Influenced by the many dragon-slaying tales circulating in the world, most people imagined that dragon lairs were almost always undefended. The evil dragons only woke when dragon-slaying warriors tried to steal their treasures or rescue a princess.
But imagination was one thing; reality was another.
Dragons' possessiveness and obsession over their treasures were almost beyond what other creatures could imagine.
Humans still locked their homes, after all. How much more so would dragons, whose sense of territory ran even deeper?
To better protect their treasures, dragons outfitted their lairs with all kinds of defenses.
The most important were protective barriers, Alchemical Vision, and various traps. More common still were the many Retainers patrolling the areas around dragon lairs.
Protective barriers were originally an independent invention of the Elves, though they preferred to call them mythals—magic mythals.
The first mythal was a byproduct of a certain Elf archsage's research into the Weave. First-generation mythals were networks woven from magic, extending along the Astral Plane's conduits that linked the entire multiverse through the Weave.
The areas covered by magic mythals often developed all sorts of miraculous effects, depending on how the mythals were woven and which properties of the Weave they harnessed.
The most famous were naturally the great mythals of the Elven capital of Larissan: Nature's Whisper, Mundane Bulwark, and Unfallable Larissan.
It was said that Elves within the capital received the blessing of nature's power, and all nature-related spells gained a +1-level bonus. They also had a layer of Earth Elemental protection, which made them immune to magical effects below the third level. Then there was the most outrageous effect of all, the city's invincibility:
As long as an Elf died within the capital's mythal, and wasn't killed by a soul spell that caused instant death or a spell that transformed them into an undead, the mythal would protect their soul at the moment of death. It would then send them directly to the Tree of Life through the Weave's crystal-vein channels, where a Druid could resurrect them in their original body.
Even if their body was completely destroyed, they could still become Druids based on their deeds and contributions in life, returning to the mortal world through a bond with an animal companion.
With these great mythals, the Elven capital had once been virtually impregnable. No matter how powerful the dragons, the rulers of the land, had been, they could still fight them to a standstill.
That lasted until an Elf sage discovered that dragons grew frenzied whenever a periodic comet called the King-Killer Star appeared. The sage eventually developed a vicious creation that would go down in history:
Mad Dragon Enchantment!
During the great battle between the Elves and dragons, the Mad Dragon Enchantment spread across most of the continent. Every dragon instantly fell into mindless madness and began slaughtering the others without mercy or reason.
The dragon race was devastated by the battle, and eventually gave up its position as ruler of the continent.
After that, during several Crown Civil Wars, the Elves pushed their mastery of magic mythals to the limit. They went from using them as passive defenses for a few major cities to deploying them directly on the battlefield.
They would prepare in advance, then draw their enemies into the mythal they had set up and fight them there.
The dragons had gone all in and lost everything, but they weren't stupid. They holed up in their caves and began studying the mythals of those pale-faced, dark-hearted, long-eared Elves. When they realized how effective mythals were for protecting their homes, the hoarding techies became completely obsessed.
Some dragons even developed a kind of mental disorder called "mythal fixation."
In essence, it was a classic case of severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. If they couldn't figure out an unfamiliar mythal, they'd devote all their attention to it, neglecting everything else and even stunting their own growth.
Unfortunately, mythals were in some ways like the integrated-circuit databases of the computers on Li Wei's former world, Blue Star. They were expensive to develop, and maintaining a large-scale server room took so much energy that it could easily bankrupt a third-rate country.
But dragons were mostly miserly to a fault. They couldn't bear to use something that consumed so much energy. So what could they do?
In dragon hands, the mythal skill tree went completely off course.
If mythals in Elven hands followed the path of enormous military supercomputers, then in dragon hands they gradually evolved into household PCs that used very little energy.
Unwilling to waste even a single magic stone, these utterly deranged cheapskates came up with the idea of powering their mythals with nothing but the elemental energy radiating from their own bodies.
Perhaps, in the eyes of these Scrooges, even the energy naturally leaking from their bodies was a waste that made them wince every day. Putting it to use was a win for everyone.
After all, they spent most of their time at home. The energy their lairs received while they occasionally went out to hunt or visit neighbors for a week or two was just enough to keep their mythals running.
The kinds of mythals different dragons preferred offered a glimpse into their habits.
