Dany let out a huge sigh of relief. Just as she had hoped, after entering the Pool of Faith, the two droplets of the Song of Water—one large and one small—no longer dissipated.
However, compared to before, each had shrunk by one-tenth.
This made Dany's heart ache.
They were the Song of Water!
Even if she couldn't use them for now, letting them evaporate away like that was far too wasteful.
"Huh? Dahei, what's going on with you…" As her attention returned, she suddenly noticed something strange about her dragon-spirit, Dahei.
He was still Dahei, but he was no longer the diligent blacksmith.
His divinity and aura had changed.
At this moment, his appearance was still as fierce and terrifying as before, like a man-eating dragon capable of sacking a city. Yet his eyes, and the aura radiating from him, were as gentle as a loving mother from some faraway dream.
A Holy Mother!
Dahei had become a Holy Mother!
"You gained another divine office?!" Dany asked in surprise.
"Yes." Dahei was equally delighted.
But Dany's expression shifted immediately. She erupted in fury: "You idiot! I agonized endlessly over whether to choose Blacksmith or Warrior, and only because I had to forge Valyrian steel did I reluctantly choose Blacksmith.
But the second divine office should, by all reason, have been Warrior.
How stupid do you have to be to choose Holy Mother right before the final battle with the allied army?
What, are you planning to show mercy and compassion to those slave traders?"
"I don't know what happened. You told me to open the Door of Faith, and in my panic, I somehow became a Holy Mother." Dahei's spiritual voice was full of grievance.
"Ugh, you really—"
Splash!
Dany was about to scold him again when she saw the two droplets begin to rotate gently. Like faucets being turned on, they released streams of clear spring water.
In just a moment of stunned silence, the gushing streams formed a small pool in the Pool of Faith, about the size of a bathtub.
"What's going on?" Dany was dumbfounded.
The next instant, she replaced Dahei as the Holy Mother. Closing her eyes, she sensed carefully, then muttered in shock and uncertainty, "The power of faith is decreasing. The Song of Water has merged with the power of faith, transforming into divine power infused with water attributes.
This isn't ordinary pool water—it's divine power!"
But then she frowned again. The pool water wasn't pure divine power; it also carried a material quality that could be taken into the real world.
It was as if divine power had dissolved into clear water.
With the will of the "Holy Mother," Dany separated the droplets of the Song of Water from the faith power, and the fountain abruptly ceased.
"We'll test it more carefully once we're back in Astapor."
Shaking her head, she and Dahei withdrew from the Pool of Faith, their souls returning to their bodies.
Rumble!
The river, once drawn by the Song of Water, lost its momentum as the Song dissipated, and it collapsed into a thirty-foot waterfall, crashing down on Dany and staggering her.
She managed to endure—her second soul had been in the Pool of Faith, but her main soul was still controlling her body, allowing her to actively dodge the falling torrent.
Da Xiong and Old Jiong weren't so lucky.
The knight had only glanced at the physical form of the Song of Water before his soul, unable to withstand its pressure and incomprehensible knowledge, fainted on the spot.
By the time the surging waves had passed, Dany couldn't even see their shadows anymore.
Although the river water was flowing back into its channel, the water along the bank was now chest-deep.
"Dahei, pull Mormont and Clinton out!"
Thankfully, before descending, Dany had given each knight a soul mark. Through his dragon-spirit state, Dahei could sense their positions.
The black dragon was a natural swimmer. At once, he slipped into the river like a giant black fish, diving deep as the waves rippled violently outward.
Within moments, water splashed thirty meters downstream, and the black dragon surfaced, his jaws gripping Clinton, covered head to toe in mud. He had been swept further since he wore no armor.
After much struggle, daylight broke and the two knights finally woke groggily.
Old Jiong rubbed his right cheek, scratched by wild camellia branches, and asked in confusion, "What just happened?"
