novelraw Chapter 310: Youthful Red Iron Dragon, The Second Heart
Chapter 310: Youthful Red Iron Dragon, The Second Heart
Unknowingly, time had reached the year 275 of the New Calendar.
The convergence lands between the Ser Wilderness and the Permafrost Tundra.
This stretch of land, once dotted with sparse green, had since been reshaped by the cold currents unleashed in a final duel between two legendary rulers and by the ecological upheaval from the dragons’ war.
The howling cold wind dragged along endless feathering snow, like billions of invisible ice blades, ceaselessly slicing at the exposed rock and frozen soil.
As far as the eye could see, only a chaotic pallor remained between heaven and earth; thick drifts of snow greedily swallowed every undulation and edge of the terrain, almost assimilating the entire convergence lands into a merciless extension of the Permafrost Tundra.
Huff! Huff! Huff!
The roar of wind and snow was the only, eternal background sound here.
Yet upon this silver-clad land, Red Maple Valley seemed cut off from the world.
No matter howling the blizzard outside, how far the ice stretched.
Inside the valley flowed a warmth and vigorous life as if it were late spring turning into early summer.Tall maple trees stained the forest in layers of color—crimson, gold, orange-brown...—countless burning hues wove together into a brilliant dome; the brook murmured, reflecting the flaming canopy and breaking it into a river of glittering stars.
Within this tranquil valley that glowed with warm tones and teemed with life,
a slender, quick figure darted like a streak of light weaving through the trees.
It was Deborah, the brass-silver dragon, who, having ended her dragon sleep and entered the youth phase, could now skillfully use Transformation to assume human form.
She appeared as a roughly seventeen- or eighteen-year-old human girl—lithe, tall, slender yet undeniably agile.
Her hair fell to her waist, not purely copper red nor silver-white, but as if molten red-gold and flowing secret-silver mercury had been blended by the most exquisite brush, splashed and mixed; with every lithe leap and nimble turn, that streaming light spilled dazzling, mesmerizing luminescence.
Her skin was unbelievably fine, with the soft, pearlescent sheen of top-tier mother-of-pearl, beneath which hinted a warm jade-like texture.
Most unforgettable were her eyes.
The pupils held pure, brilliant secret-silver starlight, while the areas around the pupils to the eyelids were suffused with a deep, warm base tone like top-grade amber or beeswax.
Taken as a whole, those eyes were like a deep autumn lake inlaid with stars—profound, lively, reflecting the world’s radiance.
At this moment,
this beautiful brass-silver dragon maiden stood barefoot on the wet, smooth green stones by the stream, lightly stepping, constantly hopping and running.
Her target was a magic butterfly whose wing shimmered with rainbow-like, elusive light.
“Got it!”
Deborah let out a clear, pleasant laugh and suddenly sprang up, her delicate hand reaching for the butterfly dancing in the air.
The magic butterfly seemed to anticipate this and beat its wings in a flash.
Buzz!
In an instant, light and shadow shifted and illusions multiplied—hundreds, even thousands of identical magic butterflies appeared from nowhere like an explosion of colorful fireworks, scattering chaotically in all directions.
However,
Deborah’s gaze did not waver or scatter.
Her eyes locked onto one of the illusions among the thousands, and her reaching hand showed no hesitation, darting through layers of false light as fast as lightning, fingers closing.
Snap!
Steady and precise, she pinched the real magic butterfly into her palm.
“Ah!”
With a short exclamation and a flicker of unstable magic light,
the magic butterfly in Deborah’s hand vanished.
In its place was a feisty little faerie dragon—Vira—pinched in her grasp, angrily flapping her wings and dragging her tail.
To pass the long, dull days waiting in Red Maple Valley for Garoth to awaken,
Deborah had deliberately brought this mischievous little creature back from the tribe for companionship and amusement.
Vira puffed up and whipped her tail in frustration, her eyes full of confusion and defeat: “Why! Why do you always catch me?! My illusion was so perfect! Lifelike!”
Deborah smugly lifted her chin a little, the corner of her mouth curving into a sly yet lovely smile; silver-honey eyes glittered with mischief.
“Secret!”
She would never tell the faerie dragon—she had already cheated!
Before the game began, she had silently left an extremely subtle, hard-to-detect magical mark on Vira. No matter how Vira’s illusions shifted and blurred truth and falsehood, that mark always guided Deborah to lock onto Vira’s true body.
After a chase and an illusion contest,
the still-playful dragon and faerie dragon came to a slow bend downstream where the water moved calmer, and began a fishing contest.
Vira clearly remembered the first time she fished, when she foolishly used herself as bait and was swallowed whole by a ferocious big fish.
This time she had learned: cautiously wrapping her nimble tail around a slender branch to act as a rod, she watched the float with rapt attention,
while Deborah reverted to her brass-silver dragon form.
The elegant, massive dragon body stretched lazily by the stream, a long tail leisurely dipped into the cool water.
She did not use a rod; she instead gently flicked the tip of her tail near the bottom to mimic algae or insect bait, fishing in the way she knew best.
Before long,
splish!
Water splashed!
Deborah whipped her long tail covered in brass-silver scales upward.
A plump, silver-scaled fish flashed in the sunlight and was thrown onto the grassy bank, still bouncing and struggling with vitality.
“Another one!”
Deborah’s tone was light and cheerful.
She prepared to plunge her tail back into the depths to seek the next unlucky target.
Suddenly!
Chomp...!
