Chapter 739: I Am Going to Eat All of You!
Clang.
The Sun-Herding Dragon's claws clashed with the Stasis Seven-Segment Grass Nails in midair, grinding out sparks, and one stalk of vetiver grass caught fire and burned away into a small flame.
At the same time, Locke gradually grasped the key to wielding the power of the Sun-Herding Dragon, this particular kind of dragon creature.
He swung his dragon tail and struck the Stasis Seven-Segment Grass Nails, and the grass nails floating in midair began igniting one by one.
Locke rose like a sun from below into the sky above, his rounded Sun-Herding Dragon belly now radiating golden firelight that spread in all directions like a great solar disc.
"So that is how it works. The power of the Sun-Herding Dragon is different from the power of a wizard."
Locke had figured it out.
"The reason I was making myself so clumsy before was that I was trying to control the Sun-Herding Dragon's power in the same way I use magic, which was entirely the wrong approach, adding unnecessary steps in between. Using this kind of dragon-race power only requires using it the same way I use my superintuition."
"The Sun-Herding Dragon converts power by burning the dragon blood within its body."
"So I need to control this power in a more direct manner. It is a mode of application that approaches pure instinct."
Locke realized this was probably also what wizards of the bloodline school felt when fighting.
After forcibly switching to a new skill set and panel, Locke, now as a dragon, had developed a far better understanding of how magical creatures fought. He also realized that during his First Circle stage, when he had used bloodline magic, he had developed many incorrect habits.
The first of them was treating bloodline magic the same way he played with botanical magic.
Thinking back carefully, along his journey so far, he had received proper instruction in botanical magic, alchemy, and breeding studies, and even archaeology.
But bloodline magic had always been a half-hearted affair, learned here and there with no system to it, never studied in any comprehensive way.
And so he had been going about bloodline application entirely the wrong way all along.
That was perfectly understandable.
But what this also meant was that he had never once drawn out the true power of the Three-Eyed Tiger Cat or his dragon bloodline.
Locke swung a dragon claw at the last two remaining Stasis Seven-Segment Grass Nails, and then three trails of molten lava spread out from his dragon claws.
Dragon Claw!
In the next moment, two molten lava claw marks swept through the Stasis Seven-Segment Grass Nails, completely devouring both of them. The remaining molten lava claw mark hurtled toward Wizard Kelt.
The Dragon Claw imprint swallowed him whole.
The Dragon Claw was an innate bloodline spell-like ability of the dragon race, a type of quasi-spell ability considered one of the origins of spell models, primitive and crude, but effective. Using it could not be approached like solving a precise mathematical problem. It had to be wielded like exercising one's own instincts.
Of course, this meant he could no longer fine-tune spell models during combat.
Wizard Kelt was turned into a fireball and sent plummeting from the sky, crashing into the Dragon Mountain Range and blasting a deep crater in the mountainside.
Seeing this, Locke immediately turned and headed toward where Witch Esther had fallen.
At that moment, Esther was being besieged by numerous wyverns, and was also under attack from Golden Crown Mountain's sun ring and moon ring wizards, leaving her with no means of escape.
But now Locke spread his wings and took flight, and as a dragon, he held a significant advantage within this wyvern swarm. The moment the wyverns sensed the dragon authority radiating from his body, they gave way one after another.
This allowed Locke to move freely through the wyvern swarm, and wherever he moved, a wide path of wyverns parted before him.
Locke quickly flew to the sky above Esther, and after releasing one dragon roar, all of the wyverns besieging Esther immediately drew back. In that instant, the space around Esther was completely clear.
Even Esther herself was taken aback, half-wondering whether she had somehow cast a summoning school spell and brought this great dragon under her control.
Wizard Cis, standing on his mahogany tree boat, swept a suspicious gaze over Locke, confirming that there was no summoning school dragon-taming sub-branch spell model on Locke, nor any other spell model of any kind.
In the next moment, Locke snapped his jaws toward Witch Esther, while simultaneously unleashing another of the dragon race's quasi-spell abilities that functioned like pure instinct, the Blazing Sun Dragon's Breath.
A wave of dragon-tongue fire washed over Esther's entire body.
At the same time, Locke made as though to swallow her whole.
Witch Esther's heart immediately steadied.
"So it wants to eat me. It sees me as prey, and has been helping me entirely by accident."
