Chapter Six: The Offering

  History teaches us from mistakes. But what if we never made any? Would history even exist? Here, mistakes were not lessons. They were fuel.

  Guards pushed us in front slaves began to walk their steps showing that they hadn't taken a full rest to recover the same situation was with me my legs were shaking not in fear but from the cold air every steps was uncomfortable my eyes dropped on the ground cautiously body flinching from the scolding of the guard thinking anytime it'd be my turn of getting whipped. Behind me I was Han, and Wu and in the other line was Feng.

  I was a link in a chain of misery. The iron collar caught in my neck, its cold surface was a second skin, with every gust blizzard was stealing warmth and hope, freezing not only skin but also the will. Every step was a battle with the frozen mud, a battle that I was losing. Around me, the economy of cruelty played out on repeat: a slave stumbled by something, then a guard’s boot found a kidney the outlines of were a human. I kept my eyes on the trudging feet ahead, chanting a mantra in my skull: Don’t fall. Don’t be noticed.

  A heavy kick between my shoulder blades shattered the mantra. Pain ran into my skin, and I lurched forward, the chain yanking the man in front of me.

  “Eyes on the ground, void-spawn!”a guard snarled, his voice hoarse “Or I’ll feed your eyes to the Kholkis myself.” I cursed quietly, heart beating unusually fast. As I found my footing, I caught the low murmur of the guards walking alongside our cursed procession.

  “...fool’s errand, cutting through the Glacial Vein,”one muttered to the other, his voice tight. “This is Kholkis’s territory. The Master’s pact doesn’t mean spit to those feathery abominations.”

  “Pact?”the taller one, the one who’d kicked me, grunted. “We don’t need pacts. We have bargaining meat.” He jerked a thumb back at our line. “A dozen of these wasted breaths. The Kholkis always hunger for warm meat and fresh terror. We just give them one from each line hah!. They’ll take their tithe and let us pass. Simple.”

  'Kholkis'. The term echoed in the hollow place my mind had become. Not just monsters. A localized calamity. Another named terror in this atlas of pain. A part of me, the part that had died in World 3, wanted to laugh. A break? There were no breaks. Only variations on a theme of suffering. There was no fear or panic now. I had seen worse in past worlds; it couldn't be much worse.

  My thoughts were severed by a sound that belonged to no earthly creature. It started beneath us, a deep roar like a lard predator bird and then from deep within the white snowy ground came..

  A screech.

  It was a loud sound of a child crying and glaciers falling apart mixed into one piercing shrill. I clapped my hands over my ears, but it was useless. The sound bypassed the ears and spoke directly to the brain, instinct screaming "RUN YOU ARE FOOD."

  The entire convoy ceased to gather. Slaves froze in silence, their bodies trembling like wings of a bee, a wave of pure animal terror locking their joints. The guards, their arrogance forgotten, faces went pale, hands flying towards their weapons, and heads turning toward the source: a vast, snow field plunged out at unimaginable speed at our left side

  From beneath , shape began to detach itself from the blizzard’s weave. Unfolding a beast that was larger than a man, it forms a nightmare parody of joints in the shape of a bird. Its "feathers" were layers of frozen, jagged flesh and icicle-like quills. And eyes, visible even at this distance, glowed with a hungry, intelligent blue light.

  The Kholkis had come for their tithe.

  The tall guard swallowed, his earlier bravado gone, replaced by the grim efficiency of a man trying to counter the fear of death. “Cut the rear chain loose,” he commanded in a hurry tone, his voice cutting through the terrified silence. “Now.”

  Beside me in the second line a big man was shaking in fear he had already accepted his demise, that hollow rattling that came from his very soul. I saw his eyes… once perhaps full of the life of a farmer or a father rolled back until only the whites showed, his lips moving in a silent, frantic prayer to a god whose name he had likely already forgotten.

  The woman on my other side was scratching at the iron collar around her neck, her fingernails already bloody and torn against the cold metal. They weren't just afraid of dying; they were paralyzed by the realization that they had been weighed on a scale and found worth less than the safety of a few cruel men. This was the true product of the Mill: iron or timber? No but the total extraction of human dignity until only the raw, shivering warm meat remained.

  Raw panic shot through the line. We were all chained in sequence; to be "the rear" was a death sentence. A frantic scrum of bodies erupted as those in the back tried to surge forward, those in the middle pulled away…. a human tide of pure, selfish terror. The guards moved with brutal precision, their axes striking not flesh, but the iron links between the fifth and sixth slaves from the end… Ironic luck that I was one of them, and with me was Han, Feng, and the big man and the fearful woman.

  Clang. Clang?.

