"If I had known earlier, I would have studied under Master Fahai. As long as it's a demon, guilty or not, you strike first with a Great Mighty Heavenly Dragon."
Most of the parasites and ninety-nine percent of the viruses were burned to death. However, whether parasite or virus, all of them contained magic and were miniature magical creatures. A portion of the viruses could still adapt to the power of the fire element.
Dragonfire had a unique purifying effect against "monsters" with yin and evil attributes. But Dany's "Fire Control: Gather Flame" only gathered elemental fire. Its temperature was lower than dragonfire, and it had no purifying effect on evil beings. Elemental power was neutral and carried no concept of "good" or "evil."
Therefore, Dany's flames could not kill all the viruses.
If she could not even save herself, how could she possibly help those two pitiful giant ravens?But the Children of the Forest's ravens did not fear death; even after losing their physical bodies, they remained calm.
"Why can the True Tongue lie?" Dany asked curiously in the soul-space.
The True Tongue was the language that praised the earth, mountains, and rivers. It conveyed the speaker's emotions perfectly.
The Children of the Forest had told her that the True Tongue could not go against one's emotions or truth, which was why she never doubted a single word the bat spirit said.
"Maybe it has lived too long—five hundred thousand years—and learned how to lie?" Afu said uncertainly.
What kind of answer was that?Dany fell silent.
Great Mist sighed. "Your Majesty, can you return our souls to Westeros?
"Let us merge with the earth, mountains, and forests of our homeland. That would be a good resting place. We simply do not wish to die in a foreign land."
"Fine. Go soak in the Faith Pool first. If I die, nothing will happen to you."
Dany opened the barrier of her soul and welcomed the two emerald-green ravens. After they completely relinquished their physical forms, their true spiritual forms as ravens emerged.
Indeed, the Children of the Forest awakened a second life inside the bodies of ravens. They were ravens to begin with.
Dany split a thought from her second greenseer soul. It transformed into a small boat for the two ravens to sit in.
Her main soul entered Big Black's body, merged with his dragon-spirit, opened the path of faith, and sent the little thought-boat drifting downstream. In an instant, they reached a vast world of milky white mist—the Faith Pool of the Seven.
In the physical world, the soul-less raven bodies decayed at a speed visible to the naked eye until they became two foul puddles of blood.
Utterly horrifying.A shiver ran through Dany. She commanded Big Black to burn the blood into dry black ash with dragonfire.
A strange "hululu" sound came from the entrance of the cave not far away.
Dany looked up and saw the black brute King Kong grinning at her misfortune.
When it noticed her gaze, King Kong hurriedly clamped its mouth shut. Unfortunately, its muscles were still smiling. It ended up wearing the classic leering grin of the Black boxer Prince DeAngelo.
"Roar!"Sensing the dragon queen's gaze growing increasingly dangerous, King Kong stopped pretending to smile, turned around, and ran back into the cave. While running, it waved at Dany and hollered at her to follow.
Though uncomfortable, Dany's curiosity got the better of her. What was inside that cave that made the bat demon fight so desperately?
She left Big Black at the entrance and conjured a ball of dragonfire to light the way, then followed King Kong into the cave.
The entrance alone was forty to fifty meters high and over thirty meters wide, yet once inside she realized the stone cavern was far larger—almost big enough to be turned into a small airport.
Stone pillars jutted from the ground here and there, and among them stood the remnants of collapsed buildings—a massive stone temple whose only surviving structure was its altar. Behind the temple, a small stream flowed, and strange plants grew amid the scattered rocks.
Passing the pillars and temple, crossing the stream, and climbing over rocks taller than herself, she walked through exotic flora for nearly a kilometer. After rounding a bend, Dany immediately understood everything.
Countless enormous skeletons were stacked in an orderly manner.
The smallest were seven or eight meters tall; the largest, forty to fifty meters—all the same size as King Kong.
Hundreds, even thousands of skeletons.Every one of them belonged to a giant ape.
