121: Chapter 121 Trial Entrance

Darkness. Not the kind of darkness when you close your eyes—it was a darkness where consciousness was stripped from the body, senses were completely severed, and only thought remained suspended in a void.

There was no dim light from the Dragonstone pillars of the mine secret chamber, no golden patterns on the surface of the rib fossils, no runes of Orys Targaryen on the stone walls of the secret chamber. Nothing. He couldn't even hear his own heartbeat.

Drogon waited in this void for a long time. Perhaps an instant, perhaps several hours—the flow of time inside the trial was different from the outside, and he could not judge it.

Then, a blinding purple lightning bolt suddenly tore open overhead. It was not real lightning, but an image of the sky being ripped apart, sealed within the memory of the Storm Ancestor Dragon thousands of years ago.

That lightning struck down from the void, tearing the darkness in two, with cold purple electric light burning along the edges of the rift. He opened his slit pupils.

He stood on an ancient battlefield constructed from pure memory.

The sky was the dark purple of the day the Storm Ancestor Dragon fell, thick as congealed blood.

The clouds were torn into shreds, each wreathed in electric light from thousands of years ago, exploding silently above his head—not thunder, but the extremely faint tearing sound of space itself when the electric light burst.

Underfoot was not the ground—it was the fossilized spine of a giant sea dragon that had died ten thousand years ago.

The dragon bone stretched across the void, each vertebra thick enough to fit his entire dragon body, the cartilage between the vertebrae having long since turned into obsidian-like crystals.

The bones were covered in black basalt eroded by storms, with sea salt weathered for thousands of years embedded in the rock crevices—that was the sea salt that had seeped into the marrow when the sea dragon was alive and soaking in the deep ocean.

The air was filled with the pungent smell of ozone mixed with dragon blood—the last remaining scent of the ancient battlefield, and with every breath, he could taste the ionized flavor on the tip of his tongue.

In the distance, a dragon shadow wrapped in lightning stood with its back to him.

With a wingspan of over fifty meters, every flap of its dragon wings tore a new rift in the clouds, from which more purple lightning surged.

The silhouette of that dragon shadow was larger, older, and closer to the source of the dragon bloodline than any dragon he had ever seen—when its tail hung down and swept across the dragon bone vertebrae, every vertebra it touched trembled slightly.

System prompt. In white text, but the voice was quieter than usual, as if afraid to disturb this space of memory.

"Host has entered the Storm Ancestor Dragon Will Trial · Stage One: Storm Battlefield. Current scene source — the final combat memory before the death of the Storm Ancestor Dragon 'Storm Devourer'. Trial objective: Defeat the phantom enemy generated by the remaining will of the Storm Ancestor Dragon in the battlefield, and prove that you are qualified to inherit its power. Note: The system will be unable to provide real-time tactical analysis during the trial. All combat decisions are to be made by the host. The flow of time inside the trial is approximately sixty times that of the outside. Please focus all your perception, Host."

"It has its back to me. It knows I have entered. It is waiting."

He spread his wings.

In the consciousness space, his dragon form was exactly the same as in reality—a thirty-four-meter wingspan, dark gold scales shimmering with cold light under the purple skylight, with icy blue fine lines inlaid on the edges of every scale.

The tail spikes were craggy, with ghostly blue Ice Fire condensed on the tip of every bone spike, the Ice Fire swaying slightly in the storm but not extinguishing. He took a step forward, and his dragon claws crushed a slender crack into the fossilized sea dragon bone beneath his feet—the crack spread outward from the claw tips, extending several feet across the surface of the vertebra.

The moment he took that step, the dragon shadow wrapped in lightning slowly turned around.

It was not the face of the Storm Ancestor Dragon.

It was a face he was incredibly familiar with but would never mistake.

White Mane's amber eyes—those eyes that had glared at him under the scorching sun outside Yunkai, glanced at him when she was tripped by his tail on the training ground, and blinked when she watched him leave for the trial from the edge of the Dragonstone training ground.

