The cocoon formed from countless threads floated inside one of the empty pits where the mad dragon’s eye should have been.
Qin Shu concentrated and could see the glowing pathways that appeared whenever energy was transmitted back and forth, a sinister chill flowing through the threads. The cocoon continuously absorbed nourishment from outside and from the mad dragon itself, slowly gestating more and more…
More of what?
Was it producing more crippled little dragons that looked like worms and white maggots? What was even the point? Qin Shu could not understand it.
Compared with the first time Qin Shu had seen the cocoon, the scene had changed somewhat. The mad dragon’s enormous, bloated body lay coiled in the darkness, its jaws clenched tightly as it continuously released low growls of pain.
Ever since several key figures in Phoenix Village had either died or been seriously injured, the thickest threads attached to the cocoon seemed to have broken completely and vanished, leaving them unable to continue supplying sufficient energy. Nearly all the nourishment the cocoon was currently drawing came directly from the mad dragon’s own flesh and blood.
As a result, the mad dragon was in terrible condition, perhaps even the worst state imaginable. The entire scene was thoroughly misplaced, absurd beyond reason, and something that never should have existed.
While Qin Shu considered whether he should take advantage of its weakness and kill it while it was vulnerable, and whether he had missed his chance by not going there personally… he suddenly noticed the blood-red figure of the little phoenix.
Because the difference in scale distorted his perception, Qin Shu genuinely had to search for quite a while before finding the divine bird, and the instant he did, his heart abruptly tightened.
The phoenix was hiding inside the mad dragon’s other empty eye socket, looking astonishingly tiny and adorable.
It floated among the threads and calmly lowered its head to groom its wings, plucking away several sparkling tufts of loose down with its sharp beak. The flames around its body were enclosed by darkness, while its long tail feathers, which should have appeared magnificent and dazzling, looked no more than a faint, flickering speck of starlight beside the mad dragon’s colossal body.
The difference in their size was so absurd that it resembled a tiny firefly insisting on comparing itself with a distorted full moon hanging in the sky.
The white dragon told Qin Shu that this was what a true dragon at the height of its strength was supposed to look like. The white dragon’s own current size was closer to that of an immature adolescent dragon, primarily because of its long imprisonment and secondarily because Qin Shu had forced an inexplicable blood contract on it without its consent, limiting its strength according to Qin Shu’s cultivation. At most, it could currently exert about thirty percent of its power.
Qin Shu ignored the complaint woven throughout the explanation. He had never intended to get dragged into a catastrophe involving the dragon race either, but now that things had reached this point, all he could do was take matters one step at a time.
How deep was the hole beneath the Drum Tower that it could contain something of such outrageous size?
Merely imagining it sent a delayed chill through Qin Shu. If even the phoenix looked like an ant in front of the mad dragon, then had Qin Shu insisted on going down there personally… the creature could probably have blown his head into eight pieces with a casual breath.
No wonder Pei Zhao had rejected the idea without hesitation. Qin Shu could not win. There was absolutely no possibility of winning.
Unbelievable. Seriously. Little boss, you see it now, right? This hereditary madness isn’t some ordinary calamity. Look at this thing—ugly is one thing, but its intelligence has fallen through the floor. It’s stupider than the naked little kids running around Phoenix Village!
Unable to complain successfully about Qin Shu, the white dragon began muttering inside his head about the mad dragon instead. It used its tail to pull shut the door that had been blown open while continuing to adjust the “resolution” of the fractured bronze mirror, never once stopping its chatter.
I’ve been parasitizing Little Liu’s face for the past few decades, so I’ve been playing with phones alongside her for years. My thinking is very modern now, hmph. I’ve realized you humans really are clever and devious… We dragons are the ones falling behind the times. We couldn’t even invent condoms.
“If there weren’t a hereditary madness involved, there’d be nothing wrong with them wanting to have more little dragons.” Qin Shu lightly wiped the blood from his temple, lowering his eyes thoughtfully. “According to legend, every part of a true dragon is precious and dragons are noble from birth. Even divine beasts of mixed blood are extraordinary.”