The water, previously as still as a mirror, suddenly erupted in concentric, violently spreading ripples with no warning; the solid ground beneath their feet transmitted a distinct tremor, as if a colossal beast had turned over underground!
“Whoa!!!”
Vira’s eyes instantly widened into perfect rounds, bursting with excitement.
“My fishing rod’s vibrating! Oh my gosh! Lady Vira is about to catch an unprecedented super big fish—maybe even bigger than a dragon! Deborah, help me hold it down! Don’t let it escape!!”
As if to confirm the faerie dragon’s exaggerated words,
boom!
A muffled roar exploded from the streambed.
In the next moment, as if countless charges buried in the riverbed detonated at once,
the crystal-clear water was torn and hurled, shattering into billions of diamond fragments; the solid riverbank cracked like brittle biscuits, fist-size stones and chunks of frozen earth cannoning outward.
Amid the sky of spray and dust,
a vast, suffocating shadow covered in dark scales, bearing momentum like mountains crashing, ripped through the water and smoke and surged skyward.
“I caught it! I caught it! Hahaha, it’s as big as a giant dragon!”
“Lady Vira is truly the fishing god—Deborah, quick! Help me subdue...”
Vira dodged the incoming torrent of spray and flying rocks while shrieking excitedly in a flood of words.
“That idiot— that’s not a fish. It’s Garoth.”
“I caught Garoth?! Haha! Then I’m even more awesome! Vira the Dragon-Fisher—that title rules.”
The faerie dragon danced and flailed with excitement in the dust and mist.
“I think he just happened to wake up.”
Deborah looked up toward the sky.
At the same time,
the figure that had torn apart the stream and earth and mounted into the air, wrapped in endless vapor,
appeared high in the heavens.
Cold gusts like knives raked his ironlike scales, unable to sway him; the flying snow around him swirled into a blizzard vortex centered on him as he churned wildly.
Just as a snow dragon-tornado was about to form,
huge wings, blotting the sun, spread; the dragon shredded the wind and snow and abruptly hovered in midair.
The wing edges were sharp as blades; scales along the wings and tail could mesh into enormous cutting edges and spears; black scales laced with silver lined his great form... at last the massive figure revealed itself without concealment between the vast sky and earth: the youthful Red Iron Dragon.
“Huff...”
A deep, resonant roar, as if vibrating metal itself, slowly issued from Garoth’s tooth-filled maw.
He flexed his slightly stiff, enormous body, joints and scales clanking.
“This time... I slept until my bones nearly rusted.”
After hovering a moment to let the icy gale fully rouse his dormant body and senses,
Garoth began carefully inspecting the changes to himself.
First, his life level—Level 17!
A number that would shock the majority of adult great dragons.
You must understand... a typical adult red dragon’s life level is generally around 15, and among the main dragon types the strongest of equal age, the Gold Dragons, usually start adulthood at only Level 16.
And Garoth had only just stepped into the youth phase.
“Level 17... the usual training, the huge intake of precious metals, magic gems, and the black oil crystals I swallowed before sleeping—those were crucial, otherwise I should be at Level 16.”
Garoth thought to himself.
Then he began examining his body.
First, size: from the tip of his snout to the end of the blade-spined tail, his total length reached an astonishing over twenty meters.
This was not a size befitting a youth-phase dragon.
Even among adult red dragons and Gold Dragons, known for their large bodies, this size would rank in the upper-middle. Compared to White Dragons, even a White Dragon in its prime would struggle to match Garoth’s bulk.
But oddly,
the muscle groups that should be brimming with explosive power showed an abnormal dryness and atrophy.
The huge skeleton beneath heavy metallic scales remained rugged, thick and full of strength, but beyond that frame the muscles that should have been swollen like molten mountain ridges now seemed drained of essence—thin and slack.
This over-twenty-meter giant body now gave a peculiar contradictory impression:
still powerful, yet eerily hollow.
As if only tough bones and resilient scaly hide remained to support this iron body, while the inner living energy that should have filled it was gone.
This change was unusual.
Garoth clearly remembered that before falling into deep sleep he had devoured large amounts of magic gems and precious metal ingots and had swallowed all the accumulated black oil crystals at once.
Given his reserves and vitality, even if dragon sleep consumed some energy for metamorphosis, upon waking he might not be at his pre-sleep peak of muscular ferocity—but he should never look like a dragon starved for a hundred years, skin-and-bone.
Moreover,
his life energy, his magical energy, his Dragon Qi—all displayed a cliff-like plunge, as if something had sucked out most of his energy reserves during his sleeping transformation.
As Garoth examined himself, that thing surfaced.
A heart!
Garoth inhaled deeply and could clearly feel his heartbeats and the furnace-like abundant energy contained within.
More crucially,
he sensed with absolute clarity that his heart had somehow become two.
The organ produced during the last sleep evolution, located in the right side of his chest—an unusual energy-bearing tissue that stored heat—had now become another throbbing heart in the deep recesses of his right thoracic cavity, radiating astonishing energy fluctuations.
To be precise, it was not a heart grown from flesh and tissue in the ordinary material sense,
but an energy organ formed from his vigorous life energy, immense magical energy, condensed Dragon Qi... energies that had originally been dispersed and stored throughout his body, pressed together, condensed, and qualitatively transformed to form an energy-core organ composed purely of high-density released energy—a unique energy heart.
Clearly,
the energies Garoth had seemingly lost had all condensed into this heart.