  The sounds were obscenely clean against the howling wind. Six of us… excluding the man I’d been yanked by earlier… were suddenly,horrifically, cut adrift. Our chain, still connecting our hands, fell to the ice with a final, heavy thud. We were offering.

  "Move!" the lead guard bellowed at the main column, whipping the air. The remaining slaves, fueled by the vicious relief of the reprieved, stumbled into a desperate, shambling run away from the place. We six were left on a shrinking island of chained stillness.

  The Kholkis descended to the ground.

  The air didn't just turn cold; it turned aggressive. It was a predatory frost that felt like thousands of needles going through my skin, eager to turn the moisture in my blood into jagged ice. As the Kholkis drew closer, its shape growing rapidly , the very sound of the blizzard began to change. The howling wind was swallowed by a heavy, pressurized silence, as if the monster was an anchor of absolute zero, dragging the atmosphere into a lightless, frozen depths. I could hear the terrifyingly rhythmic tink-tink-tink of my own sweat freezing into beads against my forehead, a countdown of my body's heat loss. Every inhale felt like broken glasses, a jagged reminder that in World 4, the environment was just as much a butcher as the guards.

  And Kholkis... It didn't fly down; it cascaded like a shard of the glacier breaking loose. One moment it was a silhouette against the blurry sky, the next it was among us, moving with a silent, gravity-defying speed. The air grew colder, a cold that seized the lungs and made the heart stutter. I saw it clearly now.

  As I forced my mind to lock onto the flickering flaw in the Kholkis’s pulse, I felt a sickening pop in the back of my skull…. the sound of a door being ripped off. Suddenly, the memory of my third-grade teacher’s face, a woman who had once given me a gold star for a drawing, dissolved into void. It faded slowly, a pay back of something I had achieved, leaving a raw, aching void in my mind that the cold wind filled the unwanted place. To see the "Office" of the monster, I had to trade pieces of the man I used to be. The trade was involuntary and merciless and without my will.

  I was becoming a map of the 11 Worlds, but the ink was being brewed from the marrow of my own history. I wondered, with a flash of cold terror, how much of "Mo Fei" would be left by the time I reached the Architect.

  Then I saw the spirit threads that connected their shrieks to a deep, icy well of power beneath the glacier. And I saw, on the breast of the kholkis a symbol: a jagged, fractal rune that seemed to drink the light and pulse with a slow, ancient hunger. From the outline I could say it wasn't the Creator's mark. This was different. Older. A principle of this world made flesh and frost.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  The Kholkis landed before me. It cocked its head, a grotesquely curious gesture. Then it opened its beak.

  It reached towards me.

  The voice of piercing wind was so intense that it felt like a pin was going to go through me. My body moved away, I fell into the snowy ground and the dirt stuck into my clothes. A man that was directly behind me screamed… a short, wet sound as the sonic lance struck him. The Kholkis's head darted forward through him. Its beak, lined with razor-sharp fangs of ice, punched clean through his chest with a horrific crunch of parting bone and tissue piercing through his body. I stared horrified by the scene I had seen of dead bodies in previous worlds but this sight happened in front of my eyes, the silver snow turned crimson blood soaked to the ground.

  I stared, frozen, as the creature lifted the impaled, thrashing man into the air. With a savage twist of its neck, it ripped him in two. One half it tossed skyward and swallowed whole. The other it discarded, a ruined heap of meat and chain steaming on the ice.

  Chaos. The remaining seven of us scattered,the long chain linking us becoming a snarling, tripping death sentence. Kholkis swooped to another man, but its target fell, tangling the chain and making the creature shriek in frustration as it climbed back into the sky to lock his target.

  The Kholkis turned its glacial gaze back to me. I could see it now: a spirit thread forming in the air between us, a line of lethal cold targeting my core, its hum building to a killing pitch.

  Instinct…. not thought, not courage took over. But the same instinct that made me grab the shard in World 2. The instinct to break the laws.

  I didn't try to outrun the sound, there was flickering instability in the spirit thread where the Kholkis's own freezing aura warred with the chaotic wind. A knot of contradictory rules. I didn't have any weapons to fight back.

  "No weapon? Then I'll create one."

  All I had was my will,my refusal to be part of its song.

  I stared at that flaw. I poured my terror, my rage, my defiance into it. "What's the point of being a coward when all I'm facing is a certain death either way," I snarled at the beast, and at the law of its attack.

  I scooped up a handful of snow and frozen dirt. I hold that in my hand. As the killing of the Kholkis reached its peak when it appeared just in the line of my face, I threw the handful not at the bird, but directly into the path of the glowing, flawed spirit thread.

