He suddenly began chanting arcane Dragon Script. Until then, both he and Lu Mingfei had been manipulating the elements directly through thought.
A new domain sprang into being. The metal filings around Norton spun and danced around him, drawn by an invisible vortex. At the same time, brilliant "stars" rose from the surface of his molten blade-droplets of liquefied metal. As the surrounding metal gathered and the blade's "stars" drifted away, the weapon was reborn. Its crude old form and impurities fell away, leaving a smooth, gleaming edge, with beautiful, flame-like patterns hidden beneath its mirror-bright surface.
Norton was not worried about Lu Mingfei launching a surprise attack.
Now that neither of them was moving at high speed, the King's Domain and the elemental domain stabilized. Their distinct boundary stood between them like a translucent wall. The chaotic elemental storm was compressed by the domains into that thin boundary, where lightning and flames raged.
During their last clash, both had been at the end of their strength. Now they were racing against time to heal. If Lu Mingfei tried to interrupt the forging with his broken body, Norton was confident he could kill him with a single strike within his domain.
Lu Mingfei quietly watched Norton forge the blade.
The process was entirely different from what he had learned at Cassell College. It involved not merely fire and spirit, but the intertwining and transformation of all five elements. Through that process, the material approached its ultimate point of equilibrium, little by little, while a certain Alchemical Domain was embedded within it.
Lu Mingfei admitted that he was no match for Norton in this field.
He was in no hurry to interrupt the "forging." Instead, he closed his eyes and breathed more calmly.
All around him were roaring winds, a heartbeat like pounding drums, the crackle of exploding sparks, the sharp reports of electrical arcs piercing the air, and the dense, wave-like rustling of colliding metal filings. There was also the sickening writhing and grinding within his bones and flesh. Everything was as clear as if he had activated the domain of the Word Spirit Kamaitachi.
Then everything fell silent.
He entered a state akin to deep meditation.
Within the darkness of his mind, another version of himself lit up.
Norton kept his eyes fixed on Lu Mingfei while tempering the alchemical weapon in his hands, raising it to a higher level. Yet as a certain moment approached, the quieter Lu Mingfei became, the more uneasy Norton felt. By all rights, both of them should have nearly recovered. The moment when Norton expected Lu Mingfei to attack was almost upon them.
Yet Lu Mingfei remained just as quiet.
Just then, Norton sensed an anomaly in the fire elements behind him. Within a hazy spherical region, their fluctuations were faint, yet unmistakably clear to the Dragon King's senses.
The thing realized it had been discovered and immediately stirred, trying to "squeeze" its way into Norton's domain. It was pure flame and destruction: the Fell God Flame, now dozens of times stronger than when Lu Mingfei had first released it. Even the King's Domain of the supreme sovereign of fire could not dismantle it quickly.
Only then did Norton realize that he was not the only one who wanted to end the battle.
The new god had infused that Word Spirit with something beyond spirit. It was not under his control, yet it could conceal its own elemental fluctuations, track its enemy and move behind him, and absorb energy to strengthen itself. All this was possible because it had transformed into a living "natural will." It had lingered at the edge of the kings' battlefield, only openly releasing its will once Norton discovered it: destruction.
Some Word Spirits were not Primordial Authorities, yet possessed similar destructive power.
Ultimate Word Spirits!
The new god had created an Ultimate Word Spirit of fire that belonged to him alone!
Norton no longer had any desire to reforge his blade, even if its completion could decide the battle.
He drove every defensive Word Spirit he could layer onto himself to its limit, frantically beating his skeletal wings to escape.
But the Fell God Flame activated.
The singularity vanished. The confined energy broke through the event horizon, and the extreme heat caused the matter at its center to emit radiation bright enough to burn a dragon's eyes. The surrounding gas was instantly compressed to hundreds of thousands of atmospheres-in theory, a piece of charcoal placed inside would have been crushed into diamond. In the next stage, streams of high-energy particles escaped at tremendous speed, followed by the formation of a shock wave.
By then, Norton's feet had only just left the ground. Layer by layer, according to their distance from the singularity, his scales, skin, flesh, and bones disintegrated and turned to ash.
What killed him was not even the flame, merely the shock wave.
Chapter 64: Bug
Time stopped again.