"This is something I can make use of. As long as I can properly exploit this dragon, I can use the dragon disaster to shake off my pursuers."
In the next moment, Locke was astonished to see nothing more than a rose appear before him, and then he and Witch Esther swapped positions.
He found himself on the mountain peak where Witch Esther had been standing, while Witch Esther appeared in midair at the spot he had just occupied.
She reached out and seized a wyvern king, deploying a dodder magical plant. The dodder coiled around the head of the wyvern king, whose magic pressure was at the peak of the First Circle, then rapidly spread across its skull. Within just a few breaths, it had transformed into a set of reins wrapped around the wyvern king's body.
Though the wyvern king had not lost its independent will, its body was now under Esther's control, and it could only carry her in flight.
And so Witch Esther gripped the hanging part of the dodder and dangled beneath the wyvern, ordering it to fly away as swiftly as possible.
Moreover, because she had seized control of the wyvern king, the majority of the wyverns stopped attacking her.
Wizard Cis observed this scene, no longer caring about dealing with the great dragon that was Locke in disguise. A cold gleam flashed in his eyes, and he immediately turned his boat around to give chase.
"Esther, any wizard who betrays the Throne must die."
"You are bound by many contracts with Golden Crown Mountain. You cannot leave."
"While you still have time to turn back, you can come back. As long as you go before the Throne and admit your mistakes, perhaps you can still atone for what you have done. For the sake of our hundred years of friendship, this is the last mercy I will offer you."
Wizard Cis recited an incantation, and a scholar tree wooden sword that had been flying toward Locke's swapped position suddenly vanished and reappeared in his hand.
Wizard Cis looked at the scholar tree wooden sword in his hand. "The Sun-Herding Dragon's attribute clashes with my scholar tree wooden sword. Had it fallen just then, it would have killed that infuriating dragon outright."
"But doing so would cause the dragon's blood to splatter, and my scholar tree wooden sword's power would be affected. That was surely what Esther was counting on. This scholar tree wooden sword is linked to my Grand Magic. My Grand Magic would become unstable and my magic pressure would drop."
Wizard Cis gritted his teeth.
"Esther has personally led many medium and large-scale wizard wars. She is experienced and seasoned, and truly troublesome to deal with. A person like her has betrayed the Throne. Why?"
At this moment, Locke, now on the mountain peak, noticed a hidden scholar tree wooden sword hovering just three inches above his dragon head. Had Wizard Cis not recalled his magical plant on his own initiative, Locke would likely have been severely injured in an instant.
"Sun ring wizards... are truly the most exceptional within the Second Circle."
Locke felt a tremendous sense of pressure.
Even as a Second Circle wizard, he was this vulnerable before a sun ring wizard.
Yet they were still all Second Circle in tier, and so through a series of fortunate coincidences, he had managed to qualify to intervene in a battle between high-level Second Circle wizards.
On the other side, Wizard Kelt flew out from the flames. A series of water cloud barriers materialized around him, dreamlike and serene, light as drifting clouds.
Wizard Kelt looked toward Locke's position with obvious irritation.
"That wretched dragon."
"No idea where it came from. There is no trace of any wizard's spell model having been placed on its body. It is just a wild dragon."
"Only, the longer we fought, the more its movement seemed to sort itself out, and I ended up coming off worse for it."
Wizard Kelt called out urgently to his Golden Crown Mountain colleagues, "All of you go after Witch Esther. I will deal with this foolish dragon that has barged in on us out of nowhere."
At this, the Golden Crown Mountain wizards each employed their own methods and set off in pursuit of Witch Esther, who was attempting to flee on the back of a wyvern king.
Wizard Kelt flipped open his left palm, and a stalk of vetiver grass appeared in it. In moments, one stalk after another appeared, and an entire grassland spread across his palm.
In an instant, his magic pressure rose to its peak. All of the surrounding wyverns seemed to feel fear, and began retreating and giving way one after another.
Only because of the suppressive presence of those peculiar planar dragons hanging inverted in the sky above, they did not turn tail and flee entirely, and continued slowly closing in on Wizard Kelt, though at a much reduced pace.
This was Wizard Kelt's Grand Magic, Serene Prairie.
He had come from a small-to-medium wizard organization in the Cloud Marsh Wetlands called Serene Garden. After Serene Garden was annihilated by the Twin Demon Realm, he worked his way to Golden Crown Mountain through great effort. But his Grand Magic had already been constructed, and so it remained rooted in the Serene Prairie.