  The shriek that followed was a triumph of outrage. The backlash cost me: a sharp, white-hot pain lanced behind my eyes, and a memory in this moment… I had lost it the more I stayed the more I'd lose I realized that through the pain.

  The Kholkis shrieked, a physical sound that shook the valley. It had failed. Now it would use talons. It launched itself at me once again, a blur of frozen flesh and fury.

  Before it moved I was already moving, prepared to dodge. I saw it for a split-second before it committed… a slight shift in its wing, a tightening of its talons. I didn't run. I lunged sideways and down, under its striking arc. As it passed and couldn't maintain its immense speed bumped into a rock, then a desperate, adrenaline-fueled idea seized me. I threw the length of my connecting chain up and over its thrashing neck, choking it down.

  The world became a violent spin of ice, sky, and black feathers fell to cover the white beneath me. I was getting yanked off my feet, the shackles tearing at my wrists as the beast bucked and twisted, trying to dislodge the sudden, heavy weight on its neck. I held on, my arms screaming, my body slamming against its frozen plumage. I did all I could but I lacked the strength. I wasn't a jacked man with those cool hot muscles of a man. I needed help. My eyes landed on the other offerings.

  "GATHER HERE!" I roared at the other three surviving slaves, my voice raw with a grumble of trying to pull over what I couldn't. "THE CHAIN! PULL IT!"

  For a heartbeat, nothing. The two other surviving slaves… a hulking man with a broken nose and a younger woman with eyes wide with animal panic…. just stared, frozen by the beast's thrashing and my insane command. Han stayed silent by the look I could say that he was hesitating. I couldn't blame him for fear “death is the only fear that we fear.” Feng was a coward; he didn't even hesitate; he simply took steps back to run away, his body trembling.

  Then the Kholkis shrieked again, a sound of pure, insulted fury. The chain around its neck wasn't tight enough to choke, but it was a maddening weight, an insult to its glacial grace. It bucked like an untamed horse made of ice and razors. A glare harder than steel this was insulting for a calamity to be in the ground by a normal human.

  "NOW! Or we all die like him!" I roared, my voice shredding in the cold air, gesturing with my eyes at the bloody remains on the ice.

  The command broke their paralysis. The big man, driven by a survival instinct deeper than thought, bellowed and threw his weight backward, digging his heels into the frozen mud. The woman, seizing the other end of the chain, did the same, wrapping it around her forearm and leaning back with a sob of effort. Han couldn't watch this any further with a swift motion he threw himself at the Kholkis helping me to hold its neck tighter. My eyes landed at Feng still keeping himself away from the danger.

  The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic for the Kholkis.

  Its lethal, diving trajectory was jerked into a violent, spinning spiral. It wasn't flying anymore; it was getting overwhelmed by humans. We were acting as the anchor. I was still tangled in the middle, my body whipped through the air, my world a blur of sky and snow. My shoulder screamed as the shackles threatened to dislocate it.

  The world dissolved into a storm of pain and motion, but beneath it, my cursed sight held firm. I saw the stress lines forming in the Kholkis's frozen flesh where the chain bit. It's neck given up.

  The Kholkis hit the ground not with an impact, but with a terrible, crumpling slide, wings splayed, sending up a plume of ice and dirt. It was stunned, not dead. Its intelligent, hate-filled eyes found mine there was pure hatred predator got hunted by the prey an ironic moment.

  It opened its beak for another sonic shrill, but the position was wrong. Its neck was at a bad angle, the chain pulling its throat taut. The sound that emerged was a guttural, choked screech, powerful enough to make the ice beneath us crack like a mirror.

  "THE WINGS!" I choked out, my face pressed against the frozen ground. "TANGLE THE WINGS! DON'T LET IT GET AIR!"

  The big man understood. He charged at its nearest thrashing wing. He jumped, bringing his own chain down like a flail, wrapping the links around the joint where ice-feather met flesh. The woman, seeing the tactic, scrambled to do the same on the other side, her movements frantic but effective.

  The Kholkis became a knot of monster, chains, and screaming humans. It was a horrific, grinding stalemate. We couldn't kill it. It couldn't shake us loose to use its true power. We didn't win but nor lose either as long as we keep it here we survive.

  beneath me it felt less like a bird and more like an island's tectonic plate trying to shift. Its "feathers" were razor-edged plates of white sharp edges that sliced through my forearm, leaving shallow, freezing nicks along my ribs. The smell was overwhelming…. a mix of ancient permafrost, ozone, and a metallic, predatory musk that made my stomach heavy. Every time the beast bucked, the iron chain hissed against its rough skin, a sound like a hot iron on wet leather. We were no longer people; we were weights, anchors of desperate flesh trying to drown a calamity in the mud. My muscles burned with a lactic acid fire that felt like the only heat left in the universe, a frantic, dying ember in a world of snow.

