Chapter 390 — The Giant Dragon Returns to Its Nest, Its Power Revealed
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
True dragons are born of qi and begotten of fortune; fortune gives birth to true dragons, and from it their fleshly bodies derive. The True Dragon Lord was in truth a principal dragon vein; refined into a treasure, it had lost all chance of ever evolving into a true dragon.
Shen Mu took the Heaven Emperor Jade Tablet from his neck. The instant he let go, it flew up, slowly unfolded in the air, and of itself grew larger by degrees, though it was no more than a foot in length; then, with a whoosh, it dropped into the True Dragon Nest!
Shen Mu peered into the nest and saw the tablet settle within it, coiled like a dragon at the center of the nest's ninth tier, filling its gap exactly!
The moment the True Dragon Lord entered the nest, a world-shaking dragon might burst forth. One after another the flood dragons around Shen Mu went limp in every sinew and groveled on the ground; even the flood dragon bearing them threw itself flat and did not stir!
Even the Dragon Qilin halted at once, every hair and scale on end, yet it could not withstand the terrifying dragon might from the nest; pressed flat to the ground, it dared not raise its head!
Shen Mu had no time for any of it. All at once he saw countless runes leaping upon the nest: dragon script, grotesque and manifold, shifting without cease, and not one character the same as another!
Each different character held a different message; the script revealed on the True Dragon Nest was plainly an incomparably complex cultivation art!
True dragons are born of fortune, and fortune is born of the way of heaven and earth; hence true dragons stand close to the Way, and every dragon, from the hour of its birth, knows the dragon tongue by nature, with no need to learn it.
Since there was no need to learn the dragon tongue, there was no need for repetition in it. The dragon race could set a single character for the meaning of a word, a single character in place of a sentence, even a single character in place of a sweeping essay of tens of thousands of words!
For this very reason, for other races to learn the dragon tongue was unimaginably hard.
The Dragon-Rearing Lord's bloodline was exceedingly high, but he was, after all, a flood dragon and not a true dragon; though he had taught Shen Mu a great deal of the dragon tongue, there were still countless characters on the nest that Shen Mu did not know.
Among the dragon words the Dragon-Rearing Lord had taught him, some characters were of the most complex meaning: a single character, rendered in the human tongue, would take tens of thousands of words to expound in full; and worse, some characters could not be put into the human tongue at all!
Shen Mu bent his mind to memory, committing the dragon script upon the nest to heart.
Ling Yuxiu and Si Yunxiang pressed in as well. Si Yunxiang asked doubtfully, "What kind of script is this?"
"Dragon script."
Ling Yuxiu said in surprise, "It is all dragon script up there. I once learned a little of it myself, taught by my imperial father, but I know very little; I can make out only a scattered few characters."
Shen Mu thought a moment, then said abruptly, "Yuxiu, does your Ling family still have its earliest Nine Dragons Sovereign Art?"
The Nine Dragons Sovereign Art had not been outstanding to begin with; only through the labors of generations of Ling family masters did it become a peerless art. Yet Shen Mu guessed that the earliest version must have been preserved, for otherwise Emperor Yanfeng could never have taught Ling Yuxiu the dragon tongue.
Shen Mu suspected that the original Nine Dragons Sovereign Art had been written in the dragon tongue, and that Emperor Yanfeng had taught Ling Yuxiu the dragon tongue precisely so that she might read it in its most primal form.
"How did you know I have seen the most primal Nine Dragons Sovereign Art?"