Ten days ago, Roro Uhoris departed Torturer's Deep aboard an unremarkable medium-sized rowboat.
Before leaving, Lo Quen instructed him to spread word of Torturer's Deep changing hands after purchasing repair materials.
Roro forced a knowing smile. "Understood, Lord. You want to lure those fish onto the hook."
Lo Quen nodded. With Torturer's Deep newly seized, if any bold pirates dared to stir up trouble, it would play right into his hands.
Watching the boat's silhouette fade into the sea mist, Lo Quen turned and walked deeper into Torturer's Deep.
...
Over the past few days, Janice had practically scoured every accessible corner of Torturer's Deep, sowing seven or eight batches of seeds.
The results were always the same. The sprouts struggled to break through the surface, only for their leaves to quickly turn gray and lifeless, veins charring black before withering away completely.
Instead of the strange, potent aura expected of a demonic plant, the air carried only a bitter taste.
In the cold, damp storage cavern, Lo Quen found Janice.
By the faint glow of an oil lamp, she was poring over the heavy parchment notebooks of the Bloodmage, brought from Tyria. Her silver hair shimmered faintly in the dim light, her brow tightly furrowed.
"Still no luck?" Lo Quen's voice echoed clearly in the cavern.
Janice closed the notebook, her movements betraying a trace of exhaustion.
"Tried everywhere. The seeds will sprout, but they won't survive. Soil, light, humidity... I've adjusted everything I could. It's useless."
She picked up the notebook again, her fingers tracing the obscure runes and diagrams.
"The Bloodmage's notes contain no cultivation methods—only records of gathering."
She raised her eyes to him, violet irises dark in the shadows. "I keep wondering: if the Bloodmage knew how to cultivate it, wouldn't he have had the Tyria people grow it long ago? Why risk sending people to scour the world?"
Lo Quen leaned against a cold stone cabinet, his knuckles unconsciously tapping against the rough wood. He had considered the same.
He paused. "But he used ghost grass to make potions that suppressed your blood magic 'curse.' That knowledge had to come from somewhere. How else would he know?"
"Perhaps the Bloodmage lied," Janice speculated. "The potions weren't made from ghost grass at all. Ghost grass must serve another purpose."
Lo Quen sank into thought. That was possible.
To conceal some darker secret, the Bloodmage may have explained his demand for ghost grass as potion-making—when in truth, his purpose was something else.
Then what was his real goal?
A sudden thought struck Lo Quen. The Bloodmage's need for so much ghost grass was likely tied to forbidden blood magic.
He had created a Chimera. He schemed to resurrect a dragon. Could those have required ghost grass?
He claimed he intended to seize Lo Quen's very body. Could such strange, unheard-of magic demand ghost grass as well?
The more he thought, the murkier it became. Ghost grass had to conceal a secret far greater than they realized.
Lo Quen shook his head, forcing the thoughts aside. "Since our ghost grass cultivation plan has failed, we must prepare for the worst. If that's the case, the dragons are crucial."
Dragons were not like men. As they grew, the magic within them only grew stronger.
Lo Quen had speculated before, but Janice had found the answer in the books from Tyria.
Dragons grew by feeding. Through this feeding, they accelerated their absorption of external magic, causing their bodies to expand.
If they managed to hatch a dragon, even in this low tide of magic, it would not suffer the sluggish growth that plagued Lo Quen, whose magic crawled within him like a snail's pace.
More importantly, with the Dragonblood Pact binding the Flame Knights and Lo Quen, they could ride the dragon once it hatched from his magic. When the dragon matured, both Jaelena and Janice could become dragon riders.
He led them to his bedroom deep within the sea-eroded caves.
For safety, he kept the nine fossilized dragon eggs in an ironwood box at his bedside.
Lifting the heavy lid, he revealed in the dim light nine massive stone eggs, each with its own distinct color and pattern. They lay quietly upon soft velvet, radiating an ancient and mysterious aura.
"Choose," Lo Quen said. "Which one do you wish to awaken?"
Janice's gaze wandered over the dragon eggs before finally resting on a pale purple one. Its shell bore delicate, nebula-like violet patterns. She reached out, her fingertips brushing lightly across the cold surface.
"I choose this one."
A flicker of doubt crossed Lo Quen's mind.
A purple dragon?
The vast genealogies of House Targaryen seemed to record no such color. Still, the dragon born of this egg would no doubt be beautiful.
Jaelena barely hesitated. Her eyes swept the eggs before fixing on a silvery-white one. Its shell was smooth, its sheen cold as moonlit steel, carrying a sharp, cutting beauty. She lifted it with steady, deliberate hands.
Two more remained to be awakened.
Lo Quen's gaze was immediately drawn to the blood-red dragon egg. Unlike the others, it did not lie still. In the dim light, a crimson glow seemed to flow deep within its shell, radiating a primal and dangerous allure.
Without pause, he reached for it. The egg felt icy cold to the touch, yet he could almost sense the violent power seething within.
His gaze shifted to the remaining eggs in the box. At first, he meant to choose something unlike the blood-red egg—perhaps the bronze one, or the speckled sea-blue.
But after a moment's hesitation, his fingers closed instead around a darker, heavier egg—deep crimson shading into black.
This egg was black as midnight, its shell not smooth but etched with swirling, dark-red patterns. A heavy, oppressive force seemed to emanate from it, as though it could devour all light.
Lo Quen lifted it, thinking its color not unlike Drogon's.
The four eggs were chosen and placed upon the table: pale purple, silver-white, blood-red, and black-crimson. They lay quietly, waiting for the moment of awakening.
Lo Quen nodded. He was ready.
Before this day, he had already moved all nine hundred bundles of precious ghost grass to a hidden cavern deep outside his chamber. Now he stepped out and began drawing on their immense magic.
The ghost grass released its energy in a torrent, invisible yet irresistible, rushing into his body under the pull of his will.
Forty thousand... eighty thousand... one hundred twenty thousand... one hundred sixty thousand... two hundred thousand... two hundred twenty thousand!
Magic filled every limb and bone until he reached his current limit—two hundred twenty thousand.
Beyond his original forty thousand, he had absorbed one hundred eighty thousand in a single breath.
But that limit allowed him to awaken only three dragon eggs. At once, Lo Quen fixed upon Janice's and Jaelena's eggs, along with the blood-red one he had chosen first.
[Dragonbond Lineage]!
Lo Quen's eyes snapped open, molten gold flickering deep within his pupils.
An invisible, ancient pressure surged outward, the weight of bloodline authority thickening the very air.
At his brow, beneath the skin, a brilliant golden point flared like the core of a furnace.
Then three drops of dragon blood—condensed to perfection, glowing with searing heat and primordial majesty—emerged from his brow. They hovered in the air like living stars.
Each drop stretched into a fine golden stream, silent yet irresistible, and sank into the three fossilized eggs.
Hum—
The vast magic was drained in an instant, the fullness in his body ebbing away like the tide.
Lo Quen's face turned pale, the strain of overexertion flickering across his brow. But his eyes did not waver.
He plunged once more into meditation, drawing out another torrent of ghost grass magic. This time he drew one hundred thousand—seventy thousand to awaken the egg, the rest to replenish his forty thousand reserve, filling the nearly dry wellspring within him.
Finally, his gaze fell on the last of the four—the black-crimson egg, dark as a midnight wave frozen in time.
...
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