This was King Kong's home.
"Wooaah…" King Kong lowered its head and let out a mournful howl at Dany.
"All right, this place is yours again," Dany said with a wave.
Then she gave a wry smile. "I really don't know how much of what that bat demon said was true and how much was a lie."
After that, Dany returned the way she came, called Big Black inside, and had him boil the stream with dragonfire. She soaked herself in the boiling water, scrubbing off the blackened filth and the charred remains of her clothing.
Once completely renewed, she finally considered the viral plague inside her body.
The problem was actually easy to solve. All she needed was to guide dragonfire into her body to burn everything unclean.
Long ago, Dany had hoped her fire-resistance would slowly grow until she could one day withstand dragonfire.
She could handle ordinary flames, but dragonfire still burned her.
When they were hatchlings, Little White and Little Green had repeatedly left her face and hands covered in blistering red burns.
Yet as she roasted herself every few days and gradually mastered fire magic, she became more attuned to flame.
But her dragons grew too—in size, in magic, and one of them even advanced into a demigod dragon.
Her body's growing fire-resistance simply could not keep up with the increasing power of dragonfire.
Now that she had Fire Control, she no longer risked getting accidentally burned. But if she were to take dragonfire head-on with her physical body—especially Big Black's dragonfire—the results would be far worse than years ago.
"Splash!"Dany climbed out of the stream completely bare. Her wet silver hair clung to her rounded chest, droplets sliding down her jade-white skin and tracing the lines of the four firm abdominal muscles along her waist.
She sat cross-legged on a smooth boulder by the stream, propping her chin with one hand as she pondered.
Should she take the risk and attempt a full-body refinement in pure fire?
She was the Holy Mother, a dragon-queen who could grant spirits.
More importantly, she had just eaten a bowl of weirwood-seed paste beyond the Wall.
Weirwood seeds did not increase talent, but they awakened one's innate talent completely.
Brynden had once said the seed paste could save her a thousand years of cultivation.
Even now, Dany had no idea what the limits of her potential truly were.
Just like the colt crossing the river—if it doesn't step into the water itself, it will never know how deep it is.
"King Kong, go—" Dany turned her head, only to see that black brute staring lecherously at her body, completely entranced.
"Idiot, go to the valley and gather the corpses of the vampire bats," she scolded.
"Ho ho—" King Kong looked confused.
It had intelligence, but it couldn't understand commands that were too complicated.
"Big Black, leave behind a ball of dragonfire, then go out and teach him how to do it," Dany said helplessly.
Soon, Big Black flew out of the cave. The gorilla jogged after him, and only the murmuring stream and a bright red fireball the size of a tree trunk remained beside Dany.
The nine-colored vortex spun rapidly. Fire-control magic activated, and dragonfire as thin as mist separated from the fireball. It seeped through Dany's pores into her flesh and blood vessels, and through her seven orifices into her organs and bone marrow.
Gradually, Dany's entire body was wrapped in a bewitching red cloud of flame. Her skin began to redden like the shell of a steamed crab.
When it reached its peak, her delicate, glossy skin began to wither, fade, decay, and crack like a rose in an oven.
Dany could no longer withstand the scorching of the dragonfire. Every cell in her body was on the verge of collapse.
Then she suddenly "cheated" and opened her Pool of Faith.
A massive surge of spiritual essence rushed forth and split into two streams. Beta-type active spiritual essence fused with the Holy Mother's divine power to form healing power, flowing into her flesh to repair the cells already burned or being destroyed. The non-beta spiritual essence poured into the nine-colored vortex like a waterfall. The foundation of the Great Sorcerer clearly began to swell, her magic increased rapidly, and her soul power skyrocketed.
One obvious effect of the weirwood seed paste was that, like a dragon, Dany's soul could "infinitely" absorb spiritual essence (see Chapter 581).
And spiritual essence strengthened the soul and increased magic power—commonly known as "leveling up."
