Chapter 33: Speaking of Which, Am I Exploiting Child Labor?
Putting away the giant axe, Joshua gazed at the dead dragon corpse before him, fell silent for a moment, then turned around decisively and flew upward.
Returning to the second level of the dragon’s nest, he swung his sword in midair. A sharp blade of air sliced through the throat of the melee dragon whose left leg had been severed, causing massive blood loss and leaving it on the verge of death. A large amount of blue blood foam gushed out from behind its scales. The intense pain briefly awakened the dragon for an instant, but within a few seconds, its will returned to endless slumber.
With this, all the dragons in the White Dragon Peak nest of the Northern Lands had been completely wiped out by Joshua. Counting the few dragons the warrior had slain outside the nest, he had killed a total of thirteen adult dragons.
As for young dragons and old dragons, not a single one was found.
In truth, for a dragon’s nest, thirteen dragons was quite a large number, but for the nests of this era, it was few.
“Recalled to Dragon Island, huh…”
Standing before the corpses of this group of dragons, recalling the words spoken by the dragon that had used magic, Joshua appeared thoughtful. “If that’s the case, things aren’t that urgent. It seems there’s still some time before the Dragon Calamity begins.”
His reasoning had a basis.
Before the Dragon Calamity began, the Five-Colored Dragons and the Metal Dragons within Dragon Island would erupt into an internal conflict. This was a certainty established in his previous life and an event that absolutely could not change in this life.
The Steel Dragon and the Five-Headed Dragon God had always been at odds in their philosophies. One insisted on peaceful development and recuperation, isolating itself from the conflicts of the continent, and if the opportunity arose, to once again open void routes to travel to primitive worlds without civilization on the other side, rather than competing with humans.
The other had always been secretly plotting conspiracies, attempting to overthrow the status of all native races on the Mycroft Continent and restore the entire dragon race to the glory of the original world.
Using dragon beasts to initiate the Dragon Calamity was indeed a way to use the native forces of the Mycroft Continent to deal with other native races. If the plan succeeded, both humans and dragon beasts would be greatly weakened. Without a doubt, the Five-Headed Dragon God would become a great contributor to the resurgence of the dragon race, and could even legitimately surpass the Steel Dragon to become the sole god of the Astral Dragons.
But the Steel Dragon had always been close to the human gods. It knew very well that no matter how badly humans were defeated, as long as the Far Sea Church of the Seven Gods had not fallen, the Seven Gods of Humanity would always have the possibility of directly using the ruins on the Holy Mountain to enter the material world as avatars, or even in their true forms. Seven true gods descending to the mortal world was a power that the entire dragon race could not withstand.
Therefore, the Five-Headed Dragon God, aware of this, planned to directly gather its forces and launch a surprise attack on the Holy Mountain from the Far South—this was also the direction of the plot in his previous life.
The Five-Colored Dragons, having gathered all their elite forces, launched a surprise attack on the Far Sea Holy Mountain but failed. Even the Five-Colored Dragon God was besieged by the Seven Gods, knocked down from the Boundless Heaven, and forced to descend to the mortal world in the true form of a saint. However, this also lifted the curtain on the Dragon Calamity. For some reason, the Seven Gods did not pursue, but allowed the Dragon Calamity to ravage the various kingdoms.
At the time, Joshua could not understand this behavior, but back then, he did not care about these plot-related issues. As long as there were enough enemies for him to enjoy killing, that was fine. But thinking about it now, Joshua believed it might have been to guard against even more terrifying existences in the void.
For example, the Plague and Famine mentioned by the Steel Serpent, and another unknown Chaos Evil God.
Just as Joshua was pondering the future, Ying and Lin both deactivated their Divine Mechanization. They stood by Joshua’s side, while Hei also ran over from not far away. It seemed to really like the surrounding environment, both the scent of Astral Dragon blood and the cold that suppressed its body heat.
“Is it over like this, Master?”
