Chapter 270: To save a wyvern or not |
While Chen Ren had been busy putting every part of his plan into place, Zi Wen had taken another step toward the beast master inheritance.
Even after several days had passed, he still found it hard to believe he had not only survived the wyvern’s fall, but had also found the cave that led toward the inheritance itself. Part of him wanted to believe it had all happened because things were somehow meant to unfold this way, but deep down he knew better. It had not been fate.
It had been luck.
When the wyvern crashed against the mountain peak, Zi Wen had jumped with Whiskey in the same desperate instant. Somewhere in the middle of that fall, by nothing short of chance, his hand had caught a ledge jutting out from the mountainside. Whiskey had managed to latch onto his leg at nearly the same moment. If either of those things had failed, the two of them would have dropped thousands of feet and died without much left to bury.
But somehow, they held on.
Zi Wen still did not know whether it was the rush of that moment or whether he had simply grown stronger inside the pagoda, but he had managed to haul himself up over the ledge in the end. The instant his body hit solid stone, he felt the first real wave of relief he had known in some time. For once, he was no longer one slip away from death.
After that, the choice in front of him had been simple.
He could climb back down, search for Little Yuze, and count himself fortunate just to still be alive.
Or he could go up.
In the end, that was enough to pull him upward.
He told himself he was only going to take a look. Nothing more. With the way the wyvern had hit the mountain, he doubted it would still be in any shape to attack him even if it had somehow lived through the fall.
So Zi Wen turned and began climbing up the slope.
Whiskey protested, of course.
The little lunari wanted nothing more to do with danger. But it also had no desire to be left alone on the mountainside, so after a brief fit of unhappy sounds and resistance, it jumped onto Zi Wen’s shoulders and stayed there, tense and alert, its eyes constantly moving as it watched for any beast that might lunge at them without warning.
Like that, the two of them continued the climb.
It took hours before they finally reached the peak. The moment they did, Zi Wen stopped.
The wyvern’s tail hung off the side of the mountain, limp and still against the snow.
He stood there for a full minute just looking at it, telling himself that if it moved even a little, he would turn around and go right back the way he had come. But it did not move.
So he took the last few steps forward. What he found on the other side made him stop again.
The wyvern’s body was in ruins.
Its spikes had broken off completely and lay scattered across the snow around it, some half-buried, others stained dark where the blood spreading from the beast had turned the white ground red. One of its wings, the one that had caught fire earlier, lay twisted off to the side with clear holes torn through the membrane. The other looked a little better. As Zi Wen slowly moved around the body, he found a great wound split into the side of its head, deep enough that he could see a glimpse of brain matter beneath shattered bone while blood still leaked sluggishly from the injury.
The whole thing was grotesque.
Zi Wen had seen plenty of dead and dying beasts before, but never something this large in such a state. Even Whiskey, who was not easy to shake, looked visibly disturbed as it clung to his shoulders.
Still, Zi Wen took another step closer, then another.
By the time he reached the wyvern’s face, he found himself offering a quick prayer to the heavens hoping that nothing terrible was about to happen. Carefully, he raised a hand and held it near the beast’s nostrils.
Faint air brushed against his skin.
Despite the fall, despite the blood loss, despite the state of its body, the wyvern was still alive. Zi Wen could not imagine many other beasts surviving something like that.
Even so, he doubted its death was very far away.
Being this high in the mountains, with the cold biting into its body, its wings burned through, and no healing pills anywhere in sight, the wyvern was probably only a few hours away from dying quietly where it lay.
That thought made Zi Wen pause. Then, slowly, another question took shape in his mind.
What was he supposed to do?
Leave it here? Kill it and harvest what he could? Or actually try to heal it?
The last option felt the strangest. If he healed it, would it simply recover enough to turn around and eat him? Zi Wen had no idea.
Whiskey, however, seemed to have already made up its mind.
The little lunari moved ahead, and Zi Wen immediately noticed lightning beginning to gather in its paw. It was clearly preparing to finish the wyvern off, but before it could act, Zi Wen reached out and grabbed it.
“What are you doing?”
The lightning fizzled out at once.
Whiskey squirmed in his grip, chirping angrily as if demanding to be let go so it could finish the job properly, but Zi Wen only shook his head. He sighed and looked back at the wyvern, turning the choice over again.