For example, Gold Dragons liked using Illusionary Barriers. Travelers who wandered into one often thought they'd experienced a fantastic dream, never realizing that they'd entered a dragon's lair.
Li Wei's own kind, Silver Dragons, preferred Winter Barriers. Silver Dragon lairs were usually built on steep, perilous peaks, where the fierce blizzards unleashed by a Winter Barrier were enough to turn away most intelligent creatures.
The Chromatic Dragons, by contrast, were a much more devious bunch. Red Dragons loved using Inferno Barriers to turn entire volcanic regions into hellscapes of exposed magma. If a dragon-slaying warrior accidentally stepped on a trigger node, scorching lava vapor would erupt beneath their feet, hot enough to roast an unprotected creature like a chicken.
Black Dragons, meanwhile, favored barriers of total darkness. Anyone who entered couldn't see a thing, and torches were useless. Light simply couldn't exist inside the barrier. Before the trapped could figure out how to see again, the Black Dragon would usually bite their head off.
As for the one Li Wei had, it wasn't a barrier at all, just a lesser Alchemical Vision: the True Sight Eye.
There was no helping it. A poor dragon had no grand ambitions. Even Black Dragon Kangerweian had worked diligently in the Underdark for decades, robbing every neighbor he could bully, and still couldn't afford even the cheapest protective barrier. Besides, even when they had the money, most dragons wouldn't spend their vast fortunes on one. They preferred to learn about mythals from their ancestors through their innate inheritance, then develop their own protective barriers.
In truth, Kangerweian wasn't old enough to have awakened that knowledge. He'd even gotten the True Sight Eye by stealing it from another dragon. Otherwise, his lair wouldn't have been ransacked by a pack of Gnolls, even if he'd only installed the lowest-grade protective barrier.
Unfortunately, even that True Sight Eye had ended up in Li Wei's hands.
Its function was exactly what its name suggested: it could monitor everything happening within a ten-mile radius of the lair.
With it, the lair was like a house surrounded by cameras with no blind spots. Li Wei could monitor everything without ever leaving home.
He could even set up an alarm. If anything with an unusually high magic-energy level approached, it would warn Li Wei to prepare.
As soon as Li Wei linked the thing to his consciousness, he "saw" Huozi, covered in blood, rapidly approaching the lair with several Slimes leading the way.
"Not bad."
Li Wei exited monitoring mode. With a thought, his scales shifted to a deep red, and his previously sleek, well-proportioned body swelled with powerful muscle.
The moment he transformed into a Red Dragon, a small wave of Fire Elemental energy erupted from the lair's center and swept outward. The frost that had only just formed on the rock walls evaporated instantly. Steam soon filled the lair, making it look like a fairyland.
It wasn't that he distrusted Huozi, who had signed a servant contract with him. Li Wei knew that even servant contracts weren't foolproof. The devils of Barto Hell were experts at exploiting loopholes in contracts.
Huozi might withstand torture, but he couldn't deceive his own soul. So Li Wei had to take precautions.
After a while, Huozi arrived at the lair with several hopping Slimes. When he saw Li Wei's massive, imposing True Dragon form, he couldn't help but briefly lose himself in awe once more.
Even though this wasn't his first time seeing it, that powerful body still filled him with reverence.
Huozi dropped to one knee and reported:
"Master, the First Layer Mine has been cleared. More than a hundred of my Tribe Members suffered minor injuries, one was badly wounded, and none were killed. We estimate we collected more than seven thousand six hundred Cavens Rat corpses and captured another two thousand three hundred. Of those, one thousand eight hundred are male and only five hundred are female. We've started keeping them penned up as you instructed, but we're short on tools, and the Cavens Rats are constantly trying to escape."
"Also, perhaps because we achieved such a great victory this time, the refugees who had been watching from the sidelines are now clamoring to join the mining operation in the West Mining Area. Should we take them all in, or select only some?"
"There's one more thing. Tiger, the Guild Leader of the Golden Miner Brotherhood, has requested a meeting with you."
Ah, the book gets its first recommendation slot at two this afternoon! It's what they call a trial promotion. Only the top performers in the rankings will advance to the next round of recommendations. Most new books fizzle out after failing to advance through this series of rounds. So Old Seven is asking everyone who likes this book to support it during these few rounds! Favorites, continued readership, and Recommendation Tickets are the most important metrics during the promotion! Please, everyone! (,,ω,,')
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