Dany thought for a moment before explaining: "When an ordinary person looks directly at the summer sun at noon, their head spins, their eyes sting and water, sometimes they even go blind temporarily, seeing only a field of white.
That's because the sunlight is too strong, too concentrated, for human eyes to endure. But a dragon can stare at the sun all day without the slightest discomfort.
Those two droplets are existences beyond mortal comprehension. Just as noon sunlight exceeds human sight, the droplets surpass ordinary soul perception.
In truth, even I, nearly a demigod, couldn't endure it.
So your souls were crushed by the pressure, and you fainted."
"What are those droplets?"
Da Xiong crouched at the riverbank, his iron boots sinking half a foot into the wet mud. As he wrung out his soaked white cloak, he asked curiously.
"They are—" Dany paused mid-sentence, then turned around. Stepping across the mud and drenched weeds, she shouted at the calm river surface: "Old Man of the River, why have you returned?"
"I had already swum to Qohor, but I sensed turbulence in the water upstream, and it seemed to carry the aura of the Song of Water. So I came back to investigate."
The old turtle didn't surface. His spiritual voice came from beneath the water.
"Why don't you show yourself?" Dany asked.
"There are many people on the cliffs around us. Now that it's daylight, they're watching this place with telescopes," said the old turtle.
"You're the Old Man of the River. What's there to fear?"
After all the floods, explosions, and raging flames throughout the night, even the blind and deaf would have noticed.
But Dany didn't care about those onlookers. Let them watch.
The more they saw and the more they learned, the greater their fear and reverence for her would be.
Since she was already exposed, she might as well gain some fame!
"I fear being targeted. Other than the surviving followers of Lhoynar who worship me, I never show my face before outsiders," the old turtle admitted honestly.
Dany's lips twitched. She had nothing more to say.
The world was simply that hostile toward the extraordinary—
even a farmer's rake could leave a bleeding hole in the skull of a millennia-old divine turtle.
"The Dragon Queen, did you find the Song of Water from the Crab King?" The old turtle's tone carried both urgency and expectation.
"I don't know what happened. When my Little Green was eating crab meat, he suddenly bit into a droplet. The pain made him roll all over the ground. I knew it was a treasure, but he couldn't endure it. My head nearly split apart from the pressure, so I spat it out. That caused a flood, and afterward, the thing disappeared."
Aside from concealing the fact that she had stored the droplet in the Pool of Faith, Dany had not lied much—she only blurred details about the dragon spirit, the Green Seer's second soul, and other personal secrets.
Even separated by dozens of kilometers, the old turtle could sense the fluctuations of the Song of Water, which showed that even if he was not an expert, he was at least well-versed in the matter.
"Alas, what a pity! Such a great opportunity, wasted like this. If only I had arrived a little later… missed it, missed it!"
The old turtle kept sighing about the loss, without doubting her words at all.
"Why would this happen? Elder, could you explain it in detail for me?" Dany asked curiously.
The old turtle did not refuse and spoke slowly: "At the dawn of creation, all living beings could hear the Song of the Laws. Yet only a few holy spirits became true gods who mastered their own songs.
Other holy spirits and non-holy spirits, if they did not resonate, could hear the Song of the Laws but could not sing their own.
Take Mother, for example. She resonated with the Song of Water but utterly rejected the Song of Fire.
Thus, no matter what, the Song of Fire would never condense for her.
Your green dragon likely resonates with the Song of Water, so he absorbed the Song of Water that escaped from the Crab King's body. But only true gods can possess the Song of Water… alas, such a pity."
The truth was not far from what the old turtle said. The Song of Water, deep within the soul cores of the knifefish and the Crab King, had entered Dany's consciousness space together with divine essence, existing in a peculiar state.
If divine essence was water, then the Song of Water was sugar dissolved in it.
But sugar and water were not on the same dimension. The Song of Water existed in a "higher-dimensional" form, so much so that Dany had not sensed it at all.