Then another thought entered his mind.
Was the test really about killing it?
The more he considered it, the less that made sense. If this truly was a trial left by a beast master, then why would the answer be to slaughter a beast that was clearly not wild? No beast master would build a trial around meaningless killing, especially not when Zi Wen was certain the wyvern itself was a part of the test.
And more than that, there was another problem.
No ordinary climber should have been able to bring down something like this in the first place.
What had happened here was luck—insane luck, mixed with the items he had received from Sect Leader Chen. If that was what the test expected, then it was a poor test. So maybe the point had never been killing the wyvern at all.
Maybe it was supposed to be tamed. Or at least subdued.
If that was the true goal, then Zi Wen had already failed badly enough. And if he finished it off now, he might fail even harder.
That thought left him standing there for several breaths, staring at the wounded beast and wondering whether healing it might actually be the better choice after all.
Zi Wen did have pills and herbs on him, but looking at the wyvern’s injuries, he knew that would hardly be enough. The damage was too severe, and more importantly, he knew almost nothing about wyvern anatomy. Healing a beast like this was not the same as patching up a person or even treating an ordinary spirit beast. He would need real knowledge for that, and there was no chance of finding it on a mountain peak in the middle of nowhere.
At best, he might be able to keep it alive a little longer. But even that was uncertain.
While he was still turning those thoughts over, Whiskey wriggled free from his hand and bounded off across the snow. Zi Wen barely noticed at first, too caught in his own thinking, but then he heard the little lunari cry out.
His head snapped up.
He looked around quickly, trying to find it, and a moment later Whiskey appeared again from behind the wyvern’s body. Before Zi Wen could ask what was wrong, the lunari suddenly darted off in a hurry, and with no better choice, Zi Wen followed.
He moved awkwardly over the wyvern’s enormous body, stepping across its claws, over the torn stretch of its wing, and through the broken gaps in the membrane where the fall had ripped it apart. But the moment he came around behind the beast, he stopped.
There was a door in the snow.
A simple wooden door, standing upright on the mountain peak as though it belonged there. Zi Wen just stared at it.
The wyvern’s body had hidden it from view until now, and for a few seconds he could not make sense of what he was seeing. It looked too ordinary and too impossible at the same time, just a lone door planted in the middle of the snow with nothing attached to it.
He blinked. Had he breathed in something strange? Was the mountain making him see illusions?
Slowly, he walked forward and reached out to touch the wood. It felt solid beneath his fingers. Then he moved around it, checking behind it as if that might somehow explain things, but it really was just that—a wooden door standing by itself on the peak.
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Zi Wen turned to Whiskey, who was staring at it too.
“Do you know anything about this?”
The little lunari gave a small shrug, as if to say it knew no more than he did.
Zi Wen let out a faint, wry breath and looked back at the door, still trying to figure out what exactly he was supposed to make of it.
For a few seconds, he found himself wondering whether opening the door would unleash something terrible—dark spirits pouring out of it to kill him before he even had time to react. But that thought felt a little ridiculous once he steadied himself. He was standing on a mountain peak, not in some ancient tomb or cursed ruin.
That kind of thing seemed unlikely.
Maybe it was nothing more than a trick. Maybe the door opened to emptiness, or to some meaningless space meant only to confuse him. The thoughts kept circling, but before he could decide what to do, Whiskey acted first.
The little lunari leapt straight onto the handle.
Zi Wen’s eyes widened.
Before he could stop it, the handle turned. A click followed, sharp and clear in the cold air, and the door swung open.
Whiskey jumped back immediately. Zi Wen stared past it, and his eyes widened even further.
There was a library on the other side.
The spatial technique at work did not surprise him much. By now, he had seen enough strange things in the pagoda to accept that space could be twisted in absurd ways. What surprised him was the library itself. Of all the things that could have been hidden behind a door on a snowy mountain peak, rows of books were not what he would have guessed.
Still wary, Zi Wen stepped inside.
He half expected something to drop on him the moment he crossed the threshold, but nothing did. The room remained quiet. It was small, not much more than a compact study with shelves lining the walls, perhaps a hundred books in total, and a table with a single chair set in the middle.
Then, as he moved farther in, he noticed writing on the wall.
Zi Wen stopped and read it.
“After entering the room, you will have one day to prepare for the final trial. Once the wall turns red, your trial will begin.”
