Night

However, its appetite had grown along with it. It ate anything and especially liked grinding its teeth on metal. It was practically a bottomless pit.

Redd looked at it, then at his storage space, empty apart from books, and muttered to himself:

"This little fellow just keeps getting bigger and eating more. I'm starting to struggle to feed it!"

But seeing how lively it was, he could not bear to let it go hungry. After all, it was one of his few "companions" in these ruins.

Night slowly soaked the skies of Valyria like the thickest ink.

Deep blue intertwined with inky black, the stars sparse, as though even they were cowed by the eerie atmosphere.

Inside the Dragonpit, Redd had finished his preparations. He checked the weapons at his waist, then patted the little dragon King Ghidorah, whose tail was swishing with excitement. It was time to leave.

He walked up to the Black Dragon Ehm and the Red Dragon Aegon and tried to climb onto Ehm's back.

However, both dragons grew unusually agitated.

A low, threatening growl rumbled in Ehm's throat, while the Red Dragon Aegon expelled a small blast of scorching air,

their enormous heads stubbornly pressing against Redd, trying to stop him.

Through their bloodline connection, intense unease and warnings flooded madly into Redd's mind:

"Danger! Don't go out! The black mist is thicker! Something is watching!"

Redd could feel the instincts deep within their bloodlines sounding an alarm. The Valyria Ruins were far more dangerous and unpredictable at night than during the day.

Of course, Redd understood that.

He could even imagine the creatures that hid during the day now lurking in the shadows, waiting for prey to walk into their trap.

But his brows only furrowed slightly before smoothing out again.

He knew the danger, but he also knew that if this continued, never mind evolution points-even filling his belly would become a problem.

Unlike King Ghidorah, he could not sustain himself by gnawing on metal. As for those battered weapons he had collected, forget eating them-he did not even want to take a bite.

He did not want to go hungry, much less end up like certain mortals, nothing but a silent skeleton in the ruins.

"I know it's dangerous," Redd said, his voice carrying an unquestionable firmness, "but we have to go out. For food, and to survive."

He stopped trying to soothe them and gave an order instead, his tone decisive.

Ehm and Aegon sensed their master's determination. Though still uneasy, they finally, slowly stopped blocking him.

Ehm let out a long sigh, with a helplessness peculiar to dragons, and beat his wings, taking to the air first; the Red Dragon Aegon followed close behind, his eyes still full of vigilance.

As for King Ghidorah, the little fellow seemed completely oblivious to all this, or simply did not care.

Seeing the two large dragons take flight, it flapped its wings excitedly and gave a cheerful cry,

then pushed hard with its short little legs and followed, clumsily but resolutely, without the slightest concept of "fear."

Redd did not let the two large dragons fly too far.

He knew all too well how dangerous the night was and did not dare fly too far.

He chose to ride on the back of the relatively steadier Black Dragon Ehm, circling only the airspace around the volcano where the Dragonpit lay.

They flew high in the sky, looking down over the pitch-black Valyria Ruins below.

Sure enough, the ruins had come fully alive at night, becoming incredibly "bustling."

The creatures that had been sparsely visible during the day now began stirring, as though they had emerged from underground.

Packs of wild dogs howled softly in the corners of the ruins;

mutated lizards darted swiftly among the broken walls;

farther away, the agile shapes of cheetahs, tigers, and lions could faintly be seen lurking in the shadows;

there were even deer cautiously foraging, and eagles circling overhead, surveying everything on the ground.

What made Redd's scalp prickle even more were the stranger creatures:

Fire Earthworms as thick as buckets, their bodies glowing scorching red, stirred beneath the ground;

swarms of Green Poison Ants covered certain areas like a green tide;

and many insects he had never seen before, in all manner of shapes, shimmered eerily in the moonlight.

"What a hunting ground..."

Redd tightened his grip on his weapon, his gaze sharp.

The danger was real, but prey was equally abundant.

It seemed tonight's haul might not disappoint him.

He lowered his body and instructed Ehm to move closer to the ground, ready to begin the hunt.

The hunt beneath the night sky went fairly smoothly.

Redd directed Ehm and Aegon as they dived and strafed like hunters of the sky.

Two streams of scorching dragonfire, one black and one red, swept precisely over a pack of growling wild dogs on the ground like two furious tongues.

These wild dogs looked to be in terrible condition. Many had rotting flesh that exposed stark white bones. They were minor creatures that only dared emerge at night after prey grew scarce during the day.

"Sss-" The instant the dragonfire touched the rotting flesh, it made a teeth-grating sound.

The wild dogs instantly became charred corpses, emitting acrid black smoke as they collapsed to the ground, leaving a scattered mess of scorched bodies.

But just then, something suddenly changed.

Sharp-eyed, Redd clearly saw something drift free of the smoke rising from the charred corpses, as though it had broken loose from restraints.

It was an exceedingly brief white shadow, vanishing in a flash, so fast it almost seemed like an illusion.

What was that? Alarm bells rang in Redd's mind.

Before he could think it through, an utterly agonized scream suddenly rang in his ears, seeming to come from the depths of a human soul.

The sound was filled with extreme pain and despair, piercing his eardrums painfully, yet strangely, Redd himself felt nothing abnormal in his body.

Almost at the same instant the human scream rang out, the Red Dragon Aegon let out a short, feeble cry of agony!

The sound made Redd's heart stop, and he whipped his head around.

The Red Dragon Aegon's previously agile flight had become extraordinarily unsteady, as though he were drunk, his wingbeats growing weaker and weaker,

his body plummeting rapidly, about to crash into a huge piece of rock debris below.

"Aegon!" Redd cried out, quickly bringing up the system panel connected to Aegon.

His gaze was immediately drawn to the status field on the panel-the "aged" status, which had temporarily disappeared for some reason,

had actually disappeared again, replaced by an even more unsettling word: "cursed."

Cursed? Could it have been those things that came out of the wild dogs' corpses?

Before Redd could fully react to this sudden turn of events, the Red Dragon Aegon's impact was imminent.

At the critical moment, Redd roared, "Ehm, catch him!"

The Black Dragon Ehm had clearly sensed his companion's peril as well. He reacted extremely quickly, his enormous body banking sharply,

his two thick, powerful claws catching Aegon's tail with the precision of iron pincers. With a forceful yank, he forcibly arrested Aegon's fall, leaving him suspended in midair.