The Serene Prairie was based on the Vetiver Assassination Storm as its foundational spell.
And vetiver grass was also Serene Garden's primary research direction.
Small wizard organizations like Serene Garden, unlike large ones, could not spread their limited resources across too many fields while still maintaining their ability to publish journals and apply for grants. So they tended to specialize in only one or two areas.
Serene Garden's key research focus had been vetiver grass.
Even so, Serene Garden's vetiver grass research had not matched Golden Crown Mountain's, because vetiver was a type of pasture grass, and Golden Crown Mountain also maintained a vetiver garden dedicated to the study of this plant.
Wizard Kelt had always considered himself relatively fortunate. After joining Golden Crown Mountain, he had gained access to a wealth of cutting-edge vetiver research, and through this accumulated research he had gradually refined his Grand Magic.
At this moment, the vetiver grass within his Grand Magic, Serene Prairie, was growing wildly, surging toward Locke.
Every surrounding wyvern was bound by the grass, which transformed into terrifying chains. Any dragon-kind creature that fell into this grassland would be immobilized and unable to move.
Locke opened his dragon maw and released his Blazing Sun Dragon's Breath, a torrent of flames that shot forward and fell upon the vetiver grassland.
Under the dragon fire, the vetiver grassland caught flame, but the damage was minimal.
Locke paused in surprise, only then noticing that while vetiver was the primary component of the Serene Prairie, it was mixed with more than a dozen other grass species, including some bromegrass of the Poaceae family.
This First Circle magical plant possessed powerful fire-resistant properties.
Beyond that, there was also some sun radiance alfalfa, a grass capable of converting solar energy into light energy, an apprentice-level magical plant.
While these were peripheral grasses at the edges of the Serene Prairie, they were playing a critical role at this moment.
Furthermore, once the sun radiance alfalfa burned away into plant ash, it would release multiple natural magical power structural components, which would in turn cause the vetiver grass to flourish, triggering a chain reaction.
Locke was genuinely taken aback.
"Worthy of a long-serving Second Circle wizard at Golden Crown Mountain. Even if this Grand Magic was not particularly refined at the start, Wizard Kelt has spent twenty years at Golden Crown Mountain making small adjustments and modifications bit by bit."
"No matter how difficult a Grand Magic is to rebuild, and no matter that it can only be patched rather than replaced, after so many years, his Grand Magic has overcome many of its weaknesses."
"It has become very well-rounded."
Though its energy dissipation was extremely high compared to the Grand Magics he had seen in the Silent Chalice competition.
The Serene Prairie wasted a great deal of energy, and its energy compatibility was only average. Its instantaneous magic pressure amplification was the worst aspect of all.
The Serene Prairie lacked offensive magic, which caused severe problems with its instantaneous magic pressure amplification.
Wizard Kelt's approach had been to optimize the ecology of the Serene Prairie, making it more closely resemble a truly vast and natural primordial grassland, thereby reducing energy dissipation and improving energy compatibility.
That was the only way he could compensate for its weaknesses.
A wave of vetiver grass broke through the wall of flames and surged toward Locke's dragon body to bind him.
Locke swung a dragon claw, shattering some of the grass, then turned and flew upward, but the magical grasses with vetiver at their core kept multiplying behind him, spreading continuously.
Grass did not win through quality. It won through quantity.
Locke turned and tried once more to unleash a breath attack, a surging dragon's breath descending like heavenly fire, washing over Wizard Kelt's Grand Magic. For one instant, it seemed as though the entire grassland had ignited.
A great conflagration, the magical grasses charred black.
But the moment he stopped breathing fire, the flames diminished sharply, and before long they died out entirely.
Locke turned to look back, genuinely surprised. Was Wizard Kelt this capable?
Wizard Kelt smiled at the sight. "Had I encountered this foolish dragon twenty years ago, when I had just entered Golden Crown Mountain, a thorough dousing of breath like that would certainly have dealt a devastating blow to my Grand Magic. But I have spent twenty years at Golden Crown Mountain and received a wealth of cutting-edge ecological knowledge."
"Weeds are weak, yet they can smother fire. Pasture grass may not be a combat magical plant, but at this moment it can seal away your power."
Wizard Kelt held a stalk of vetiver in his hand.
