The Rise of the Winter Wolf - Book 6 - Chapter 22 - A Casual Palace Stroll

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Don't mind this fluff. It's so that free readers can't read half the chapter.

Click the following link if you want to read this chapter on a googledoc:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X0y9xZrPvLqnRCUWpIWvOlcwIEY9UsY6_W5aFb9ELxc/edit?usp=sharing

Or just keep scrolling down to find the chapter further down this Patreon post.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For those of you who are reading this on a website that is not Patreon, please stop. You're reading a pirated version. Instead, if you would be so kind, please click on the table of contents link below and go to my Patreon instead. Or even read it off of Royal Road, which is free.

Discord Invite

Table of Contents

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wolf

Well, who cares about these bugs.

I put my hands in my coat pockets and begin walking through the halls of the palace while quietly expelling lunar ice element of eternity from my body. Making the walls, floor, and ceiling all freeze simply from my passing. Not to mention any invisible bugs that I pass, giving me EXP for each one I end up killing.

Eventually I run into some regular monsters in the place that aren’t the invisible bugs. But they freeze too, since the monsters here aren’t immune to my ice like they were in the last fifth.

A faint smile touches my lips as I continue walking through the halls, just searching for my personal exit as Sapphire sleeps.

After just three minutes pass I manage to find my first two ‘enemy’ competitors.

And I say enemy because they are technically supposed to be my enemies, but instead I give them the order of searching for my personal exit for me.

Well, that and to give me their crystals so that they don’t try to run.

Because it’s always nice to have extra search parties.

I do the exact same with every other lunar winter beast I find. And I do it to the ones who aren’t lunar winter beasts as well.

After turning them into lunar winter beasts, that is.

Because this competition doesn’t need anything other than lunar winter beasts.

And I’ll dump all the crystals I get from them outside of my personal exit when it’s found. Just so I’m not left soloing every single centurion quinzel. What with how there are raid bosses mixed in with the quinzels meant for numerous people to fight at once.

While there’s a decent enough chance that I can fight and kill them on my own, why would I force myself to do that when I can just use an army of lunar winter beasts?

I don’t even have to care about the people themselves since they’ll cease to exist the moment this floor theme is over anyways, seeing as they’re all just copies of people from their universe. So while they are real people when I’m in here, they won’t exist anymore once I leave.

Plus my turning them into lunar winter beasts makes them stronger, so it’s a win-win situation.

With that in mind, I just continue walking through the hallways while freezing everything and making a rather long, frozen path through the palace as I turn every competitor I find into a lunar winter beast before giving them their orders. And after an entire two days pass, with several thousand lunar winter beasts searching for the exit, I finally hear one of the lunar winter beasts letting out a loud howl through our bond.

Something I only realized was possible not too long ago.

Without hesitation I turn into my hunter form before charging through the palace straight towards the source of the howl.

And what I find is the lunar beast in question surrounded by hundreds of other lunar winter beasts, with even more charging over here because of the howl. But more importantly, I find the glowing red portal with my name floating above it marking it as my exit.

So without hesitation, I grab all of the linked crystals I’ve taken from the lunar winter beasts before tossing them out into the hallway without a care. Since there’s no way I’m going to personally hand each one’s crystals to each of them.

Partially because that’d be too much work, but mostly because I don’t know which one I took which crystal from.

They all look relatively similar to me after all, what with them all being insect-crab people, and names tend to go in one ear and out the other when I meet people for the first time. Unless they leave a rather strong impression, that is.

But I doubt anyone here could ever do that.

After dumping the crystals, I go ahead and grab my own before reaching out and touching the exit, making the red color turn blue. Then I find myself reappearing within the arena amidst the audience’s wild cheering.

Of course, I ignore them to summon my little house and lie down on the couch with a yawn.

Sapphire gets out of my hood and turns into her teenage humanoid form before falling face first onto my stomach and going back to sleep with most of her body not even on the couch. Which has me raising a brow before I let out a sigh and get up, picking the girl up and moving her to the bed in her room.

A room that used to be the guest room of the house but was claimed by Sapphire long ago.

Once I finish moving her, I go ahead and move back to the couch in the living room before opening up the System Forums again for the first time in a little while. Partially because I haven’t had the time to bother and partially because I kind of lost interest in the forums at some point.

And just like before, I find the System Forums flooded with discussions about me, along with some about Sapphire and some about the forerunners of the original Administrator Dungeon that are still going on. Albeit more as a sideshow to the Beta Dungeon than anything else.

Both because of the pseudo progenitor competing in said Beta Dungeon and the fact that the Beta Dungeon is new and unique.

It’s not just another Administrator Dungeon out of the dozens of Administrator Dungeons that have occurred throughout the millennia.

There’s something that’s bothering me about this whole Centurion Quinzel thing though. Specifically what the Centurion at the end of it will be.

Since something tells me it won’t be a normal Centurion.

With that thought in mind eating away at me, I continue reading the threads for a little while before eventually falling asleep myself for the first time in a very long time.