The bat spirit's final strike reminded Dany of something important: although the demigods of this world might be pitifully hacked to death by knights wielding Valyrian steel swords, that did not mean they lacked true substance.
And with the great battle of Meereen approaching, considering whatever trump cards Jenny might have hidden, Dany planned to go a step further and use the hundreds of skeletal remains of the Titan's ancestors to break through to demigod level.
Although she had access to three meditation methods—the Grand Sorcerer's technique, the Green Seer's wind meditation, and the Rhoynar water magic—Dany's goal this time was only to become a fire-aligned demigod.
Because after the last dragon battle in Meereen, her fire magic had already brushed the edge of the demigod realm.
But she was mistaken. Touching the edge did not necessarily mean she could climb over it.
Countless wisps of spiritual essence entered the Grand Sorcerer's meditation vortex and transformed into fire mana. The nine-colored meditation foundation slowly expanded.
Yet even after she absorbed the divinity of the Song of Strength, greatly increasing her power, her fire magic still did not break through to the demigod level.
Instead, her bloodline advanced further and gradually adapted to the flames of the Smith God.
It resembled the phenomenon of a black hole devouring a planet and then ejecting streams of matter. Once the nine-colored vortex expanded to its limit, it began ejecting large quantities of bright red mana particles.
They were not fire mana, but the most fundamental mana particles—the basic substance of the mana sea, the source of all magic in the world.
Dany was shocked.
But after confirming she was uninjured, she continued infusing spiritual essence into the nine-colored vortex.
If a person's sea of consciousness were compared to a universe, then at this moment, Dany's nine-colored vortex was like the mana sea of the real world.
The eruption of mana particles was equivalent to a massive tidal surge of magic, raising the overall magical energy level within her inner universe.
And within this universe were also the Green Seer's wind meditation and the Rhoynar river magic.
Their energy levels increased as well.
To put it simply, Dany's consciousness held three meditation systems. Her fire magic had overeaten and begun ejecting high-quality "nutrient matter." After absorbing these nutrients, the Green Seer and water magic gradually increased in power.
And that was where the problem appeared: Dany's comprehension of the Song of the Wind far surpassed her comprehension of the Song of Fire.
In other words, her modified Green Seer meditation realm was already higher than that of her fire magic.
She had intended to frantically replenish mana and ascend as a fire demigod, but unexpectedly, the Green Seer meditation completed its grand cycle first.
A faint ring of small tornadoes appeared out of thin air inside the cave, swirling around Dany like a silkworm cocoon.
From the wind, she heard countless messy and useless pieces of information: the rustling of leaves, the screams and curses of wildfire, the sound of field mice gnawing tree roots, parrots calling in rubber trees, the hiss of venomous snakes slithering through vines, and…
Boom!
Inside her consciousness, the second soul-ring exploded after absorbing innumerable mana particles. The countless runes forming the Green Seer meditation dissolved into colorless and shapeless wind.
The shattered runes became countless tiny breezes, and the breezes combined into a pale-cyan wind ring.
The Green Seer's second soul-ring vanished, replaced by a perpetually flowing ring of wind.
Almost at the same moment, within the Black Gate of the Wall—inside the Gate God's divine domain, a world filled with cyan hurricane winds—the number of lower-level tornadoes suddenly decreased by one-tenth.
Above them, the Song of the Wind shining atop the upper storms dimmed by one-tenth, its aura weakened by one-tenth.
"Sigh… this day came so slowly. I knew it would eventually arrive, but I didn't expect it to come this quickly."
Dany jolted awake and looked around. Aside from the fire tornado encircling her, nothing else was there.
"How strange. I thought I just heard…" Dany frowned and pondered. "It was the Gate God's voice. Was He sending me a message? No… He was talking to Himself. Something about slow, something about fast…"
It had taken her barely one year to comprehend the Song of the Wind and, up to this moment, condense her own initial version of it—astonishingly fast.
From the moment the Gate God first sang the Song of the Wind until a second living being appeared to sing it with Him, millions of years had passed—so long that time itself had become meaningless.
Aside from the Gate God, no one could feel or understand such emotions.
"I wanted watermelons but ended up with a giant pumpkin."
Dany wore a complicated expression. With a gentle wave of her hand, the massive wind column passing through the cave floor and ceiling disappeared.
The lingering flames within the column gradually dimmed. In the end, only a thin layer of bone fragments glowing with sparks remained on the ground, while the entire cave was covered in dense white ash.
"Ah-choo, ah-choo!" The titan, once covered in black fur, had been turned into a shaggy snow monster and kept sneezing as he covered his nose.
The tricolored lotus platform beneath Dany had grown faint, yet it still suspended her in midair.
With a thought, divine power surged within the wind ring. Her body and the lotus beneath her seemed to turn into wind itself, merging with the air. In an instant, she drifted over a hundred meters and appeared before Big Black.
He was covered in white ash as well, looking like a white dragon.
"Skreee!" Big Black cried joyfully, celebrating his Mother Dragon's ascension to demigod.
"Hahaha! Now I really can fly!" Dany was excited too.
Her fire wings—her angel wings—could not let her fly because their fundamental principle was merely the Fire Ladder technique.
The Fire Ladder overcame gravity and allowed suspension.
Like a hot-air balloon.
But a balloon only lifted upward; to actually fly, one needed wind or a propeller attached to the basket.
"Ho! Ho!" The titan pointed at the remaining bones on the ground, shouting excitedly.
Earlier, the inner cave beyond the bend had been filled with gorilla skeletons. Now it was empty except for a few hundred charred bones of various lengths.
