He woke with the dragon's gaze still burning behind his eyes.
Moonlight made a pale rectangle on the floor. His shirt clung to him, damp with cold sweat. For a heartbeat he thought the room would holdthat the night would be ordinary again if he just breathed slowly enough.
The system disagreed.
[Skill Registered: Dragonization]To wield what you were shown, prove that you are not pretending.Activation Requirement: Slay one member of the Dragon species.A provisional arena has been prepared.Generate Trial Dungeon: Drake's Nest?[Yes] / [No]
He didn't think. He pressed [Yes].
The world snapped.
The mattress, the window, the familiar creak in the wall gone. Cold hit him first, a knife slid under the ribs. He was barefoot. Pajamas. Stone slick beneath his soles, damp and uneven. A gout of air tasted like old coins and rot. Somewhere water dripped in a patient rhythm.
Green fire guttered in bowls set into the cavern walls. Shadows stacked in layers.
Then came the pressure killing intent rolling in slow waves, heavy enough to make the knees remember how to shake.
[You have entered: Trial Dungeon Drake's Nest]Hazard Rating: FatalArena Rules: No exit until trial conditions satisfied. No external interference. Observer present.Objective: Slay one 1draconic-class entity.
Stone rumbled. The walls breathed.
Eyes opened in the dark.
Dozens at first, then a hundred, then more a field of slitted pupils, emerald and ember, catching the torchlight. The drakes came forward in silence that made the torch crackle sound obscene low to the ground, long limbed lizards with plated shoulders and hooked talons, heads wedge shaped, teeth like a handful of knives spilled into a jaw. Each one the size of a horse. Each one radiating the same pressure as the goblin chieftain and some worse.
Ji-hoon exhaled, bare feet finding grip on the wet stone. Pajamas and a beating heart. That was all.
"Fine," he said softly, and reached.
The Beastbone Spear dropped into his hand from nothing, perfectly balanced, hide-wrapped grip warm against his palm. In the other, Grudge flickered into being unimpressive, dull gray, a whisper of a blade that cut past whatever pretended to protect.
A smaller drake broke ranks first, all tendon and speed. Its claws screamed sparks from the stone as it lunged.
Ji-hoon stepped toward it.
The spear went low feint then snapped up, the fang point punching under the hinge of the jaw and into the brainpan. The drake's momentum carried it past him; he let the shaft roll in his grip and wrenched free. It folded into itself with a thud that ran up his shins.
Blood stung his bare feet, hot as spilled tea.
The system chimed.
[Qualification satisfied.]Skill Activation Permitted: Dragonization (Stage I).Warning: Transformation strains vessel. Proceed?[Yes] / [No]
He didn't have time to answer in words. Ten drakes came at once, and the cavern narrowed to teeth and breath.
"Yes," he hissed.
The world turned inside out.
Pain started behind the eyes as a pressure, a thumbscrew. It widened, liquefied, poured down his optic nerves and into his spine. Every nerve lit at once as if a forge bellows had been pressed to his marrow. He gagged, dropped to a knee, the spear's butt ringing on stone.
Heat filled his skull until he couldn't hear the torches anymore.
Then the pressure resolved like a chord finally finding its note.
He opened his eyes.
The cavern leapt into cruel clarity. Not brighter truer. The green fire broke into strata of heat. Dust motes hung like slow snow. Heartbeats thudded in things he could not yet see, a radiation of rhythm that mapped the tunnels around him. He could taste angles. The air all but wrote where it would be.
A pane edged in gold slid into the corner of his sight.
[Dragonization: Stage I Eyes]Effect: All base stats ×2. Perception dilation. Heat/pressure vision.Duration: Vessel-limited.Cooldown: None. (Caution: Anchor damage risk with prolonged use.)
He stood.
The drakes hit him like a storm. He moved like the eye of it.
The first claw came in high he was already inside it, spear driving through the soft place behind the elbow plate, the fang point exiting in a spray of heat. He pivoted, let the body fall past, used the shaft as a lever to vault over the second. Grudge whispered across scaled throat no resistance blood coughing into the torchlight. He landed on the third drake's back, both heels digging for purchase on wet plate, and drove the spear down into the seam at the spine.
