gulped down air, cold sweat streaming across his forehead, his violet eyes filled with a terror unlike anything he had ever known.

His heart pounded so violently it seemed about to shatter his rib cage.

It was not merely because of those bloody, brutal fragments of memory-the madness of the sacrifice, the horror of the doom, the desperate flight.

It was even more because of the "information" and "rules" conveyed to him with absolute clarity in that final instant.

Leaning against the stone pillar, he slowly slid to the floor. The cold ground sent a chill through his soaked clothing, but it could not compare with the cold in his heart.

He understood everything now.

Why the system had repeatedly warned him to "avoid bleeding" and "do not let them discover you."

Why his bloodline sensed "rejection" and "malice" here.

Why a single drop of blood before the mural had drawn such a terrifying gaze.

Why this Torregar descendant had died so strangely-his remains intact, yet his soul completely devoured.

At last, Aegon understood what the system had meant: the souls consumed by blood and fire still cursed those of Dragonlord Bloodline who entered this land.

The truth of the curse was a blood debt being collected across time.

The unprecedented, blasphemous blood sacrifice House Torregar had performed here had not awakened the Progenitor Dragon. Instead, the lives of hundreds of thousands who had died in agony, and their overwhelming hatred, had poisoned this land.

These dead souls were bound here. Their hatred had not faded with time, but had become a vicious curse aimed at a specific target.

The curse's target was extraordinarily precise: the Dragonlord Bloodline.

More precisely, House Torregar, which had performed the blood sacrifice, and the descendants of Valyria's Dragonlords who carried similar "guilty blood."

Their bloodline was like a beacon in the darkness, drawing the attention of the dead souls.

And their blood was like a spark cast into boiling oil, fully awakening and enraging these sleeping spirits of vengeance!

That Torregar survivor had returned in search of Dragon Eggs, only for a single drop of blood to bring about his death. The vengeful souls had divided his soul among themselves, making him the freshest "morsel" at their feast of revenge.

And he, Aegon Targaryen, carried the same Dragonlord blood originating in Valyria!

Though his family was different, there was probably little distinction in the "perception" of these souls, tormented by madness and hatred for centuries-they were all "descendants of the executioners," all "targets of revenge that must be devoured"!

"So that's it... 'caught in a curse'... that's what it meant," Aegon murmured hoarsely. This curse was no vague, intangible ill fortune, but an extraordinarily vicious and precise "hunting mechanism."

Here in these ruins, he was living, moving "bait" and a "sacrifice"!

After the fear came a cold, almost despairing clarity.

His situation was ten thousand times worse than he had imagined.

Not only did he face severe injuries, hypothermia, monsters, and the threat of Crow's Eye, but he now had to remain constantly vigilant against becoming the prey of countless vengeful souls.

One careless moment of bleeding could bring utter catastrophe.

Yet at the same time... an exceedingly dangerous, almost insane thought slipped into his mind like a venomous snake.

This curse was a death trap, but... could it also become a weapon?

In the scenes of death he had witnessed earlier, the souls awakened by "dragon blood" had made no distinction between friend and foe. They had simply devoured the entire party led by that Torregar survivor.

Perhaps this could be the ultimate weapon against... an enemy he could not fight through conventional means?

The thought made him shudder, not merely from fear, but from the promise of mutual destruction it held.

He shook his head, pushing that dangerous thought aside for now.

His immediate priority was to survive, find his companions, and reach the check-in point. The "reward" offered by the check-in system might be his only hope of escaping this predicament.

He struggled back to his feet and retrieved the torch. Its light once again illuminated the Torregar remains.

Looking at them now, he saw boundless terror and agony in that curled-up posture.

Aegon glanced at them in silence and did not touch them again.

He turned, his gaze sweeping across the dim underground chamber. That...

In the memory fragments, the man had come here to "hunt for treasure."

Then could there be something nearby...?

His gaze fell on a crack in the wall diagonally behind the remains.

The edges of the crack were neat, as though someone had widened it later. He carefully approached and shone his torch inside.

Within was a small alcove, empty except for a thick layer of dust. Yet in the middle of the dust seemed to be a shallow indentation, its shape... rather like an oversized egg?

Aegon's heart skipped a beat.

A Dragon Egg? Had it been taken? Or had the man never found it at all-or had what he found... been something else?

He inspected the alcove carefully, but apart from that indentation, there was nothing.

Aegon felt a little disappointed, but did not dwell on it.

For now, finding a way out and his companions mattered more. Besides, those memory fragments held the locations of many other valuable things, including armor forged from Valyrian steel. Perhaps if he found it, he could replace his sodden clothes and armor, and get an "equipment upgrade" along the way?

He took one last look at the underground chamber and was about to continue exploring in the direction he had come from when, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted an enormous hole with extremely irregular edges at the base of the far wall opposite him.

The hole was pitch-black, even larger than those he had seen earlier in the underground prison.

Familiar, unsettlingly large scrape marks covered its edges.

A smell of mold mingled with some indescribable rank odor slowly drifted from the hole.

Aegon's breath caught.

Clearly, those "burrowing" creatures ranged far beyond the underground prison.

The passages they had opened spread in every direction and might even connect many corners of these ruins.

And the route he had just taken might have been one of those "creature tunnels."

He did not know what creatures owned these holes, but he certainly did not want to encounter them in his current state.

He tightened his grip on his long blade, lowered the torch, and held his breath. Step by step, extremely slowly and silently, he began moving away from the hole toward the ancient passage he had seen in the memory fragments.

The golden point of light on the system map blinked steadily somewhere ahead.

Behind him, the enormous hole in the wall resembled the maw of a silent beast, casting a thick, ominous shadow at the edge of the flickering torchlight.