Black Technology of Little Use

Though he had only been growing for three years in theory and had not even left the Young Dragon stage, Li Wei was already as large as an African elephant from his previous life. His wingspan had surpassed twenty feet, or seven meters, even more exaggerated than some Red Dragons at the Young Dragon stage, which theoretically began after twenty years of development.

The uneven baby teeth he had once had from chewing dirt and eating ore had all been replaced. They now interlocked across his upper and lower jaws, sharp and dangerous.

Fan-shaped dragon fins, the kind that normally only began developing in Young Dragons, had started growing from his temples and spine. His two long dragon horns had also fully formed, sweeping backward from his body in elegant arcs.

His hind legs had already begun developing toward a thickness beyond that of a Red Dragon's, allowing him to maintain a bipedal crouch for long periods. The hooked claws at his wing joints were likewise balanced and powerful.

It even made him wonder whether he might someday take the unorthodox path of a Dual-wielding Berserker.

Naturally, that assumed he could forge gigantic weapons suited to his size. For example, a Forty-meter Greatsword? One swing would be like a city gate crashing down. Ahaha? Li Wei nearly laughed at his own absurd idea.

Or perhaps the hooked claws on his wing joints could hold a staff, letting him imitate those mages and their Combat Casting. Three hands were already disgusting enough in certain games. Did he count as having four claws?

Although he had received the inheritance of True Dragons and knew that a dragon's strongest weapons would always be its teeth, claws, and tail, relying on a dragon's naturally overwhelming physique and strength to inflict mountain-splitting, rock-shattering wounds with claw swipes, bites, and tail sweeps alone, Li Wei, after three years in this world, still seemed unable to fully adapt. He even vaguely felt that fighting entirely through biting, scratching, and shaking one's ass—tail swinging—looked no different from women tearing each other apart.

If other dragons heard that secret thought of his, they would absolutely gang up on him and grind this aberration to dust. Even Bahamut, the Platinum Dragon God, might be too lazy to acknowledge such an oddball.

If all that could still barely be considered normal, then the four twisted, coral-like horn clusters growing atop his skull were starting to become decidedly unmagical.

Unlike ordinary Silver Dragons, whose originally dull scales gradually became as bright as Polished Wax as they grew, glittering beneath the sun while flying through the clouds and sky—

Li Wei's scales had instead grown dimmer over the past few years. They were still silver, but seemed frosted over. Light shining on them produced no reflection whatsoever. Thus, in the dimly lit Underdark, Li Wei was a natural assassin, just like those Dark-skinned Drow.

Because of this, whenever Tim cleaned his nest, they had spent no small amount of effort licking the Silver Dragon's scales, trying to make them a little brighter. To no effect.

His originally azure eyes, streaked with mist-like silver lines, had gradually become as dark as the void over the past few years. A faint purple glow lurked within them, like black holes that devoured everything.

All of it seemed to indicate that his body was undergoing some unknown mutation.

Li Wei himself could clearly sense this mutation. His heart rate was more than three times slower than during his Young Dragon days, as though his surroundings had filled with metal, and it was slowing further and further. Sometimes, Li Wei even wondered whether his heart might one day simply stop beating.

Yet Li Wei felt no discomfort whatsoever. On the contrary, he possessed far greater energy and strength than he had as a Young Dragon.

Other than his throat feeling slightly itchy whenever he woke from sleep, there seemed to be no other abnormalities.

Until one time when he awoke and felt as if there was an old wad of phlegm lodged in his throat that simply had to come out. As he instinctively opened his jaws, wisps of dark light involuntarily spilled from his mouth and nostrils. Even in his slowly opening eyes, a deep purple hue gathered.

The next moment, as if he had sneezed, a blazing purple beam like Stellar Collapse burst from his mouth.

"Annnggg—BOOM!"

It sounded like muffled thunder rolling through the sky on a rainy day.

The tremendous Kinetic Energy caught Li Wei off guard and violently threw his head backward, nearly wrenching his own neck.

Yet that dark beam, which lasted only an instant, silently sliced into the ground. The surface rock and soil vaporized in an instant.

When that terrifying beam, dark in color yet seemingly capable of burning out one's eyes, finally disappeared, it left behind only a head-sized hole of astonishingly regular shape, one whose bottom could not be seen at a glance. The edges had already been corroded beyond recognition. Dark-red magma streamed downward under gravity, and through the image distorted by the constant high-temperature steam above the hole, it was obvious that the temperature inside was absolutely not low. Yet bizarrely, dark purple Ice Crystals gradually formed across the rock walls of the entire nest.

No one knew how long passed before the beam seemed to pierce something deep underground. The ground shook continuously as though a Minor Earthquake had erupted, while fine dust and small rolling stones pattered down from the nest's rock walls.

"Mu yi! Mu yi!" The slimes still engaged in their great reproductive endeavor inside the cave ran about with Screams, as though they had been afflicted with a mass fear spell.

If someone were hit head-on by this Negative Energy blast, even their "Memory Unit" probably would not upload successfully into the Collective Consciousness.

Smoke pouring from all seven orifices, Li Wei first felt an empty sensation as though his body had been hollowed out. Then, staring dumbfounded at his own handiwork, he blurted out, "Damn it, this place is unlivable now."

Only then did Li Wei seem to remember the dream he had nearly forgotten, as well as some of the mechanically rigid information it had conveyed.

"Void Umbral Energy."

