The war beast wrist device still needed work. The direction was right, but success remained a long way off.

In the meantime, even Yueyang had limits on his audacity. He was not going to bother His Majesty again. That kick had not been a gentle one. His Majesty had been genuinely furious — nothing else would explain a person of that composure physically launching someone out of their own bedchamber.

Yueyang had his Heavenly Eye of Wisdom, of course. He had seen exactly who came bursting through those curtains. He chose, with great deliberateness, to exercise the rare wisdom of strategic ignorance — to see nothing, know nothing, and maintain that position indefinitely.

He had intended to settle in for a few quiet days of research, build something worth showing, and then present results. The old fox had other plans. This was the critical window for the Dragon Rider Legion announcement, and the whole exercise rather required the man at the center of it to actually be present.

So it was that, at dusk one day later—

“What is that?”

“Looks like a storm front. But it’s moving wrong.”

“That’s not a storm. Those are birds — no — gods above — those aren’t birds. Those are dragons. That is a sky full of dragons.“

The mercenaries resting in the great plaza outside the Sky Stairway looked up to see what appeared to be a dark bank of cloud rolling in from the distance. As it drew closer, the cloud resolved itself into something else entirely: tens of thousands of flying dragons, every conceivable variety, blotting out the sky in a tide of wings and scales. Even without the slightest hint of aggression, the sight nearly unmanned grown warriors where they stood. A single dragon was enough to wipe out a mercenary company. How many were up there? The count defied estimation — ten thousand at minimum. If they chose to attack, they could level a city. They could end a nation. Most terrifying of all: scattered throughout the formation were several hundred dragons that glowed with the unmistakable aura of Gold-rank Dragon Kings — beings of genuine intelligence, each one the equivalent of a human warrior at the Innate realm or above.

At the very front of the formation flew a line of dragons, each one carrying a rider.

Old and young. Male and female. The majority were tall, powerfully-built women warriors — and veteran mercenary commanders recognized them at once. These were the Third Young Master’s Celestial Dragon-Women, a warrior race of tremendous power and remarkable humility. They claimed no glory for themselves, pursued no advantage, and yielded in all things. There was only one authority they acknowledged: the Third Young Master of the Yue Clan. No one else in the entire Sky Stairway could give them a single order.

The woman at their head, crowned and riding a Venomous Dragon King, was Queen Zige.

Not far from her, standing on the back of a Plasma Dragon, was a figure the mercenaries also knew: Shui Dongliu, acting dean of the Evergreen Academy, a sage of extraordinary power and wisdom who had, not long after achieving Innate realm, become a foundational pillar of the Innate Alliance — and one of the Third Young Master’s publicly acknowledged mentors.

Shui Dongliu had kept a relatively low profile for much of his career, but his abilities were exceptional and his mind was oceanic in its depth. The outstanding generation of the Sky Stairway — the Third Young Master, Snow-Hungry Wolf, Yanpojun, Wind Seven-Kill, Sea Fatty, Ye Kong, and others — all of them had been his students.

The mercenaries were still craning their necks at the sky, trying to work out whose handiwork this was, when it happened.

From the very apex of the heavens — a roar.

A black speck appeared at the top of the sky, plummeting.

The wind hit their faces before they could think.

A pressure descended with it — vast, unignorable, something older than authority — a presence that made the air itself feel thin. It wasn’t just the mercenaries. Everyone present felt it. Every person in the plaza, every bystander in the surrounding streets, felt the breath go out of them at once.

Then the wings opened.

Thirty meters, tip to tip. Larger than three ordinary dragons laid wing to wing. Scales like hammered gold, blazing in the last light of the sun until looking at them directly was nearly impossible. One roar — a sound like lightning striking dry earth — and the momentum of ten thousand dragons faded to nothing by comparison. Descending through the cloudbank, enormous and blinding and absolute, was a Golden Dragon. Platinum-rank tier ten. Sky-rank.

Thousands of years had passed since anything like this had appeared over the Longteng continent. An emperor-class war beast, a being the old records described in the language of legend — and it was here, now, today, dropping out of the clouds above the Sky Stairway.

As a mount.

The entire plaza arrived at the same conclusion at the same moment.

Who in the entire Longteng continent rode a Sky-rank Golden Dragon?

Obviously the Third Young Master of the Yue Clan. Who else had the power? Who else had the right?

“—There—“

“A Golden Dragon — an actual Golden Dragon—“

The mercenaries erupted — equal parts shock and joy, voices breaking before they quite got the shout out, some half-swallowing the sound out of the instinctive fear that too much noise would be disrespectful to the great.

The moment the Sky-rank Golden Dragon appeared, the ten thousand dragons below split formation without being told. They arranged themselves into rows, heads bowed, every enormous neck lowered in deference, paying tribute to a higher order of existence.

On the backs of their dragons, the Celestial Dragon-Women saw their master descend, and tears ran freely down their faces.

Riding a dragon from the sky. This — this was the Celestial Dragon Emperor they had always held in their hearts.

They raised their weapons, gleaming in the dying sun, and shouted together. It was worship and it was celebration at once — tribute to their master, and the joy of a prophecy fulfilled across countless generations.

The Celestial Dragon Emperor has returned.

He had passed into legend once. Today he came back — new form, same truth, descending from the sky on dragonback as if he had never been away.

The Dragon-Women’s cries and the dragons’ answering roars wove together into a sound that shook the ground and rang against the clouds, rising until it seemed to reach whatever lay beyond the sky itself. Below, every war beast in the plaza — those that flew and those that didn’t — dropped to the earth. Every one of them, before the Golden Dragon Yueyang rode, assumed a posture of fear and reverence. And what they were doing, underneath it all, was not paying tribute to a dragon.