Noble, sure, but everything good in this world comes at a price. They all wanted offspring, one after another, and somehow even got addicted to something as awful as pregnancy, yet none of them ever thought about how long it takes to restore the vital essence drained away by a fetus. Nor did they consider that if some dragon child or grandchild committed a catastrophic crime, tracing the karmic consequences backward could drag the entire ancestral line into disaster. Heh.
Forget those lustful old dragons from back then. Little boss, just look at the miserable state she’s in now and you’ll understand. She’s gone completely insane raising that disgusting white egg. She’s almost dying from the pain herself, yet she refuses to stop feeding it. She’ll drain the blood out of every living creature around her by any means necessary, all so she can produce batch after batch of monsters! Fuck!
Something was wrong with the white dragon’s emotions, and the longer it spoke, the more wrong they became. Powerful emotions from a “spirit pet” could actually be experienced by its “master,” but the white dragon, which had never submitted to anyone in its life, clearly did not know this and had made absolutely no attempt to conceal what it felt from Qin Shu.
It loved the mad dragon.
Its mouth called her ugly and mocked her for being insane, yet inside, there was not the slightest genuine contempt.
There was only resentment, pity, reluctance to let go, overwhelming anger, and profound confusion.
Qin Shu closed his eyes briefly and wiped away the last of the blood obstructing his vision. His gaze fell on the white dragon’s quietly tightening tail before returning to the mad dragon’s body, which trembled faintly with pain.
Keeping his expression unchanged, Qin Shu asked, “White Dragon, can you show me the Cave God’s corpse? It’s too dark in the mirror. I need to confirm where the object suppressing the breach is. I wonder how badly the Cave God’s body has been eroded by her…”
The white dragon remained silent for a moment before giving a quiet “mm.” It manipulated the scene within the bronze mirror and continued pulling the perspective backward until Qin Shu saw an extremely familiar shape—one that almost made him lose control of his expression.
It was a headless centipede. Its entire body was pitch-black and so incomprehensibly enormous that even seeing it from a great distance made breathing difficult, producing the oppressive terror of being dragged into the depths of the ocean.
Its dozens of vicious limbs had all been stretched outward to their absolute limits like the legs of a spider, forming what seemed to be a deliberately constructed inescapable net that completely sealed the unknown “breach” beneath its body.
In appearance, it was almost identical to the little centipede, so horribly familiar that Qin Shu could barely stand to look at it, yet far more battered, solemn, and desolate, with the aura of death lying over it like frost.
This was Yuanbao’s father.
The mad dragon covered in countless eyes was currently coiled around the severed neck of the centipede. The fine threads spreading from her empty sockets hooked tightly, strand after strand, around the damaged limbs near the neck, together creating a horrifying image like a spiderweb.
Those threads did more than hold her in place. They were also tools through which the mad dragon extracted energy, painstakingly consuming nourishment from the remains of the dead deity. Perhaps because nearly all outside assistance had now disappeared, the rate at which she consumed it was extremely slow.
Qin Shu had no interest in investigating the intentions of a mad creature. Whether this came from the dragon race’s inexplicable obsession with reproduction, insanity caused by the Blood Calamity and its diseased genes, or some entirely different scheme, the conclusion was the same.
This mad dragon was digging away at the foundation of the world, destroying the stability of Phoenix Village, and hurting innocent people… even collecting human souls after torturing them almost to the point of total collapse, using methods horrific beyond description.
Treating human lives like weeds was bad.
Qin Shu narrowed his eyes toward the little phoenix, which had finished grooming its tail feathers. He watched it raise its beautiful, slender neck, spread its magnificent blood-red wings, and fly toward the cocoon inside the other eye socket.
Whenever the suddenly frenzied threads blocked its way, the phoenix spat flame at them or pecked them apart with its sharp beak. Even when its feathers were instantly tangled into chaos, it merely paused for a moment, tended its wounds, smoothed its plumage back into place, and resumed the seemingly tiny war.
Compared with the opponent it had to defeat, the phoenix was nothing more than a minuscule scarlet speck, yet it showed not the slightest fear or intention of retreating.
Qin Shu said nothing and did not watch for long. Instead, he immediately began carrying out his own plan in swift silence.
