Memories skipped, and time flowed by.
He hid in a corner on the other side of the Narrow Sea, listening to fragmented rumors coming from Westeros.
Targaryen... another family that survived by luck, had actually crowned themselves kings in that savage land?
What right do they have?!
Based on a few dragons they were fortunate enough to take with them?
While we, House Torregar, the true head of the Dragonlords, are hiding like rats in a sewer, our glory and power buried deep beneath those cursed ruins!
He was unwilling to accept this!
The family's glory and the power of The Seafarer should not perish like this!
He wanted to go back, back to those ruins, to find the dragon eggs his family might have left behind, steel armor, steel swords, or... any legacy that could let him restore the majesty of House Torregar!
He thought of a horn, one that only powerful Dragonlord families were worthy of possessing, a dragon horn capable of commanding dragons on a massive scale.
It was right here, in the underground secret chamber deep within the family castle.
After enduring countless hardships, evading monsters, and disarming traps, he finally found this family vault that might contain secret treasures.
Look, the family crest embedded in the wall was still there!
He stroked it excitedly, fantasizing about finding dragon eggs, hatching them, riding them, and making the world tremble under the wings of Torregar once more... Suddenly, a sharp pain came from his fingertip—a wound accidentally cut by a stone shard during his earlier exploration. As he touched the family crest, a drop of blood seeped out and fell upon it.
The deathly silent secret chamber suddenly came 'alive.'
It wasn't the sound of gears turning.
It was countless whispers filled with extreme pain, resentment, and madness, exploding directly from the depths of his soul!
On the walls, the floor, and in the air, countless twisted, translucent figures burning with blood-colored dark fire emerged—they were the souls of those who had 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 wisp of... 'familiar' aura.
His insignificant drop of blood, his 'Dragonlord blood' originating from House Torregar—the very blood that participated in and ultimately enjoyed that grand blood sacrifice—was like a lit torch in the dark, like blood dripping into a pack of sharks.
The vengeful spirits 'looked' at him.
In eye sockets without pupils, the fires of a curse spanning hundreds of years burned.
The roars of thousands of souls merged into a shriek that directly tore through the soul.
He turned to run, but an invisible force seized him.
He couldn't feel his flesh being bitten, but he could clearly 'feel' his consciousness, memories, and soul being frantically torn and devoured by countless cold, slimy, and hateful existences. It was as if the pain he had witnessed the sacrificial victims suffer was being magnified ten thousand times and inflicted upon his own soul.
His final consciousness was an indescribable agony and eternal icy darkness, along with an incredibly clear realization branded deep into his soul with blood:
Your blood is the horn that awakens us.
Your soul is the sacrifice that appeases our wrath.
All of the Dragonlord blood... who step foot here... must... pay!
"Ugh—!"
Aegon jerked his hand back as if burned by a branding iron, staggering backward until his back slammed heavily against a cold stone pillar before stopping.
The torch slipped from his hand, rolling a few times on the dusty floor, stubbornly refusing to go out.
He gasped for air, cold sweat drenching his forehead, his purple eyes filled with unprecedented terror.
His heart pounded so hard it almost shattered his ribs.
It wasn't just because of those bloody and cruel memory fragments—the madness of the sacrifice, the horror of the doom, the wretchedness of the flight.
It was even more because of the 'information' and 'rules' that were transmitted to him with absolute clarity at that final moment.
Leaning against the stone pillar, he slowly slid down to sit on the ground. The cold floor sent a chill through his soaked clothes, but it was nothing compared to the coldness in his heart.
He understood everything now.
Why the system repeatedly warned to 'avoid bleeding' and 'do not let them discover you.'
Why his bloodline felt 'repulsion' and 'malice' here.
Why a single drop of blood before the mural had drawn such a terrifying gaze.
Why this descendant of Torregar died so strangely—his corpse intact, but his soul completely devoured.
At this moment, Aegon finally understood what the system meant by that sentence: The souls devoured by blood and fire still curse the Dragonlord bloodlines that step into this land.
The truth of the curse was this pursuit of blood debt across time.
The unprecedented, god-defiling blood sacrifice House Torregar performed here years ago had not only failed to awaken the Primordial Dragon but had instead polluted this land with the lives and towering resentment of hundreds of thousands who died miserably.
These souls were bound here; their hatred did not dissipate with time but turned into a vicious curse targeting specific goals.
The target of the curse was extremely precise: Dragonlord blood.
