The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect Chapter 3: Chapter 3

Read chapter 3 of The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect by Magic on NovelPedia.

"In the den of wolves, the smartest rabbit does not run; it proves it can pull the thorns from their paws." The first part of my journey involved falling from the sky, and now I was… what, exactly? A piece of luggage? The Amazon had been walking without making a sound for what felt like an hour, and I had seen nothing but dense forest. It was an extremely interesting environment that I was dying to study, but after spending my time as cargo while staring at the metallic, rust-scaled monstrosity she was dragging along, my mind was starting to drift into dark, analytical territory. Was I lucky she found me? Or was I destined to become some sort of pet? I looked down at my arms and felt a sudden, biting cold in the humid jungle air. I wasn’t an expert on tribal dynamics, but I did know that in the wild, survival is the only law. That law is enforced by the strong, and they inevitably expect everyone else to be the same. While I knew I possessed the knowledge to make their lives infinitely better, would they even care? I had shoulder-length black hair, green eyes, and on the best of days, I was one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet and dipped in resin. I wasn't exactly what anyone would consider the baseline for a survivor, and if that snake was any indication of the fauna in this world, I was effectively non-existent. The best hope I had of defeating anything was getting stuck in a predator's throat and choking it to death while it tried to eat me. The forest canopy eventually broke, and the woman turned slightly to take a winding path up to a plateau, revealing a vertical landscape that defied my understanding of geology. I had been bounced against her back for what felt like an eternity, my vision blurred by the rhythmic, jarring sway of her stride. The smell? Let me just say that the invention of soap was a miracle, and it was quickly becoming one of my life’s goals to implement it here. When she finally slowed, the air grew thin and cold. I looked up—or down, depending on how you viewed my inverted perspective—and my breath hitched in my throat. A massive cliff face dominated the horizon, soaring toward the clouds. It wasn't just stone; it was a sprawling, monolithic mosaic of raw, uncut gems. Rubies, sapphires, and jagged shards of quartz erupted from the granite like crystalline tumors, catching the sunlight and turning the entire cliff into a blinding, fractured mirror of color. Honeycomb-patterned holes were bored fifty feet off the ground into the rock, scattered across the face like the vents of some subterranean machine. As she marched toward the base, I saw them. The people. They weren't just tall; they were goddamn giants. Each of them moved with the liquid, predatory grace of a landslide. Their skin was tanned to the color of cured leather, mapped with scars and strange black markings that told stories of things I didn't want to imagine. Even the children—who stood easily six feet tall—looked like they could snap my femur with a casual flick of their wrists. What in God’s green earth were they feeding these people? I thought they couldn’t, or didn’t, cultivate? How does a human reach nine feet tall and make it look as natural as taking a picture of a person and simply increasing the scale? Was this place the Telepylos Homer talked about? Or maybe this was what Jötunheimr looked like after the fall of Ymir and the flood of blood subsided? Was this Útgarðr, the realm beyond the fence? Did that make Earth, or the universe it was in, really Innangard ? All these questions were pointless if I didn’t survive long enough to ponder them and reach the truth. I needed to focus on the tribe of what I would call the Jötnar right now—a massive group of highly unimpressed giants. They didn't look at me like a person. They looked at me like a piece of strange, soft driftwood she had picked up from the shore. A curiosity, perhaps, but ultimately trash. I am going to die here, I thought, the realization settling into my gut with