During the last dragon battle in Meereen, Dany had "eaten" part of the divine essence from the ram-egg and the red dragon. Besides giving her meditation technique a trace of the Song of Fire, it boosted her sorcerer power tenfold, pushing her close to the threshold of demigodhood.
Because her strength had surged so much, she dared to go alone beyond the Wall to meet Brynden.
But because her strength had risen too quickly, even after consuming the weirwood seed paste, she had not immediately broken through the final barrier to become a demigod.
Now, however, with her life hanging by a thread, she no longer cared about achieving a "perfect foundation."
A shaky foundation was still better than being dead.
She didn't know how long had passed before the spiritual essence collected from the bat demons in the Pool of Faith was fully depleted.
But Dany still had not completed the forging of her fire-refined body.
The dragon spirit notified Big Black and told him to burn the corpses of the vampire bats.
When the bats had flown out of the cave earlier to attack King Kong, they had numbered in the tens of thousands.
The small ones were palm-sized, the large ones about as big as a rice cooker lid. Their spiritual essence was not only extremely rich but also carried a faint, down-like divinity.
It would be a waste to throw them away, so Dany had ordered King Kong to pick up the corpses.
There was no way he could collect all of the tens of thousands of bats, but he could at least gather those in the wildling residential area.
Big Black's dragonfire wasn't gentle either and could scorch the valley floor.
But Dany still didn't want to burn the wildlings' homes.
Even if the thatched huts were shabby, they were the lifelong accumulated property of the Brindlefolk. Burning people's houses without even paying demolition compensation would be going too far.
"Hiss—gah—" With Dany's command, Big Black let out a roar. The wildlings were so terrified they shut their doors, and King Kong retreated several steps. Dragonfire then poured out like a spring, washing over the small mountain of bat corpses. Big Black then soared into the air and began unleashing a storm of flame throughout Gourd Valley.
Spiritual essence fell like torrential rain, nourishing Dany's dried-out soul and body.
The white light of holy healing and the red glow of dragonfire intertwined. Radiant light shimmered on her skin, and brilliant divine light shone between her eyes, making Dany look like a sacred deity.
"Gul-dong, gul-dong." Her blood was boiling, and faint sounds of flowing water echoed within her blood vessels and bone marrow.
Gradually, Dany's body adapted to the dragonfire, and the plague virus inside her melted away in an instant like ice dust in a steel furnace.
But she still did not break through into demigodhood.
She did not know what wonders awaited beyond that realm, but she was certain she had not undergone a true transformation.
She needed to continue leveling up.
The matter of the bat demons reminded her that the Great Sorcerer inheritance was not invincible, and she—who had not yet reached demigodhood—was even less so.
The ram-egg was also not the trivial appetizer she had imagined.
If the ram-egg held no chance of success at all, why undertake such an exhausting expedition?
Dany's mind was clearer than ever. Perhaps encountering the bat demons had been a blessing in disguise, waking her from the illusion that she was invincible.
"Hiss—gah—"
Big Black sent a message: except for the wildlings' huts, all of Gourd Valley had been burned into a sheet of white ash.
The vampire bats were gone.
She didn't need him to say it. Through the dragon's burning and her own spiritual sensing, she naturally knew the bats were already reduced to nothing.
"King Kong, I want to discuss something with you!" Dany walked naked to the cave entrance and said to the black gorilla, "I want your ancestors' bones. What do you think?"
The spiritual essence inside living creatures was the richest. Fresh corpses ranked second. The more decayed the body, the lower the essence.
Even skeletons contained spiritual essence, though in sparse amounts.
But with thousands of skeletons from King Kong's ancestors, even sparse essence would accumulate into a considerable amount.
Besides, judging from King Kong's intelligence and strength, he was likely a magical creature rich in spiritual essence.
"Ho ho ho—" Once he understood the Dragon Queen's meaning, King Kong's eyes bulged and he flew into a rage.
He truly was hopping mad, stamping so hard that the cave trembled slightly.
(End of chapter)
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