The war god of Kaiyuan, wearing a golden helm adorned with peacock feathers, urged his horse forward in a desperate gallop, hoping to escape the murky waves sweeping in like a blanket cast down by the heavenly gods.
However, the speed of his mount was nowhere near enough to outrun the flood driven by the water god.
The infantry fleeing beside him screamed in panic. They were swallowed without a trace by the rolling waves, like photos of a cheating ex shredded and sucked into a vacuum cleaner.
Even four or five kilometers away from the riverbank, the water still surged at a height of more than eight meters. Within the muddy torrent, one could see soldiers, warhorses, sabers, spears, swords, halberds and even a huge dragon-worm tumbling within it.
The dragon-worm looked like a pair of jeans in a spinning washing machine. Its body was hard and stiff, yet it could not stop itself from turning with the current.
"No—!" At last, the war god Kaiyuan let out a wail and was swept into the flood as well.
In the end, this was no ordinary flood.
Grand Chancellor Turtle handled it like a veteran driver at the wheel, controlling the water so the waves held together rather than dispersing, their force undiminished as they rolled straight across the allied army's battlefield.
Viewed from the sky, one would be shocked to find that the waters pouring from the river mouth flowed along the banks in a single direction toward the walls of Meereen.
True, the ground north of Meereen sloped lower, but it was the chancellor's divine power that prevented the flood from spreading outward.
This was like a miniature water-aspect forbidden spell.
Destroying a city would be impossible, but washing clean several kilometers of plains around it was not difficult. Well… it was difficult. Grand Chancellor Turtle might seem full of strength, roaring from atop the tide, yet in truth it was already exhausted, divine power nearly spent.
An overdrawn crossbow can barely pierce silk.
"Seven above, is this the Seven blessing us?!"
On the top level of the Great Pyramid, Aemon lay flat behind his scope, nervously watching the battle. When he saw the sunlit plain suddenly turn into a lake, his mind nearly blanked out.
"No, it is a turtle! A giant turtle!"
Beside him, Myrcella's cheeks flushed with excitement as if witnessing a mythic battlefield unfold before her eyes.
"It is the River Elder!" Missandei exclaimed. "So this is Her Majesty's trump card. No wonder she was so confident, always saying the outcome would only depend on how great our victory was."
"Mother above!" Myrcella covered her mouth in shock. "Isn't the River Elder the Loen River's deity?
The gods are real… and appearing before us?
And they obey Her Majesty?"
A flash of brilliance gleamed in Missandei's golden eyes. "It must have been during the journey to the Loen River to forge the Valyrian steel. If Her Majesty could slay the Crab King, subduing the River Elder would be only natural."
"But, but…" Myrcella still struggled to accept it. "The River Elder is a deity!"
"So what if he is a deity?" said Qiqi, the plump centaur handmaiden, utterly unimpressed. "You don't think the golden bells in the queen's braids are just ornaments, do you?"
"I finally understand. This is a war of gods!" Old Aemon laughed bitterly. "Is Jennie, who drives dragon-worms to assault a city, a mere mortal?
Yesterday the queen slew more than forty dragon-worms with two swords. Is she a mere mortal?
And today we even have a mountain-sized old turtle.None of them are mortals!"
"Who cares whether that turtle is divine? The 150,000 soldiers outside the walls are doomed!" Handmaiden Ellie laughed, punching the air.
"That is true. With this flood, victory is ours." At last, the old man's shock gave way to excitement.
Win this battle and the Targaryen world empire will finally begin to take shape!
"Long live the Queen!" Aemon raised his fist toward the black dragon soaring overhead.
"Long live the Queen!" Myrcella, Missandei and the centaur handmaid echoed him.
"Long live the Queen!" The Great Pyramid resounded with rolling shouts.
"Long live the Queen!" Soon the entire city of Meereen was wrapped in thunderous cheers.
"Long live the Que—ka—"
"Kakaka—"
Suddenly a discordant sound came from the sky, like a machine with gears grinding to a halt.
Daenerys' smile stiffened as she lifted her head slowly toward the source of the noise.
The cheering people of Meereen followed her gaze.
Everyone stared in horror as a crack appeared across the blazing sun in the blue sky, as if it was not truly the sun, but a brittle rice cracker—and a child pinched it between two hands and snapped it in half. Crack—and it broke.
Blue sky. Pale clouds. A golden sun—this should have been the most ordinary weather in Slaver's Bay.
But before the eyes of more than a hundred thousand witnesses, it became anything but ordinary, because the sun broke.
"What the fa-ke!?" From beneath her visor, Daenerys' face turned pale. Confusion flickered in her alluring eyes.
Staring at the darkening sky, she suddenly felt lost.
The sky was dark.
At nine in the morning, the sky went dark.
It was not quite accurate to say the sun was smashed like glass.
It was more like a fruit hard candy, round and flat, slowly thinning as someone rolled it around on the tongue. The candy grew thinner and thinner until it finally shattered on the tip of the tongue.
No one struck it. It simply ran out of energy and broke. Its fragments still radiated a hazy white light.
It seemed as if the sun had suddenly swollen from a baked flatbread into the round dome of a grand cathedral, yet the dome was covered with a thick layer of cotton cloth. There were still large patches of hazy white light in the sky, but the heavens had darkened.
It was roughly as bright as the moment just after sunset, not pitch-black, yet compared with the earlier brilliance, everyone felt the sky had become especially dark. Perhaps the sudden anomaly also brought fear, and fear deepened the illusion.