  This isn't a victory. It's a precarious, temporary equilibrium.

  We lay there, panting, a heap of terrified humanity piled onto a seething mound of ancient winter. The Kholkis's cold radiated through us, a deep ache that promised suffering and death if we stayed locked like this. The glow in its eyes burned with undiminished hatred, but its body was pinned by our chains.

  Then, the cost of my interference hit. It wasn't exhaustion. It was absence.

  A silent scream echoed in the hollow it left behind. My vision swam, and a thin, hot trickle of blood leaked from my nose, freezing almost instantly from the cold on my lip.

  I had broken a rule of this world. And the world had taken it's payment.

  bleeding from my nose and soul, met the gaze of two unlikely comrades and Han. The panic in their eyes had been replaced by a shaky, shell-shocked calculation. They were still breathing heavier from the adrenaline rush.

  The big man met my gaze, his own eyes wide with pain and a dawning, terrible understanding. "It's still alive," he panted, stating the obvious and the terrifying truth.

  "And the guards are gone," the woman whispered, her voice hollow. "They left us. We're chained to a monster in the middle of a blizzard." “what are we going to do now”

  I looked from them to the pinned Kholkis, then out into the white void where our convoy had vanished. The arithmetic of this world was clear. We were an asset to no one. We were either meat for the beast, or corpses for the ice. A certain death either way.

  Unless we became something else.

  The Kholkis let out a final, rattling wheeze. The ice-quills on its neck scraped against the iron of my chain, a sound like a thousand needles dancing on the coffin lid . We were huddled up against it, three shivering souls hanging onto a fallen star. The creature’s cold glare was absolute; it didn't just chill my skin, it felt as though it were reaching inside me to extinguish the pilot light of my soul.

  I stared into its eye, a vast, frozen ocean of sapphire malice. I started to think about the situation that occurred a while ago.

  Seconds ago, I had seen it. I had seen the world not as mud and blood, but as a world of threads like the threads of a marionette. I saw the trembling thread that connected the bird’s throat to the very heart of the world. I had reached out with my mind and plucked that string, snapping the logic of its attack.

  But now, as the adrenaline receded, the world was shuttering. The silver threads flickered, dimmed, and vanished. I blinked, desperate to find that line of "flaw" again, but all I saw was the grime of the frozen yard and the terrifying reality of a beast that could swallow me in two bites or even one. The "Sight" was gone, leaving my mind feeling like a house that had been violently burgled.

  "What was that?" My thoughts felt sluggish, wading through a swamp of grey static. That wasn't just vision. I had looked into the "spirit threads” of this world.

  And the system had taken its tithe memory as the payback. Every time I'd "see" the truth, I lose a piece of the lie that makes me human. I was becoming a hollow vessel, traded away for the eyes of a god without my own will, and without even knowing what I did. “Will it be worth it?”

  The big man's hand tightened on the chain, his knuckles white and bleeding. "... it’s moving. It’s trying to stand."

  He was right. The blue glow in the Kholkis's chest was stabilizing. The spirit was returning. The chains were beginning to frost over; if it froze then it could break it, the iron turning brittle under the beast’s localized winter.

  "We're not chained to it," I whispered, my voice jagged like a sharp knife. My eyes remained locked on the bird's pupil, watching the killing intent fuel back to life. "It's chained to us."

  The woman let out a sob, her spirit finally snapping. "What does that even mean? It's going to kill us the moment the wind drops!"

  Han spoke his voice serious with a hint of panic. “For how long we can hold it down we have to find a way to escape” yes Han was right we didn't have any energy to keep it here longer, Ten, twenty or even thirty minutes it was a desperate situation blizzard would kill us if not Kholkis.

  I looked at the bloody stump of the man it had eaten, then back at the bird. I couldn't see the threads anymore. I was blind, weak, and freezing. But I knew one thing: The Master of this world expected us to be a sacrifice. If we died here, we were just a line in his ledger. If we survived, we would still be slaves.

  "It means," I said, wrapping the frozen chain around my bloodied palm, "that we don't let it go. We're going to use it. And when we find the master, we’re going to show him what happens when an offering decides to offer the prize."

  The Kholkis gave a low, thrumming growl that shook the very earth beneath us. Far off in the white void, a horn sounded… a deep, brassy note of the Empire. The guards were returning to check the remains.

  I didn't have the Sight. I didn't have a plan. All I had was the iron.

  "Keep it pulled." I commanded, my voice cold enough to stop a heart. "It might be useful." I knew it was risky but it was the last option Kholkis could go after us first.