Hundreds of years ago, vetiver had been nothing more than a wilded magical plant, classified as a semi-weed type. But in recent times, multiple uses had been developed for it, whether as pasture grass, as a raw alchemy material, in perfume production, as plant fiber thread, or in the construction of certain special void warships and war machines. This grass had applications in all of these.
And so the study of vetiver had risen along with its economic importance.
A fierce gleam flashed in Wizard Kelt's eyes.
"Let me finish off this foolish dragon now. The most valuable things on a Sun-Herding Dragon from head to tail are its dragon blood and its dragon pearl, which can respectively be used to make..."
Wizard Kelt had already mentally calculated the price of every part of Locke's body.
He was just waiting to collect his bounty. He could recoup some of his losses.
As it happened, his one-million-magic-stone loan from the Fairy Bank was due for repayment, and this foolish dragon had appeared at just the right moment, like a pillow delivered when he felt like sleeping.
Locke glanced in Witch Esther's direction and saw that Esther had managed to escape the encirclement thanks to his two interventions, and seemed on the verge of getting away entirely.
The best thing to do now was to shake off Wizard Kelt and catch up, to ensure he could fully complete the private mission Witch Yekaterina had assigned him.
Only when Locke looked up, he found himself surrounded on all sides by vetiver grassland. The vetiver had spread completely, closing off above and below, and in an instant, the dragon radiating light and heat from his entire body was completely encircled by the Serene Prairie.
Stalk after stalk of vetiver caught fire, burned away to ash, and then those ashes were absorbed by the prairie, from which even denser grass grew in their place.
Locke immediately worked out the general principle. Using the ash of burned grasses to produce even more abundant vetiver pasture did not seem entirely logical on the surface.
But when properly exploited, the natural magical power structural components released by the apprentice-level and First Circle magical plants within the prairie burning to ash could achieve exactly this effect on a localized scale.
In this way, the Serene Prairie acted like a sealing spell, capable of immobilizing his power.
At the same time, Locke felt the dragon force within him becoming harder and harder to move.
These vetiver grasses were not only growing more numerous, but once they wound around his body, they caused his power to congeal. Even the firelight radiating from his dragon scales on the surface of his body had begun to gutter out.
Locke's magic pressure was now continuously declining, while his soul force was becoming increasingly active in inverse proportion. His soul force was rising steadily.
After Wizard Kelt saw that Locke had been completely immobilized, he reached out one hand, casting two spell models, the Grass and Wood Divine Weapon Curse.
A stalk of vetiver appeared in his hand. It was a First Circle-grade vetiver grass, yet under the enhancement of a Second Circle spell model, it became like a sharp green sword.
Wizard Kelt, holding his vetiver grass sword, stood before Locke, watching the surrounded dragon with his firelight fading and his magic pressure declining, and gave a cold snort.
"Wretched foolish dragon. You have made everything so needlessly complicated because of you. You have caused us such enormous trouble."
"You should have some quasi-spell abilities that allow you to learn the human language. Is there nothing you want to say?"
He drove the sword through the dragon scales on Locke's chest.
"Tell me. Why have you helped Witch Esther multiple times? Who ordered you to do this?"
"Is this your own doing, or has a high-circle wizard given you a command?"
At this moment, Locke sensed that for one brief instant there had been a trace of magic pressure movement in the surrounding area, but in the very next instant, all of those fluctuations vanished.
It was clear that Wizard Kelt had not detected it at all. The fact that he could detect it was not because he was more capable than Kelt, but because his Three-Eyed Tiger Cat possessed a high-level pupil technique, which allowed him to catch this instantaneous magic pressure shift.
"Someone is observing this place remotely with a spell. It seems I have been showing too many tells, and someone has grown suspicious of my identity."
"Teacher told me I absolutely cannot reveal my identity, so I have to cover this up."
"And right now I do not know who is watching this place. But if Wizard Kelt has not detected it, that means the person is a wizard of very high circle."
"No, wait. If it were a very high-circle wizard, why would I still be able to detect the magic pressure movement? Deliberate?"
"Yes. This too is a test."
Locke grasped this in an instant, thanks to his extensive combat experience against black wizards, and the naturally keen combat instincts he had been born with due to his dragon bloodline. With superintuition, he had immediately grasped the other party's intent.
