Absorbing Fortune, the Yan Emperor Becomes a Dragon
Chen Du continued his journey through the Yan Kingdom.
When he reached the Yan Kingdom's royal capital, he split it in two with a single stroke of his sword.
The sword scar stretched from the city gates all the way into the depths of the imperial palace. It was several zhang wide and bottomless.
The scar split the entire royal capital in two. It was not just stone paving and earth that had been cleaved apart, but hope itself.
The surviving citizens knelt on either side of the streets, trembling. None dared raise their heads to look directly at the barefoot figure carrying a sword.
Before Chen Du arrived at the royal capital, the emperor of Great Yan had fled north in a panic, surrounded by his court officials.
The officials had died or scattered along the way. By the time the emperor reached the northern gate, fewer than a hundred people remained at his heels.
All were disheveled and ashen-faced.
Chen Du did not pursue too quickly. He merely followed at a measured distance, his pace as steady as ever.
He had a feeling that whenever he was about to think of killing the emperor of the Yan Kingdom, everything went against him.
It was as though his opponent had fortune on his side.
But before Chen Du's absolute power, the so-called natural and man-made calamities might as well have been made of paper.
Gales and torrential rain, mudslides and lightning—anything that came near was cut down with a single stroke.
Whenever loyal soldiers tried to cover the retreat, he swept his sword out, and they fell in rows like wheat at the autumn harvest.
The Yan Emperor looked back, watching the Great Yan elites he had taken such pride in fall before that wooden sword, wave after wave.
It seemed the last line of defense in his heart had utterly collapsed.
In his despair, the Yan Emperor suddenly recalled his ancestors' instruction.
It was a secret the previous emperor had personally passed on to him after abdicating, on the day he ascended the throne.
Through the generations, Great Yan had passed down one final path of retreat: "Should Great Yan fall, enter the Dragon Tomb."
So said the ancestral instruction, but it had never told him what lay inside the Dragon Tomb.
With nowhere else to turn, the Yan Emperor could only flee toward the Dragon Tomb.
Chen Du pursued him, expressionless.
Wherever the Yan Emperor fled, he pursued him.
He would kill this emperor of the Yan Kingdom.
The entrance to the Dragon Tomb was hidden deep within an unremarkable barren mountain north of the royal capital. There stood a stone door that had been worn by wind and sand for who knew how many years.
A coiled dragon was carved on the door, its eyes closed and its body wrapped around a sword broken in half.
A thick layer of the dust of ages had gathered beneath the door. Clearly, it had not been opened for centuries.
The emperor of Great Yan had fled here, and Chen Du had naturally pursued him here!
When Chen Du stepped into the Dragon Tomb, an ancient, decaying aura washed over him.
He had a vague feeling that only by killing the emperor of Great Yan inside the Dragon Tomb could he truly sever Great Yan's fortune and further bring this age of chaos to an end.
The stone walls on both sides of the passage were covered with carvings depicting the lives and achievements of Great Yan's emperors throughout the ages.
From the founding emperor to the previous emperor, each mural occupied a stretch of the passage, like a gallery of achievements buried beneath the earth.
At the end of the passage was a magnificent underground palace. Its domed ceiling towered overhead, and luminous pearls embedded in the four walls cast a cold, ghostly light over row upon row of stone coffins.
A tombstone stood before each coffin, engraved with the emperor's personal name and posthumous title.
Some inscriptions were clear, others mottled, recording the rise and fall of Great Yan over the centuries.
When Chen Du arrived, the emperor of Great Yan was sitting on a throne in the deepest part of the underground palace.
The throne was no ordinary object. It had been carved from a single block of black jade, with a back that rose like a dragon's spine and armrests covered in intricate dragon patterns.
He sat squarely upon it, an indescribable look of wild delight on his face,
all because he held a ghastly white bone in his hand.
It was a Dragon Bone, the spinal bone of Great Yan's founding emperor!
It was as thick as an arm, its joints clearly defined, and a faint dark-gold light flowed over its entire length.
The light flowed slowly within the Dragon Bone, as though some ancient flame still burned deep within its marrow?
"Thank you!"
The Yan Emperor looked at Chen Du and suddenly burst into laughter.
"If you hadn't driven me into a dead end, I would never have come to this Dragon Tomb! Nor would I have discovered Great Yan's greatest secret of the past several centuries!"
