Episode 207

Su Jin was quite curious about this item that Wu Chen just used and asked, “What is this item? It looks like an eye of sorts.”

The item that Wu Chen had thrown into the air wasn’t very large and it was round, so it resembled an eye in the sky. And when Su Jin looked up at it, he noticed that the object looked back at him too, as though it were sentient.

“This is an Air Seeing Pearl, which is a pretty special item. But the air it’s looking out for isn’t the atmospheric air but the breath of living creatures,” explained Wu Chen. “As long as it’s alive, it’ll have breath. Of course, different living creatures will have a slightly different sort of breath, but this pearl is able to see the breath left behind by any living creature within the last three days.”

Su Jin clapped his hands excitedly. Now that they had a clear target, they immediately headed in that direction. One was a formidable owner who had once reached deity level, while the other was an old timer who had gone through a few dozen Challenges. Each of them had their own way of moving around and could move at incredible speeds.

Su Jin flapped his arms and covered more than 10 meters with one leap despite the Handbook’s limits on his strength in Challenges. From afar, he looked like a large bird taking flight.

Wu Chen used a technique that Su Jin had never seen before. He looked like he was just running in spurts, but he never fell behind Su Jin, which was simply amazing to Su Jin.

A few hours later, they both came to a stop. They had arrived at a village, or rather, what used to be a village. The entire place was white from being covered in frost and ice. A large number of people and animals in the village had been frozen into ice sculptures, but the forest a distance away had been burned and reduced to ash.

Everything else had also been destroyed. Houses and fields had been severely damaged as well. It looked like this village had just gone through the apocalypse.

“It looks like we’ve been heading in the right direction,” said Su Jin with a frown. Suddenly, he heard the sound of crying. The two of them immediately looked for where the sound was coming from and quickly realized it was coming from one of the houses. Everyone had been frozen solid, except for one young man who was hugging one of the ice sculptures helplessly and crying like a child.

The two of them exchanged glances. Su Jin reached out to pat the young man on the shoulder and said, “The dead have gone, the living must be strong.”

“Jin, he’s not Chinese – are you sure he gets what you’re saying?” whispered Wu Chen.

The young man nodded at Su Jin and said, “Thanks for the condolences, but… my entire family has been killed by the evil dragon. The pain and sadness I feel is just too much for me to bear!”

Su Jin gave Wu Chen a smug look, then turned back to the young man and said, “Instead of wallowing in your sadness, why not take action on it? Your family has been killed by the evil dragon. What’s the point in crying now?”

“What do you mean?” The young man wiped his tears away.

“Take revenge! Wouldn’t that make you feel much better?” said Su Jin matter-of-factly. Wu Chen tried not to laugh. His team leader was sounding more and more dramatic by the minute.

But the young man agreed with Su Jin. He said to them, “What about both of you? Are you also people who lost their homes to the evil dragon?”

They nodded and the young man asked to go with them on their hunt for the dragon. Su Jin didn’t mind letting him tag along. An ordinary person wasn’t of much help in a fight, but he needed his help in other aspects.

“As the saying goes, if you know your enemy well, you can win any fight against them. Since we’re on a mission to slay the dragon, then it’ll be best to find out more about it. Young man, do you know anything about this evil dragon?” asked Su Jin.

The young man shook his head. Just when the two older men were a little disappointed, the young man piped up, “Oh, but the village chief has some books about the evil dragon. We could try to look for them.”

Su Jin and Wu Chen’s faces lit up. As the young man led them toward the village chief’s house, he said, “My name is Fabian. How about you?”

“Su Jin.”

“Wu Chen.”

Fabian went on, “There was word that the evil dragon had appeared nearby, but… the villagers didn’t think much of it. I didn’t expect…”

There was a pained look on his face. Being able to pull himself together and move on shortly after losing his entire family was very commendable for a young man like him already. But it was still going to take his heart some time to recover from his grief.

But after hearing what Fabian said, Su Jin immediately asked, “Fabian, are you saying that the evil dragon doesn’t stop at just one place?”

“Of course not. The evil dragons travel to different places around the world. They’re terribly evil – they massacre the people and destroy everything we own. But there aren’t a lot of them, so there are people who may never even meet them in their lifetime.” Fabian’s eyes were brimming with tears again. The chances of running into a dragon weren’t that high to begin with, yet his village had been unfortunate enough to run into one and had been completely destroyed as a result.

Su Jin was thinking about something else instead. He wondered to himself, “If that’s the case, then why did the previous village prepare a warehouse in advance of a dragon attack? It can’t be that they’re extremely sensitive to imminent danger, right?”

The three of them soon arrived at the village chief’s house. This was a slightly larger house with its own yard, but other than that, it looked no different from the other houses in the village.

