Chapter 1332: Left Aftermath, Aching Heart and Soul

By the time the last traces of battle finally died away, the deepest portion of the abyss looked as though something vast had tried to claw its way out from beneath the world. Ice cliffs had been torn open from end to end, entire crystalline shelves were missing, and black cavities scarred the places where Phei, the Dragon Lady and the two World Transcendents had been hurled through ancient walls again and again.

Primordial Blood still lay across the ruined ground in dark-red streams, some frozen inside shattered ice while other portions continued twitching faintly beneath Phei’s lingering will.

Void wounds scattered throughout the cavern were slowly sealing one after another, their black-white edges shrinking until the abyss stopped looking as though existence itself had been gnawed apart.

The Dragon Lady had collapsed near one of the few walls still standing, and Phei had ended up beside her with equally little concern for dignity.

She lay heavily upon her side, one ruined wing stretched behind her while the other remained folded awkwardly against a body covered in broken scales, dried blood and ugly patches where Healing Touch had managed to close the worst of her wounds. Several of the beautiful crystalline ridges along her neck remained fractured, and the crack near the base of one horn still bothered Phei enough that his eyes kept returning to it even when he tried not to look.

He was in better condition only because Dragon Regeneration refused to let damage remain for long.

Most of the bruising across his chest and jaw had already disappeared, the flesh burned away by the Dragon Lady’s own white flames had regrown, and even portions of white hair vaporized inside her breath had returned, leaving his clothes as the only part of him that had apparently failed to discover immortality.

Phei lay beside her neck with one arm folded beneath his head and his other palm resting upon a cracked scale near her shoulder. Healing Touch continued flowing through that hand in a slow, patient stream, gentler than the frantic bursts he had forced into her during battle.

Warm power seeped beneath the great crystalline scale and travelled through wounded flesh, easing damaged muscle, closing tiny ruptures and restoring circulation through places where impact and freezing essence had left everything stiff. Her breathing had been harsh when they first collapsed, each breath dragging through her enormous chest with enough effort that Phei could feel the strain through the ground beneath him, but little by little the rhythm improved.

One breath came easier than the last, then another, and after several minutes the painful shudder at the end of each exhalation began fading.

"That’s better," Phei murmured, fingers moving idly along the edge of the scale beneath his palm.

The Dragon Lady answered with a weak rumble without opening her eyes, and he smiled faintly.

"You still sound terrible, but at least you have enough strength left to complain. I’m choosing to see that as progress."

He let his eyes close after that and allowed his perception to sink inward.

Times like these often pulled him deeper into himself, especially when the noise of battle had finally ended and there was nothing left to distract him from everything waiting far beyond the Primordial Frozen Zone.

Somewhere inside his soul rested the thing he still called the Soul Anchor, though the name had been bothering him for months:

—it had sounded fitting when the connection was simpler, but too much had changed since then.

The Anchor had become something stranger, something crowded with bonds, marks and presences that no longer felt adequately described by a single old name. Phei had been trying to think of something better and had failed so consistently that he had eventually decided the Soul Anchor could remain insultingly temporary until inspiration stopped being useless.

The moment his awareness brushed against it, familiar souls answered:

The Living Soul Harem Mark connected him to Sienna, Roxanne, Melissa and Soraya, and their emotions came to him through that bond as softened impressions rather than clear thoughts.

Warmth drifted from one soul, quiet happiness from another, longing from more than one, along with the ordinary ripples of irritation and amusement belonging to people living their own lives somewhere impossibly far away.

Phei lingered over each presence carefully.

He had learned enough about the Mark to recognize when fear sharpened through it and Phei would know if danger ever approached strongly enough to disturb the soul, and he felt nothing resembling either now.

They were safe.

Their lives continued beyond this frozen prison, and the simple certainty loosened something inside his chest that he had not realized had been tight.

The Spiritual Bond Ring let him feel others as well, though those connections were different, less intimate than the Living Soul Harem Mark but still strong enough to remind him that his world had never truly disappeared.

Phei had spent close to a year trapped inside the Primordial Frozen Zone, separated from home by distance and whatever strange laws governed this place that he could not portal himself out, yet he had never once been completely alone.

His women remained somewhere inside his soul, their emotions reaching him even here at the bottom of an abyss where a god had hidden itself for centuries, and instead of soothing him completely, that warmth only made homesickness settle deeper.

He missed Melissa most painfully in moments like this—

He missed her voice, the way she looked at him whenever she already knew he was about to say something stupid, and the familiar mixture of affection and exasperation she seemed to reserve specifically for him.

He missed their child too, and that thought brought back the question that had been haunting him more often as the months passed. He had spent at least a year here by his own reckoning, but how much time had truly moved outside?

After all this strange realm had never been particularly respectful of ordinary time, and Phei had enough experience himself in this ridiculous place apart from what Sienna had told him to know better than to assume the clocks at home had politely waited for him.

He wondered how Melissa and their child were doing, whether she complained about him every day and whether she still defended him the moment anyone else dared join in. He wondered how the Goddess was, how Elena was doing, what Sienna had destroyed, discovered or accidentally improved while he was gone, and how many problems had accumulated around people he loved without him being there to see them.

The thought of Althea remained heavier than the others because he already knew there had been no success there, and even the Living Soul Harem Mark could not tell him the things he actually wanted to know.

It could reassure him that Sienna was safe, but it could not tell him what had happened yesterday, what had changed at home, who had cried, who had laughed, who had been waiting by a window and pretending they were not.