A Man Like None Other (Jared Chance) novel Chapter 5860

"That frostborne poison is brutal." Jared's voice slipped out in a hushed rasp, words fogging the frigid air.

Hold your breath, draw it inward, cut the lungs from the wind. Jared clamped down on his breathing, switching to an inner cycle that starved the toxin of entry.

The small fire unicorn faltered, clearly uncomfortable; fire-aligned beasts were always throttled by such cold. Even so, the proud little creature lifted its head and pressed close to Jared's flank, a corona of gold flame roaring along its scales, pushing a clear pocket of warmth around them both.

The basin was not vast—no more than a few hundred yards from rim to the frigid pool at its heart—yet each step felt like crossing an endless tundra.

Jared advanced with painstaking care, spiritual sense fanned wide, every flicker of movement, every shift of air, passing through his mind like signals across taut wire.

The nearer he drew, the clearer the Thousand-Year Frostblood Lotus appeared. Nine crystal leaves, red as faceted rubies, stretched around the stem, their veins pulsing as if true blood pulsed within. At the center, the bud had already cracked, a shy slit revealing petals the color of fresh wine. A heady perfume—sweet, metallic, strangely inviting—floated on the cold, making his spirit quiver with exhilaration even as instinct whispered of lurking danger.

"It's almost in bloom." Jared's heart kicked with tight, bright urgency.

He quickened his pace, boots tapping over thin ice that pinged under the strain.

But when scarcely a hundred yards of killing ice remained between him and the pool—

"Roar—!" The sound detonated through the basin, so vast it seemed to rip clouds from the sky.

The bellow thundered from a cavern mouth halfway up the tallest ice peak—a savage birth-cry of some primordial behemoth waking after uncounted ages.

Sound-waves hammered the basin; the ice under Jared's feet spider-webbed with cracks that raced outward in frantic, splintering lines.

Then came the pressure—cold as polar oceans, heavy as collapsing stars—bursting from the cavern in a tidal flood that blanketed the entire hollow.

Under that weight, Jared felt like a paper boat hurled into a hurricane, every joint screaming that the next breath might tear him apart.

He grunted, forced chaotic essence outward, and a hazy gray shield congealed around him, allowing him—only barely—to keep his footing.

Uni dropped to a low crouch, legs trembling, golden blaze raging higher in defiance of the crushing aura.

"Heavenly Immortal Realm—Top Level Nine!" The words escaped Jared between clenched teeth, half awe, half warning to himself.

Jared's expression tightened despite himself. From the sheer weight of the unseen force pressing on his bones, he could already tell—the spirit beast lurking ahead possessed strength far beyond anything they had faced.

Booming thunder rolled through the cavern like stone grinding on stone, a deafening prelude to the terror about to reveal itself.

The curtain of frigid vapor guarding the cave entrance churned into a storm, as though some colossal heart were pushing against it from the dark within.

Then a shape—vast, sinuous—slowly probed out of the fissure, its silhouette hinting at a dragon's majesty.

No... not a true dragon. Jared realized with a chill, but something born of the same ancient blood.

Its head resembled a dragon's yet bore only a single horn, the entire crown cast in translucent ice-blue crystal.

Its body, thick as an anaconda, was masked in palm-sized sapphire scales that refracted a cruel, frosted light.

No claws clung beneath its belly, yet from either flank sprouted wings as thin as cicada membranes, almost invisible against the snow-pale air.

Stretching more than three hundred feet and thick as a manor wall, the creature coiled in midair like a glacier-hewn mountain newly given life.

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