Magma River

No, I couldn't wait any longer!

At that critical moment, a thought flashed through his mind like lightning:

Feeding Ehm my blood could break the curse, so shouldn't the reverse work too?

As long as my blood could enter Ehm's body, the effect should be the same!

The moment the idea appeared, Redd seized on it.

There was no time to worry about all those details. This was the only way!

He rode on Ehm's violently heaving back, having already swiftly drawn the longsword at his waist.

Ehm seemed to sense Redd's intention. Though weak, he still used his remaining awareness to send a trace of unease and confusion through their bloodline connection.

Redd roared at Ehm, "Ehm! Bear with it!" His voice was somewhat hoarse with tension.

He gripped the longsword with both hands and pressed its edge against Ehm's thick scales.

The scales were as hard as the finest black iron. Prying one open would take tremendous strength.

Redd gritted his teeth, veins bulging on his hands as he poured all his strength into his arms and used the spine of the sword as a lever, prying hard.

The blade scraped against the scale with an ear-piercing screech, sending sparks flying.

"Roar!" Ehm let out a muffled grunt of pain, his enormous body shuddering involuntarily.

Finally, with a sharper crack like snapping metal, a palm-sized scale was pried open, revealing the warm, dark-red flesh beneath.

Redd had no time to savor this brief "victory." He immediately aimed the sword's tip at the exposed flesh and thrust with all his strength.

Squelch! The sound of the tip sinking into flesh was barely audible amid the chaotic battlefield, but Redd could clearly feel the resistance.

He applied force through his wrist and sliced, managing only with great effort to cut a wound roughly a palm's width across and over ten centimeters deep into Ehm's muscles, which were as thick as a city wall.

For a dragon a hundred meters long, the wound looked insignificant, barely worth mentioning, yet at this moment, it was the key to survival.

Without the slightest hesitation, Redd reached back, grabbed the leather cord at his waist, and pulled it tight,

binding himself securely to a protruding bone spike on the dragon's back so he would not fall, then clenched the longsword's blade with his other hand.

The cold blade instantly cut into his palm. The intense pain made him suck in a breath, but his gaze remained unusually resolute.

Blood ran down the blade like a stream as he steadily pressed his palm against Ehm's wound,

letting as much of the warm, life-filled blood as possible seep into that dark-red flesh.

"Splash..." His blood mingled with Ehm's, making a faint gurgling sound.

Redd clamped his hands over his ears, trying to shut out the headache-inducing screams that kept piercing his eardrums.

Ignoring everything else, he focused entirely on Ehm's status field on the system panel.

Time seemed to freeze.

"Tick... tick... tick..." The information in the status field began behaving abnormally. Instead of a steady "Cursed," it began flickering and refreshing wildly.

Weakened... cursed... weakened... cursed... the two statuses were like a seesaw,

alternating rapidly before his eyes, each flicker making Redd's heart sink.

"Shit!" Redd's expression instantly turned utterly grim, his face as dark as the bottom of a pot.

This was barely doing anything!

Yet just as he was on the verge of despair, he keenly caught a slight change-although the status field was still flickering, its fluctuations had clearly diminished,

and most importantly, Ehm's condition really did seem to have stopped deteriorating! It had stabilized for now!

That faint hope, like a firefly in the darkness, eased Redd's taut nerves just a little.

At least his effort had not been wasted.

Now they had bought a little time, but the road ahead remained fraught with danger.

Redd knew that the Red Dragon Aegon was now so weak that even his dragonfire came in fits and starts,

but he could not suppress the agitation in his heart and still could not help shouting at Aegon as he crawled below:

"Faster! Hurry up!" His voice was filled with urgency and a barely perceptible trace of worry.

It was not that he had never considered risking a jump onto Aegon's back and using the same method to transfuse blood into him and break the curse.

Even if it couldn't break it completely, slowing the curse's spread a little would be something!

But when his gaze swept over the sight of Aegon's back, that thought was instantly snuffed out.

The bone spikes on Aegon's back were like a jagged mountain of blades.

Though they might not have been especially conspicuous compared with his enormous body, which exceeded a hundred meters in length, the spikes varied in length and stood in uneven rows.

Even the short ones were over ten centimeters long, like daggers. The longer ones reached forty or fifty centimeters, each like a poisoned spear, gleaming coldly in the firelight.

Just looking at them made Redd's scalp prickle.

If he really jumped down, never mind landing securely-he would probably be skewered full of holes by those bone spikes before he even touched Aegon's skin, pierced straight through the heart.

Forget it. Better forget it, Redd made an excuse to himself. I'm probably just a bit of a coward. I don't have that kind of courage.

He could not help smiling bitterly as he remembered that he had never even won a lottery prize in his previous life. He did not dare try a gamble with his life like this. Surely the odds were even worse than winning the lottery?

So he could only keep riding on Ehm's back, watching and listening in every direction, constantly observing the battlefield and directing the three dragons.

Ehm continued frantically spewing dragonfire and lashing his tail, while King Ghidorah was like a tireless little firecracker, doing his best to release electrical arcs to harry the enemy.

Aegon struggled on as well, occasionally spewing a small burst of flame to slow the encirclement.

The process was extraordinarily difficult, and every step forward came at a tremendous cost.

Although the surrounding lumps-of-flesh creatures were kept from venturing too close by the scorching waves of air from the lava vent,

they still crowded around the perimeter like a tide, growling low and waiting for a chance to strike.

The screams still rang incessantly in their ears, but as they drew closer and closer to the lava vent,

the invisible barrier formed by the intense heat really did seem to give the creatures pause, and their attacks became somewhat less frequent and less intense.

After nearly another hour, through the three dragons' bloody struggle and Redd's precise commands, they finally managed to approach the river of flowing, scorching magma.

Dazzling orange-red light shone on them, and the air rippled like water.

The temperature at the river's edge was frighteningly high, and even the air seemed to burn,

and sure enough, most of the lumps-of-flesh creatures pressing after them stopped, shrinking back far beyond the reach of the intense heat, not daring to take another step forward.

At last, they were safe for the moment.