I Can Only Cultivate In A Game-Chapter 355: The Price We Paid

Victor took a threatening step closer. "What did it mean by retribution? What haven’t you told me?"

Rhozan opened his mouth, closed it again, then attempted to muster a reassuring smile. "The corrupted entity is deceptive. It manipulates minds, twists words to prey on your emotions. You mustn’t—"

Victor let out his aura, causing the surroundings to tremble as his qi swept out like a wave.

A thin, sharp distortion of space cracked the ice beneath Rhozan’s feet.

"Don’t try to BS me."

Rhozan swallowed hard.

Victor stared him down coldly. "If you don’t tell me the full truth, I’m leaving. Right now. Your whole civilization’s fate can go to hell for all I care."

The Kahr’uun warriors stiffened in shock.

Rhozan’s composure shattered instantly. "N-no! Wait—please!"

Victor folded his arms.

The Kahr’uun leader lowered his head in defeat, exhaled a long trembling sigh, and murmured, "Fine. I... will give you the full story, Great Iruhun. The real one. But not here. We must return to the under-ice city first. What I must show you... lies behind the eastern sealed door."

Victor’s eyes sharpened. "So it is connected."

Rhozan gave a defeated nod. "Yes."

Victor didn’t respond. He simply turned away and watched as the surviving warriors began retrieving the bodies of their fallen brothers.

One was headless.

Another was missing half his torso.

A third had a perfectly round hole where his chest once was with internal organs crystallized by the cold.

The living looked barely better. One warrior named Gaari, clutched the stump of his missing arm as his teeth grinded from the pain and cold. His face was pale.

Victor stepped forward and lifted a hand.

"Stay still."

A celestial-gold glow enveloped his palm, completely opposite from the frigid world around them.

"Celestial Restoration."

A golden circle appeared on the ground and surrounded Gaari like a blanket of warmth in the dead of winter. Golden veins of light stitched over the stump, then flesh regrew, muscle twined itself back together, bone spiraled outward like carved marble. Within seconds, a fully formed arm rested at Gaari’s side.

The warrior stared in awe before dropping to one knee.

"Great Iruhun... thank you..."

Victor didn’t respond. His expression was distant, thoughtful.

The corrupt entity’s last words echoed in his mind:

"Learn the full story before becoming judge, jury, and executioner..."

He pushed the thought aside and gestured for them to move. "Let’s go."

The group began trekking back toward the underground entrance carved into the glacier. It took nearly thirty minutes to descend the spiral pathways deep beneath the ice, where the temperature grew even more unbearable, dropping to levels lethal for humans but normal for the Kahr’uun.

They passed through caverns shimmering with frozen stalactites, glowing with faint blue luminescence from icy minerals. As they descended, the distant noise of a city rose drifted into their ears.

Finally, the enormous under-ice metropolis came into view.

Tens of thousands of Kahr’uun filled its wide crystal streets with ice towers littering the surrounding.

Children played atop frozen platforms and Merchants argued at stalls carved from frost.

A civilization thriving in a place no human could survive even for seconds.

The moment the crowd spotted Rhozan and the warriors returning, a wave of excitement spread.

"They’re back!"

"They’ve returned from the hunt!"

"Did they defeat it? Did the corrupt entity fall?"

But then...

They saw the corpses and a hush fell over the city.

Excitement turned to dread.

One Kahr’uun woman ran forward, and when she saw the headless corpse, her legs gave out. She fell to the ground screaming, clutching what remained of her loved one’s frozen armor.

Her tears immediately solidified into tiny ice stones before hitting the ground with a plink plink sound.

The sound was haunting.

More families arrived and their faces broke into grief when they recognized their dead.

Victor watched quietly without saying a word. He didn’t want to be pulled into the emotion of it but grief was infectious.

Some survivors bowed deeply to Victor, speaking through tears:

"Great Iruhun... why did you not destroy it...? Why has it escaped to torment us again?"

Victor scoffed and without ceremony, he pointed to Rhozan.

"Why don’t you ask him?"

The crowd turned.

Rhozan stiffened, forced a smile, and quickly raised his hands. "Everyone, please. The Great Iruhun and I have matters to discuss. Matters concerning the future of our people. Go home. Tend to your families. Prepare for mourning rites."