Ever since Li Wei had rejected that hidden entity's Link Request to requisition his body after his first sleep following transmigration, it had never appeared again over the past three years, as though the connection had truly been severed.

Sometimes, Li Wei maliciously wondered whether that artificial intelligence-like existence had suffered a logical collapse and blown itself up.

What depressed Li Wei for a time was that it would have been fine if that damn thing had merely blown itself up, but it had also "blown away" the dragon Inheritance Dreamscape that had originally belonged to him.

Of course, it was not as if nothing remained. Even a computer infected with a virus would leave devastation behind rather than being completely wiped clean.

But because the two situations were so similar, Li Wei's Inheritance Dreamscape was a complete mess, like countless folders scattered and scrambled without order. It contained every kind of bizarre thing imaginable, and more importantly—

"I fucking can't understand any of it!!!"

"Can anyone tell me what the hell this Binary Hydrogen Furnace Maintenance Manual, with pages missing and more than half of it garbled, is supposed to be? Why is it even more sleep-inducing than that <Basic Binary Logic Concepts and Computational Rules of Integrated Circuits> I idly flipped through back then?"

"And what the hell is this <Proposal for the Deductive Improvement of the Michael III Annihilator Rocket>? At least give me a prototype! No! We don't need anything that advanced. Even a Maxim Heavy Machine Gun Manufacturing Process would let me see some hope of achieving something in my lifetime!!"

"This Imperial DR3029 Chainsword Manufacturing Blueprint, which is relatively intact, is kind of interesting. I can grab a few clever ones later and have them study it."

At the thought of each of his Retainers wielding a Chainsword with an inherent Magic Breaking effect, hacking through enemies on the battlefield until flesh and gore flew everywhere, he felt faintly excited.

But aside from these incomplete pieces of "Black Technology," all castles in the air, there remained only the emptiness of having his body hollowed out. These shattered "folders" lay scattered throughout an endless black domain. Standing among them, Li Wei felt like a scavenger on a lonely planet.

And that entity's Schrödinger-like existence seemed to remind him that it still clung to him like a ghost in the void.

Having received the inheritance of True Dragons, Li Wei compared it against the fragmented history of Coriel World in his mind. For a time, he suspected that this thing might be a Tower Spirit created by some great Arcanist during Netheril's peak more than three thousand years ago. After all, at the height of Netheril, the knowledge and authority wielded by those mad great Arcanists had once surpassed even the gods, and they had even opened an era of planar colonization.

Unfortunately, people could never change their suicidal habits. The great Arcanist Karsus became interested in the Weave, so he created a twelfth-circle [Karsus God-Seizing Spell] in an attempt to usurp the position of the First Generation Goddess of Magic.

He succeeded. He successfully stole Mithriel's authority over the Weave. But when that power of heaven and earth gathered within his body, his mortal form exploded on the spot.

The Weave went out of control. Chaotic Wild Magic ravaged the world, forcing Mithriel to sever the connection between the Weave and reality through suicide. But after being revived, she was no longer that pure, kind, noble Goddess of Magic who devoted herself wholeheartedly to guarding the Weave.

She became Mystra, a woman who knew no shame and spent her days fooling around with her Chosen, leaving countless people sighing in regret.

During that time, the out-of-control Weave also caused every Floating City of the Netheril Empire to crash. The once-prosperous Netheril Empire was destroyed by the hands of a single arrogant man.

Yet in the bizarre development of Coriel World, it was not as though creations filled with a sci-fi feel had never appeared.

For example, the Nautilus Ships built by Mind Flayers were genuine spaceships. There were even rumors that the strange race of Mind Flayers had used powerful psionic abilities to migrate as an entire species from some future in the Outer Multiverse that was about to collapse.

And in some Dalelands on the surface, it was said that Mechanical Constructs similar to Gundams had been built. Piloting them could even feed a portion of their attributes back to their operators. It was truly miraculous.

Compared to those, the "Black Technology" he had encountered simply had a more bizarre Art Style. Li Wei comforted himself with that thought.

But what kind of impact would this have on his future? For now, the most immediate and painful consequence was that he still had not learned how to fly.

It was not that Li Wei's wingspan was not strong enough. From a scientific perspective, however, a dragon's massive size and weight should theoretically make it impossible to lift itself into the air through physical means alone. Dragons relied more on controlling magic power to achieve levitation and flight. Their two wings merely assisted with flying, making emergency stops through aerial repulsion and changing direction so that their bulky bodies could appear somewhat agile.

Mm, very magical.

The ability to control magic power had long become the instinct of every True Dragon through inherited talent. But because he needed to conceal his identity, Li Wei had likewise never had an opportunity to try it.

Maybe he could find time to give it a try?

Just as Li Wei was pondering this, Pipim burst in with a string of "Mu yi, mu yi," interrupting his thoughts.

After Pipim transformed into a Koutao Fishman and laboriously gestured while reporting in "gu ga, gu ga," then drew an absurdly distorted Kobold on the ground, Li Wei finally understood what Pipim meant:

"They discovered a large Kobold Tribe advancing toward our territory."

"Kobolds? Rare guests! So you finally dare show your heads? Prepare the carriage! Get a big surprise ready for our Dog Meat Hotpot! Roar!!!"

Upon hearing that, Li Wei swept away the gloom in his heart. His grin stretched to his ears as a loud, delighted Dragon Roar thundered through the nest.

PS: What use do I have for these tickets! EMMMM, they sure smell nice! Recommendation Tickets~