Even the thick layer of bone ash had vanished, blown to the outer cave and all the way into the canyon by the sudden hurricane.
"Ah, that's cremation. Go dig a hole and bury whatever's left," Dany said casually to the titan.
The titan was confused.
Dany didn't leave immediately. She spent a bit of time getting familiar with her demigod mana and her greatly boosted strength. While at it, she searched the cave with a treasure-hunter's mindset.
There was dog-head gold in the cave, but it wasn't a gold mine. It was simply part of the offerings placed near the collapsed temple altar—dog-head gold, jade the size of a human head, diamond ore as thick as a heel…
Dany glanced only once before shifting her eyes away from such vulgar objects.
The damaged murals found in the temple ruins, however, were what truly caught her interest.
On the murals, wild men were worshipping gorillas as tall as mountains.
This showed that the cave indeed belonged to the Kong tribe.
Entering deeper into a stone chamber filled with bat droppings—likely the residence of the bat demon—Dany discovered an area where magic elements were unusually concentrated, almost one quarter of what the Great Wall contained.
A divine realm?
A place where a deity was active?
Like the Great Wall, was this the end of the world?The boundary of another world?
The terminus?
She studied it for quite a while but still couldn't figure out its underlying principle.
However, she also guessed the real reason the bat demon forcibly seized the monkey demon's dwelling.
In an age when magic was fading, even she would be tempted by such a cave abode.
One day later, at the foot of the mountain, Dany met Kong again.
It was a lush green peak, four to five hundred meters high, with long, gentle slopes covered in ancient forest.
Rain had just cleared, the mountains glistening a vibrant green, and the air carried the fresh sweetness of plants washed clean by water.
A red-headed, green-feathered parrot-kong perched in a patch of yellow chrysanthemums, small in size but loud in voice, its calls ringing through the valley. A troop of proboscis monkeys chattered noisily as they chased each other through the treetops of banana trees.
At first glance, this place seemed no different from any other part of the rainforest.
But from the sky, one could see that a small village had been carved out at the top of the mountain.
It looked like a person with thick green hair who had shaved only the top of their head.
This place was roughly 500 kilometers from Kong's Gourd Valley. Kong had run all night and throughout the morning, and now he was exhausted like a dog, lying on the ground with his tongue hanging out as he panted heavily.
Yesterday morning, Dany encountered Kong, followed him to Gourd Valley during the morning, and left near dusk riding her dragon.
In just one day, she had visited all six swamps marked by Clinton.
She contracted twenty swamp dragons over 25 meters long, ten shadow dragons over 15 meters, and five striped dragons between 12 and 15 meters.
Striped dragons indeed ate less and were slightly faster than swamp dragons, making them a surprisingly cost-effective choice for mounts.
She could take a few back for testing.
After acquiring this batch of winged dragons, Dany discovered a major flaw in the sheep-egg's contract magic.
It consumed far too much soul power.
A thought fragment from the demigod dragon was refined into a rune and imprinted into the winged dragon's mind, relying on the demigod's draconic pressure to subdue it.
This was the fundamental mechanism for controlling winged dragons.
A single thought wasn't a heavy burden on Big Black, but what about ten or twenty?After contracting more than fifty winged dragons in total, Big Black began showing signs of discomfort.
Otherwise, Dany wouldn't have stopped at contracting only thirty-five this time.
At the same time, she yearned even more for the demigod feast the "guide party" had offered to the "imperial army."
Yes, she truly wasn't that different from the invading soldiers entering a village, and the native Kong was the "rainforest traitor," the guide.
"I don't have time to waste. Hurry up and lure the creature down," Dany urged.
Rainwater from the mountain gathered here into a waterfall seven or eight meters high. Under the sunlight, the crashing spray formed a faint rainbow. Big Black stepped on the waterfall with the rainbow above his head, half of his body submerged in the stream.
Below, the black brute was also crouched beside the small river, lowering its head to gulp down mouthful after mouthful of water.
The water was yellow and muddy.
He wasn't afraid of getting an upset stomach.
And it seemed the bat demon's plague spray couldn't harm Kong either.
The waterfall thundered loudly, but it still couldn't stop Dany from using wind to carry her voice into the gorilla's ears.
"Hou-hou…" Kong's eyes looked dull, and even his calls sounded weak.
He hadn't slept for two days and nights, had climbed mountains and crossed rivers, and had sprinted 500 kilometers. Even Kong couldn't endure that.
"I'll deal with that evil creature. You won't need to do much," Dany said.
"Wo-ho-ho!"
"Boom, boom, boom… boom, boom, boom…"
From the dense forest around the waterfall, the sudden howls of wild men and the rhythmic beating of hide drums echoed out.
To Dany's astonishment, about thirty filthy, striped-skinned men walked out.
They first knelt before Kong, raising large nuggets of dog-head gold and fist-sized dazzling pink diamonds as offerings.
But when they saw the demon dragon beneath the rainbow and the silver-armored knight on its back, an uproar broke out. More than ten of them stepped forward and used stone axes to chop off their own left arms at the elbow.
Blood splattered everywhere. The wounds were jagged and uneven, leaving Dany utterly shocked.
The remaining wild men began rhythmically beating the hide drums at their waists. An old man with dirty, matted white hair stepped forward, solemn-faced, tore off his greasy baboon-skin loincloth, and shook his shriveled, pickled-cucumber-like thing as he performed a strange dance filled with primitive savagery toward Dany.
Ten one-armed wild men endured the pain and raised their severed arms, offering them to Dany and Big Black.
(End of chapter)
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