More accurately, it was House Torregar, who performed the blood sacrifice, and the Valyrian Dragonlord descendants who shared similar 'sinful blood.'
Their bloodline was like a lighthouse in the dark, attracting the attention of the vengeful spirits.
And their fresh blood was like a spark dropped into boiling oil, completely awakening and enraging these slumbering spirits of vengeance!
That Torregar survivor came back looking for dragon eggs, only to meet his end because of a single drop of blood. His soul was torn apart and eaten by the spirits, becoming the freshest'snack' at their feast of revenge.
And he, Aegon Targaryen, had the same Valyrian Dragonlord blood flowing through his veins!
Though their families were different, in the 'perception' of these souls who had been tormented by madness and resentment for centuries, there was likely no great difference—they were all 'descendants of executioners,' all 'objects of revenge to be devoured'!
"So that's it... 'Entrapped by the Curse'... so that's what it means," Aegon whispered to himself, his voice hoarse. This curse wasn't some ethereal bad luck, but an extremely vicious and precise 'hunting mechanism.'
In these ruins, he was a living, breathing, moving 'bait' and'sacrifice'!
After the fear passed, a cold, almost desperate clarity surged into his heart.
His situation was ten thousand times worse than he had imagined.
Not only did he have to face heavy injuries, hypothermia, monsters, and the threat of Crows Eye, but now he also had to be constantly on guard against becoming the hunting target of countless vengeful spirits.
A single accidental bleed could bring about total disaster.
But at the same time... an extremely dangerous, almost insane thought quietly slithered into his mind like a venomous snake.
This curse is a dead end, but... could it also become a weapon?
In the death scenes he saw earlier, those souls awakened by 'dragon blood' didn't distinguish between friend and foe, directly devouring the entire team led by that Torregar survivor.
Perhaps this is an ultimate weapon... for dealing with enemies that cannot be countered by conventional means?
This thought made him shiver, not just from fear, but because of the mutually destructive implication it contained.
He shook his head, temporarily suppressing this dangerous train of thought.
The priority was to stay alive, find his companions, and reach the check-in point. The 'rewards' given by the check-in system might be his only hope of breaking the deadlock.
He struggled to stand up again and picked up the torch. The firelight once again illuminated the corpse of the Torregar.
Looking at it now, that curled-up posture was filled with boundless fear and pain.
Aegon looked at it silently and didn't touch it again.
He turned around, his gaze scanning the dim basement.
In the memory fragments, he had come here to'search for treasure.'
So, would there be... his gaze fell on a crack in the wall diagonally behind the corpse.
The edges of the crack were neat, as if it had been artificially enlarged later. He walked over carefully and shone the torch inside.
Inside was a small niche, empty except for a thick layer of dust. But in the center of the dust, there seemed to be a shallow indentation, the shape... somewhat like an enlarged egg?
Aegon's heart skipped a beat.
A dragon egg? Was it taken? Or did he not find it at all, or was what he found... something else?
He carefully inspected the niche; besides that indentation, there was nothing else.
Aegon felt a bit disappointed but didn't dwell on it too much.
Right now, finding a way out and his companions was more important, and there were many other locations of good things in those memory fragments, including even armor forged from Valyrian Steel. Perhaps if he found that place, he could change out of these soaking wet clothes and armor, and get an 'equipment upgrade' while he was at it?
He took one last look at this underground secret chamber and was about to continue exploring in the direction he came from when his peripheral vision caught a glimpse of a large, extremely irregularly edged hole at the bottom of the far wall.
The hole was pitch black, a size larger than the ones he had seen in the underground cages earlier.
Familiar, unsettlingly large scratches covered the edges of the opening.
A mixture of musty odor and an indescribable fishy, rank smell slowly drifted out of that hole.
Aegon's breath hitched.
It seemed that the range of those 'burrowing' creatures' activities extended far beyond the underground cages.
The paths they had dug out went in all directions, possibly even connecting many corners of these ruins.
And the path he had just walked might have been one of those 'biological tunnels.'
He didn't know what the owners of these holes were, but he definitely didn't want to encounter them in this state.
He gripped his long blade tight, lowered the torch, held his breath, and began to move step by step, extremely slowly and silently, toward the ancient passage from the memory fragments, in the opposite direction of that hole.
The golden light on the system map flickered steadily somewhere ahead.
And the massive hole on the wall behind him, like the mouth of a silent giant beast, cast a heavy, ominous shadow at the edge of the flickering firelight.
Ãdvåñçé çhàptêr àvàilàble óñ pàtreøn luffy1898