He rose from the throne and held the Dragon Bone aloft. The entire underground palace began to tremble faintly.
The lids of the stone coffins of Great Yan's emperors all shook at the same instant, as though something were awakening.
"For centuries, my Great Yan has waged war year after year, expanded its borders, slaughtered cities and destroyed nations, campaigning north and south.
"Everyone thought Great Yan was at the height of its glory, but only the emperors of past generations understood, just before they died.
"Every battle Great Yan won, every inch of land it annexed, more than half the national fortune it gained was absorbed by the Dragon Bone in this Dragon Tomb!
"Centuries of fortune, centuries of accumulation, all hidden inside this bone!"
He slowly drew the Dragon Bone back, gripped it with both hands, and pointed it at his chest. "And only an emperor of Great Yan, only I, can absorb the fortune within this Dragon Bone!"
As his words fell, he drove the Dragon Bone savagely into his chest.
The tip of the bone pierced his dragon robe, pierced his skin, and entered his breastbone.
No blood flowed. The instant the Dragon Bone came into contact with the emperor's bloodline, it began to melt, turning into a dark-gold torrent that surged through his blood vessels and into every limb and bone.
His pupils abruptly became vertical slits, a fine pattern of scales appeared across his skin, and his aura began to soar at an incredible speed.
Middle Stage of the Heaven-Human Realm, Late Stage, Peak Stage... then he broke through the barrier that no one in the Heavenly Human Realm had ever breached.
The entire Dragon Tomb shook violently. The stone walls cracked, luminous pearls rained down, and the stone coffins of the emperors of past generations exploded at once.
An invisible force tore the dome off the underground palace, exposing the gloomy sky above, as though heaven and earth themselves were changing color for this moment.
The Yan Emperor threw back his head and let out a long howl. It was no longer the voice of a human, but a dragon's roar that shook the nine heavens.
His body rapidly swelled, stretched, and twisted in the golden light.
His skin transformed completely into dark-gold dragon scales, his limbs became dragon claws, and his spine extended into a dragon's tail covered in bony spikes.
His face was the last part to be covered in scales. His human features contorted, finally becoming a ferocious dragon's head.
Two dragon whiskers streamed in the wind. When his dragon eyes opened, two beams of golden light shot from his pupils, illuminating the entire underground palace as brightly as day.
He circled above the Dragon Tomb, looking down at the land beneath him, his voice rolling like thunder. "So that's how it is! So that's how it is! I finally understand. Expanding our borders, unifying the world, the flourishing fortune of the nation—it was all a lie!
"All the wars, all the conquests, all the people left destitute, all the lives plunged into misery over these past centuries had only one ultimate purpose: to absorb the fortune of everyone under heaven, so that I could become a true dragon and rule this world for all eternity!"
He swept a dragon claw toward the earth.
The whole territory of Great Yan was glowing.
From the ice fields of the Northern Border to the hills of the southern border, from the reefs of the East Sea to the deserts of the Western Regions, dark-gold patterns of light appeared on every inch of land the Yan Kingdom's iron cavalry had trampled.
It was an enormous array diagram that covered the entire nation,
every war over the past centuries,
every slaughtered city,
every wronged soul that had died beneath the Yan Kingdom's blades had contributed strands of fortune to this array diagram.
And now, like a hundred rivers flowing into the sea, that fortune was converging on the Dragon Tomb, where the golden dragon circling in the sky devoured it frenziedly!
All of Great Yan was in turmoil!
Villages, cities, mountains and rivers—everything was trembling faintly.
The common people knelt on the ground, feeling their strength being drawn away by some irresistible presence.
Those above the Saint Tier felt it even more clearly. The power they had cultivated painstakingly for decades, even a century or more, was being stripped away strand by strand by an invisible force.
If even Saint Tier experts were affected so, then the Spirit Tier, Mystic Tier, and Mortal Tier martial artists felt even more like guttering candles in the wind, liable to be drained dry by that suction at any moment.
Heaven-Human Realm experts were likewise horrified, and likewise affected.
They felt the power within them leaking away beyond their control.
All eyes in the Heavenly Human Realm turned in the same direction.
There, golden light shone in every direction, as though an immortal deity had descended. It was utterly terrifying, glorious beyond compare, and seemingly invincible.