Most of Norton's body had already turned to charcoal. His humanoid body possessed more than a thousand bones, but fewer than a fifth remained intact. His limbs had been stripped away, and his chest and cranial cavities had been completely burned out. His dried, carbonized organs and soft tissue clung to the remaining skeleton like withered black vines.
Yet the flames could advance no farther.
The world had fallen completely still at the microscopic level. Under normal circumstances, all matter at this point would have met the definition of absolute zero. But in a world deprived of its temporal dimension, human scientific concepts meant nothing.
At the last instant, Norton had used his remaining will to open a passage between the Spacetime Markers.
Simply put, the world in a dragon's eyes consisted of curled dimensions that defied description. Dragons could leave "Beacons" at spacetime coordinates with the appropriate curvature, then perform a miracle through ultimate alchemy—opening a passage outside the dimensions of the world.
Passing through this passage was, in essence, a reversal of time that produced no temporal paradox. When he reached its end as an observer, a new historical timeline would open. Thus, in the dragons' worldview, the universe did not possess only one history. It contained every possible history, each with its own probability.
And in this new "history," Norton knew Lu Mingfei's killing move in advance.
That unknown Ultimate Word Spirit of fire drew its explosive power from the "natural will" within the ultimate Alchemical Domain [Creation of Life]. It was destruction made manifest, and its essence was a "collapse" opposite to the Word Spirit Dust-Free Land-a Dragon King-level collapse imposed on the fire elements.
Its own energy had not reached a level capable of overturning everything.
Thus, after it erupted, its energy decayed extremely quickly. Apart from the shock wave it had already generated, its remaining power could not inflict damage over long distances. And within the Bronze City of this Nibelungen, there was no shortage of endlessly overlapping bronze passages and cavities capable of weakening a shock wave. On a macroscopic scale, those winding, looping, interconnected chambers resembled the structure of a human firearm's suppressor.
Norton only needed to evade this unexpected ambush and finish refining the blade imbued with part of the concept of the "Sin of Greed." Then victory would be assured!
You harbor a "human heart," yet seek to wield divine authority. Pay for that greed with your flesh and blood!
The silent drama of reversed time on the Panhandle Plateau played out once again.
The world began a brief journey against entropy. The "future" unfolding now was the "past" remembered by the observer. The rapidly expanding shock wave of the Fell God Flame slowly contracted. Wherever its boundary passed, charred fragments flew against the wind pressure, landing on Norton's ruined body and fitting together. Cells revived, tissues coalesced, organs recovered, and complex biological systems rebuilt themselves.
When the final scale shuddered shut and merged into his streamlined body, Norton was fully restored.
By then, the Fell God Flame had shrunk into a tiny light source and was fading out.
Time Reversal grew even slower.
Norton thought nothing of it. Although he could use alchemy to open a passage outside the world's dimensions, he did not fully understand what lay between the Spacetime Markers. To beings living within those dimensions, it could not even be described in terms of space and time. Every rule ceased to apply there, like some terrifying bug.
Each passage through it was different. Sometimes the observer even saw and heard horrifying illusions, so an "uneven speed of Time Reversal" was no cause for alarm.
But this time was different.
After slowing to an extreme, Time Reversal actually stopped.
Norton was trapped halfway through the passage. This had never happened before. Word Spirits and elemental powers ceased to function here, which meant he might remain lost forever.
Apart from his conscious will, he had no ability to move at all.
And in this silence that pierced the worldline, Norton noticed something wrong with Lu Mingfei.
The young man's eyelashes trembled slightly, and his tightly shut eyes suddenly opened! They were eyes devoid of emotion or reason, flowing with stern, icy golden lava. Nothing but pure hostility gathered within them, like a wild beast's.
Time Reversal retraced the history remembered by the observer. With Norton's memory, there was no possibility that he had misremembered its details.
There was only one possibility: Lu Mingfei had changed the course of history!
Covered in blue-black scales, the young man struggled slowly, as though wrestling with some tremendous force. His movements resembled a film with missing frames.
An unfamiliar emotion called fear exploded in Norton's heart.
The ultimate Alchemical Domain [Time Reversal] only altered the timeline by opening a new historical branch. What the hell could change history within the world's dimensions themselves? In theory, the world's historical timeline was jumping at every smallest unit of time!
