Long Moya’s expression wavered. He hesitated for a moment, then extended his left hand. A golden light flashed through the pitch-black space, and when it passed, a golden sword of strange make had appeared in his grip, an astonishing weight of blade-presence rolling out to meet them. Its arrival displaced the very air around it, and the whole field of force in the chamber shifted.
“This is the Godslaying Dragon Sword, my companion for half my life, and one of only ten Divine Mystery-tier weapons on the Lost Continent. In the hands of my race, this blade can bring out several times its power. If you had this sword, your current ability alone would be enough to walk the world unchallenged. Put the fox down, and the Godslaying Dragon Sword is yours.”
A Divine Mystery sword… A Divine Mystery-tier weapon, said to be capable of destroying heaven and earth, that every living soul longed for and none could obtain! Long Moya had not drawn it merely to tempt Ye Tianxie into surrendering the fox he was shielding; had he chosen force, he could simply have annihilated Ye Tianxie and the Mystic Fox together. He had already intended to give him the Godslaying Dragon Sword beforehand — the strange, formidable dragon-power the young man had displayed had left him hungry to see how far he could grow, and in his heart he wanted to help him grow faster. Now he was merely folding that intention into a temptation… And he believed the choice was as simple as choices came: on one side, a strange creature met only moments ago, with no possible depth of feeling attached to it; on the other, a Divine Mystery sword that could awaken greed in anyone alive.
Ye Tianxie’s expression and gaze both froze. He stared, transfixed, at the golden blade in Long Moya’s hand. The presence of that sword, and the pressure that had come with it, proved exactly how mighty a Divine Mystery weapon it was… This was a temptation no ordinary person could withstand. In his arms, the Mystic Fox lifted its head, its tiny black eyes stealing a look up at him, both front paws clutching tightly at his clothes. The panic that had only just subsided crept back into its eyes… He and I are strangers… would he really… could he really be willing to give up a Divine Mystery weapon to protect me?
But Long Moya had underestimated Ye Tianxie’s pride — or perhaps his wickedness. That evil streak that seemed to have been born into him meant that what he held to, and what he valued, were not the same as other men’s. Having decided to protect this snow fox, he would not permit anything to harm it… The temptation of a Divine Mystery sword was enormous. And if he abandoned the fox he had decided to protect for the sake of that temptation, it would be nothing less than trampling his own self-respect, his own pride, his own conviction into the dirt.
He couldn’t do it.
However mighty a Divine Mystery sword was, it was still a dead object. And the snow fox was a living thing of this world.
So his gaze snapped from stunned to coldly awake — and he shook his head again.
Long Moya fell silent, so surprised he briefly didn’t know what to do with himself. He could not understand at all why the young man would give up a Divine Mystery weapon that anyone would dream of owning in order to protect a creature he had only just met, one he had neither feeling nor interest invested in… Was his heart simply too kind? Or had he gotten water in his brain, and then been slammed in the head by a door, and then kicked by a donkey, and then rooted at by a pig…
In the instant Ye Tianxie shook his head that second time, the Mystic Fox’s eyes trembled, and something bright glittered in them with a beautiful, moving light… After all these silent ages, it finally understood what feeling could be called being moved.
Long Moya let out a short breath. The Godslaying Dragon Sword in his left hand leveled, pointing straight at the Mystic Spirit Snow Fox in Ye Tianxie’s arms, and a deep helplessness entered his cold expression. “Your stubbornness astonishes me. But the Mystic Fox is too terrible — terrible enough that I dare not, and cannot, gamble on luck of any kind. Before its power recovers to what it was, I must destroy it. Though I have no wish at all to harm you, if you insist… then I can only destroy you along with it. You may carry half a dragon’s blood, but you are also a human from another world, and you cannot truly die here. So do not blame me… Blame me or not, today I must strike.”
A horrifying pressure fell over him, one he could not resist at all, and Ye Tianxie was suffocating in an instant. He frowned hard and retreated a step, but the aura locked onto him followed him instantly.
The power born of Ye Tianxie’s Evil Dragon soul far surpassed ordinary dragon-power. But newly-awakened dragon-power could hardly compare to Long Moya’s thousand years. To destroy him would take the old dragon a single instant.
The crushing weight nearly buckled his body, and in his suddenly contracting pupils, a golden light came ripping toward him from the sword in Long Moya’s hand. A savage force bore down like a tidal wave… This was the first time Ye Tianxie had ever faced Divine Mystery-tier power, and the horror of it exceeded everything he had anticipated. This was a terrible power that no player could ever face with composure!