Fabian led them past the yard and into a small room, which looked like a storeroom of sorts. Several books were randomly stacked in one corner.

They started looking through the books and quickly found a book that was as thick as a finger. Su Jin flipped it open and froze. The book was filled with words that he couldn’t understand at all. They looked like English letters, but there wasn’t a single word he had seen before.

Wu Chen noticed Su Jin’s reaction and took the book from him. He glanced down at the pages and said, “Oh, it’s a Magar Kham dialect. It’s a bit different from what I know but I can still read it.”

“You understand this language?” Even Fabian was shocked. He didn’t expect Wu Chen to be able to read the language in this book.

He exclaimed in surprise, “The village chief was the only person in the entire village who could read these words. He said that these are words left behind by the gods and he only knew how to read them, but had no idea how to write them.”

Wu Chen chuckled and whispered to Su Jin, “How else do you think I made it through so many Challenges?”

He proceeded to translate the content of the book in a low voice, “Nobody knows where these evil dragons hail from, but they always bring death and destruction with them. Countless brave people have tried to slay these dragons and perhaps many of them have succeeded, but the number of evil dragons have never decreased and they continue to terrorize this world.

“The dragons bear very deep grudges. If a brave warrior has slayed a dragon before, then once the warrior dies, other dragons will come forward for revenge. They will kill the family of the warrior and disappear. Strangely enough, their quest for revenge will never affect anybody besides the family of the warrior.

“Dragons are evil and greedy. Legend has it that if you slay a dragon, you will be able to attain a wealth equivalent to a nation’s riches. A poor man can become a rich man overnight.

“Dragons have many different powers. They can control flames, frost, lightning, poison and more. The breath of a dragon is alarmingly fatal. Any ordinary person who gets breathed on will turn to nothing but bones in an instant.”

The entire book was filled with details on the dragons’ weaknesses and special characteristics, which were considered very detailed information in such circumstances. After they had finished reading the book, Su Jin started thinking through everything that had happened since the Challenge started and tried to connect it to what they had just read. He seemed to have a rough idea of what was going on now.

By the time they were done reading, the sun had already set. Wu Chen thought of camping overnight in the village, but Fabian absolutely refused because he said staying in the village only made him sad.

Su Jin could understand where Fabian was coming from, so he got Wu Chen and Fabian to set off first, while he went to deal with all the bodies. He didn’t think it was appropriate to just leave the bodies like this.

After the two of them had walked out of sight, Su Jin made a torch of fire for light, then gathered all the frozen bodies together and dug one large hole. It wasn’t possible to give them an individual grave, but he could still bury them properly.

Digging a large hole wasn’t a difficult thing for Su Jin. Given how strong his body was, he just needed to punch the ground and a fairly large crater would be made. It took him less than half an hour to dig a hole big enough for all the bodies.

After he carried all the bodies into the hole, he looked at them and murmured, “The evil dragon killed them but didn’t take anything from them. This village isn’t the richest, but they’re not dirt poor. Weren’t these dragons supposed to be greedy?”

Su Jin realized that some of the things he had discovered did not match the description in the book they had just read, but he just shook his head, filled up the hole, then ran off to catch up with Fabian and Wu Chen.

The two of them did not walk very quickly, and when Su Jin caught up with them, he realized that they had stopped and seemed to be looking at something.

Su Jin approached them and asked, “What are you two looking at?”

They moved aside to show Su Jin what they were looking at. Su Jin blinked in surprise when he saw what it was. It turned out to be a human, and it was the middle-aged newbie who had left with that old timer.

His body was facing up, but his lower half had disappeared. Su Jin looked more closely and discovered that the lower body seemed to have been bitten off by something, since it wasn’t a clean cut.

“Did his lower half get bitten off? It looks awful,” said Fabian as he pulled the dead man’s clothes open. Su Jin and Wu Chen were even more shocked.

“He wasn’t bitten. Something… something corroded his body.” Wu Chen was very experienced in this. Based on the blood vessels and the flesh around the wound, he could tell that it had either been burned or eaten away. This was not caused by a bite.

“It’s the dragon.” Su Jin remembered that there was a section in the book that mentioned that the breath of a dragon could corrode a body. He immediately started looking around and noticed that several trees were broken. A gigantic creature must have attacked this place and broke all the trees.

Just then, Wu Chen called out to Su Jin, “Jin, someone or something flung this fellow from a distance.”

Wu Chen was standing behind a large boulder and motioned to Su Jin to come over. Su Jin walked over and Wu Chen pointed to something on the boulder. “Look at that. It must have snagged onto this boulder when he was flung out here.”