Chapter 373: The Story After (5) [Side Story, Part 5]

“So this is the place,” the Tower Master murmured.

He was flying toward a mountain range at the far edge of the continent. As he drew near, the outline of his destination came into view. A vast and towering line of peaks rose from the land, their full width impossible to grasp at a glance. Every ridge and slope lay buried under snow.

This was the Alphra Range. It was one of the five largest mountain ranges on the continent, a place any geographer would name without hesitation.

Reports of frequent earthquakes in the region had reached the Mage Tower, so he had come to investigate. Under normal circumstances, there would have been no need for him personally to move. If it had been an ordinary tectonic disturbance, his disciples would have managed the investigation and cleanup.

However, this time was different. The Alphra Range lay in one of the most remote corners of the world. No one lived nearby. Even the closest village sat so far away that, by planetary standards, it might as well have been another land.

Yet the quakes from Alphra had reached that distant settlement. Something was happening here on the scale of the entire continent. That was why the Tower Master himself had left his desk and taken to the sky.

“Earthquakes in the Alphra Range...,” he muttered as he flew.

A few years ago, he had examined the ley lines of Alphra himself. At that time, there had been no issues at all. If anything, the foundations had seemed exceptionally stable, the sort of place where no quake should occur for thousands of years.

Puzzled, the Tower Master arrived at the mountain range and entered what should have been its interior. Then he stopped moving.

“What?”

Shock rooted him where he stood. This was the Alphra Range. It had once been a collection of colossal, cloud-piercing mountains, a wall of snow-draped peaks that carved the sky in two.

Now that range lay broken. The ground had sunk and shattered. The mountains had collapsed in on themselves. To someone who had never seen the place before, it would no longer look like a mountain range at all. They would think the land had simply caved in, leaving a field of ruins.

The range itself had disappeared. The Tower Master took a moment to steady his thoughts. Perhaps this was an aftereffect of the war years ago, the titanic conflict with the Demon King and the Primarch. Perhaps they had missed the damage because it had not manifested immediately.

He tried to read the scars. He traced the patterns of collapse and the age of the fractures, examining them as if they had been lines of script carved into the world. The answer came quickly.

“This is not that old,” he realized.

Some of the destruction was recent. It had nothing to do with the war. That made it harder to accept.

A mountain range counted among the five largest on the continent had collapsed without any connection to that great catastrophe. No legendary battle, no divine intervention, no world-ending event had marked it. It had simply fallen.

“This is strange,” he said.

He landed lightly on the broken stone and placed a hand on the ground. A low hum spread out from his fingers.

A vast wave of mana rippled away from him, sweeping through the ruined range. It brushed over every rock and crevice, searching for residues of Myst, for traces of any force that might reveal what had happened.

However, nothing answered. There was no lingering mark, no twisted line, no echo of power. It felt as if the range had broken apart by pure coincidence, nothing more.

“What is this?” The Tower Master’s confusion deepened.

He could have returned at once and reported that there was no threat. He could have said that the mountains had collapsed through natural causes and that there was nothing left to worry about.

Yet something in him refused that conclusion. His instincts whispered that something vast and alien lay behind this. There was a wrongness here that he could not ignore.

“This will be troublesome,” he said quietly. “But there is no helping it.”

He spread his fingers. A complex circle of geometric lines and runes unfolded at his feet, blooming like a magical flower.

“Deep Searching,” he intoned.

A Tenth-Class spell unfolded, its power stretching outward across the land and threading through the air before sinking deep into the earth. Magic seeped into the bedrock, reaching down to probe the very bones of the world.

The ruined range poured itself into the Tower Master’s mind. Every fissure and hollow, every buried layer, every fold and fracture was recorded and arranged. The sweep of his perception continued to spread, drilling deeper, down toward the crust itself.

He let out a humorless chuckle. “Of course...”

The earth was completely ruined. Even with Ketal’s strength, restoring this place might have been difficult. Something had torn through the foundations in a way that defied easy understanding. He could not even guess what kind of force would break the land like this. He continued tracing with his senses.

Then he noticed something strange. Far below, deep in the crust, there was a region where his mana would not pass. His probe hit a blank space and slid away.