They were as strong as the chieftain had been; his body now was more.
The nest woke fully. A chorus of roars rolled down the tunnels, a sound with weight. Claws hammered stone. The cavern narrowed again no, he narrowed, focus striping the field into vectors and openings. Heat signatures flared; he put the spear where the heat cooled; things died, fast.
Minutes lost their names.
He learned the shapes of their mistakes. The way they aligned their hips before a lunge. The tick of a throat just before a flame gout. The tiny gap where the chest plate rose when they drew breath. The spear sang through those places. Grudgewas a rumor that kept coming true.
They learned him back.
They began to feint. They began to herd. One took a cut to bait him into a tighter corner where two more waited with breath and claw.
The corner cost him.
He slipped on his own blood. A talon found his ribs and raked. The world flashed white and red; his back hit rock; he tasted iron and stone.
[-31 HP]
He rolled. Flame seared where his head had been. A tail swept; he went with it, let it add to the spin, came up in a low crouch with the spear horizontal and ripped the ankles from the next one. It fell; Grudge finished the fall.
He stopped thinking in words after that.
There was breath. There was the work.
Spear, cut, step. Pivot, parry, thrust. Shoulder to stone. Elbow in joint. Fang under plate. Hands sliding on a shaft wrapped in dead hide that took on his heat and gave it back. Bare feet slapping and skidding and finding purchase where no shoe would have. A hiss at his neck and he ducked; a spear butt in a throat and a cracking sound and an animal that did not get to make a second sound.
The gold on his panes dithered at the edges.
[Warning: Anchor strain rising.]
He ignored it. He had learned to put pain where it belonged.
Time broke.
Two drakes at once he stabbed one through the eye, let it collapse into the other, ran up its ribs as it fell, vaulted, turned Grudge into a comet's tail and drew a red line across a third's carotid. Dropped. Rolled. Spear back to hand by the anchor. Breath. Work.
One tried to pull him down with its death all teeth and weight in a final crush. He snarled something that had never been Korean and ripped the spear free with a twist that took muscle and plate both. Gold shivered in his eyes; for an instant the heat of the drake's heart was as visible as a lantern. He put Grudge through it. Lantern out.
They kept coming.
He lost count at thirty. Forty. Fifty. The chamber's floor became a wet slope of meat and scale and shattered talon. His pajamas stuck to him in strips, soaked and torn and then predictably irrelevant. His hair clung to his forehead. His forearms were slick to the elbow. Somewhere behind the animal breath and torch hiss, the faintest echo of laughter pressed from far above as if someone watching approved of something besides mercy.
He did not ask for it to stop.
The stat boost from his title thrummed when a drake larger than the rest shouldered through the tunnel bone spurs crowning its skull, heat pouring off it in waves. Stronger than him by a hair, which meant the system loved it.
[Bloodlust Surge: 50% stat amplification vs. superior target Active]
He watched it inhale. The chest plates rose, the heat banked there. He ran before the flame came, dove under the gout, slammed the spear into the gap at the sternum and shoved until the fang point kissed back. The drake convulsed, tail smashing him sideways into stone. Stars salted his vision.
[-22 HP]
He rode the pain. Drew Grudge. Cut the breath away.
Something in his head began to ring not a sound, a pressure, the reverse of the dragon's gaze. The gold at the edges of his vision frayed. His heart had been a drum; it became a hammer.
[Warning: Anchor instability approaching unsafe threshold.][Stage I time in: 00:47:12]
He didn't know if that was minutes or an insult. He killed three more and decided it didn't matter.
The waves thinned.
When the nest finally realized it had run out of bodies to throw, it offered silence. It was not kind. It allowed him to hear himself breathing.
The last drake came alone.
Old scars scaled its flank. One eye milked over. It came without roar or rush, dragging a talon that had once been broken and remembered. It regarded him the way he regarded it.