Apparently out of curiosity, he picked up the three candles lying near his feet, peeled through the accumulated layers of blood-red wax, and found the cotton wicks hidden inside them.
His fingertips brushed the wicks, and the lingering flames around him instantly lit the candles again.
“What are you doing?”
At the same time, one of the white dragon’s golden vertical pupils silently moved closer, growing larger until it nearly pressed directly against Qin Shu. The cold-blooded eye gleamed with a translucent, inhuman chill and was itself several times larger than Qin Shu’s entire head.
“This is my first time seeing a real true dragon, so I want to pay my respects. Don’t worry, I don’t mean you. You said it yourself—you currently look like an underage dragon.”
Qin Shu’s expression remained perfectly normal as he turned toward the bronze mirror and calmly explained, “But you should also know that in Chinese culture, seeing a dragon and phoenix together is considered an auspicious union of dragon and phoenix, the kind of extraordinary good fortune people can only dream of.”
By then, Qin Shu had already bent at the waist, his posture reverent. Holding the three nearly exhausted red candles tightly in both hands, he bowed deeply toward the mad dragon in the bronze mirror and silently repeated the one wish he had at this moment.
First bow: Die.
Second bow: Die.
Third bow: Die.
Not one wasted word. Simple, direct, reverent, solemn.
The white dragon had no idea what Qin Shu intended to accomplish, but it knew that Qin Shu was weak yet dangerous, so naturally it had already become wary.
Its tail, thicker than Qin Shu’s entire body, had long since wrapped around his waist in coil after coil and was tightening with a warning amount of force.
But Qin Shu was enormously strong himself, and when the necessary conditions were met, that strength could even become utterly unreasonable and transcend common sense. The tighter the dragon’s tail squeezed, the deeper Qin Shu bowed, producing an unprecedented sense of dread inside the white dragon.
Compressed dragon scales gave off tooth-aching creaks as flames licked over them with dry, scorching sounds. Qin Shu spat out a mouthful of burning blood, and neither man nor dragon was having a pleasant time.
“Fuck. What did you do to her? I can’t kill you—I can’t kill you! What the fuck… What the fuck is this damned blood contract?!”
The wind rose again. Panicked beyond endurance, the white dragon once more began speaking aloud, thunder faintly rumbling between increasingly rapid breaths. “You’re not the Human Sovereign, so what gives you the right to wield some rule-breaking ability like this?! Fuck, are you the Jade Emperor’s illegitimate son or something?! Huh?!”
“Not that.” Qin Shu lowered the candles and flicked the single horn on his forehead with one finger, producing a crisp sound. “Apparently, I’m a Xiezhi. In my previous life, or maybe the life before that.”
The dragon’s breath abruptly stopped, and silence descended.
Its golden vertical pupils nearly widened into circles, filled with thick suspicion and confusion as they locked onto Qin Shu.
Qin Shu curved his lips into a gentle smile and calmly met its stare. “White Dragon, do you know anything about me? Tell me.”
“I know… I should know. It caused a huge commotion, so I heard about it. Weren’t you dead?”
The white dragon appeared deeply uncomfortable beneath Qin Shu’s gaze, but its own confusion was so intense that it could not look away. It muttered softly, “If you really are… really are that thing… I did hear about you when I was young. You had the audacity to eat one of the Yellow Emperor’s grandsons, yet continued running rampant for more than a thousand years, slaughtering countless people throughout the human world. Eventually, a relative of one of the dead devoted themselves desperately to cultivation, ascended after becoming an immortal, and submitted a bloodstained petition against you to the Heavenly Court. Only then were you finally brought to justice!”
“Me? I ate the Yellow Emperor’s grandson? He had quite a lot of grandsons… Logically speaking, we humans are all his descendants anyway, so if I ate a few bad people, that seems pretty normal.” Qin Shu appeared genuinely interested in the story and displayed an astonishingly low moral threshold. “I don’t think I’m really that awful.”
