[Yet what you saw was another scene. The giant snakehead had survived its heavenly tribulation. The golden wind that had raged moments before had long since died away, and it lay where it was, limp with exhaustion and utterly still.]
[Strangely, its battered, bloodstained body began healing rapidly after the tribulation.]
[The lightning that fell again no longer carried destruction. Instead, it held a burgeoning force—like spring thunder rousing hibernating creatures and waking all life.]
[It was just like the solar term Awakening of Insects. "Hibernation" meant lying hidden; when spring thunder sounded, burrowing insects, birds, beasts, and feathered creatures all awoke, and heaven and earth came back to life.]
[Having survived the heavenly tribulation, it received a gift from the Heavenly Way.]
[Bathed in lightning, the snakehead's aura climbed steadily. Its body and cultivation both advanced to a higher realm. The fish, which had seemed to bear a giant turtle's shell, gradually transformed; small claws even sprouted beneath it.]
[When members of the Sea Clan faced a tribulation, their forms often reverted toward their ancestral origins. Judging by this strange sight, could the snakehead's ancestor actually have belonged to the Ancestral Dragon's line?]
[Then again, dragons were notoriously lustful. Their tangled lineage was hardly surprising.]
[But the True Dragon clan had always claimed the Ancestral Dragon's bloodline and looked down on other descendants of mixed blood.]
[Besides, those who carried Dragon Clan blood were often forced to obey True Dragons. Suppression through bloodline was an immutable law among demon beasts.]
[One reason the Dragon Clan remained overlords of the Four Seas was that so many among the Sea Clan carried dragon blood and bowed beneath their might.]
[Dragons also married within their clan to preserve the purity of their bloodline.]
[Qi Ling and the others had realized that the