Level 1 to Infinity: My Bloodline Is the Ultimate Cheat!-Chapter 881: Uncoiled Mountain

"That day, when the Divine Sea Temple elder appeared and laid eyes on the Black Qilin, he must have realized what we intended, that we would send him into the Forbidden Vale to break the seals that bind us." Xakier’s voice was steady, yet his eyes carried a depth that spoke of centuries endured rather than years lived. "Since the Mythic Age, every ancient clan has been shackled. The sea clans beneath their waters, and we upon this land. Each seal was crafted to be absolute. The Temple cannot endure without the ocean’s energy. We cannot leave without the bloodline of a King. Both conditions were meant to be impossible."

He lifted his gaze to the aurora-streaked sky, its shifting colors reflecting faintly in his irises. "And yet, before the next Mythic Age has even begun, both impossibilities are converging. The heavens are changing."

"So we do nothing but watch?" the Cloudfang elder asked quietly, his sharp eyes sweeping across the distant peaks where countless figures gathered like dark flecks against the snow.

"No," Xakier replied, turning away as his robes stirred in the cold wind. "We prepare. When the seal shatters, we follow our King. We fight for this world. What awaits us may be rebirth, or it may be extinction."

With that, he vanished into drifting snow.

The remaining elders stood in silence for a moment, their expressions grave, yet beneath the solemnity something else flickered, something that had not stirred in countless generations. To break the seal. To follow a King once more. To march into battle not as prisoners but as sovereign beings. The hope had never truly died, only lain buried beneath centuries of frost and resignation.

Rebirth or extinction. After millennia in confinement, the distinction had grown thin. Freedom itself was worth any cost.

One by one, their figures dissolved into the whitening air.

Only the Cloudfang elder and Nightclaw remained, their gazes fixed upon the distant apex beneath which the Forbidden Vale lay concealed, silent and waiting.

---

Far deeper within the Vale, in a cavern buried well below the surface where no sunlight had ever reached, a pair of pale grey eyes snapped open in absolute darkness.

"You’ve come."

The voice was calm, almost expectant.

The figure rose slowly, tilting his head toward a jagged fissure high above. A sliver of weak light filtered down through the crack, thin and distant, like a forgotten memory of the sky.

Clank.

Chains shifted somewhere in the blackness. A second pair of eyes ignited, crimson and steady, cutting through the dark.

"So your wait is over? It seems mine is as well. How amusing. We have shared this pit for over twenty years, and now our guests arrive together."

The grey-eyed figure stepped forward into the shaft of light. It slid across his bare shoulders and down the clean lines of his body, revealing skin smooth as polished jade and muscles honed to unnatural perfection. When the light reached his face, it exposed features identical to Ethan’s, save for the pale, almost colorless eyes that held no warmth.

"We are one," he said softly. "Twenty years ago, our mother separated me from him and sealed me here. Now he returns to reclaim what was taken."

His lips curved, though there was nothing gentle in the expression.

"But I am not a fragment. I am myself. Does he truly believe he can simply take me back as though I am an object? Let him try. I will erase his consciousness and claim his body instead. I will walk free, not as a shadow, but as the whole."

A low chuckle echoed from the darkness as the crimson eyes drifted closer.

"You would fight yourself? Now that is something I would pay to see."

For a fleeting moment, a massive head emerged from the gloom, its scales ashen and worn, its horns chipped with age. An ancient Qilin regarded the grey-eyed youth before receding once more into shadow.

The grey-eyed Ethan stared upward at the fissure for a long time, as though measuring the distance between himself and freedom. Then, without warning, he bent his knees and launched himself upward, his body slicing through the darkness like a streak of silver.

The cavern thundered.

An invisible barrier struck him mid-flight. Space rippled outward from the point of impact, and he was hurled back as though the world itself had rejected him. He crashed violently into the stone floor below, the force splitting rock and sending dust spiraling into the air.

He rose almost instantly, fury burning across his face.

"Damn her. Damn my mother. Why am I the one punished? Why am I the one locked away?"

His voice echoed wildly against the cavern walls as he struck the unseen barrier again, though he did not leap this time. The invisible force remained unmoved.

