Chapter 9 — Burning

Gao Yang was startled, and at once realized he still had not fully gotten into character—he had given himself away. So he hastily put on a stern face and dredged up every ounce of his acting ability. "Dwelling on such things is of no use. Gao Yang Cecil is a pioneer. Every inch of this family's land and every coin of its wealth I built from nothing with my own hands. If the domain is gone, it is gone; at worst we find somewhere new and break new ground. What is all this fussing about?"

Heidi and Rebecca nodded hurriedly, and as they nodded they were filled with boundless admiration for the Xuanmai Sect, thinking to themselves that this was truly a legendary-level Xuanmai Sect—such vision and such breadth of mind were indeed beyond compare. They only wondered where the ancestor intended to go and break new ground, in an age when all land had already been carved up by the existing noble order and the unclaimed territories were almost all forbidden zones...

"There's nothing more worth seeing here. Next we must plan our route. First we find a town, then find a way to regroup with the group that broke out back then," Gao Yang said, seizing the moment while his assumed authority still held to change the subject. "I recall it was a knight named Philip who led the breakout, was it not? Did you agree on a rendezvous point?"

Rebecca answered at once. "We settled on Tansang Town in the north. If Tansang has also been attacked by the monsters, we continue north along the King's Road."

Gao Yang nodded and was about to leave when a strange sensation suddenly halted him in his tracks.

After a moment of blank surprise, he and the knight Byron beside him cried out almost simultaneously, "Get down! Hide!"

Though they did not understand why, Rebecca and Heidi immediately followed the knight Byron and hid beneath a large boulder nearby, while Amber had vanished into the shadows the instant Gao Yang opened his mouth, slipping into some corner or cranny beyond knowing. Gao Yang ducked in close behind Rebecca to take cover, only to see that the somewhat simple-looking little maid Betty was still standing there clutching her frying pan, a blank look on her face. He shot out and dragged her back, and almost in the very next instant, a sense of oppression that made every heart tremble descended from the sky.

In the growing radiance of the "giant sun," an elegant and enormous creature flew slowly across the sky.

It was a dragon, tens of meters long.

In her terror, Heidi instinctively cast a third-tier spell, "Bent-Light Field," concealing the forms of everyone present, though she had no confidence at all that such a crude spell could fool the eyes of a legendary creature.

But the dragon indeed did not notice the people on the ground—or perhaps it simply disdained to pay them any mind. He or she merely beat its wings slowly, flying across the sky with elegance and majesty, those enormous eyes reflecting the lands of the Cecil domain laid waste by the demonic tide.

Then it spat a mouthful of soda water... oh, exhaled a breath and burned the place to ash.