“Is there a deposit of ore that blocks magic?” he wondered.

It would not have been unusual for rare minerals to be embedded that far down. He shifted the angle of the magic, working around the obstacle and trying to slip between seams.

“Hmm...?”

The more he tried, the clearer the oddity became. No matter which direction he approached from, his detection failed. Mana simply would not enter that region, as if it were pressing against an invisible wall.

“What is this?”

The Tower Master had scanned the interior of the crust many times before, but he had never encountered a block like this that covered such a wide area. More than that, when he had examined Alphra in the past, there had been no trace of such a phenomenon.

Frowning, he widened the spell further. He spread his detection magic across the whole area. Mana swelled, searching, but the region in question remained blank.

Even that absence was information. He focused on the edges of the void and tracked its boundaries. Within a short time, he understood something new.

“It is moving...,” he realized.

The region that blocked his magic was shifting, little by little. It moved with a steady rhythm, expanding and contracting in a repeating pattern. He watched longer, reading the pulse. The movement matched a pattern he recognized—one that made his breath catch.

It felt like the faint motion of breath, the rise and fall of something immense and alive. As the realization struck the Tower Master, the ground began to tremble. The presence that had rejected his magic was stirring from its rest.

The earth roared. The ruined mountains sank further, collapsing as if the ground beneath them had dropped away. The Tower Master shot up into the sky on instinct, throwing layers of protection around him.

The land split and subsided. The entire mountain range dropped out of sight, leaving behind an enormous cavity. From that dark hollow, something began to climb.

“How dare you?” a thin voice whispered.

The sound slid through the air and under the Tower Master’s defenses like a cold blade. His whole body prickled. For an instant, he felt like prey standing before a predator whose hunger knew no end.

“You disturb my sleep,” the voice said.

“Ah...,” the Tower Master breathed.

It was a serpent—a white serpent, vast and ancient. Calling it large would have been an insult. The word lacked the weight to describe what rose from the broken ground. The long neck that reared up punched through the layer of crumbled earth and stretched toward the sky. By the time it finally stopped, its head brushed the clouds.

Even then, he could see only a fraction of its full length. The rest remained buried in the earth. He knew what he was facing.

“The legendary White Serpent...,” he whispered.

Long ago, in the tales told during an emperor’s lifetime, there had been stories of monsters. There were White Serpents that swallowed glaciers, White Bears that stirred earthquakes, and Ugly Rats that poisoned the sea. The serpent before him was one of those three. He knew it instinctively, as if the knowledge had been carved into the world itself.

How?

he thought.

By all rights, Ketal should have separated the Demon Realm from the Mortal Realm, cutting off the monsters that belonged to that strange domain. The White Serpent flicked its tongue and fixed its eyes on him.

“A paltry mortal,” it said. “Such an arrogant thing. You do not even look edible.”

The land shook as its body shifted. With that small motion alone, what remained of the mountains caved in further. The ground in every direction buckled and fell. The sheer mass of its body was a disaster in and of itself.

“There is no flavor in you at all,” the Serpent said. “You are not even worth chewing. Die.”

It twisted, and the stone around it exploded. Chunks of the shattered range tore free and hurtled toward the Tower Master. Calling them fragments was misleading, since each piece was the size of a hill. Even he could not afford to overlook them. He swept his arms upward.

A high keening sound rang through the air. A shield of solidified magic snapped into place around him. The first strike hit, and the barrier shuddered under the weight of the impact.

The White Serpent moved again, irritated. The world roared in answer. The shattered mountain peaks rose like hurled boulders and swept toward him, a rain of stone vast enough to crush entire nations flat.

“W-what is this?” the Tower Master growled. He clenched his fist. “Teleport.”

His figure vanished. The airborne peaks crashed down on where he had been, smashing into one another and the ground, sending out waves of force that rolled across the land like a storm-tide.

The Tower Master reappeared high above the White Serpent’s head, suspended in the air. Spell formulas assembled in his mind with practiced precision, and as he gave them voice, multiple spells erupted at once.

“Hellfire! Frozen Tempest!”