The moment he finished reading, everything in his mind began to shift.
The pieces that had seemed disconnected only moments ago suddenly started to settle into place.
The wyvern had been part of the trial.
Not just an obstacle, but something meant to be subdued, perhaps even tamed, so that it would lead the climber here—to this room, to the final stage waiting beyond it. Zi Wen had not truly managed that. He knew it. But even so, while falling, the wyvern had still moved toward this place deliberately.
He wondered why that was the case, and in the very next moment felt relieved that he had not killed the wyvern outright.
He had come close enough to it already. Close enough that, if things had tilted a little differently, he might have finished the beast off without thinking twice. But now it was obvious that the wyvern had been part of the trial from the beginning, and that realization sent another question quickly rising behind it.
What, then, was the next trial supposed to be about?
Surely it was not simply another matter of taming a different beast—unless there were more hidden spaces inside the library that he could not yet see. But standing there among shelves and books, the answer seemed more likely to lie elsewhere.
Knowledge.That thought only grew firmer when Zi Wen pulled out the first book. The title was about beasts. He reached for another. That one was as well.
The pattern became obvious very quickly. The whole room was filled with books on beasts, taming methods, anatomy, habits, and care. There were volumes on handling them, understanding them, subduing them, and healing them. Whatever came next, this library was meant to prepare him for it.
That much was clear. But one thing still troubled him.
Would the questions of the trial draw from all of these books?
If so, then one day felt painfully short. Zi Wen could read quickly enough, but reading alone would not be enough here. If the final trial truly tested knowledge, then he would need more than just a glance at titles and scattered pages. He would have to understand what he was reading.
A frown crossed his face.
Standing there thinking about it would only waste more time, and he knew that well enough.
So Zi Wen stopped hesitating.
He grabbed one of the books and sat down on the bed, opening it immediately. The title marked it as a volume on land beasts and how to treat severe injuries. Without wasting another moment, he flipped to the first page and began reading.
He was a little surprised by what he found.
Each page contained clear anatomical diagrams of the beasts being discussed, carefully drawn and labeled, with direct explanations beside them of how each body worked and how various injuries affected them.
He had never read anything so detailed before, and as he turned the pages, he found himself wondering who had written it. Maybe the beast master himself. There was no author’s name on any of the books, and the thought felt reasonable enough. But Zi Wen did not dwell on it for long. He kept reading, trying to hold on to as much information as he could from each page, forcing himself to absorb the details of the beasts laid out before him.
Then a low grunt from outside the library broke his focus.
Zi Wen’s head snapped to the side at once. Through the still-open door, he could see the wyvern.
His expression changed immediately.
It was still there. Still in pain. Still dying.
In the rush of discovering the library and the notice about the final trial, he had almost forgotten about it. Now, looking at the beast again, he could see that nothing had improved. Blood still darkened the snow. Its breathing still looked wrong. And whatever time it had left was slipping away quickly.
Zi Wen sat there for a few breaths, just looking at it.
Then the question came back. What was he supposed to do?
The pills he had were not meant for beasts, and even if he gave them over, they would probably only keep it alive a little longer at best. Certainly not for more than a day. But beyond that, did he even have another way to save it? And if he tried, how much time would he lose when he was supposed to be preparing for the final trial?
Zi Wen scratched at his head, the feeling of being stuck pressing harder on him with every passing second.
His frown deepened enough that even Whiskey, after watching him for a bit, jumped up onto the table and looked at him with something like concern in his eyes.
The more Zi Wen thought about it, the more obvious the problem became.
He could not truly focus on both things at once.
Trying to save the wyvern would take time. And if he gave that time up, was he ready to risk the inheritance for a beast that had nearly killed him? The practical part of him said no. That voice told him to leave the wyvern alone and focus on the trial. Sect Leader Chen probably would have done exactly that.
But the thought still sat wrong in him.
It felt too close to betraying the very core of his Dao.
In the end, Zi Wen looked down at the book in his hands and muttered, “I’m going to regret this.”
Then he stood up immediately and began moving through the bookshelves, pulling out one book after another in a hurry. If there was anything in this place that could help him, it had to be here. So he searched, skimming titles as fast as he could, shoving the unhelpful ones aside until at last, after several minutes, his hand stopped.
He found what he was looking for.
A book on wyverns.
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