White Mane's silver-white braids flew in the storm, and what clung to the braids was not the black sand of Dragonstone, but the electric light debris of the ancient battlefield. White Mane's side profile—the curve of the cheekbones, the sharp angle of the jawline.

But her body was not human—it was a translucent dragon body made of pure storm energy, with a wingspan equal to his, and every flap of her dragon wings splashed out fine electric light, like two thunderclouds torn by the wind.

The end of the dragon tail was not a bone spike, but a tail blade in the form of a dragon-kiss sword gleaming with cold light. The shape of the tail blade was exactly the same as the dragon-kiss sword in her hand—the crossguard featured intertwined dragons, the blade was slender, and the edge rippled with dark silver under the electric light.

The phantom initiated the attack. There was no sound, no opening remarks, only the howling storm triggered by the sudden flapping of dragon wings—the sound of the wind was like torn canvas, sharp and coarse.

The first move was exactly the set White Mane had warned him about in the Brand transmission—a chain slash followed by a backhand thrust.

Its right wing slashed down like a scimitar, the wingtip tearing through the air and bringing up a visible arc of electric light, the air at the edge of the arc ionized into a pale blue plasma mist.

The first wing slashed toward the old scar at the root of his left wing—that patch of scales that had grown back after being pierced by an ice spear on the walls of Meereen, slightly thinner than the other scales, with translucent keratin at the edges.

The second wing followed closely, trickily blocking his space to dodge to the right, the wingtip almost grazing the scales on his ribs, leaving a very faint trace of electrical burn.

Then it stepped forward with its left foot. Preparing to thrust the tail blade backhand.

Here it comes. Two wings slashed, left foot stepped forward—next is the backhand thrust.

But you will have a pause. Because the dragon-kiss sword is lighter than the scimitar you are used to, with the center of gravity further back, the backhand thrust requires a longer moment adjustment. The Storm Ancestor Dragon does not understand this—it thinks you are a perfect connection.

Before the third beat arrived, he dodged to the left in advance. Not to the right—but to the left. Because the phantom White Mane's backhand thrust was initiated with her right hand, the attack direction would inevitably veer toward his right ribs.

He remembered what she had said in the Brand transmission— "There is a pause before my backhand thrust. The dragon-kiss sword is lighter than my previous scimitar, and I haven't fully adapted to its center of gravity. This pause is about half a beat."

Sure enough. The phantom's tail blade thrust out, the angle precise to the point of near perfection—but the connection was half a beat faster than the real White Mane.

It was that "overly perfect" half-beat that caused its tail blade to miss.

The blade tip grazed the scales on his right ribs, less than an inch away. He could feel the slight numbness left on the scales by the electric light brought by the blade tip—like being pricked by an extremely fine ice needle.

Seizing the moment it missed, he suddenly raised his left wing, and the collision between the dragon scales and the side of the tail blade sparked a string of dark golden sparks.

His dragon tail swept out fiercely from the right—not to block the tail blade, but to sweep toward the root of its left wing.

The bone spike at the tip of his tail accurately hit the storm energy node at the joint of its left wing, the very spot White Mane had told him on the training ground was "where the storm energy at the root of the left wing is the most unstable."

The phantom's dragon body trembled violently.

The storm energy was briefly disrupted at the root of the left wing, and electric light gushed out from the wound, exploding into fine specks of light in the air—each speck wreathed in extremely weak lightning, dissipating with a crackle.

But it did not fall. It retracted its wings and retreated, a flash of ancient, cold light that did not belong to White Mane flickering in its amber eyes—that was the Storm Ancestor Dragon analyzing why he was able to break this move.

System prompt. Intermittent, the words fragmented by the interference of the trial.

"First sequence... broken. Phantom damage approximately fifteen percent. Host's left wing old scar not hit. White Mane's Brand calibration data... effective."