The flames of hell itself surged downward, wrapped in a spiraling blizzard of killing cold. It was the magic of a great archmage, the kind of power that tore up landscapes and rewrote weather. Even one of the Demon King’s Four Demon Lords would not emerge unscathed if they took such a strike head-on.

The White Serpent watched the torrent approaching and released a small breath. A single exhale drifted outward. That breath met the inferno and the ice storm, and both disappeared. A thunderous blast tore through the sky as his spells unraveled, shredded apart like scattering fog.

“

Khh—!

” the Tower Master cried.

There was no time to brace. The same breath that had erased his magic caught the Tower Master himself. He shot upward like a leaf in a gale. He burst through the lower layers of the atmosphere and only managed to stop himself when the air had grown thin and cold.

“What...?” he gasped.

With a single casual exhalation, the White Serpent had not only shattered his spells, but it had blown him almost out of the sky. The word

monster

did not begin to cover the devastation it had brought.

The White Serpent lifted its head slightly, looking up at him as if genuinely impressed that he was still intact.

“Oh?” it said. “You still maintain your form? You are even alive. Among the mortals that scurry Outside, you are not entirely useless.”

Its eyes, slit like a serpent’s but bright with cruel intelligence, fixed on him.

“You do not look like you would taste good,” it said. “But I do not mind. I will permit you to become a part of me.”

Its head swept toward him. The Tower Master reacted on instinct, throwing himself aside. The Serpent’s jaws snapped shut on the space he had occupied a heartbeat earlier. The wind alone struck him, violent enough to rattle bones.

The force of the passing bite sent him spinning, almost toppling him out of the air. The Serpent shook its head once.

Bone met magic as its skull crashed into him with the force of a hammer. Every barrier, every ward, every artifact he had layered around himself shattered in the same instant. The impact drove straight through him, leaving his body ringing with the force of the blow.

The world became a blur. He hit the ground hard enough to crater it, the shock rippling outward and making the land quake all over again. The Serpent clicked its tongue.

“If I crush you like this, it will be hard to find the corpse,” it said. “It will be troublesome to eat.”

Even so, it could still gather a few lingering scraps. It lowered its head from the sky to the ruined earth, and the air around it twisted, heavy and turbulent, on the edge of becoming a storm.

Then the Serpent paused.

“You are alive,” it said.

“Barely...,” the Tower Master replied.

His body was a wreck. Cracks split his skull. The lower half of his body was simply gone. Half of his ribs had been pulverized into dust. He was forcing himself back together, patching bone and weaving what remained, but the damage was severe.

The Serpent let out a low, amused laugh.

“You endured my strike and still cling to life,” it said. “Impressive. I commend you.”

“You are the White Serpent of the White Snowfield, are you not?” the Tower Master asked it.

“You ask what you already know,” the Serpent replied.

Its tongue flicked, tasting the air. The Tower Master gave a strained smile.

“How?” he asked. “Ketal sealed everything.”

The Serpent’s amusement deepened.

“I came Outside long ago,” it said. “I have simply been waiting quietly for my time.”

It had not emerged recently. It had left the White Snowfield years before and settled beneath this mountain range. It had remained still, coiled and patient, sleeping while the world above shook.

“While I slept, I watched,” it said. “I wanted to see what became of the world outside. It seems it is still intact. That means he has vanished.”

𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

“The one you speak of is Ketal,” the Tower Master said.

“If that damned creature still existed in this world, it would not look so peaceful,” the Serpent replied. “For me, this is convenient.”

The Tower Master listened, then asked quietly, “So you have been hiding all this time because you feared Ketal?”

“Silence!” the Serpent snapped. Its voice cracked like a whip, and the sky itself shivered.

The Tower Master let out a short, breathless laugh. “So I was right.”

“I care nothing for what mortals think,” the Serpent hissed. “Without that barbarian, this world is mine.”

It began to rise, pulling the air upward in a long, spiraling draft that trailed along its body. As its full height unfolded, the sky above seemed to warp, bending around the enormity of its form.

“This world will belong to me,” it said. “You, mortal, will be my first stepping stone.”

Its jaws opened wide. The colossal mouth came down and swallowed the Tower Master whole.