Looking around with her green eyes at the dragon corpses, Ying said somewhat regretfully, “It still feels so fast. This is dragon-slaying, something that could be written into a legendary tale… Killing them so quickly, how are the bards supposed to make up stories?”
“Yeah.”
Lin nodded, also looking a bit unsatisfied. The Divine Mechanism youth sighed, “It’s a pity these dragons aren’t Chaos creatures. Otherwise, it would have been another substantial accumulation of power.”
He seemed quite calculating.
Hearing the conversation of his weapons, Joshua was reminded of something.
Lin was right. This was a Five-Colored Dragon’s nest. Logically, there should be some traces of Chaos remnants.
Closing his eyes slightly, the warrior calmed his mind. Immediately, a profound will imbued with the power of order swept outward, searching for any existence that could resonate with him.
After a moment, Joshua opened his eyes again.
“Found it.”
Saying this, he walked directly toward a large hole not far away. The item he sensed was on the third level of the dragon’s nest.
Next to the incubation room.
Descending to the third level of the dragon’s nest, in the corridor beside the dragon egg incubation room, Joshua easily found a huge ice chamber. Entering it, he saw many strange vessels, a massive workbench, and various peculiar research tools. It seemed to be the dragon’s mana workshop.
And the source of his perception was above the huge workbench.
This workbench was about twelve meters high. Joshua had to fly to see what was on it. On the left rear side of the workbench, a bottle containing a black substance caught his eye.
A dense substance, neither gas nor liquid, was bound by runes and magic arrays, suspended in this small bottle made of blue crystal—small, of course, relative to dragons. For Joshua, this bottle was almost as big as his entire body.
Joshua could clearly sense that this bottle contained a very thick, Chaos-adjacent aura. It was similar to the Chaos mist that had once confused magical beasts and stirred up the Black Tide from the Black Erosion Dragon, but even more concentrated.
Frowning slightly, Joshua approached the bottle and observed it carefully. He had a premonition that this was the foundation of the dragon race’s confidence in initiating the Dragon Calamity and controlling those Primordial Realm dragon beasts.
“Good grief, these dragons don’t use the same programming system as humans.”
Muttering to himself, the warrior examined it for a long time before having to admit he had no idea what the runes inscribed on it meant or what effects they had.
The dragons used runes to write magic arrays, employing concepts completely different from humans. If it were a human magic array, even if Joshua couldn’t use it, he could understand its function. But now, he could only shake his head. “I’ll have to wait for Nostradamus to come and let him, an Ultimate-rank mage, take a look at what this thing is. With this as evidence, the Imperial Emperor will certainly believe what I say… and he won’t have a choice but to believe. The facts are all here; everyone is just clinging to wishful thinking, unwilling to pierce that layer of paper.”
Suddenly, a massive tremor originated from the bottom of the dragon’s nest.
Joshua felt this vibration. He looked up at the ceiling, where ice cracks were rapidly expanding. Countless huge blocks of ice and ice shards were falling quickly, and the pervasive snow dust had become thick enough to block vision.
“It looks like…”
Ying reached out, her slender, fair wrist turning as she caught a bit of cold snowflake in her palm, and said softly, “It’s going to collapse.”
“Yeah, it’s going to collapse.”
Lin also shook his head, flicking away the scattered ice shards from his hair, then echoed, “The dragon’s nest is really fragile. It collapses just like that.”
“Hiss, hiss.”
Hei let out an excited hiss from the side.
None of them seemed uneasy. Regardless of the fact that their master, Joshua, was a Gold Peak warrior, these beings themselves possessed Silver-rank strength and special abilities. Even if the entire dragon’s nest collapsed, it would only take a bit more time to crawl out from the ice and snow.
Ignoring his weapons and mount chatting idly on the side, Joshua instead noticed something because of this.
The collapse of the dragon’s nest was not a big deal, but how should he bring back those dragon eggs and this man-sized large bottle in front of him?
The warrior pondered for a moment, then turned to look at the siblings Ying and Lin, nodding thoughtfully.
He thought of a way.
And the Divine Mechanisms collectively shuddered.
(To be continued.)