The white dragon watched him warily and tightened its tail around him, searching through its ancient memories for fragments concerning Qin Shu. “I was still young then and only heard the elders discussing it. One Lunar New Year’s Eve, the Xu clan of Xixiang held a sacrificial ceremony for my father at Zhuyai Bay. They had barely set out the offerings when you directly ate the Xu clan elder…”
The dragon paused, its voice becoming increasingly aggrieved. “And then you stole the entire boatload of offerings! Do you have any idea how prosperous Zhuyai Bay was in those days? It was New Year’s, and my father did not even get a scrap of meat! An absolute humiliation. When Father was unhappy, every shrimp and crab in the palace suffered for it. Even I got beaten for no reason!”
“Mm. I don’t know much about ancient sacrificial customs. What exactly did the Xu clan put on that boat?”
Qin Shu raised his brows and stared directly at it, making the question unusually pointed.
The white dragon fell silent for a moment, then lowered its voice. “Virgin boys and girls were the main course, accompanied by rare delicacies from mountain and sea comparable to imperial cuisine. Beautiful young women became consorts and concubines, complete with twelve guards carrying bridal sedan chairs. There was more gold, silver, and jewelry than anyone could count. Father especially loved mutton-fat jade, so every year the Xu clan offered him a separate chest of it in exchange for favorable weather, fertile fields, and safe commerce.”
“Then what was wrong with me eating the Xu clan elder? That entire family deserved to be eaten by me.”
“…”
“And given the opportunity, I’d eat your father too.”
Man and dragon stared at each other, and another awkward silence spread through the room, leaving only the cold wind repeatedly battering the paper windows like thousands of dead souls wailing in misery.
Meeting Qin Shu’s eyes, which had somehow darkened toward red, the white dragon opened its mouth to argue, thought for a long moment, then found nothing useful to say. Finally, it muttered, “I was little back then. I couldn’t change anything.”
“Even after growing up, you apparently never thought about changing anything.” Qin Shu sneered. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been caught and imprisoned for this many years. Looks like you inherited your father’s legacy perfectly—comfortably exploiting ordinary people.”
“False accusation! Someone falsely accused me! I was framed!”
“Then perhaps I was framed too. The version of me in those stories doesn’t sound like there’s anything wrong with him. Maybe I was simply a more enthusiastic follower of the Gongyang tradition.” Qin Shu raised his brows and continued unhurriedly, “‘With no Son of Heaven above and no regional lord below, even a feud nine generations old may still be avenged…’ Even if I killed you again right now, I’d sleep perfectly well afterward.”
Elio’s Notes: Qin Shu is invoking the Gongyang tradition associated with the Spring and Autumn Annals, particularly its strong rhetoric surrounding justice and vengeance across generations. His point is deliberately provocative: an old grievance does not automatically become illegitimate merely because many generations have passed.
“…I can’t follow all the complicated schools of thought you humans invented.” The white dragon’s eyes wandered before finally settling on the black horn protruding from Qin Shu’s forehead. It leaned closer, apparently trying to determine whether Qin Shu truly was the monster from its stories.
“That’s normal. I’m a high school senior. Give me another year and I won’t remember them either.” Qin Shu paused before abruptly changing direction. “But I can tell who is good and who is bad. You’re definitely no good thing. I suspect… the Blood Calamity afflicting your dragon race exists because the older generations accumulated too much bloodshed. Especially you. You committed too many killings, so your descendants ended up suffering such a catastrophic karmic consequence.”
“I didn’t! I—I only happened to sneeze while I was out traveling once! Who could’ve known that sneeze would come with so much water that it somehow flooded Jin’e Mountain… Oh, right, it wasn’t called Jin’e Mountain back then. It was just some ordinary mountain!”
Qin Shu’s pupils contracted slightly, yet all he did was narrow his eyes and give a cold “heh,” allowing the suddenly anxious white dragon to keep desperately proving its innocence.
“Besides, there’s no way water from my sneeze could’ve turned into boiling water! Supreme Lord Laozi above, I’m cold-blooded. Cold-blooded! Someone must have engineered the whole thing behind the scenes. I’m not insane—why would I deliberately cook an entire village for no reason, throw them into a mountain cave, and turn every single one into some walking-corpse monster?!”