“Soul of the Evil Dragon!“
BOOOOM!!!!
In the instant Ye Tianxie shouted it, a colorless flame kindled across his body, and an invisible spherical barrier formed around him at once, enclosing both himself and the fox. That terrible attack — a Divine Mystery blade in the hand of a Divine Mystery beast — slammed into the colorless barrier with an enormous crash, and great cracks spread across the ground all around them.
But when the impact passed, Ye Tianxie was still standing where he had been. Not only was he unharmed, he hadn’t so much as shifted position. Even that tremendous force had been canceled out entirely.
Long Moya was shaken again. Once more, Ye Tianxie had astonished him. As far as he was concerned, all the young man had was the elementary power of a Dragon Soul that had only just woken; there was no possible way he could withstand a single blow of his. And yet, after an attack in which he had held nothing back, Ye Tianxie stood there perfectly intact — and even the Mystic Fox in his arms was untouched.
“What is that?” Long Moya cried out. His hand moved again, and a violent wind rose, sweeping up countless fragments of stone from the ground and hurling them toward Ye Tianxie in a frenzy.
The wind came screaming in, laden with savage energy — but before it could touch Ye Tianxie’s body, the colorless barrier flickered into visibility, and the wind was split by that impregnable sphere, breaking into two streams that rushed past his left and his right… Once again, without so much as brushing him.
The barrier of the Soul of the Evil Dragon rendered him invulnerable to any attack of any form or magnitude. But his HP was draining at 10% per second, and while it held he could not recover HP by any means. In this situation, the absolute-defense barrier could last a maximum of nine seconds — once his HP hit 10% or below, the barrier would vanish automatically. What faintly puzzled him was that this innate skill exclusive to his Rebel-Boned Evil Dragon class was called Soul of the Evil Dragon, yet it formed its absolute barrier by burning life… So where was the “soul” in it? Or was the present effect only the skill’s most basic form, with its true ability to be revealed slowly, as he grew?
Long Moya’s movements stalled, his gaze fixed on the faint, barely-there colorless barrier around Ye Tianxie’s body… Dragon-power. He sensed something familiar in it — and yet unfamiliar, wholly unlike any Dragon Soul power he had ever known.
So this is the strange dragon-power born of the union of darkness and light!? So feeble, and yet his attacks could do nothing against it!
Watching his HP plummet, Ye Tianxie knew that in nine seconds the barrier would vanish on its own, and that what he was doing amounted to little more than a dying man’s last thrash. He didn’t retreat again, and he didn’t run. Under the aura-lock of a Divine Mystery dragon like Long Moya, escape was impossible, and a Town Portal Scroll was more impossible still. But he wasn’t tense, and there was no hesitation or regret on his face. He stroked the little fox in his arms slowly and said, evenly, “This guardian barrier of mine is formed from dragon-power that belongs to me alone — but it won’t hold for long. You have your convictions. I have mine. You would kill me for the sake of yours, and I don’t resent that. But I won’t abandon mine out of fear of dying… If the fox and I are fated to die at your hands, then that only means I wasn’t strong enough.”
His HP had already fallen below half, and the flickering Dragon Soul barrier could gutter out at any moment. His words left Long Moya briefly silent — unsure, in that instant, whether to praise his composure and his defiant spine, or to sneer and sigh at how unspeakably foolish he was. But whatever the case, he had to kill the Mystic Fox, because no one could shoulder the terrible consequences of its power returning. He would not allow that possibility to exist — not even at one chance in ten thousand, or one in a hundred million.
The Mystic Spirit Snow Fox’s eyes were like two trembling drops of black water, glimmering in the darkness with a faint light that quivered with feeling. That light held no impurity at all; its purity was enough to break the heart. It could speak into Ye Tianxie’s mind, and so of course it could understand human language perfectly. A strange environment. A man it could not currently resist, determined to destroy it… And in that most despairing, most helpless moment, Ye Tianxie’s protection — his willingness to give up a Divine Mystery sword, his willingness to throw away his life rather than bend — struck it to the core.
That thing called being moved grew inside its heart, and swelled, and spread… and in one instant, it made a decision that the creature it had once been could never have made.
The moment the Dragon Soul barrier winked out, Long Moya’s brow set. The hand he had lowered rose again. And in that very instant, the Mystic Spirit Snow Fox, which had been lying quietly in Ye Tianxie’s arms, suddenly sprang out from between them, thrust its fluffy head forward, opened its jaws — and, before Ye Tianxie could react, bit down hard on his finger.
(End of Chapter 113)