GOT: I Plunder Skills — Chapter 412 - Primitives and the Red Comet

The warmth still lingering in the hearth told him the owner hadn't been gone long.

Lynn crouched and pinched a bit of ash between his fingers.

Just ordinary remnants of a fire.

He stood, gaze sweeping across the surrounding jungle.

Too quiet.

Not a single bird. Not a single insect.

Winter's three heads swept the treeline, all three throats rumbling with low, uneasy growls.

Lynn told it to stay and walked on alone, deeper into the jungle.

The decaying leaves underfoot were thick and soft, swallowing every footstep whole.

He pushed through a vast marshland choked with enormous fungi, each one leaking a faint blue glow, and the scene ahead suddenly opened up.

A primitive tribe, tucked into a mountain hollow.

Dozens of crude huts built from mud, stone, and great animal bones, scattered in no particular order across the hollow floor.

A massive bonfire burned at the center. A group of people huddled around it.

They were tall, their skin an unhealthy grayish-white. Tattered furs and leaves covered just enough to qualify as clothing. Their hair was a knotted mess. Their faces and bodies were smeared with colored mud, painted over with bizarre totems.

The weapons in their hands were sharpened animal bones and wooden clubs lashed with stones.

The moment Lynn stepped out of the jungle's shadow, the entire tribe exploded.

"Gah! Oo-lah!"

"Jee-goo! Jee-goo!"

A string of sharp, rapid syllables he couldn't make any sense of — like a troop of monkeys that had just been startled out of a tree. Every one of them snatched up a weapon, fell into a defensive crouch, and closed in around him.

An elderly native stepped out from the crowd. The chief, by the look of it.

He was smaller and thinner than the rest. The paint on his face was more intricate, more layered. A necklace of animal teeth hung around his neck. He raised a staff with a dried skull mounted on the end, pointed it at Lynn, and began to chant in a strange, wavering tone.

As he chanted, a wisp of spiritual energy crept toward Lynn. Faint enough to be almost nothing.

Some kind of primitive mind-influencing witchcraft.

Lynn couldn't even be bothered to resist. This was like trying to put out a forest fire with a cup of water.

He just watched, the way you watch a bad street performance.

Seeing that his witchcraft had produced exactly no effect, the old chief's expression moved through confidence, then shock, then fear.

The natives behind him began to stir.

Then.

ROAR,—!

An earth-shaking dragon cry split the air from somewhere outside the tribe.

Winter, calling for its master.

That was all it took.

Every last shred of color drained from every face in the tribe , including the old chief's, still mid-incantation. Weapons clattered to the ground. The next instant, the whole tribe was screaming and scrambling on all fours toward their huts. Some just dropped straight to their knees, facing Lynn, pouring out unintelligible pleas.

Total chaos.

Lynn lost what little interest he'd had left.

Too primitive. Couldn't understand a word. Civilization level: essentially zero. Beyond proving that intelligent life existed somewhere on this continent, they were nearly useless to him.

He turned and walked back the way he'd come.

He didn't kill any of them. There was no point. These people didn't even have iron , they were no threat to him at all.

He had a comet to find.

Lynn vaulted onto Winter's back and patted the hard scales.

"Let's go, buddy."

He pointed at the star still burning its bloody red against the dim sky.

Winter roared, beat its wings, and launched skyward.

Below, the natives who'd just barely recovered poked their heads out of their huts.

They watched that enormous, sky-filling black shadow carry the mysterious stranger up into the clouds and vanish.

Every one of them dropped to their knees again.

The old chief, moving in something close to a frenzy, grabbed a stone and began carving everything he had just witnessed into the great sacrificial rock at the center of the tribe.

...

This new continent was far larger than Lynn had imagined.

Winter flew west at full speed for two solid days and still the land below didn't change , endless primordial jungle, and black mountains that stabbed up into the clouds. The mountains were a strange, bare black, stripped of all vegetation, as though heavenly fire had scorched them clean long ago.

At one point, Lynn spotted a river running green.

The comet had vanished over the horizon. It had landed somewhere.

The further west they flew, the more clearly he could feel it , a vast magical source, somewhere ahead, radiating energy outward in steady, unbroken waves.

On the evening of the third day, Winter crested a massive black mountain range.

And Lynn's breath stopped.

Before him lay a ring-shaped basin of unimaginable scale. Its diameter stretched at least fifty li across. The ground was a smooth, glassy black , scorched, fused, as though some unimaginable heat had melted the earth itself down to slag.

At the center of the basin, hanging silently in the air:

A sun.

A sphere of light over a hundred meters across. It burned, but not with any ordinary fire. The color sat somewhere between gold and blood-red, and it radiated no heat , instead, it made the air around it thick and heavy and hard to breathe.

Across its surface, countless golden lightning bolts writhed and twisted like living things, snapping and crackling in the silence.

It pulsed like a heartbeat.

With each pulse, a wave of visible energy rolled outward and swept across the entire basin.

This is the Red Comet?

Winter descended slowly to the basin's rim. All three heads were alert, uneasy. It could feel the energy inside that sphere , enough to tear it apart.

Lynn dropped from the dragon's back.

The moment the energy storm touched him, the magic inside his body lurched and began to boil , out of control, instantly.

Every cell craving. Screaming.

Devour it. Merge with it. That pure, primal power—

Lynn clamped down on the impulse.

He knew exactly what would happen if he charged in recklessly.

That violent energy would blow him apart from the inside.

He kept his gaze locked on the sphere.

Through the burning outer shell of light, at the very core , he could just barely make it out.

A shadow. Blurred. Indistinct.

What is that?

Lynn narrowed his eyes. His spiritual energy pulled tight and focused, pushing outward, trying to pierce through the storm and see what was waiting inside.

➤ Next: An Egg — Inner Fire