“You’re getting defensive? Hilarious. What a morally upright role model for someone who’s killed countless lives.” Qin Shu raised his brows. “You dare tell me you never watched your old dragon of a father drag civilian women home by force? Classic. If I’d been seized as an offering to a Dragon King, I would’ve cursed your dragon race in blood for generations…”
“You! If you insist on going even further back, then I’m even more innocent! Qin Shu, listen to me. I’m not like my father. I’ve never abused men or forced women in my entire life! Know why? Because it’s beneath me! Humans are ugly as hell. You’re pretty ugly too, hah. I only like female dragons stronger than me. I only consume the essence of the sun and moon. What do humans amount to? Who would care in the slightest how a colony of ants lives?!”
Interesting. Extremely interesting.
So the “moon weeping and turning into a boiling mountain flood” from Phoenix Village’s legend had actually begun because a white dragon accidentally sneezed… Learning such an old secret was an unexpected bonus, but that had never been Qin Shu’s true purpose.
He only wanted to stall for a little time, yet he had not expected the white dragon to react this intensely. More importantly, the dragon was not truly explaining any of this to Qin Shu.
It was speaking to the mother dragon on the other side of the bronze mirror.
After Qin Shu abruptly dumped such an enormous accusation onto its head, the white dragon was terrified that the mother dragon would believe him. It feared she would blame her uncontrollable mutations and madness, and the original cause of her catastrophic Blood Calamity, entirely on the white dragon.
For what it was worth, this dragon seemed genuinely rather stupid.
Its attention at any given moment seemed capable of holding only one thing, leaving it completely unable to notice other changes occurring around it.
Perhaps its long imprisonment, followed by being forcibly reduced to an adolescent form, meant the white dragon had not yet adapted to its vastly reduced… brain capacity?
Whatever the reason, it worked in Qin Shu’s favor.
Qin Shu did not particularly enjoy behaving this way, but he knew perfectly well how to say provocative garbage at carefully chosen moments to manipulate someone’s emotions. After all, with Tang Rui Cheng as his best friend—a person who specialized in provoking teammates while gaming—Qin Shu had long ago been forced to develop the skill.
The white dragon really had become anxious. It was still desperately trying to prove that it had done nothing wrong, completely unaware that its surroundings were undergoing drastic changes and equally unaware that the image inside the bronze mirror had abruptly changed.
“Holy fuck?! Wait—holy shit! What the hell are you?!”
Good, it had finally noticed. In truth, even Qin Shu was startled.
He lowered his gaze slightly toward Coalball, which was hiding beside his feet and trembling violently, and barely restrained himself from drawing in a sharp breath.
Coalball’s body was still tiny. It was, after all, merely a newborn black eaglet covered in thick down, only about the size of Qin Shu’s fist.
Its head, though… oh, its head now occupied nearly two-thirds of the eerie chamber. The only reason it had stopped growing was because there was no more space.
Coalball had transformed its head into that of the mad dragon: a pair of damaged snow-white horns, uneven ruined scales, diseased pale flesh, and countless dark golden eyes peering outward through blood-□□ gaps in the flesh.
Elio’s Notes: The supplied raw contains 血□□隙里 in this description. The contextual meaning is clearly that the eyes are peering through bloody gaps in the dragon’s diseased flesh, but the exact missing Chinese characters have not been reconstructed.
And inside the two empty sockets where the dragon’s main eyes should have been, one remained completely empty.
Since he had a rare opportunity to inspect the details clearly, Qin Shu quietly studied it from close range. He could see damaged scars along the inner walls of the socket, as though someone had used their bare hands—or perhaps claws—to violently gouge out the dragon’s eye, leaving those gruesome marks behind.
Inside the other socket was a familiar gray-white eyeball… Xu Qian. Qin Shu had not even noticed when Coalball hid her away and secretly brought her into the underworld.
Compared with the enormous eye socket of the mad dragon, the gray-white eyeball, despite having somehow grown several times plumper, still looked exceptionally tiny inside it.
“Now I’m relieved. We can leave.” Qin Shu looked toward the white dragon, whose jaw had practically fallen open. “Are you still willing to take me out of here? Or do you want to see whether you can kill me first?”