Chapter 1013 — Spin-Up

Pei Yi left the room. Luo Yan stood in place for a while before he finally broke the silence, as though talking to himself: "Everything is indeed as you said."

The moment the words left his mouth, an invisible wind suddenly swept through the empty study, and from it came a murmur like several voices layered atop one another, drifting in from every direction: "Of course—perhaps we have not been on the best of terms these past years, but one thing you must admit: where matters of the gods are concerned, the knowledge I have given you has never once been wrong... Once a cooperative relationship is established, I have always been full of sincerity."

Luo Yan narrowed his eyes slightly. Others might see nothing at all, but in his sight, scattered motes of starlight had already crept over the surrounding walls and floor. Within the violet-black shadows countless gazes seemed to lurk, and the floor-to-ceiling window at his side was spilling in a light like that of dusk—a radiance that cast its projection upon the ground, shot through with shadows like cloud and mist.

Amid this tangled overlay of light and shadow, an abstract eye, wound together from curving lines, slowly opened before him. Its hollow pupil was fixed on this place, utterly devoid of any human feeling.

If an ordinary person were to witness this scene—even a single careless glimpse—they would in an instant be driven mad by this eye and the boundless knowledge it contained. But to Luo Yan and the members of the Augustus family, this eye was already an "old friend."

"Sincerity..." Luo Yan said softly, the corners of his mouth seeming to curve upward ever so slightly. "You should know very well that I have never truly trusted your sincerity... For mortals, trusting a 'thing' like you is far too expensive a proposition."

"...Fair enough," the eye was silent for a moment, and then, surprisingly, it shed that ever-present note of seduction and agreed with considerable seriousness. "I must admit, over the many years past, my dealings with you have not been altogether pleasant... I know what a great price your family paid to accommodate 'me,' but whether you believe it or not, that was never my intent."

Luo Yan said nothing, only listening quietly as this "eye" spoke on as though muttering to itself.

"...I have been this way since the moment of my birth, and so have the other gods since theirs. Toward you mortals we bear no malice whatsoever, and yet our very existence is a threat to you—just as those who draw near the flame are burned, though that is not the flame's fault. Child of Augustus, if you set aside your prejudice, you should know that what I say is the truth.

"So I do not expect you to 'trust' me in any great measure, for even I do not trust myself not to do you harm in the days to come... Humans should not believe in the mercy of nature, and you should not believe in a divine fragment that parasites upon your family...

"But on that premise, we still share a common goal... Child of Augustus, we share a common goal."

Luo Yan Augustus finally broke the silence. He said in a low voice: "To end all of this."

"Yes, to end all of this, to end this relationship that has been torment to us both," the eye said calmly. It floated in midair, the countless curves that formed its outline and the starlight spilling around it slowly writhing, and within that motion there seemed to be a faint, gentle tremor. "Relax a little—this curse is finally coming to an end... Better to think now of the brighter future ahead. You and your family will at last be free of the nightmare, and I too shall have my freedom—do not meet that with fear or resistance. I can promise you this: I will stand on the side of you and your empire... Are you not about to lose the guardian deity you have always had? Then let me take that place. The power of dreams shall be your new bulwark..."

Luo Yan was silent for several seconds, as though seriously weighing the feasibility of the matter, and only after a long while did he give a slight nod: "Once all is settled, I will give it serious consideration."

"Of course, of course, you must be that cautious—otherwise I would not hold you in such regard. Consider it carefully; the decision is yours. Whatever answer you give when the time comes, our cooperation will stand..."

The eye's voice gradually faded, and the drifting light and shadow in the room little by little returned to normal. As the starlight and the dusk-like glow receded, the space before Luo Yan's eyes became the room he knew once more.

He gazed calmly at the now-empty air, and for the next ten minutes or so he did not look away, as though that eye were still floating there...

……

"That is the intelligence General Philip has just sent back," Hedy reported the situation at the front, standing before Gao Yang with an unusually stern expression. "In this battle, the World Serpent has lost all combat capability; what wreckage was recovered has essentially no value for repair. The other armored train is severely damaged, and repairs may stretch into spring. Dragon-rider casualties are still being tallied—the blizzard caused a considerable number of missing personnel, and search-and-rescue operations are already under way."

Gao Yang sat behind his desk, listening to Hedy's report without missing a word. This battle report, arriving suddenly from the front, had shattered the stalemate and balance that had held there for many days, and had also thrown off the rhythm of certain plans of Gao Yang's own—and moreover, from this sudden large-scale operation of the Typhonians, he had caught a whiff of something unusual.

"In other words... the Typhonians employed a large-scale 'miracle,'" he said at last, breaking the silence once Hedy's report reached a pause. "And because it was a disturbance on the scale of a celestial phenomenon, or for some other reason, this thing also slipped past our detection technology?"

"Yes. Until the supernatural phenomenon suddenly appeared within the blizzard, the magic-detection devices mounted on the armored trains and dragon-riders showed no response at all—after which those same devices were comprehensively jammed, and the enemy launched their full assault," Hedy nodded, her expression grave. "General Philip's analysis is that this may on one hand be due to the special nature of 'miracles'—a miracle in the form of a celestial phenomenon would in itself possess properties that evade detection—and on the other hand the Typhonians may have developed some kind of... countermeasure against our detection technology. Considering that their accumulated knowledge in magic is far more advanced than ours, the emergence of some counter-spell is highly likely."

"Our current detection technology still has room for improvement," Gao Yang said in a firm voice. "Send the battlefield data and all the wreckage of Typhon equipment collected on site to the research institutes at Changfeng and Solin. Find out exactly what means the enemy used to bring about this surprise attack... Also, what are the dragonkin casualties?"

Hedy thought for a moment: "Two dragonkin mercenaries dead, sixteen severely wounded, the rest lightly wounded... The casualty figures in this regard have been compiled and sent to the relevant officers of the Holy Dragon Duchy."

Gao Yang was taken aback. "...Every single dragonkin wounded?"

War inevitably kills. Even with the dragonkin's formidable fighting power, facing the overwhelming Typhon air force, it was impossible that they suffer no casualties at all—Gao Yang had considered this when he first recruited the dragonkin mercenaries. But he had not expected that this mighty air force, on its very first foray onto the battlefield, would come back with every last one of them wounded. For a moment he was somewhat surprised—not one of them had come away unscathed? Were the Typhonians truly that strong?