Chapter 217: Dragons?
Physical attacks?
The blades of the Elven warriors struck against dragon scales and erupted in blinding showers of sparks, yet most of the time they could leave behind only the faintest white marks.
A casual sweep of a dragon’s tail, or a light slap from one of its claws, contained enough monstrous force to send elves, together with their armor and weapons, flying through the air and crushing them to pieces.
The dragons remained silent.
They did not actively attack the elves. They simply glided forward, slow and unwavering, like a force sweeping clean across the land.
Wherever they passed, life was drained away, magic was devoured, and all that remained was a deathly gray-white wasteland so absolute that even bacteria would have struggled to survive there.
Behind them, the forest died in broad swaths, as though some giant eraser had been dragged brutally across the canvas of the world.
Against that silent advance, that devoured all things in its path, the resistance of the elves looked so futile, so absurd, filled with all the tragic grandeur and helplessness of doomed heroism.
The vision froze on a close-up of one dragon’s eye.
That pure black pupil, like an abyss, swallowed Ryan’s entire field of view.
“The Dragon Race,” Serandil said. His voice was calm to a frightening degree, yet beneath that calm Ryan could hear an ancient, bone-deep hatred as cold as frozen time itself. “They were not creatures born of nature. They were not another intelligent race that coexisted with us in this world. They were an error, a flaw in the laws of reality, a manifestation of the void... something that should never have existed.”
“They possess no soul, no self-awareness, no emotions, and no mana circuits.” Serandil spoke each word slowly, like icicles striking stone. “At its core, our Magic relies upon communicating with the world’s elemental forces, resonating with them, and guiding them into specific effects. But they... their very existence is a local negation of the concept of Magic itself. Any form of magical energy that nears them finds no circuit, no medium upon which it can act. It breaks apart on its own, is absorbed by the void-like properties of their bodies, and is turned into nourishment that sustains their existence.”
“As for physical attacks? Their scales are among the hardest substances in the world, and the resilience of their muscle fibers surpasses that of any known lifeform. The magical civilization we took such pride in, when placed before them, was like trying to drown fire with water, or illuminate absolute darkness with light. At the deepest level of its logic, it was a war doomed to fail from the very beginning.”
The vision dissolved, returning once more to flowing white light.
But the despair of what Ryan had just witnessed had already been branded into his consciousness.
He felt as though he could sense the cold absurdity that must have seeped from the bones of those Elven warriors when they faced an enemy they could not injure at all. Syl curled up against his shoulder, his green light dimming, waves of fear and sorrow rising from the ancient racial memory buried deep within him.
“Avalon lay along the migration path of the Dragon Race,” Serandil continued. His voice now carried a heavy weariness, the natural exhaustion of recounting such a burdened past. “One single passing was enough to turn a tenth of the forest into dead land. We tried every method we could think of—relocation, avoidance, raising stronger magical barriers... but the movement of the Dragon Race was only slow on the surface. In truth, the area they covered was vast, and their path could not be predicted. Their numbers, too, seemed to be increasing little by little. We lived like a civilization built beside a timed explosive. Every detonation took countless lives and erased another piece of the homeland we cherished.”
He fell silent for so long that Ryan almost thought the tale had ended.
“So,” Serandil said at last, “we began searching for a way to slay dragons.”
His voice cut cleanly through the silence.
“If Magic was useless, and physical force could barely wound them, then could we create something... something capable of piercing through that negating property and directly damaging the essence of their existence?”
The white light gathered again. This time it condensed into the phantom of a perfect dodecahedral crystal rotating slowly in midair.
It was entirely transparent. It resembled the two crystals Ryan had found, but inside it, seven-colored light, thick as liquid, drifted slowly in motion. It radiated a pure, holy aura, yet at the same time it stirred an inexplicable unease in the chest.
“We gathered the greatest sages, mages, and alchemists of our entire race. We studied scales shed by the dragons. We studied the land tainted by their passing. We studied every possible clue. At last, a theory was proposed. If the Dragon Race was the encroachment of the void upon existence, then what could oppose them should be the most concentrated and purest essence of existence itself: a crystallization of highly condensed spiritual force and the most fundamental Mana.”
“It had to be pure enough that it could function like the sharpest needle, piercing through that layer of negation. But it also had to be resilient enough that it would not instantly collapse under the erosion of the void.”
Serandil gazed at the crystal phantom, the shifting light reflected in his golden eyes. The emotions in those eyes were layered and tangled—pride, sorrow, and endless grief.
