Far from the suffering world above, the ancient ruins trembled.

  The land surrounding them had entered a state of quiet panic. Creatures fled without direction, instincts screaming warnings they could not explain. Ferocious predators abandoned territory. Lesser beasts moved in frenzied packs, driven by fear rather than hunger.

  Deep underground, magma rivers surged violently.

  Fire salamanders abandoned their nests, scattering into tunnels that had never known their presence. Heat intensified to the point where stone glowed and bone turned to ash within seconds.

  At the heart of this inferno, a lesser dragon slept.

  Roy’s body was coiled within a cavern shaped by molten flow and pressure. Around him, unstable power leaked despite suppression. Bright red flames splashed intermittently against stone. Violent yellow thunder cracked through the air in uneven pulses, as if tectonic plates ground against one another.

  Beneath it all, abyssal fire burned silently—violet, dense, consuming light rather than emitting it. It did not spread.

  It waited.

  Inside Roy’s mind, balance was no longer still.

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  Holy and abyssal attributes collided without pause, pressing against one another in constant opposition. Any lesser will would have fractured under the strain—but Roy’s innate blessing of clarity held.

  His mind remained cool.

  His thoughts did not.

  Memories surfaced uninvited.

  Villages erased from reports.

  Deaths categorized as delay.

  Power excused by urgency.

  The images did not provoke immediate rage.

  They accumulated.

  A pulse of anger escaped before he corrected it.

  Roy’s tail struck the cavern floor.

  Stone shattered. A crater spread outward, molten rock forced back by the impact.

  Silence followed.

  He exhaled slowly and reasserted control, folding his presence inward once more.

  Not yet.

  Cosmic knowledge did not intrude.

  It informed.

  Through it, Roy sensed unfolding events without vision—alliances formed, commands issued, mana anomalies spreading unevenly across regions. He felt where power concentrated, where it was withheld, and where lives were lost not to chaos—but to decision.

  He understood something else.

  If he had acted earlier, some lives would have been saved.

  That truth did not justify rage.

  But it did create weight.

  Roy recognized the danger clearly: restraint was no longer neutral. Suppression itself had begun to produce consequence.

  Worse still, excessive suppression risked inviting something far more destructive than abyssal fire—an unshaped darkness born of denial rather than judgment.

  That could not be allowed.

  Not ever.

  The calculation ended without ceremony.

  Roy did not awaken.

  He did not rise.

  He did not act.

  Instead, he chose stillness one last time—forcing the surrounding magma to settle, the thunder to quiet, the abyssal flame to dim beneath control.

  The cavern stabilized.

  The world above did not.