"Ah, the sun is gone, it's dark!"
"Seven Gods, what has happened?"
Ordinary soldiers panicked, no longer caring even about victory that was within arm's reach.
"Do not be afraid, everyone. This is the queen's power. The queen has summoned a great flood. The queen has blotted out the sky. Long live the queen!"
These were the Dragon Queen's fanatical followers.
"Long live the queen, the queen blots out the sky!"
Strangely enough, not only did people believe such nonsense, quite a few believed it. In just a short while, the entire city of Meereen was echoing with such cries.
"Is Dany really this strong?!" Old Eamon was also half doubtful, half convinced.
"There's nothing the King of the Khals can't do!" the Dothraki handmaiden Jhiqui thrust out her ample chest and shouted along with the crowd, "Long live the queen, the queen blots out the sky!"
"Ahh, it's dark! The Dragon Queen is terrifying beyond measure. She summoned a great flood and even blotted out the sky. We're finished!" The elephant soldiers in the south of the city were also frightened out of their wits, shouting and fleeing in panic.
The Dragon Queen in the sky.
"Moo… no, this is the Long Night. The Long Night has fallen. The sun has gone out!"
At last, some living relic old enough understood what was happening.
The Turtle Chancellor no longer restrained the flood. He stretched out his neck and let out a terrified howl from the depths of his soul.
Ordinary people could not understand his soul-cry, but the entire city of Meereen shook several times under his roar.
Great Black lowered its altitude. Dany leapt down, fluttering like a leaf, and landed unsteadily on the back of the mooing giant turtle.
"Stop howling. It's just the Long Night," Dany stamped her foot, cutting off the Turtle Chancellor's "public embarrassment."
"No, you don't understand," the giant turtle's head, as large as a train carriage, shook repeatedly. "Last time, cracks appeared in the sun, and then it slowly went out. The whole process lasted an entire week. This time, it took only a few minutes."
Dany felt there was no real difference between going out in a week or in a few minutes, so she urged the old turtle, "We're fighting a world war here. Can you be a bit more serious?"
Indeed, after the sun shattered, the old turtle stopped driving the flood. The waves that had once been four or five meters high had already burst apart. Although the north of Meereen had turned into a marsh stretching for dozens of miles, the water was far too shallow.
It barely reached calf height. How could it drown anyone?
Sure enough, in just a short time, tens of thousands of people on the battlefield staggered back to their feet.
"With things like this, how do you expect to keep fighting? Are you going to kill everyone?" the old turtle shouted.
To be honest, at that moment, Dany truly wanted to drown all 150,000 people outside the city.
Don't blame her for being ruthless. Just look at the sky. The sun had gone out. The heavens had darkened.
The Long Night had come far too suddenly. Thinking about growing crops again was almost a luxury.
The extinction of the sun was so terrifying that she now lacked confidence even in feeding her own people.
One hundred and fifty thousand prisoners meant one hundred and fifty thousand mouths. Asking her to use the life-saving grain of her own people to feed these former enemies was utterly nauseating.
If they all died, everyone would be spared trouble.
But such thoughts could only stay in her heart. They could not be spoken aloud.
Ideally, the old turtle would hold out a bit longer, and only withdraw the flood after everyone had drowned.
Unfortunately, this Turtle Chancellor seemed to have his own misgivings and refused to proactively share the Dragon King's burdens.
Bad review.
Dany muttered inwardly and said, "The fighting in the north of the city is basically over, but there are still five thousand elephant soldiers in the south.
According to the original plan, you should move to the south and pour the flood into the dragon-worm tunnels."
The southern part of the city had more or less been turned into a special kind of barbican, sealing off three blocks and using the buildings along the streets as the barbican walls.
"Moo…" The Turtle Chancellor raised his head and howled once more. Under the terrified gazes of the surviving allied soldiers, he stomped through the muddy water and strode toward the HLJ embankment.
Flooding the dragon-worm tunnels in the south was not difficult. The old turtle bobbed up and down in the river, the water swirling as it diverted around him and poured into the breach in the southern embankment.
Earlier, to flood the 150,000 allied troops in the north, the HLJ northern embankment had been opened. Now, to flood the dragon-worm tunnels in southern Meereen, the Turtle Chancellor dug through the southern embankment as well.
The old turtle lay near the breach, driving the river water into the southern city. Along the channels dug in advance, the water flowed steadily and unceasingly.
Only then did Dany sit cross-legged on the turtle's back and ask the Turtle Chancellor about the secret of the sun.
"How could the sun shatter and then go out?" she asked curiously.
Isn't the sun a star?
Even if a star dies, it should first expand into a red giant, then after millions or tens of millions of years collapse into a white dwarf, or, if massive enough, evolve into a black hole.
Shattering and going out was far too unreasonable, far too unscientific.
Half of the Turtle Chancellor's body was submerged in the water. Two jets of water sprayed from his nostrils as he spoke in a deep, muffled voice, "The Mother Goddess told us that our world was born from a mass of fire in the cold, empty universe.
At the dawn of the world, because all flames were suppressed and buried beneath primordial hills, the surface was shrouded in absolute darkness. The world was desolate, icy, and silent, almost identical to the void beyond the universe.
It is said that the first living beings were born from the ancient shadows, and they were also the first generation of Dark Demon Gods.
Some powerful Demon Gods have even survived to this day and are worshipped by the people of Asshai in the far east."
(End of chapter)
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