Chapter 1050 — Hope and the Future

"Never mind mourning the ship, Bayangor—just how many orbits did we circle up there..." Beside the silver-white dragon, the aged black dragon kept shaking his dizzy head; the aftereffects of so many implants shutting down made it harder for him to adapt to the current environment than for his two companions, and noise in his nervous system interfered with his judgment without cease. "I feel like I've seen a dozen sunrises and sunsets..."

"Considerably more than that. We were decelerating the whole descent, and once we reached low orbit our orbital velocity was tremendous..." Heragor, scaled in gold, raised his head to look at the empty sky. "We should be grateful for those orbits. Without such a long deceleration, we would by now be part of this land—the impact of falling straight from space to the ground is something even a dragon cannot withstand."

"This land..." Bayangor had finally recovered some strength. Listening to Heragor's words, he slowly propped up his vast upper body and raised his head high to gaze at the devastated land, saying nothing for several minutes—until a particularly biting cold wind swept past his ears, and only then did he draw a soft breath. "Have we... already returned to Thalundor?"

"...I'm not certain, but there seems no other explanation," Heragor said, his voice low. "The last time I could see out the window, I saw that we were falling toward the North Pole, so the only place we could have landed should be Thalundor."

Anqian raised his head as well, gazing silently into the distance, a faint red glow flickering in the mechanical prosthetic eye set in the side of his skull—though the Omega system was offline, many of the implant modifications on this primordial dragon were of very ancient technology: inefficient, yet capable of operating on their own once Omega was lost.

He gazed out for a long while before Anqian finally broke the silence. "Is this really Thalundor..."

"This is what it looks like now... In countless dreams, and in the 'revelations' the gods showed me, I have seen this very sight," Heragor said, taking a step forward. Beneath the golden dragon's feet, the scorching, parched earth cracked inch by inch, and rocks already made fragile by the heat crumbled into dust with a clatter. "...Anqian, Bayangor, what I see at this moment is even a little better than that 'revelation'—after all, the three of us are actually still alive."

"Yes, we're actually still alive," Bayangor said, shaking his head in disbelief. "So why are we still alive? What was that thing that appeared at the end... what pushed us back from space?"

"I don't know, but it was clearly a carefully calculated 'rescue,'" Heragor said. "Without extremely precise calculation, we could not have survived the return after losing power and attitude control."

The three primordial dragons fell silent as one. This unexpected "survival" was far too bizarre, and the situation before them offered no clues whatsoever, so that even the wisest dragon could not begin to make sense of it at this moment.

The silence lasted several minutes before Bayangor spoke in a low voice. "Then what do we do next? What can we still do on this wasteland?"

Anqian, at his side, sighed. "Anything but word-chain games, at any rate."

Heragor shook his head. "I need to think carefully about what we're to do next. This wasteland, well... we are probably the last surviving primordial dragons. Omega must already be—"

"Wait, Heragor," Anqian suddenly cut him off. The aged black dragon raised his head, gazing at the distant sky. "What you just said—that we are probably the last surviving primordial dragons?"

"Hm?"

"Something seems to be flying over," Anqian raised one of his enormous wings and pointed toward a certain direction in the sky. "...Doesn't it look familiar to you?"

In the distant sky, a colossal, ancient black dragon was approaching rapidly, with a smaller blue dragon flying just behind and to its flank. They had evidently already spotted the crash crater on the ground, and without a word between them they quickened their pace, hurtling toward this side in a near-diving posture.

By the crash crater, Anqian, Helagor, and Bayang'er all saw the figures appear in the sky, and apart from Bayang'er—who had not returned to Tarrond in many years—the other two "people" had even identified the two silhouettes by sight alone. Helagor gazed at the sky, and a flicker of complicated emotion suddenly surfaced in his yellow-crystal eyes: "...Perhaps what we are looking at is merely Omega's nodes..."

At those words, Anqian and Bayang'er both fell silent in unison. They all knew Omega's original directives, and naturally they knew what would happen once this final battle drew to a close—in order to avoid the influence of "humanity" as much as possible, to keep Omega from developing a "heart" and forging a connection with the gods, they had set Omega's operating logic in place a million years ago. The latter would run in the most efficient, most precise, and most ruthless manner, and the entire future of dragonkind was placed wholly in the judgment of Omega's AI—in the simulated feedback generated by a thousand hundred trial runs, Omega had without hesitation executed the plan to erase the minds of all dragonkind...

Amid complicated emotions, the three primeval dragons watched the two figures flying in from the distance draw ever nearer, watched them slow in the low air and gradually approach the ground. They saw the aged black dragon land steadily among the ruins, while the blue dragon, as though unable to judge its footing, missed a step amid the broken walls and tumbled head over heels to land right before Bayang'er.

For a moment, the atmosphere turned a little awkward.

Bayang'er tilted his head slightly and looked toward the silent Helagor.

"Why do I get the feeling this one doesn't look like one of Omega's nodes?"