To prevent any chance of a zombie resurgence, Hope summoned fire and incinerated the black‑armored man in one blow.
After dealing with that little incident, the party finally could enter the royal city ruins.
Unlike the barren outskirts, here the buildings, though also ruined, still hint at past grandeur.
Massive stone walls crumble and topple, exquisite reliefs are blurred by wind and frost, and the shattered dome casts mottled shafts of light that carve alternating bright and dark patterns across the cracked, grassy ground.
"Is this the royal city of Doragunov? Even in ruins it's still impressive," a young archaeologist exclaimed, imagining its splendor four hundred years ago.
Unfortunately, all that remains now is a wasteland.
Old Buck and the team leader eagerly brandished magnifying glasses and notebooks, eager to record every grain on each brick. "Look at these patterns! This craftsmanship! It's a quintessential example of the era's peak! So precious!"
The other archaeologists busied themselves—some shouting for a surviving book, others thrilled at a relatively intact ancient painting... Unlike the excited historians, Hope frowned, his eyes constantly scanning the ruined walls. He had scattered magical plants as sentries along the way, some of which had already gone silent and disconnected from him.
Beneath this dead silence, something seemed to be lurking.
Hope flexed his newly recovered arm and whispered to Elusha, "Be careful. I sense more black‑armored beings here, possibly more than one."
Elusha nodded gravely, still clad in the Celestial Wheel armor, her twin swords sharp in her hands, already anticipating further combat.
The ruins of the royal city aren't vast, and with debris everywhere, even with frequent stops, the group toured most of it in just over half an hour.
Surprisingly, the wary battle Hope and Elusha expected never materialized.
After a brief rest, they pressed on to the last unexplored spot of the ruins.
It was a broad platform with a towering stone slab at its center. Thousands of mummified corpses and bones faced the slab, kneeling in a prostrate posture, an eerie sight.
No matter how bizarre, it couldn't dampen the scholars' enthusiasm for historical research.
They'd gathered many finds along the way, yet the truly useful answers remained elusive—why the Doragunov kingdom fell, why its ruins appeared here, what became of Queen Erin... Cautiously, they stepped onto the platform where a thousand "people" knelt in worship.
Leading the way, Hope suddenly recognized a familiar figure among the corpses.
Upon closer look, despite being reduced to a wrinkled skin shell, Hope identified him as the warrior ghost he had spoken with Elusha about the night before.
These skeletons must be the remains of those ghosts.
But why were they kneeling here?
While Hope was stunned, Old Buck had already reached the massive slab at the platform's center, eyes bright as a child as he examined the dense ancient script.
According to Buck's translation, the front of the slab lists names; per the inscription, these were heroes who sacrificed themselves during the human‑dragon war four hundred years ago to protect the nation.
After the war, Queen Erin commemorated them by engraving their names on the huge slab for posterity to revere.
The front side holds little interest; the reverse bears the information that thrilled Buck.
Hope and Elusha moved to the back, where a massive stone carving depicted a giant dragon and a maiden shaking hands.
Two columns of text flank either side of the slab.
One side reads, "May human‑dragon peace endure forever," while the other contains a story. Buck spent a good while translating it.
Over four hundred years ago, the dragon race split into two factions over their attitude toward humans.
One faction treated humans as food and toys, believing that power gave them the right to dominate the weak—the "Supremacy" faction. The other sought coexistence and friendship—the "Coexistence" faction.
The Supremacy faction comprised the majority of dragons, most of whom were malicious, amoral beasts that launched an unprecedented all‑out war against humanity.
The massive crisis united almost all humans; countless mages rushed to the front to battle the evil dragons, yet human magic could barely harm the inherently mighty dragons.
Fortunately, the Coexistence dragons extended a helping hand, assisting humans in resisting the evil dragons.
But the Coexistence dragons were always a minority; even a mighty fire dragon king like Ignuil could not halt the war, and humanity's defeat was only a matter of time.
At humanity's brink, in the small nation of Doragunov, a human queen and her dragon companion—both teacher and friend—created a special magic: the "Augmentation Technique."
They wondered: if a dragon's power were grafted onto a human, could that give humans the strength to fight evil dragons?
After all, only dragons could stand against dragons.
Thus they acted, and the world's first dragon‑slayer mage was born, named "Erin."
The dragon who bestowed its power upon Erin was the renowned scholar‑dragon, Sage Dragon Bellsealion.
With the emergence of dragon‑slayer magic, more humans partnered with friendly dragons, becoming dragon‑slayer mages, which unnerved the evil dragons.
One stormy day, fifty evil dragons launched an assault on Erin's nation. To protect Erin and her people, Sage Dragon Bellsealion was slain by the dragons, and Erin was gravely wounded.
That seemingly inevitable dragon onslaught was turned around by the arrival of a mysterious strongman whose name had been erased from the slab, leading to a human victory.
Bellsealion's sacrifice broke Erin's heart; she adopted his name as her surname to honor him, and she kept fighting for their shared wish of "human‑dragon peace forever." That's all the slab records.
It is an epic grand saga, and also the arduous journey of a great heroine.
When Buck finished his translation, no one spoke; they all knew that when one story ends, another begins.
However, the next story is dark.
Erin never fulfilled her dream, and was betrayed by her subjects.
The dragons also failed to coexist peacefully with humans and headed toward extinction.
Elusha stared blankly at the weather‑worn likeness of Queen Erin, and somehow raised her hand to touch it.
Yet the moment her hand made contact, the thousand corpses rose in perfect unison and turned to look at her.
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