Chapter 493: The Clear and Fierce Dragon's Roar
The night at Beixinqiao, like summer nights anywhere else in the capital, was thick with oppressive heat. The grass was covered with people ceaselessly waving palm-leaf fans, and many of them held an ice pack in the other hand that wasn't gripping the fan handle. Chen Changsheng waited for a very long time before finding the right opportunity to slip from beneath the tree to the well's edge, and then he jumped down.
It was that familiar sensation of falling, that same bone-piercing chill. The scorching heat of the surface found no trace in the underground space. The thick frost and snow on the ground made it clear that here, it was eternally a cruel winter.
Watching the black dragon slowly drifting through the air like a mountain range—even though he had seen this scene many times before—Chen Changsheng still couldn't control his emotions. His heart trembled with fear.
The black dragon drifted to the air in front of him, looking down at him from on high. The emotion in its dragon eyes seemed very cold. Only he could see that deep within, hidden, there was a trace of restlessness and resentment.
Since returning to the capital from Xunyang City, he had come to see the black dragon once. But recently, because the pressure on the National Academy had been too great, he had been far too busy and simply couldn't find a way to leave.
The wound between the black dragon's brows should be healing. At least now, from the surface, no problems were visible.
Chen Changsheng took out the customary offerings of roast chicken and lamb, tidied up the garbage on the ground, and was just about to speak when suddenly a gust of cold wind rushed toward his face.
That was the black dragon's dragon breath, containing terrible power and chill within it.
No matter how powerful a soul might be, it could be scattered by this freezing dragon breath.
Legend said that the breath of a golden dragon could directly melt metal and stone. Chen Changsheng had never encountered that, but at this moment, he was very certain that the breath of a Frost Dragon of the same rank could absolutely freeze metal and stone into powder, because right now he was frozen solid. The chill was bone-deep, unbearably painful. After some time, he struggled to break free from the ice, his lingering fear not yet faded as he said, "Don't joke like that in the future."
He didn't know that his body had once been soaked in the black dragon's true dragon blood. Otherwise, that breath just now would have frozen him to death—that was no joke.
Deep within the black dragon's enormous eyes, a flicker of delight and smugness passed. The underground space echoed with a strange, creaking laughter.
Chen Changsheng had grown accustomed to the black dragon's odd laughter. He told it about the recent troubles the National Academy had encountered, also as an explanation for why he hadn't come for so long.
The black dragon slowly descended to the ground in front of him, blocking the light cast by the thousands of night pearls on the dome.
Chen Changsheng stood in the shadow, gazing at it for a long time, and made up his mind that today he would definitely get an answer.
Back then, when he had risked his life for his first meditation, he was on the verge of death. But in the end, when he woke up, he was lying on the bed in the National Academy. Not only was he completely unharmed, but he had also gained unimaginable physical strength, power, and speed.
He knew this must be related to the black dragon. He had asked several times afterward, but the black dragon had never directly answered his questions. Hearing his question now, perhaps sensing his determination today, the black dragon didn't, as it had before, directly ignore him to humiliate him, or use its dragon breath to humiliate him. Instead, it was silent for a very long time.
"Are you sure you want to know the answer?" The black dragon spoke in human language.
This wasn't the first time Chen Changsheng had heard the black dragon speak with a human voice. At first, he hadn't understood why the black dragon's voice sounded like an irritable, quick-tempered little girl. Only later did he figure it out: although the black dragon had been imprisoned underground by Wang Zhice for centuries, relative to the long life of the dragon race, it was actually still in its adolescence. It couldn't be called a young dragon, but it should be considered…
A teenage dragon girl?
Chen Changsheng said, "I want to know the answer."
The black dragon was silent for another long time, then described the situation at that time.
Only then did Chen Changsheng realize how incredibly lucky he had been.
After a long time, he looked at the black dragon and said, "How should I thank you?"
Since his trip to the Zhou Garden, he had rarely used honorifics with the black dragon. But now, his mind was unsettled, filled with lingering fear and gratitude toward the black dragon, so he very respectfully used the word "you" in its formal sense.
However, the black dragon clearly didn't want to hear that word. Deep in its enormous eyes, a trace of anger arose.
Then, the black dragon thought of something, and that trace of anger turned into a hint of annoyance.
If Chen Changsheng could have been sharper in certain areas, he might have also caught a glimpse of shyness.
All the meanings deep in the black dragon's eyes finally coalesced into a single murderous intent.
You got my first blood, and you still ask me how to thank you!
The underground world instantly became incomparably cold. The layer of snow on the ground was blasted away, snowflakes fell again from the air, and everywhere was a stark, chilling white.
A dragon's roar landed directly in Chen Changsheng's sea of consciousness.
That was her voice. This time, she used the dragon tongue.
Her voice was very soft, very clear.
Her emotions were very fierce, very intense.