They were paying tribute to the man on its back.

They were not even worthy of offering tribute to that man directly. The emperor they knelt before was only that man’s mount.

Ordinary merchants and servants had simply folded where they stood, gone slack in their legs under the weight of the dragon’s aura — a single passing glance from above was enough to send a cold terror through the weakest of them. The mercenaries had more backbone than that, hardened as they were to blood and danger — but even they felt the fear. It was just that in them the fear was buried under something bigger: a blazing, irrepressible exhilaration.

Mercenaries dropped to their knees.

Not out of compulsion. Out of something they had never felt before — a pure and involuntary reverence, the kind that rises in a person when they see something so far beyond ordinary human scale that the only honest response is to bow.

This is strength. Real strength. The kind that ends arguments.

Heads tilted back across the plaza as the sun went down. The golden dragon blazed in the last light, scales throwing fire in every direction, and at its center stood the young man everyone recognized — ringed in gold light, elevated above everything, looking — perhaps, just perhaps — the way the legends said the gods looked.

Not perhaps. Exactly like that.

“The Third Young Master of the Yue Clan, riding a Sky-rank Golden Dragon, led ten thousand dragons out from the Sky Stairway and returned to the Great Xia capital.”

“The Great Xia Emperor Jun Wuyou personally led a welcome party.”

“The four great clans have gathered. Nearly a hundred noble families and great houses attended.”

The news spread like a chain of cannon fire, city to city, each report landing before the last one had finished reverberating. Within hours, there was not a tavern, a plaza, or a public corner in any city that wasn’t talking about it. No exaggeration, no rumor — the announcement came directly from all three guilds simultaneously. The Warriors’ Guild, the Mercenary Guild, and the Thieves’ Guild carried identical notices: the Third Young Master of the Yue Clan was forming a Dragon Rider Legion. No restriction on gender. No restriction on background. No restriction on current strength, age, or origin. The goal was simple: to find potential and develop it.

On the door of nearly every tavern, the three guilds had posted notices, free of charge:

Come and join the Dragon Rider Legion. What are you waiting for?

The next elite could be you.

You may not know how much potential you carry. You may never know what you’re capable of becoming. That doesn’t matter. Take one step forward, and the life you’ve been dreaming of can be yours. Even if you’re nothing — if your will is unbreakable, the Third Young Master will give you everything.

It costs you nothing. All you need is a heart that refuses to stop growing. That’s all. And you could be the next Dragon Rider — or the next Dragon Blood Guard.

If your own ambitions have burned down to ash — why not let your children try? The next honored Dragon Rider might be your son or daughter.

Fathers who dream of sons that soar — here is the path.

Your sons need this chance.

It went on like that, wall after wall, door after door, across the length and breadth of the continent.

Nobody who read it was unmoved.

No one had ever been this generous. Free evaluation of potential — no cost, no catch. A flying dragon and the title of Dragon Rider, given outright to anyone who qualified. And beyond that: the thing no one else had ever offered. A chance for an ordinary person — the kind the world normally forgot — to become something.

Even if I can’t qualify, maybe my child can.

Even if my child can’t ride, maybe they can serve. Even a groom in that Legion would be worth more than anything I could give them by staying here.

Who had ever shown mercy to the people at the bottom? Who had ever given an opportunity to the mercenary with nothing left to lose? Who had ever looked at the people dying in the slums and seen anything other than a problem to be managed?

Before the Third Young Master — no one. And after him? No one had the power.

Only him.

Across the Longteng continent, something shifted. Not just the culture of martial cultivation — something deeper. The will to survive. The belief that fate was not fixed. It erupted like a volcano, spreading through every city and village, and in its light something happened to people’s eyes on the street: the dullness that had always been there before was replaced, one face at a time, by something that hadn’t been seen in a long time.

Hope.

Real hope, rising from the inside out.

In the Great Xia Imperial Palace. The main hall.

“What you’ve done is put me on display, and I want it on the record that I object.” Yueyang, it turned out, was not quite as magnificent as the general public had been led to believe. The old fox and Jun Wuyou’s aggressive promotional campaign on his behalf was irritating him considerably. If it weren’t for Qianqian and Luohua, he would have been genuinely tempted to knock both old men sideways. “I have things to do. I was busy. Now you’ve made me ten times busier.”

“For the important occasions, yes, we need you present,” the old fox said hastily, soothing the situation before it escalated. “But for routine matters, you won’t need to appear in person. You can focus on your own work.”

“They say that on the path to godhood, the sincere faith of a great many people matters enormously,” Jun Wuyou added helpfully.

“You think ascending to the divine realm is like buying cabbages at the market?” Yueyang stared at him.

“It is a matter of eventually, isn’t it?” Jun Wuyou chuckled mildly. As a father-in-law, he had absolutely no intention of getting into a proper argument with Yueyang.

“Little Yueyang.” Elder Wuteng spoke up, and Yueyang had no recourse whatsoever — his genuine respect for this mentor was unconditional. He raised his hands in surrender and agreed to let everyone make the arrangements. He would cooperate.

As a reward for his good behavior, Princess Qianqian gave him a light kick under the table. When Yueyang looked over at her, she had already turned away, pretending to be deeply engaged in conversation with Yue Bing.

But Yueyang caught the message underneath.

It seemed Qianqian was planning to keep him company tonight.

Things were looking up.