The crowd hesitated, but eventually dispersed reluctantly and sorrowfully. Only the grieving families remained, cradling frozen corpses in numb disbelief.

Rhozan wiped sweat from his brow despite the frigid air, then turned toward Victor.

"This way."

Victor didn’t move. "And this time, you’re actually telling me everything."

"I will," Rhozan said quietly with a shaky tone. "I swear it on my ancestors."

Victor held his gaze for several seconds before nodding once.

"Lead the way." 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

The group moved deeper into the city, toward the distant eastern part.

Unlike the lively main streets, this part of the under-city was barren, silent, and dimly lit. No civilians lived here. No guards stood around. Even mana lightstones were scarce, as if the place itself had been forgotten by the living.

Victor finally spoke as they walked.

"That door," he said coldly. "The one you didn’t let me approach. There’s something behind it tied to what the Corrupt entity was talking about, right?"

Rhozan’s shoulders tightened.

"Yes," he whispered. "Behind that door lies some of the truth I ommited. The reason the corrupted entity exists..."

Victor’s eyes narrowed.

"So the thing wasn’t lying."

Rhozan trembled, but forced himself to keep walking till they arrived at the stairway that led further down.

The visibility of the surroundings further dimmed the lower they descended until they finally arrived in the same passageway from before.

"Iruhun... truly the story you know is incomplete," Rhozan admitted. "And the part we hid... is the part that damned us all but I did not hide it due to ulterior motives..."

They soon reached the final corridor.

Victor followed with arms folded behind his back and a straight expression.

His boots echoed softly across the frozen stone. A whirring sound grew louder the closer they approached the massive door up ahead.

This was the door he had seen half-open before. The one Rhozan had tried so hard to keep him away from.

The door was easily thirty feet tall, crafted of a strange metal that looked like liquid mercury yet felt older than the ice itself. It wasn’t fully shut. The same narrow gap from Victor’s first encounter still remained, letting a line of pale white light spill across the floor.

The truth waited behind it.

Rhozan stopped. His hands trembled as he pressed both palms against the door.

He looked back at Victor once, as though asking for silent permission.

Victor said nothing.

Rhozan pushed.

With a deep groan, the door slid open.

A wave of frigid air rushed out, far colder than the rest of the under-ice city. Even Victor felt a slight sting on his skin.

Inside was a cavernous chamber unlike anything else Victor had seen beneath the ice.

The ceiling soared hundreds of feet high. Massive pillars of translucent crystal spiraled upward like frozen trees. Strange geometric lines ran across the walls, shifting, rotating, realigning themselves with every vibration of mana.

But the most striking thing...

Was the pillar of light in the center of the room.

A column of radiant white energy descended from the ceiling to the floor, emitting a strange energy.

And suspended inside it, was a person, floating as though trapped in time.

A young man who was human in appearance, drifted unconsciously with his limbs loose and his eyes closed.

Victor stiffened.

"Who the hell is that?"

Rhozan bowed his head. "That... Great Iruhun... is the last who walked through our doors. Five years ago."

Victor blinked. "The last... Iruhun? What does that even mean? You all keep calling me that, but you’re saying someone else came before me?"

"Yes." Rhozan’s voice was heavy. "Before you, there was another."

Victor stepped closer to the light pillar, examining the young man inside. His clothes were tattered, patched with blood. His skin was pale but unblemished. His body was frozen in a suspended state, alive, yet unmoving.

"What happened to him?" Victor asked. "Why is he here?"

Rhozan inhaled sharply. "That... is part of the story you must finally hear."

Victor shot him a glare. "Then start talking. From the beginning."

And so Rhozan did.

Rhozan began pacing slowly around the chamber.

"You already know a fragment of our past... that our world collapsed into ruin, and we fled here to survive."

Victor nodded impatiently.

"But what you do not know," Rhozan continued, "is the cost. The price that spell demanded. The price we paid. The price... we buried."

He clenched his staff tightly.

"Sending our people to Earth was not the hard part. The real difficulty was transforming this region—making a place cold enough for us to live. A world like yours has no natural climate fit for our survival."