Chen Changsheng nearly fainted from the shock. Recalling the dragon's roar he had just heard, he realized that was what the black dragon had said to him.
The dragon tongue was the most complex and also the simplest language in the world. A single dragon's roar was one syllable, yet it contained countless tones. It could be one meaning, or it could be a whole essay.
When Chen Changsheng was very young and reading the last volume of scriptures, he had come into contact with the dragon tongue. After coming to the capital, he had also studied it for a while with the black dragon, but this time he didn't fully understand.
He vaguely caught certain fragments from the black dragon's dragon roar.
"Blood… you… me… oath… vow… heartless… shame… betray… die… storehouse… water… fat… time…"
What did this mean? He was bewildered, especially the word "heartless," which rang most loudly in his mind, making him doubt whether he had really heard it, whether he had really learned the dragon tongue.
"What exactly do you want me to do?"
He brushed the frost and snow off his body, walked up to the black dragon, and looked up.
The black dragon looked down at him. In its emotionless eyes, a trace of gloom and grievance gradually emerged.
Whether it didn't want Chen Changsheng to see, or because it was truly tired, it closed its eyes. The wind and snow in the underground space also ceased.
Chen Changsheng looked at it and said, "Thank you."
He said it very sincerely, but the black dragon didn't open its eyes. Just as it had said in the Zhou Garden and on the Snow Ridge, it felt that when he said those two words, he didn't mean them from the heart.
Chen Changsheng had actually seen that trace of gloom and grievance before the dragon eyes closed.
He didn't connect it to himself. Instead, he thought that if one looked at it from a human or demon perspective, the black dragon was probably about the same age as a little girl like Luoluo.
A little girl deceived by a powerful human, imprisoned underground for centuries—of course she had the right to feel wronged, of course her expression would be gloomy.
Chen Changsheng thought he understood why the black dragon had seemed so angry earlier.
Yes, the black dragon had saved his life, had even granted him a better life, and it had been imprisoned underground all this time. He had once promised it that if possible, he would find a way to rescue it. But what had he done these past six months? Had he ever thought about this matter? And just now, he had even asked how to thank it…
He lowered his head, walked past the black dragon, and headed into the distant darkness, gradually disappearing.
At this moment, Chen Changsheng's heart was filled with guilt.
The black dragon didn't open its eyes, but it knew what he was doing, though it didn't know what he was thinking inside.
Silence reigned, broken only by the fading footsteps. The area around the black dragon's closed eyes trembled slightly, and frost and snow fell with a rustling sound, as if it wanted to open its eyes, but in the end, it didn't.
She thought somewhat numbly, humans really are shameless and useless. When faced with problems they can't solve, or favors they can't bear, they think only of escape, or worse, they turn hostile.
You are still, after all, a human.
Then, if you want to leave, just leave.
—I have no appetite today. I don't feel like eating people.
But if you come next time and still only say thank you, yet refuse to bring the food from the National Academy's cafeteria for me to taste, I will definitely swallow you in one gulp.
Yes, when Chen Changsheng had been recounting the recent events at the National Academy, he hadn't forgotten to mention that Tang Thirty-Six had turned Chenghu Tower into the National Academy's cafeteria.
When she heard the words "blue lobster," she remembered following her father to play in the Western Sea when she was very young. Bored during the underwater journey, she would casually scoop up a few blue lobsters and crunch them in her mouth as a snack. Later, when she came ashore to the human world, she discovered that some humans in the south also liked to eat similar things. Was it called betel nut?
The black dragon suddenly snapped back to reality. She thought, have I been imprisoned for too long? How can I get so easily distracted? A moment ago, I was ready to curse the heartless one, and the next, I'm thinking about snacks?
Then she heard a knocking sound from a very distant place behind her, and slowly opened her eyes.
She was a Frost Dragon. The chill in her eyes could make the whole world tremble with fear. But somehow, at this moment, a trace of warmth had crept in.
The knocking came from very far away, because the black dragon's body was enormous, itself like a mountain range.
Chen Changsheng was now in front of that immensely huge stone wall, trying to break the iron chains that trapped the black dragon.
Strangely, those two iron chains weren't very thick, at least compared to the black dragon's body. Yet the black dragon had no power to break free.
Chen Changsheng had tried before and knew that even the Stainless Sword, rated by the Heavenly Mechanism Pavilion as unmatched in sharpness, couldn't cut through these chains.
Because the Stainless Sword's blade couldn't actually make real contact with the chains. The outer edge of the chains was wrapped in a layer of energy that couldn't be seen or touched, yet truly existed.
The knocking sound at the wall now was him chipping away the thick ice layer where the chains entered the wall.
The chains and the formation that could imprison a Frost Dragon were, of course, not something he could break now. But as the saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. He had to take that first step.
The first step was research.
The more he researched, the more he felt his heart pound with awe.