If not for Little Green's resonance with the Song of Water, which allowed him to absorb all the "sugar," it might have quietly faded away before long.
Dany frowned and thought for a while, but still could not figure it out, so she asked: "You say only true gods can possess the Song of Water, but neither you nor the Crab King are true gods."
"The Song of Water belongs to Mother, and we subordinate gods are essentially part of Mother. Aside from inheriting Mother's Song of Water, I, like your dragon, cannot possess the Song of Wind or the Song of Fire," said the old turtle.
"I heard that Balerion seized R'hllor's Song of Fire. That guy isn't a true god," Dany said.
"I only said mortals cannot possess an already-existing Song of the Laws. I never said mortals cannot condense a Song of the Laws. The difference is immense."
"Different people, different perceptions of things. The so-called Song of the Laws, at its core, is the understanding one gains after listening to the World's Song.
R'hllor and Balerion were the past and present masters of the Song of Fire, but the songs they sang were not the same.
So-called seizing the Song of Fire does not mean Balerion defeated R'hllor and robbed him of it like a bandit stealing treasure.
Rather, it means that with talent far beyond R'hllor's, he condensed a Fire Song of his own—one more perfect than R'hllor's.
There can only be one Song of Fire in the world. The strong replace the weak, the perfect replaces the flawed.
When Balerion condensed his own Song of Fire, R'hllor's Song of Fire was extinguished."
"Survival of the fittest, ceaseless evolution—so the world even has such a rule forcing true gods to keep advancing?"
After realization, Dany was struck with shock and doubt.
If such a rule of "progress" existed, why had this world fallen into such a wretched state?
Shouldn't it have thrived and developed into a mythic world beyond magic and war?
Yet at this moment, she suddenly understood the immense kindness shown to her by the Gate God: she could not possess the Gate God's Song of Wind, so He was helping her condense her own Song of Wind!
This was simply…
Why would the Gate God treat me so well?
Dany felt somewhat bewildered.
"Can you now condense your own Song of Water?" Dany asked.
"Alas, I wish I could, but I cannot," the old turtle said bitterly.
"Why not?"
"Only holy spirits can gain insights after hearing the World's Song and compose their own Song of the Laws. I am only a half-holy spirit, or what you might call a subordinate holy spirit.
Your giant dragon and the Crab King are the same as me. We were born in the First Age after creation, false holy spirits with only partial traits of true ones.
According to Mother, the sight of a holy spirit rises above the river's surface, allowing them to see and sense more primal existence. A half-holy spirit, close to the water's surface, can faintly see the scenery on the riverbanks, but blurred and distorted. Non-holy spirits remain trapped at the river bottom, never able to perceive the reality beyond the laws.
Non-holy spirits are not unable to grasp the Song of the Laws, but it is like a blind man feeling an elephant. To glimpse the whole picture is far too difficult," the old turtle explained.
Dany stood stunned for a moment. The fact that she could condense the Song of Wind proved she was a holy spirit, and it seemed rather easy for her.
Then she thought of Sheep Balls—that one was also a holy spirit.
The cultivation advantage of holy spirits was truly immense!
"So you're saying that my dragons will never become true gods in their entire lives?" Dany frowned.
It was like telling a mother: your son is too stupid, no matter how hard he works, he will never get into Tsinghua or Peking University.
That was crushing.
"There is nothing to be done. I have lived for over a hundred thousand years, and I've encountered more giant dragons than mudfish you've seen. Yet never has one become a true god.
Mother said that the Father of Creation is fair. We half-holy spirits are born strong, far better equipped to survive than ordinary creatures, but our comprehension…" The old one sighed deeply.
Dany suddenly understood something. Was the Gate God strong?
His true form was only a tree. Compared to giant dragons, giant turtles, and giant crabs, He was pitifully weak.
Was the Mother of the Rhoyne strong?
She was a river.
Would you call that strength or weakness?
(End of Chapter)
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