Chapter 65: You Really Know How to Stay Alive

When Linde arrived at the destination, all he saw was a blanket of smoke and a gigantic crater.

He had not expected the battle to conclude within the single minute it took him to travel there.

Watching the celebrating wyverns and earth dragons surrounding the area, his tightly furrowed brow relaxed slightly.

Yet, an indescribable sense of unease still lingered in his heart.

Where there is smoke, there is no damage...

With his vision obstructed, he could not determine the true state of the red dragon at the bottom of the crater.

Until he laid eyes on the red dragon reduced to ashes and verified it with his own eyes, such uncertainty left Linde unable to settle his mind.

Even if the creature really had turned to ash, he would still mix the dust evenly with water and pour it out into the sea.

The elderly patriarch of the burrowing dragon clan, seeing Linde still peering anxiously over the edge of the crater, walked over and patted him on the shoulder:

"Lord Linde, we have all witnessed the destructive power of that red bomb you crafted, known as TNT. It is practically impossible for any physical body to endure such damage."

"No matter how formidable the red dragon was, being struck by so many of them simultaneously at such close range, it is definitely dead beyond a doubt."

"Even the rest of us retreated so quickly and were still nearly caught in the blast radius. The crater is blown out this deep, my lord, what on earth is there for you to worry about?"

"Uh..."

Linde fell into deep thought.

There were simply too many instances of celebrating too early only to suffer a disastrous defeat shortly after, and for a moment, he didn't know which examples to cite to the patriarch.

Even if he did, the creature would most likely not understand a single word.

Forget it. Seeing is believing; he would just have to go down and check for himself.

"I still feel somewhat uneasy. Send two messenger dragons right now to notify Ceylona and Victoria respectively, and inform them of the situation here.

In addition, whether they are earth dragons or wyverns, tell them to quiet down for now. Until I confirm the red dragon's final status, do not jump to conclusions and do not celebrate too early.

I can still fly for a little while longer, so I'll go down first and scout the situation."

"Very well, proceed with caution."

The old patriarch, still immersed in the joy of having supposedly eliminated the red dragon, found Linde's actions somewhat baffling.

Lord Linde was being far too overly cautious.

Could something truly revive after being blown to ashes?

Such a thing was completely impossible to happen.

Despite the doubts lingering in his mind, he still followed Linde's instructions and signaled the surrounding dragons to quiet down and await further orders.

Linde took a deep breath and readied himself to leap downward when a black-and-red figure suddenly surged out from the depths first.

The dragons were struck with dismay, quickly suppressing their previous joy as their expressions turned grave.

The wyverns, who hadn't even had the chance to drop their TNT payloads yet, immediately prepared to follow up with a secondary bombardment.

However, to their surprise, the figure soaring upward showed no intention of attacking them whatsoever; instead, it beat its wings and headed straight toward the mountain peak where the palace stood.

Linde reacted the fastest, flapping his feathered wings to give chase to the corpse-faking red dragon.

Taking advantage of this pursuit, he finally managed to get a clear look at the creature's current appearance.

If anything could still prove that the entity was a dragon, it was probably nothing more than that single framework of black skeletal bones.

The viscous black substance coating it seemed to be constantly writhing, as if possessed by a conscious will of its own.

As for the red dragon's physical body, it was already unrecognizable, with unidentifiable mutilated tissues hanging off the bones in a somewhat eerie fashion.

Comparatively speaking, the most intact part remained its head.

The dragon's once-majestic horns were both snapped in two, and viewed from behind, its head still held high while its side profile revealed only bare, bleached bone.

In the red dragon's current state, the mere fact that it could fly was nothing short of a miracle.

Linde even began to wonder if this world had been modified with a mod, and he was somehow playing a hundred-days survival horror game.

However, he quickly noticed an abnormality near the creature's dragon wings.

Upon closer inspection, he realized they were constructed from countless tiny black cubes interlinked together to form a brand-new set of black wings.

He was far too familiar with this sort of thing.

Weren't these the exact same miniature cubes dropped whenever he finished mining materials?

The creature had merely adopted those identical blocks to form a pair of dragon wings.

Since they were blocks, that meant he could mine them away mercilessly!

Despite Linde's utmost efforts to catch up to the battered carcass, the distance between man and dragon continued to stretch wider and wider.

At that moment, he couldn't help but yearn for Victoria's speed.

If the young dragon were here, he would have long since poked the enemy right in the rear.

"With the two of us—human and dragon fighting side by side—we will surely sweep away that red dragon like fallen leaves!"

Victoria's once-lively voice echoed once more in the depths of his mind.

Relying solely on himself, there truly were limits after all.

Considering that the duration of the enhancement command was about to expire, and to avoid falling into the same predicament as Victoria, Linde temporarily abandoned the thought of pursuing the red dragon.

Watching the creature fly away toward the distant palace, he couldn't help but grit his teeth and mutter:

"You really are remarkably hard to kill!"

This was no time to afford the enemy a chance to recuperate.

The strange mutation occurring on the red dragon meant that the longer it was dragged out, the more unpredictable its subsequent changes would become.

That black, ominous aura reminded Linde of the pitch-black pearl nestled within the belly of the dragon skeleton deep inside the cavern.

There was a high probability they originated from the same source.

The most urgent task now was to double back, reunite with the dragons, and share the intelligence.

He needed to regroup his forces and storm the mountain to capture the dragon in one fell swoop!