Ochre Valley at Four in the Morning

Five months later, Ochre Valley, Eaglebeak Cliff.

A towering cliff jutted outward, shaped like the inverted beak of a giant eagle. Its sharp point pierced the sky, and its perilous terrain blocked out the sunlight, casting the vertical cliff face below entirely into shadow.

Within that shadow was a steel-gray dragon hatchling. With only one foreclaw gripping the rock, he hung from the sheer cliff face.

The muscles and knuckles of his foreclaw bulged. Even through his scales, one could sense the immense force it bore.

Ferrum remained motionless, maintaining his static grip like a raised ridge of rock on the cliff, with only his tail swaying gently in the wind.

Due to their dense bones and complex scale structure, Heavy-Metal Dragons were far heavier than they appeared. At the same size, they outweighed Metallic Dragons and Chromatic Dragons by a great margin. Supporting their own weight with a single foreclaw was no easy task.

But Ferrum had maintained this posture for a long time. His clawed toes began to tremble, and the tiny bony spines along his neck gradually quivered. Before long, even the scales all over his body began to shake faintly.

"Ten, nine, eight..."

Ferrum silently counted down, gritting his teeth bit by bit. He forced himself to hold on for another ten breaths before using his left claw to replace his right.

The instant his clawed toes loosened, his heavy body immediately dropped.

Ferrum paid it no mind. He calmly stretched out his left claw and hooked it onto a slightly lower protrusion of rock, about to stabilize himself once more.

But the rock on the cliff face was nowhere near as solid as it looked.

"Crack, crack, crack, crack."

Under Ferrum's grip, the rock rapidly fractured and crumbled away. In an instant, the Chrome Dragon lost his support, his body pitching backward as he fell from the nearly hundred-meter cliff along with great chunks of shattered stone.

The howling gale struck at once, sweeping over and battering the Chrome Dragon's body.

Ferrum remained unhurried. He calmly looked around, his two clear yellow slit pupils flashing as he adjusted his body during the fall and rapidly searched for a new anchor point.

Once he identified his target, his left claw shot out like lightning and gripped the cliff wall with all its strength.

"Riiip—"

The Giant Dragon's claws erupted with a roar. The muscles in Ferrum's left arm pumped like flowing water, forcibly driving the Chrome Dragon's unique metal-like keratin claws into the hard granite wall, scraping viciously against the cliff with a violent, heavy friction.

After tearing out a savage gouge, Ferrum's fall came to an abrupt halt. He hung in midair by one arm, breathing faintly.

His gray-white claw, which had originally possessed a metallic sheen, now glowed with a shifting, bright red color, as though it had been roasted at high heat. Between his clawed toes, it burned like fire.

"Two seconds."

Ferrum muttered softly. Any slower, and this claw would probably have broken again.

In free fall, a Chrome Dragon's body accelerated to a terrifying speed in an extremely short time, like an ultra-heavy iron block falling from the heavens.

So once he lost his anchor point, he usually had only a few short seconds to find another. It was an immense test of his judgment and reactions. Otherwise, once the terrifying momentum of the fall fully developed, even all four claws moving together would not be able to support him.

Ferrum's claws, shoulders, and arms had broken like this many times before.

He flicked his tail, pulling his body closer to the cliff face and avoiding the falling rocks from above.

The rocks plunged off the cliff. Below lay rolling hills, where several Lesser Dragons tore and snarled at one another in the direction of Bay Lake. By the time their sounds reached this height, they were almost inaudible.

Ferrum's right claw hung at his side, sore and weak from the earlier training. Yet he did not shake off the fatigue. Instead, he maintained the posture and silently felt the flow of strength through his body.

Strength began in the bones of his fingers, tightened through the base of his claws, passed through his wrist bones, climbed up his forearm, and finally embedded itself in his shoulder blade. It was like a taut iron chain, stretching from his claw tips all the way to his spine.

It had taken him some time to figure out these techniques. At first, when hanging from the cliff, Ferrum relied solely on his claws to hold himself up. Before long, he would lose strength and fall. He could barely endure it, and the training had little effect.

Only later did Ferrum understand that to resist a Heavy-Metal Dragon's own weight, finger bones and wrist strength alone were nowhere near enough.

He had to mobilize more muscles. He needed to engage his shoulders and arms, recruit his spine, and channel all that force into his clawed toes. Only by unleashing a dragon's immense strength could he turn his claws into iron hooks and firmly embed himself in the cliff face.

The Lesser Dragons by Bay Lake fought back and forth, but little blood was spilled, and neither side could gain the upper hand.