As a naturally-born Second Circle creature, the Sun-Herding Dragon's perception and related panels exceeded those of a Second Circle wizard of ordinary human origin.
And so a magic pressure shift of that magnitude would have been exactly at the threshold of what a real Sun-Herding Dragon could barely detect.
But what if he was not a true Sun-Herding Dragon?
In that case, there were two possibilities.
The first was that he would not detect it.
The second was that he would detect it, but would pretend not to.
And so Locke erupted in rage, "Wretched wizard! I was sleeping, and you had the nerve to wake me up. I am going to eat all of you! Not one of you will be spared!"
"That witch was the loudest of all. I am going to eat her. And you too, I am going to eat you. Going to eat you!"
Wizard Kelt was momentarily stunned, and Locke made to spit dragon fire at him, but the dense grassland surrounding him blocked the flames, which rebounded and lingered inside the grassland, scorching his own body instead.
Wizard Kelt muttered to himself.
"It seems fine. Dragon-kind creatures are naturally hot-tempered. Could this really have just been a coincidence?"
In the next moment, the vetiver grassland began to spontaneously combust all on its own. The entire grassland turned into countless sparks of fire raining down toward the ground.
In an instant, Locke broke free, like a rising sun, with a dragon pearl floating behind him that blazed like a sun. It was that dragon pearl that had ignited the vetiver grassland from within, freeing Locke from his confinement.
Wizard Kelt felt his magic pressure destabilize in an instant, "What is happening? How is it possible? A dragon fighting entirely on brute force, how could it have broken my Grand Magic?"
"That was... a dragon pearl. This is a troublesome dragon indeed. How can a dragon creature of this magic pressure level be this powerful?"
In the next moment, Locke's dragon tail swept into him, and with a single blow Wizard Kelt was sent flying.
Wizard Kelt let out a pained yelp. He had been smacked by a dragon's tail and sent flying.
This was a profound humiliation.
Still, his guess had not been wrong. The Sun-Herding Dragon's skill set and panel truly could not normally break free of a Grand Magic.
With both being Second Circle creatures at roughly equivalent magic pressure, a Grand Magic was simply stronger than a dragon-kind's innate abilities.
And so what Locke had done was use the Moon of Evolution to push those vetiver grasses to the fullest extent of their growth, causing them to flourish and then rapidly wither, and through this method had broken free of the Serene Prairie's hold.
Only, because of the Dragon-Tasting Marvel, even when he used the Moon of Evolution, it appeared to outside observers as nothing more than a Sun-Herding Dragon using its dragon pearl.
At this moment, Locke flew through the air without immediately choosing to give chase, instead putting on the appearance of a dragon that was about to devour Wizard Kelt on the spot.
Wizard Kelt, rattled by the blow, hurriedly retreated, but could not shake Locke. And so with no other option, he was forced to head toward where Esther and Wizard Cis were, hoping to regroup with the Golden Crown Mountain wizards.
This way, under what was possibly the surveillance of Rose Council wizards, Locke had a perfectly reasonable excuse to continue chasing after Esther.
Locke pursued Wizard Kelt with ferocious intensity.
"Wizard, I am going to eat you. Slow down for me!"
In the next moment, Wizard Kelt ran even faster, allowing Locke to accelerate and close in on Witch Esther at greater speed.
Locke thought to himself, "Wizard Kelt truly is the second-most-considerate wizard toward me at Golden Crown Mountain. If it were not for his cooperation like this, I would have had a very difficult time completing the mission Teacher gave me in this operation."
"Honestly, if Kelt kept fighting me, the outcome would have been hard to call. He does outclass me by two thousand magic pressure. A sixty-forty split, my sixty and his forty. But he seems to have been shaken, and so he is not daring to fight me anymore."
The main point was that his own Grand Magic had a more excellent structure than Kelt's Grand Magic, and moreover his Grand Magic was the botanical school's Grand Phantom God of Internal Warfare.
Wizard Kelt's Grand Magic, the Serene Prairie, could not match his Moon of Evolution in a direct confrontation.
At that moment, Locke again sensed an abnormal magic pressure shift in his surroundings. He did a quick mental calculation and determined that it was a level of magic pressure that a normal ordinary Sun-Herding Dragon would not be able to detect. And so he completely ignored this magic pressure shift, pretending he had noticed nothing whatsoever.
"Wizard, wait right there. I am going to eat all of you!"