"Demon, I can tell at a glance you're only pretending to be dead. Great Mighty Heavenly Dragon"
Following the crack in the Vajra's soul barrier, the Green Prophet's thought slipped in like a darting fish.
A green star fell into the consciousness space and transformed into the image of a radiant Knight King—silver armor, blue cloak, and a golden cape. Well… as long as she didn't shout that ridiculous catchphrase.
"Roar—!" The Vajra answered with a thunderous roar. Its locomotive-sized fist smashed the Dragon Queen before she even finished her slogan.
It seemed the Vajra was no ordinary creature. Its soul was extremely condensed. Not only did it withstand a strike from the Fivefold Dragon Spirit, it even maintained the form of a giant gorilla while resisting the invading consciousness.
The Dragon Queen truly exploded.
Her form burst into mist, then swiftly reformed into a colossal dragon—similar to Little White's spiritual form—and she darted into the Vajra's gaping mouth.
"Demon, take my strike!"
Right in front of the Vajra's maw, the soul-slaying attack was unleashed again.
"Hum—" The gorilla's dark-green soul-space quivered lightly. Its gorilla-shaped soul turned illusory, its surface rippling like water.
Whorls of dizziness spiraled in its eyes.
It was genuinely stunned.
"Whoosh—"
The valiant Knight King reappeared. This time, she held a blazing longsword. The silver-white fleshy wings folded into a sword hilt, the white dragon's open mouth forming a guard as a fifty-meter flame blade extended from the throat.
—This was Little White!She had not ended the Dragon Spirit fusion; Little White had simply taken the form of a sword in her hand.
"This is the true Great Mighty Heavenly Dragon."
"Crack—"
With a single light stroke, the fifty-meter flame blade sliced off the stunned Vajra's head like a hot knife cutting butter.
"Awooooooooo—!"
A genuine soul-rending scream tore out. The hut-sized head howled, and the headless body howled as well.
It had nothing to do with its mouth. The wailing came from its soul.
The Knight Queen flicked the White Dragon Sword lightly. The flame blade vanished, and the hilt transformed into the Black Dragon.
In an instant, the Dragon Queen switched modes, replacing Little White with Big Black.
The hilt was still formed from folded wings and a coiled tail, but this time the blade was Big Black's extended neck.
She gave the sword a gentle shake. The black dragon blade stretched, the front end becoming Big Black's head, as though its neck extended endlessly.
The snarling dragon head inflated like a balloon.
At the same time, a series of golden-red runes flashed into existence between its upper and lower jaws.
"Roar!" At last, the dragon head at the tip shot forward, clamping over the gorilla's severed head like a rune-shrouded maw devouring its prey.
"Click-click-click." Like gears turning in perfect order, the runes inside the dragon's mouth shifted rapidly, sealing the gorilla's head into a golden sphere of runic light.
"Uuuuuuu—" The Vajra's headless soul-body cried even more miserably. A phantom head gradually formed atop its neck.
"Clatter—" Like chains rattling, the black dragon blade rapidly retracted from several hundred meters to a normal three-foot sword.
With a wave of her hand, the Black Dragon Sword vanished. The Dragon Queen looked at the giant gorilla calmly and said, "From now on, you are my summoned beast. Remove your soul defenses and let me heal your wounds."
"Roar! Roar—!" The Vajra's phantom head roared defiantly and swung its fists at her again.
"Courting death." The Dragon Queen sneered.
Without even moving, the charging Vajra suddenly collapsed, clutching its head and howling in agony, as though consumed by unbearable pain.
The Dragon Queen only sneered as she watched it howl and bleed tears.
No one knew how long it lasted. By the time the Vajra looked at her without a trace of defiance—only pleading and fear—she finally withdrew her powers.
Her awareness here was only one strand. In the real world she had not been idle—she rode Big Black in a circle around the forest, driving thousands of beasts together.
Under her fire control, dragonflame fell like a vast blanket, covering the living creatures below.
Flames roared through a primeval rainforest untouched for millions of years. Thousands of beasts screamed and died in the fire.
Boundless spiritual essence poured into the Vajra's consciousness sea, rapidly repairing the tears in its soul.
One general's success is built on ten thousand bones.
For the sake of this pet, Dany's hands were thoroughly stained with blood.
A long time ago, she had seized a sea-monster horn from a Valyrian-descended family in Lys.
The sea monster was long dead, and the horn had lost its function. But the runes within were extremely valuable in themselves.
The magic controlling sea monsters originated from the line of Grand Sorcerers—easily mastered by Dany.
It was just that she had never encountered a sea monster before, leaving her dragon-slaying sorcery with nothing to act upon.
Today, when she encountered the giant Vajra in the rainforest, she originally planned to knock it out and leave.
Although it had ambushed Big Black, her inexplicable fondness for the Kong of her previous life made her willing to spare it.
But it even knew how to play dead.And what did that mean?It meant the creature was smart!
The Dragon Queen had little interest in a brute incapable of magic, but it kept demonstrating its abilities as if saying: Look how great I am—wasting me as a follower would be a shame.
Helpless, the Dragon Queen accepted its "submission."
Even so, she only treated it as a desperate experiment. She was not sure whether the sea-monster sealing magic would even work on a Vajra.
The results were extremely satisfying. The Vajra's soul-head, stored in her Pool of Faith, could be "pinched" lightly—making its physical body suffer far worse than wearing a monk's binding curse.
