1: Prologue: Dream of the Past 1: Prologue: Dream of the Past The old tree’s withered branches split the view like lightning, dividing the night sky into irregular grids.
A crimson full moon hung high, casting a blood-red light on the ruins.
Within the endless gray mist, an ancient bell tower stood stubbornly, like an aging knight proceeding to his death, its damaged clock face resembling its faded medal of honor.
Gongsun Ce collapsed weakly into the gray mist, staring at the top of the distant bell tower, fixating on another living creature amidst the mist.
A cuckoo bird flitted back and forth above the broken clock face, repeating its tedious call again and again.
The cuckoo bird was crudely made, lacking refinement, much like a rushed project completed by students just before their deadline.
It had a glass eye, yet only one had been made, turning it into a one-eyed time-telling bird—far from charming, it was downright unpleasant.
This cuckoo bird had become the last survivor of Supibia.
This place was once a resplendent city, Morton Island’s capital of which they were proud.
Knights patrolled the bright streets, nobles chatted and laughed in their platinum-colored buildings, and the bustling outer city teemed with the clamor of ordinary people—a noisy yet peaceful scene.
Now, everything was utterly gone.
The royal city had turned into a gray, foreign realm; palaces had reduced to ruins; regardless of nobles, knights, or commoners, all life had melted into the cold mist.
Only a wooden bird kept calling monotonously, as though mourning the past, and simultaneously mocking the present.
They had made so many preparations; they fought with their lives, never wishing to give up even at the last moment…
yet now the city was destroyed, with no survivors left.
The white mist began to erode Gongsun Ce’s body, and soon he too would dissolve alive into the mist.
He felt no pain, only a sense of being entranced in his sadness.
So this was the Dragon Disaster, a force beyond the Mortal World, a calamity that destroyed everything—how insignificant humanity seemed before such natural disasters.
But the calamity had arrived, so where was the giant dragon?
A deafening bell rang out, intermixed with the low laughter of a malevolent being.
The vibrations of the bell broke the cuckoo bird’s perch.
Unable to flutter its unfinished wooden wings, the bird fell stiffly like a person.
It was supposed to fall into the grayness, to be swallowed by the mist.
However, the scene that unfolded before the young man was drastically different: the hazy gray momentarily dispersed, leaving only a few remnants, nest-like, supporting it.
Then, the city-wide mist spiraled, forming a cyclone with the wooden bird as its eye.
The gray mist wrapped layer by layer around the wooden sculpture, outlining fine scales, a thick tail, slender limbs, skeletal wings, a barrel-like swollen body, and a tiny head with just one eye—the new body, the true body.
The petite statue was no more, replaced by a massive and terrifying twisted beast!
It violently spread its fleshless wings, its dry wings slashing through the night like lightning, nearly obscuring the entire sky.
The mist surged and spun with its movements, as if countless souls were cheering the king’s arrival!
It spread its fleshless wings, flapped its dry wings, passed beyond the top of the bell tower, continuing upward, upward, flying towards the sky…
Proclaiming the arrival of the giant dragon.
Then, Gongsun Ce awoke from his nightmare.
Memories he wished to forget flooded into his mind like a tide, fear and sadness abruptly seizing his heart.
Supporting his forehead with one hand, he gasped for air, struggling to calm his emotions, yet finding it difficult to immediately dispel the lingering nightmares of the past.
The sob-like dragon’s roar still echoed in his mind, the residual sound of the dream that had not yet departed.
Because he had removed his glasses before sleeping, the scene before him was blurry, as if enveloped in mist…
Just like the gloom from three years ago, which lingered still.