In the vision, the last trace of scarlet flame in the cavern drew into a gray-white stone sphere.
The images playing across the floor gradually came to a stop.
The once-clear scene blurred bit by bit into a patch of light. It passed through one side of the stone sphere and emerged from the other as a beam that returned to Xiao Xiao's Crystal Ball.
Hermione let out a breath—it felt like the first she had taken since the images began flashing—then turned to the Doctor. She had missed the crucial point: "Why did time pass so quickly for that Dragon Monster?"
Xiao Xiao took a piece of velvet from his coat and wiped the Crystal Ball at an unhurried pace. "That's beyond little wizards of our registered rank... But we can make a guess based on a few basic rules. I'd say it was a remnant of Legendary Might."
A Legend stood above the River of Time and Fate.
Naturally, a Legend could alter the flow of time.
The explanation made sense.
"As for why it aged, my guess is that a Legend's standing was too high for the Xuanhuang Small World to provide a 'vessel' large enough to hold its Qi Mechanism... even just the remnants of it."
The Diviner continued helping the two witches understand what lay behind the images they had seen. He ran a hand over the Magic Runes on the stone sphere, a trace of puzzlement on his face. "But nirvana? Isn't that a gift unique to Magical Creatures like phoenixes or fire phoenixes? Are you sure these are the remains of a dragon?"
"Dragon Monster!"
Jiang Yu corrected him with a solemn expression. "That spirit was born of this Small World. It has no blood ties to any dragon lineage we know of,