"Sigh. With a body like this, it would be a terrifying weapon on the battlefield. But with the sea between us…" Dany looked at the obediently squatting Vajra, sighed helplessly, and waved her hand. "Go on."
"Roar! Roar—!" Seeing she truly intended to leave it behind, the Vajra jumped to its feet and howled.
"What is it?" Dany asked, puzzled.
The Vajra gestured at her, then hopped excitedly in one direction.
A heavy rumbling came from the rainforest, as if an earthquake had erupted.
Dany hesitated. She had come to Sothoryos with a mission—she needed to finish quickly and return. She didn't have time for rainforest adventures.
But the Vajra was persistent. When Big Black didn't follow, it stopped, waving frantically and calling out.
Dany decided to go take a look.
"Hurry up. I don't have time to waste."
"Awroo!" Kong answered, using both hands and feet as he ran. His speed really did increase.
After running southeast for about two hours—around seventy or eighty kilometers—Big Black and Dany were bored in the sky, while Kong was panting like an ox, crouching beside a thin stream in a canyon and gulping down water.
"I'm telling you, if you don't offer me something good, you're done for." Dany threatened him fiercely.
"Roar…" Kong's voice held a hint of hesitation.
Another half hour passed. Following the river, Kong squeezed into a deep valley.
Dany flew above him and saw his destination a moment earlier than he did.
She was shocked to see people—wildlings!
It was a gourd-shaped canyon. The entrance passage was narrow and long, too tight for Kong to walk through. He could only cling to the rock walls on either side and climb in.
But the gourd-shaped hollow inside was large. More than a hundred households lived there, along with a poorly tended field of wheat.
Dany had long known that the continent of Sothoryos had wildlings; it wasn't a secret.
Back when the ancient Ghiscari Empire built colonial city-states along the Sothoryos coast, they had captured a group of wildlings, but the Ghiscari believed their intelligence was too low for them to qualify as slaves.
After the Ghiscari and Valyrian coastal cities fell into ruin, the people of Essos no longer saw the Stripesfolk.
Yes, the people of Sothoryos naturally had skin marked with alternating brown and white stripes.
Their noses were wide and flat, very much like pig snouts.
Seeing them with her own eyes now, Dany realized the ancient texts were accurate: broad bones, knotted muscles, long arms that hung to their knees, slanted foreheads, and enormous square jaws that would put Two-Deer to shame. If not for the pig-like noses, they resembled apes.
"They seem to be a subhuman race," Dany muttered.
The Stripesfolk huts were built with mud-smeared thatch, low and shabby, even worse than rural outhouses.
But when Dany saw the dried meat hanging outside the huts, her pupils contracted sharply and her heart pounded.
It was a human corpse.
The belly had been opened, the organs removed, and the body smoked and dried—just like how people back in the Celestial Empire prepared preserved meats and cured poultry for New Year's stockpiles.
The head was still attached. The scalp clung tightly to the skull, the eye sockets were hollow, and the dried, bark-like lips gaped open.
The Stripesfolk ate human flesh.
"Ohohoh!"
The wildlings below, with their tangled black hair, also noticed the dragon in the sky. Hundreds of them raised long spears and bone knives, shouting toward the heavens.
Dany could feel that the Stripesfolk held no hostility toward her.
Perhaps they mistook the dragon for a lone pterosaur—just like that simple-minded Kong.
"Rooaar!"
By now, Kong had finally clambered past the entrance of the gourd canyon. Hanging by his left hand from the cliff wall, his body dangling, he thrust his head toward the valley and roared again and again, beating his chest with his free right hand.
He seemed to be provoking someone.
It definitely wasn't the wildlings. They weren't worthy.
"Hrah hrah hrah!"
But the wildlings reacted intensely when they saw Kong. More than a hundred men, wearing only animal hides around their hips and armed with stone knives, bone spears, bows, and arrows, formed a loose formation and advanced toward Kong with loud threats.
"Rooaar!" Kong responded just as bluntly. He strode forward, charging into the wildlings, crushing them like a child stomping ants.
"Squish, squish…"
Whether he could protect anyone was unknown, but he certainly turned the wildlings into pulp.
A bloody, mushy pulp.
Like stepping on a splatter of bird droppings on the roadside.
"F*ck!" Dany's face went green.
Damn it. I followed you across mountains and rivers, ran more than a hundred li, just to watch this?
Just as Dany grew furious and prepared to teach that idiot a lesson, a sudden change occurred.
At the base of the gourd-shaped canyon, a huge cave opened in the rock wall—forty or fifty meters tall.
At first glance, it resembled a fissure in the mountains behind the canyon.
Outside the cave, the wildlings had built a three-meter-high stone wall using piled rocks. Strangely, the stone wall had no entrance or exit.
At that moment, countless white bats burst from the enormous cave. Each was the size of a rice cooker lid, pouring out like a flood and sweeping over Kong like a dark cloud as he pursued the fleeing wildlings.
"Jiji-jiji!" The bats emitted a sound so piercing it felt like it came from an illusion. Dany could clearly hear it, yet it still felt unreal. Even from afar, her head felt slightly dizzy.
"Rooaar!" Kong abandoned the screaming, scattering Stripesfolk and roared wildly as he charged toward the white bats.
"Bang! Bang! Bang!" Kong's massive hands swung wildly through the bat swarm.
It looked like you had a thousand blood-swollen mosquitoes clinging to your thigh, and you slapped them all at once.
Bloody paste splattered everywhere, and Kong's black fur was stained a deep red.
"Those are vampire bats?" Dany realized.
(End of chapter)
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