Ji-hoon lifted the spear. His hands shook. The gold in his vision pulsed.
They moved together.
It swiped; he slid under the arc, every ligament singing protest, and struck upward with a shout he did not hear. The fang point punched into the throat pouch just as the drake tried to breathe fire. The gout backfired. Heat blew through the wound and out the new hole the smell was ruin.
The drake folded.
Ji-hoon sagged with it, the spear pinning them both to the floor for an instant like an argument that had ended the only way it could.
Then everything let go.
The gold in his eyes guttered and went out. The weight in his head switched from crown to stone. The Dragonization panes faded like someone drawing a curtain.
He dropped to his knees in cold blood and didn't get up.
[Trial Condition: Met][Objective Complete: Slay one (1) draconic class entity][Dragonization Stage I: Usage Authorized][Anchor Strain: High → Moderate][Stabilization Protocol Engaged]
The pain receded by degrees, the way heat leaves a blade when it has been asked to do too much. The headache did not vanish it stepped back. His muscles stopped screaming and settled for a resentful mutter.
He lay on his side for a while, cheek against stone that was slick with other lives. His chest rose and fell. Breath began to taste like air again instead of coins. His hands trembled less.
The cavern flickered. Torchlight lengthened into corridors that were not there. Dead eyes went glassy, then glossy, then nothing at all as the trial released what it had borrowed.
[Observer Notice][Proceed, Fragment.]
He pushed up onto his elbows. The spear lay across his lap, heavy with silence. Grudge rested beside his knee, dull and patient. He looked down at himself and laughed once wet, absurd. Pajamas. Bare feet black with soot and blood. The kind of picture that would get you thrown out of a story for trying too hard.
"Don't say a word," he told the empty air.
The dungeon obliged.
The stone under him softened to suggestion. The green fire blinked out like embarrassed eyes. The cold left last.
The room took him back.
He was on his bed again, the sheet a ruin under him, the window square blueing with the idea of dawn. Every cut he had taken still smarted. Blood his and not had found ways to dry on him. The spear leaned against the wall where it always had. Grudge lay where he always put it.
And yet.
His eyes ached, but not with pain. With memory. He blinked, and for an instant the dark had edges that only heat knows.
He dragged himself to sitting and called the panes because he needed to see the words.
They came.
[Skill: Dragonization] Stage I (Eyes)Authorized.Effect: All base stats ×2; Perception dilation; Thermal/pressure sense.Duration: Vessel-limited.Cooldown: None (Anchor strain accumulates).Notes: Stage progression available upon meeting additional conditions.
Below it, another line, almost an afterthought.
[Time-in (trial): 02:04:19]
Two hours. He let his head tip back against the wall. The smile that found his mouth felt too tired to be called anything but true.
"About right."
He peeled off what was left of the pajamas and found clean clothes with hands that wanted to be someone else's problem. The mirror over the dresser caught him: stripped down, bruised, eyes a little wrong in the low light gold remembering itself at the rims.
He leaned in. The pupils were round.
"Good," he said, and did not say for now.
He cleaned the spear. He gave Grudge the courtesy of a cloth, though it didn't need it. He sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the house breathe. A board settled somewhere. In the next room, his grandparents slept the way decent people do when they have not been told a dragon watched their grandson work in his sleep.
The headache ebbed to a heartbeat. The ache in his arms became doable. His hands stopped shaking.
He lay back and closed his eyes.
Behind the lids, for just a second, a horizon-sized eye opened and closed again in approval or amusement he couldn't tell which.
"Proceed, huh?" he murmured.
He did not sleep. He rested like a knife kept close to hand.
Outside, the first birds found their notes.
The day would ask for a version of him that did not bleed on the kitchen floor. There were markets to avoid and gates to watch and a world to shepherd through a story it did not understand yet. There were drakes in his bones now, and a dragon in his periphery, and a new line in a system that had started to sound like a promise.
He breathed once more and let the quiet count it.
When he finally stood, the room looked almost the same.
He did not.