CHAPTER 342: ABYSMAL DESCENT

Victor hopped onto the Gojo.

The beast bolted forward, gliding across the icy plains with supernatural speed.

Victor leaned back with a satisfied sigh.

"No more hiding. No more pretending. No more holding back. From today onward..."

He raised his glowing hand with void-qi swirling elegantly around it.

"...I’m out in the real world now. This isn’t no training drill, this is the real thing."

The massive raptor like mount roared into the frost-laden sky as the journey continued.

Victor looked ahead wiith ambition and excitement burning in his eyes.

"Let’s see how far I can go."

...

...

Gojo soared across the white sky like an omen of storms, cutting through gusts sharp enough to flay ordinary humans.

Victor lounged on the great beast’s back with the confidence of a man who had almost died here once and now felt annoyingly comfortable about it. He had a roasted beast meat clutched in his hand steamed against the freezing air, and each hearty bite sent waves of savory warmth through him.

The icy region stretched endlessly beneath them like a wasteland of frozen ridges and snow dunes sculpted by merciless winds. It was the kind of place humans weren’t meant to exist in except, apparently, Victor, who was currently eating lunch like he was on a picnic ride.

Gojo, the white frost raptor like creature was nearly thirty feet long from beak to tail so Victor was like a rat being carried by a flying Elephant. It’s feathers resembled crystalline plating with sharp edges and shimmering with a faint frost glow.

Its talons were large enough to crush a car and his piercing blue eyes seemed carved from the very glaciers they flew over.

It was quite majestic and yet terrifying but Victor sat atop it without any worry.

Victor sipped from his stored water with the energy of a man just enjoying a day out.

"Ah..." he exhaled happily. "Finally living the life. No morning routine, no 4:30 AM wake-up call, no Instructor screaming in my ear like he’s my dad. Just me, premium roasted meat, and my oversized chicken here."

Gojo flicked his head back and screeched.

"Okay, okay—you’re a majestic frost raptor, not a chicken. Calm down."

They continued in silence for a while, until something below flickered in Victor’s peripheral vision.

Victor froze mid-bite and then slowly turned his head down.

They had just flown past the only lake in the entire region that wasn’t frozen...

The exact same one he visited that had him at death’s door many weeks ago. It lay in the middle of a canyon crater with its perfectly smooth surface reflecting the pale sky like a sheet of blue glass.

Victor swallowed the meat in his mouth.

"...Gojo. Turn around."

Gojo didn’t argue. He flapped once, twice, banking sharply until they circled back and descended. Snow scattered as the raptor landed atop a frozen peak overlooking the strange lake.

Victor remained seated for a moment, silently observing the water.

His breath didn’t fog. The cold around the lake felt... different than he recalled.

He folded his arms and narrowed his eyes.

"The last time I came here, I was dying of thirst... and then I saw a glow right in the center of the lake. Just for a moment."

He stared hard at the perfectly still water.

"But now that I think about it... that glow didn’t look like it belonged to anything natural."

Gojo made a low, uneasy rumble with its feathers fluffing in agitation.

"You can tell too, right?" Victor muttered. "Yeah. There’s something about that lake."

He hopped off the gaint magical raptor’s back, landing lightly on the snowy cliff.

His academy uniform was practically nonexistent right now since it got reduced to tattered strips clinging to his waist and shoulders. But thankfully, he didn’t feel the cold anymore.

The soul bond had somehow affected his body, making him seem like a creature of this habitat just like the beasts that lived here.

Still, he needed to consider this carefully.

A lake that refuses to freeze in a region where fire itself dies instantly? Impossible.

He remembered vividly how suffocating the air used to be because warmth vanished the moment it existed within this region...

How frost tried to crawl into his veins and turn him into a frozen statue.

...how he couldn’t even breathe fire because the cold smothered it on the spot.

This place was a graveyard of heat, life, and anything remotely warm.

And yet...

This lake sat here, undisturbed. Water. Actual water. Not frozen. Not steaming. Not violent.

Still.

Perfect.

As if mocking nature.

