Hoo!
He held the box in his hands and opened it. A surging current of air poured forth, condensing in midair into a half-illusory, half-solid dragon that wheeled around Qiu Yan.
Qiu Yan raised a hand and grabbed. The dragon shape converged into his grasp, unexpectedly condensing into a crystalline pearl.
Dragon Pearl.
This pearl was the Dragon Pearl brought by Ao Wai, son of the Well Dragon King, when Qiu Yan had left the Imperial City. Ao Wai had then followed Qiu Yan to Jiannan, running errands under him. He was quite capable, quickly earning Qiu Yan's esteem and being entrusted with important duties.
This time, when Qiu Yan led his troops out of Jiannan, many matters in the Shu Region had not yet been fully handed over. Part of them was being handled by Ao Wai.
Qiu Yan had kept this Dragon Pearl on his person, gradually permeating and refining it with his thoughts.
Now that the Dragon Pearl manifested, the Dragon Qi suspended between the mundane and the transcendent faintly surged against him, as though ready at any moment to break free of Qiu Yan's restraints and regain its freedom.
The mundane portion of this Dragon Qi was the essence of the Dragon Clan. The Dragon Pearl was nurtured by dragons and was, in the end, merely a core within a dragon's body for storing power. The Dragon Qi it nurtured was not the Dragon Qi that roamed the world and suppressed Fortune, but a dragon's aura stained with the breath of mortal life.
Yet after Qiu Yan obtained it, the situation changed, and his method of handling the Dragon Pearl differed vastly from that of ordinary people. By normal reasoning, refining a Dragon Pearl meant chiefly refining the Dragon Qi within it—subduing that dragon aura and