On one hand, they were still young and lacked strength. On the other, dragon hatchlings had not undergone specialized training and had not mastered proper techniques for exerting force.

As a result, every one of their attacks was soft and weak. Their claws lacked explosive power and could not pierce their opponent's scaled armor to inflict real damage.

Dragons possessed excellent eyesight. Hanging from the cliff, Ferrum watched the excitement at Bay Lake for a while while silently counting in his mind. When the time came, he released his foreclaw, flipped his body, and switched to climbing with his hind claws.

This time, the Chrome Dragon hung fully upside down, head down and tail up, with his body weight pressing entirely against his belly.

This movement was not easy.

When Ferrum had first tried it, he would similarly lose control after only a few breaths. His tail flailed wildly above him, and his body swayed left and right like a flag in the wind. He often fell from the cliff and had to glide down in embarrassment.

Later, the muscles of his waist and abdomen grew stronger, and his method of exerting force changed accordingly. Gradually, he was able to stabilize his body.

After another period of extra training, Ferrum finally got the hang of it. Now, even while hanging upside down, he could clearly see the sights within the valley. His view no longer shook or spun.

Rock climbing was Ferrum's favorite training. He usually began before dawn every day, completed one round at daybreak, ate breakfast at the gathering place, rested for a while, and then trained for another round in the morning before considering the task complete.

By adjusting his posture in different ways, he could mobilize every muscle, feel the flow of strength throughout his body, strengthen every last part of himself, and hone his reactions and judgment through every perilous loss of support.

Moreover, through long-term persistence and repeated fractures of his claws, his bones had become harder and harder. All his tendons had become exceptionally tough through cycles of extreme strain and relaxation.

How powerful was a dragon's claw strike? Could it penetrate an enemy's armor? When pouncing and changing direction, could the finger bones withstand the impact without breaking? The core factors all lay here.

Ferrum breathed deeply. He knew that his Disaster Level had already reached Level Three.

Disaster Level was a commonly used measure in the Azure World. It did not directly represent strength or weakness, but assessed the degree of destruction a living being could cause when erupting with full force. It was sometimes also called a Destruction Level.

The dragon hatchlings in Ochre Valley generally had Disaster Levels only between One and Two. Level Three was already an extremely powerful rating, one currently reached by only a small number of outstanding Iron Dragons.

He watched the lively scene by Bay Lake, his gaze calm and peaceful, while thoughts churned endlessly in his mind.

Ferrum honed himself like this not merely to compete with the Iron Dragons. The fights and disputes between hatchlings were, in the end, only play. They bit one another for a while, then forgot about it after a few days.

But a true Dragon Blood War was a violent battle to the death.

Based on the information he had gathered over the past half year, Ferrum had clearly realized that although the lineage he belonged to was powerful, it was not secure.

The Ashmark Lineage, standing in the Lost Wilderness, not only had to contend with the neighboring Tagoma Kingdom and Bloodridge Tribes, but had also suffered attacks from Exotic Dragons more than once. It had even fought a massive war against the distant Blue Dragon Brood.

The lineage had relied entirely on its Great Dragons fighting in blood-soaked battle. Their leader, Taigo Ashmark, possessed the immense strength to split mountains and rend the earth. He had torn apart an adult Purple Dragon and a Legendary Blue Dragon in succession, roaring at the forefront of the battlefield, unmatched by any foe.

Six young Iron Dragons guarded the Legendary Dragon's side, crushing every enemy plot and ambition. With blood and fire, they defended the territory and dignity of their brood.

Yet despite such victory, a faint sense of urgency still lingered within the lineage. The threats posed by Chromatic Dragons and Exotic Dragons were also mentioned repeatedly in the Nurturers' lessons.

Influenced by this, Ferrum had gained a few more worries of his own.

Still, he had thought it through clearly. Dragon Blood Wars and territorial wars were heights he could not yet reach. He did not treat those threats as idle talk, but neither would he spend every day in panic because of them.

No matter what, for dragon hatchlings, the most important things were always to eat their fill, sleep well, and grow diligently.

Even the stern and serious Nurturers sometimes told the hatchlings not to be overly tense. The Great Dragons' battlefield was not yet something they needed to worry about. As long as they remained vigilant, they should eat when it was time to eat and play when it was time to play.

No matter what the outside world was like, everything remained beautiful in this valley that nurtured so many newborns.

Ferrum was not important to the lineage. He could not control or change anything, but he could control and change his own body. He could give everything he had to grow a little bigger and become a little stronger.