Victor scratched his head. "No, really. What kind of logic is this? Even the heavens would look at this place and file a bug report."

He sighed. "Alright, Gojo. I’m going down."

The frost raptor stomped and screeched, clearly unhappy.

"Don’t give me that look. If I die, you’ll know because you’ll suddenly feel a powerful emotional disturbance in the air, like ’My master died—damn, who’s gonna feed me now?’"

Gojo snapped his beak at him.

Victor grinned. "Relax. I’m tougher now."

He tightened the leather strap securing the legacy sword to his bareback and then he approached the edge of the frozen peak.

"I’ll be back. Stay here."

Gojo bowed its head reluctantly.

Victor inhaled once... and dove straight into the lake.

---

The surface swallowed him silently, and cold darkness wrapped around him immediately.

But unlike last time when contact with the water felt like daggers piercing every inch of his body, this time his skin merely tingled.

He swam downward, kicking powerfully with long, steady strokes.

The deeper he went, the dimmer the world became. His eyes adjusted at first... but slowly... surely...

Blackness spread...

It soon became complete and utterly dark.

Not even the faintest glimmer could be spotted up ahead.

’...Okay this is new,’ Victor muttered internally while his breathing blew bubbles. ’Where’s my glow? Hey, mysterious lake spirit or whatever—you showed up last time when I was at death’s door. Now that I’m alive and curious, you’re shy?’

However, he kept descending.

Thirty meters.

Fifty.

Seventy.

His instincts began twitching. There was something wrong with the space around him.

It didn’t necessarily feel dangerous but it did feel foreign. As if the water wasn’t normal water.

He slowed after descending to an extent as his toes brushed something.

He reached down and his fingertips met rough surface.

Victor assumed he had somehow swam closer to the wall of the lake and distanced himself a little before resuming his deep dive.

Victor plunged deeper into the lake with arms tucked tight to his sides, legs streamlined and body cutting through the dark water like a falling spear.

Since he couldn’t see, he tried to spread his spiritual outward, but the moment it touched the water around him, it fuzzed and scattered like ink spilled in a whirlpool.

He clicked his tongue.

"Really? Spiritual sense interference? In a lake? What next—fish forming an anti-spirit formation?"

The darkness swallowed his voice completely. Not that sound carried well underwater anyway, but Victor still talked to himself out of habit. It kept him sane. And slightly entertained. Mostly entertained.

He kept descending.

Two hundred and fifty feet...

Two hundred and eighty feet...

Three hundred feet...

Three hundred and fifty feet...

His figure sank deeper and deeper until darkness became so total he couldn’t even see his own hand in front of his face. He briefly wondered why he was doing this again.

"Oh right," he muttered internally. "Because curiosity is stronger than my self-preservation. Fantastic."

The water grew colder but was still nothing hr couldn’t handle.

Victor tried extending his spiritual sense again... and again it dissolved into static.

"How deep does this thing go?" he wondered.

By his estimation, he had already passed four hundred feet.

At this point, he might as well be descending into an abyss instead of a lake. He glanced upward but saw nothing... only impenetrable darkness.

Just when he considered turning back, a faint glimmer flickered far below him.

It was moon-colored... and it vanished almost as instantly as it appeared.

Victor froze in place with his eyes narrowing.

"That light... I’ve seen that before."

It was the same mysterious flicker from back then, that caught his attention. It had finally appeared again, further boosting Victor’s interest.

He angled himself downward and kicked off, accelerating. Rocks and protruding stone ridges became more frequent the deeper he went.

Once or twice he misjudged the terrain and clipped the edges, causing entire slabs of submerged boulders to crumble apart.

"Oops. My bad," he muttered with a wince. "Please don’t awaken some underwater ancient beast... I already have enough problems."

Minutes passed and after what seemed like ages...

Thud~

Victor’s feet finally struck a surface.

He landed on what felt like the lake’s floor.

It felt hard, uneven and yet smooth to his skin.

It was no doubt covered in frost.

Victor hovered while squinting into the darkness.

’Is this it?’