“This was the original theoretical conception of the Philosopher’s Stone. It was not some toy that turned stone into gold. It was not a delusion born from the pursuit of eternal life. It was the final and most dangerous branch of our technology and Magic tree, forced into existence by a race standing on the brink of extinction. We planned to shape it into specialized arrows, bullets, or to use it to power certain one-use large-scale weapons, in the hope that it could inflict meaningful damage upon the Dragon Race.”
“But,” he said, and his tone suddenly grew grave beyond measure, “creating it demanded a cost beyond imagination.”
“It required the purest, strongest, most positive spiritual force and emotion as both primer and binding agent—joy, hope, love, the will to give oneself. Yet in the atmosphere of ever-deepening despair brought by the Dragon Race, such things were becoming increasingly scarce. At the same time, the process of creation produced immense quantities of highly concentrated negative psychic residue and violent magical aftershocks that could not be processed. Those... were what we came to call contamination.”
Ryan understood at once.
The twisted monsters outside. The foul energy in the environment. The so-called tainted lands.
The source of all of it was here.
It was the dreadful byproduct of the Elf Race forging the straw they hoped would save them.
“The experiments progressed slowly, and the cost was staggering. Contamination began to leak out and erode the edges of Avalon, which only deepened the fear and division within our people.” Serandil’s voice sank low, almost into a sigh. “As for myself... I was appointed to oversee one of the most important subprojects, and I personally directed the construction of this observation station and laboratory, far from Avalon’s core. On the one hand, we continued refining the process of creating the Philosopher’s Stone and explored its applications. On the other, we monitored the spread of contamination, studied its nature, and sought methods to purify or control it.”
He looked at Ryan, his gaze deep and solemn.
“The two fragments you obtained were the byproducts of those early, immature experiments. Or rather, they were degraded crystals formed when escaped energy from the manufacturing process fused with contamination and was then absorbed by mutated creatures. Their energy is mixed and dangerously unstable, but precisely because they contain the fundamental wave pattern of the Philosopher’s Stone, they are capable of interfering with the defensive mechanisms that run on this station’s foundational arrays.”
The logic had come full circle. The doubts that had remained in Ryan’s mind were swept away by the scale and sorrow of the history being laid before him.
A magnificent civilization, struggling desperately to survive, had been driven to create a weapon that might destroy them as easily as save them. That made sense. All of it made sense.
At that moment, Syl suddenly stirred.
He flew up from Ryan’s shoulder, circled the phantom Philosopher’s Stone once, then returned to Ryan’s ear and lightly nudged him with his beak, sending across a much clearer pulse of thought:
“The Philosopher’s Stone? Serandil? No... I think I remember something. The Great Sage of Avalon...”
Syl’s words came in fragments. As a remnant soul, his memory was naturally incomplete. In truth, he possessed little more than instinctive intelligence and scattered traces of inherited memory. Yet the deeper Ryan went into the Elven ruins, the more active and spiritually responsive Syl had become. Even though he had said before that this did not feel like a place where elves should exist, his growing alertness and the way his memories seemed to be returning little by little only made the Great Sage before them seem more credible.
Serandil watched Syl’s reaction and gave Ryan a faintly sorrowful smile.
“It seems that even the remnant soul of Azure Tempest preserved little in the end. Still, that can be slowly nurtured and repaired, which is good. At the very least... it proves that what I have said is not false. It proves that that history, and those sacrifices, were not entirely illusion.”
He took a step forward, and the white space rippled faintly with the motion. His figure seemed just a little more transparent than before, as though his energy were beginning to run low.
“Young visitor, I have remained here alone, maintaining the final operations of this experimental station, monitoring the contamination, and waiting... perhaps for a chance to pass things on, though perhaps such a chance would never come.”
Serandil’s voice was deeply tired.
“My people are gone. Avalon has become a legend. But the research into the Philosopher’s Stone, the knowledge of how to resist the void and contamination, should not be buried with me. I see that you possess wisdom and courage. You have earned the recognition of a Sacred Beast’s remnant soul. You even managed to acquire incomplete beacons and reach this place... Perhaps that is a tiny tremor of fate.”
His golden eyes fixed on Ryan, pure and heavy with meaning.
“I cannot force anything upon you. But I ask you—please consider whether you would be willing... to receive from me some of this knowledge. Knowledge of how to identify, use, and even... begin to purify fragments of the Philosopher’s Stone. And a few small lessons on how to better protect yourself, and those you hold dear, in this world that is being slowly eroded by contamination.”
“This is not a gift of power freely given. It is a gift—perhaps an unnecessary one—from a remnant of a vanished civilization to one who came after. And it is also... a heavy responsibility.”
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