The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect Chapter 17: Chapter 17

Read chapter 17 of The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect by Magic on NovelPedia.

"To steal from a sleeping mountain, your feet must learn the rhythm of its breath." A hurricane-force gale of warm, and copper-scented air vented directly out of the porous walls on all sides of us. It wasn't a linear gust rushing down the tunnel; it was an omnidirectional crosswind. The glowing blue mycelium didn't just blow flat—it whipped frantically in the chaotic air currents before being physically pressed tight against the chitin by the sheer, and crushing weight of the sudden atmospheric shift. Vane-Uru was exhaling? Centipedes didn’t breathe like humans, did they? No. My foundational biology training immediately cut through the panic. Arthropods didn't have centralized lungs. They breathed through spiracles—a massive network of pores and tracheal valves lining the sides of their segmented bodies. We were standing inside her respiratory network. The immense pressure wasn't just a localized gravity well; it was the physical exhaust of her cellular metabolism, purging the dense Rot Qi out of her living tissues and flooding the hollow cavity around us. The gravity spiked exponentially with the localized off-gassing. I dropped to one knee, leaning against the wall, gasping as my reinforced ribs bowed inward under the atmospheric load. Pendra instantly flattened herself against the artery floor, her bladed arms anchoring into the petrified tissue to keep from being swept back or crushed by the cross-currents. Sixty seconds later, the wind reversed. The deep, rumbling inhale pulled the air back into the microscopic valves lining the walls, and the localized gravity marginally released. I forced myself up, my muscles screaming. My core was empty, and my physical stamina was redlining. I pulled one of the hand-pressed mud pills from my pocket and swallowed it dry, ignoring the screaming protest of my inner voice of reason. The immediate pharmacological shock hit my bloodstream, burning like battery acid, but it flooded my dense muscle fibers with enough raw metabolic fuel to keep me moving. We had to time our progress to her cellular respiration. Move on the inhale, brace on the exhale. It took us another agonizing hour to reach the end of the fungal map. But as we got closer to Vane-Uru’s living tissue, a new, entirely unexpected hazard hit me. It started as a dull headache behind my eyes, but it quickly escalated into a violent, and disjointed static in my mind. The mental tether I shared with Pendra pulsed with an agonizing, and sympathetic vibration. I winced, pressing a hand to my temple as I tried to isolate the variable. Pendra was right beside me, her mind sharp and grounded, but the static was coming through her. If she was biologically—and given this world's physics, spiritually—linked to her mother, then walking this close to the sleeping giant's core mass was turning our connection into a psychic antenna. I was catching the ambient bleed-through. There was no intent behind it. No directed thought or communication. It was just a chaotic, unstructured flood of sensory data that felt entirely involuntary. Like tapping into an alien REM cycle. She was dreaming. Raw, unfiltered apex-predator instincts crashed into my human consciousness. A sudden, blinding urge to launch my body through the tunnels and shatter the bedrock into dust. The phantom taste of alkaline blood and shattered chitin. A hunger so vast and old it felt like a geological era, pulling me in. I staggered, my vision greying out as the sheer scale of the psychic weight threatened to overwrite my identity. No. I clamped down on my own mind, utilizing the same clinical detachment I used to dissect biological samples. That is not my biology. That is external data. Box it. Isolate it. If the tether was the antenna, I needed to tune the frequency. I focused entirely on Pendra. I forced my mental grip to narrow, filtering out the ambient background noise and locking strictly onto the crisp presence of the younger centipede right beside me. I used her relativel