For an instant, he thought he was witnessing Ragnarök.
Who could do such a thing except that being of supreme sovereignty, supreme power, and supreme virtue?
Norton wanted to struggle, wanted to break free, but he could not even scream, "What the hell are you?"
Only then did he understand that the true outcome had been decided the moment Lu Mingfei closed his eyes. His opponent was a bug in the world itself, something that could kill him in both history's past and future at once.
Someone watched from afar and gave a scornful laugh.
"What a stupid dragon. How could someone like my brother fall for the same trick twice?"
Lu Mingfei had never faced a powerful enemy who used time as a weapon in the Lands Between. He had encountered one for the first time in the small building renovated by the Executive Department.
No one in this world could understand how Lu Mingfei learned supernatural powers. He had studied sorceries and incantations from countless scrolls, memorizing the mysterious process by which the mind manipulated power. That process could not be described in words, yet it was engraved in his instincts. When he took in Word Spirits, alchemy, and elemental powers, he continued memorizing without pause.
During that reversal of time, he had watched Norton's actions from the perspective of a supreme First-Generation Dragon. That was nowhere near enough for him to immediately master the pinnacle of draconic alchemy, but it was enough to familiarize him with the signs of its activation, the sensations in his mind, and the reactions of his body.
What he had detected was a "loosening."
That "loosening" lurked within an infinitesimally brief moment. Even if Lu Mingfei could sense it, he could hardly seize it.
Unless he let his other self do it.
Lu Mingfei's hardest battle had not been against a demigod, an Empyrean, a deity, or the Elden Beast. It had been against something left behind by the civilization of the Eternal City in its attempt to create a lord-the Mimic Tear.
The Mimic Tear could imitate everything about an enemy, including the power of divine artifacts and laws.
Chapter 65: The kill
Lu Mingfei's first transformation in combat skill and fighting spirit had come during his battle with the Mimic Tear.
Against an enemy with exactly the same strength, techniques, weapons, and armor, Lu Mingfei had no advantage at all. He was even beaten so badly that he could not fight back.
This was not an enemy he could defeat through tricks. He could only search for a faint chance of victory through countless battles.
For a long time, Lu Mingfei challenged the Mimic Tear again and again, yet he could not gradually unravel his opponent's patterns as he had in earlier battles.
Fighting was like looking into a mirror. His enemy attacked with familiar Ashes of War, sorceries, and incantations. He had to surpass that familiarity and push himself to the absolute limit before he could have a chance of winning.
He could not remember how many times he had fallen. Those familiar yet strange, cold eyes seemed almost like a nightmare, appearing whenever he closed his own.
Once, while sitting cross-legged, he was so exhausted that he actually fell asleep.
His body was not tired, but his mind was unbearably fragile. In that state, he entered a vivid lucid dream.
In the dream, the Mimic Tear walked toward him and attacked. To his surprise, he could instinctively block or evade every strike.
It was something pieced together from fragments and echoes of every previous clash. In his dream, he endlessly repeated that stitched-together battle.
After waking, Lu Mingfei gained an insight and challenged the Mimic Tear again. It was their final and longest battle. Toward the end, his mind began to drift. With every swing of his blade, every dodge, and every sorcery and incantation he cast, exhaustion accumulated within him like thin streams of water, until it became an overwhelming tide.
Blades clashed, and firelight flared and faded, illuminating those familiar yet strange, indifferent eyes.
The pain, confusion, and despair he had experienced since arriving in the Lands Between, normally buried deep in his heart, now surfaced one after another.
"I'm so tired..."
"It hurts..."
"Why..."
"There's no way I can do it..."
He had never spoken those words, yet they appeared between exchanges like auditory hallucinations, filling Lu Mingfei with a stifled anger.
He was angry not only at the cowardice of those lamentations, but also at himself for being unable to control his own heart.
So he simply abandoned thought. He also abandoned his mental exhaustion, his hatred of battle, his desires and fears, until neither past nor future remained in his heart-only the blade reflected in his eyes. His opponent still suppressed him, maintaining a subtle advantage with every move, but his eyes gradually began to resemble his opponent's.
Until they were cold and pure.
Until, at a certain instant, he began to gain the upper hand.