From deep within the shadows, the Qilin sighed, a sound ancient and tired.

"You sigh?" the grey-eyed youth snapped, spinning toward the darkness. "You are imprisoned as well. You have no right to sigh. You awakened my consciousness. You gave me awareness. If not to help me escape, then why?"

A pause followed, heavy and unhurried.

"I was bored," the Qilin replied at last, his tone carrying a faint trace of amusement beneath the weariness.

For a moment the grey-eyed Ethan simply stared into the darkness, disbelief overtaking rage.

"Bored?" His voice rose, incredulous and incandescent. "You shattered my existence out of boredom?"

The cavern offered no answer. The Qilin had withdrawn completely, leaving only silence behind.

---

Several hundred meters beyond the chasm above, Ethan and Blackie arrived at another stark boundary.

Behind them stretched endless barren sand, dry and lifeless.

Before them rose rocky, uneven terrain, jagged and dark as though the earth itself had been fractured and left exposed.

They paused at the dividing line.

"Let’s go," Ethan said quietly. The call within him pulsed stronger now, tugging him forward with a steady insistence that he could no longer ignore.

"Right behind you," Blackie replied, though his voice carried an edge he did not bother to conceal.

They stepped onto the stone together.

The moment their boots touched the rocky ground, Blackie shuddered violently. Not once, but twice, as though something unseen had brushed against him.

Ethan felt it too.

For the briefest instant, something within him seemed to thin, to stretch, almost as if a thread had been tugged from deep inside his being and then released. The sensation vanished as quickly as it came, leaving behind only a faint unease.

"Holy crap." Blackie leaped backward, staring at the ground as if expecting it to crack open. "Tell me these rocks are not more eggs."

He had felt something similar when they first stepped onto the desert, a crawling awareness beneath the sand that he had attributed to the endless insect eggs buried below. But this was solid stone. There were no eggs here. There could not be.

Ethan crouched and pressed a hand against the surface. Cold. Hard. Unremarkable. "They’re just rocks."

Yet even as he said it, doubt lingered.

Blackie slowly lifted his gaze toward the low mountain ahead. It was not particularly tall, but it stretched impossibly far in both directions, forming a long, uneven ridge that seemed to divide the landscape.

"Boss," Blackie murmured, his voice dropping lower with each word, "what if we’re not standing on rocks at all? What if we’re standing on something else. Something really, really big?"

Ethan followed his gaze, studying the ridge more carefully. The shape was irregular, but that alone meant little in a place like this. "That would have to be one hell of a creature."

"Not tall," Blackie whispered, swallowing hard. "Long."

The color had drained from his face.

Ethan turned to him slowly. "Blackie. Are you seriously afraid of..."

"Do not finish that sentence," Blackie snapped immediately, bristling. "I am not afraid. I am merely experiencing a profound and deeply justified discomfort."

Ethan could not help it. He laughed.

The sound had barely left his throat when the ground answered.

A low, rolling tremor rippled beneath their feet. The ridge before them shifted.

At first it was subtle, a faint undulation as though the earth were exhaling. Then the movement intensified. Massive boulders tore loose and tumbled down the sides in a roaring cascade, each one large enough to crush them flat. Dust billowed into the air, and beneath the crashing stone came a sound that froze the blood.

A long, resonant hiss that seemed to vibrate through bone rather than air.

Ethan’s laughter died instantly.

The entire mountain was moving.

"Blackie," he said tightly as his eyes locked on the heaving mass before them, "you had to say it."

The ridge lifted. Curved. Shifted again. What they had taken for layers of rock separated and slid against one another, revealing scale beneath stone, muscle beneath what had seemed like earth.

"Snake," Blackie breathed, his voice rising despite himself. "Oh no. No, no, no. That is a snake."

In a flash of dark light, he abandoned his human form, scales bursting outward as his true body emerged in full.

Ethan did not hesitate. He was on Blackie’s back before the transformation had fully settled.

Behind them, the titanic serpent began to uncoil, its body stretching farther than the eye could follow, its hiss swelling into a thunderous roar that shook the Vale itself.