Continuation: 1

The dragon's roar pierced the heavy clouds and echoed across Antarctica. In this world blanketed in snow and ice, it was like a surge of blazing magma, melting away all coldness.

As though they had witnessed something extraordinary, the penguins leaped about joyfully and rolled across the ice. Like little black-and-white dumplings tumbling around, they frolicked so hard that even the ice sheet, thousands of meters thick, seemed unable to bear it and began to crack.

Tesla clearly saw the legendary creature—a dragon.

Not one of those dinosaurs that had once truly existed.

No apex predator that had existed in any era could compare to it.

It hovered above the clouds, looking down upon the world, as though it had returned this modern civilization to the age of myth in an instant.

Or perhaps it had torn open a corner of this world's true face, forcing arrogant humanity to reconsider the mysteries of nature.

A dragon. A true dragon. The totem and faith of all living things, the will of life itself.

Tesla finally understood why so many marine creatures had gathered here. They had come to worship the most ancient and powerful root of life.

It was neither the five-clawed golden dragon embroidered upon an emperor's robes nor an image embellished by poets and scholars, though it was very close... Coiled amid the clouds, it lowered its head, covered in thick scales, from the dark clouds it had pushed aside.

It opened its mouth and clamped Tesla between two enormous, sharp teeth like icebergs, then plunged into the thick ice sheet.

The Antarctic ice cap, thousands of meters thick, seemed to it like nothing more than a deep layer of snow—soft, easily burrowed through.

It stopped at the bottom of the ice cap, where it met the frozen earth.