Chapter 74 — What the Hell Is Glowing?

"Naturally. They dumped it on a lab table—how friendly could they have been?" Gao Yang curled his lip. "I suspect it's been in a dormant state ever since. The Gondorian mages probably used some method to suppress its vitality, because that 'egg' has no memory of the thousand years passing. And when we took it out of the ruins... we probably broke the seal the mages left a thousand years ago."

"How do you plan to deal with it?" Heddy asked cautiously. "If it really is a dragon egg... then we can't treat it carelessly. Legends say dragons are a deeply vindictive race, and they place extraordinary importance on their eggs. The Gondorian mages of a thousand years ago might not have feared dragon retaliation, but we today are different. And in those dragons' eyes, they probably can't tell us apart from the humans of a thousand years ago."

Almost no one had ever seen a true dragon, but descriptions of them were hardly scarce. Their temperaments, classifications, preferences—even their diets—were detailed in countless scholarly books across the continent with great solemnity. Some were accounts by local folk experts on dragons, others came from the Holy Dragon Principality in the north—the icefield nobles who claimed descent from dragon blood, who employed many florid and terrifying words to describe the "progenitor dragons" of their imagination. Heddy chose to believe the most dangerous of those descriptions.

Gao Yang rubbed his chin. "Fair enough... Let's leave it there for a few days and let it air out. No one disturbs it. Let it become convinced that no one really is coming to experiment on it, and then I'll figure out how to build trust."

Having said that, he couldn't suppress a long yawn. The drowsiness of being woken in the middle of the night and the exhaustion from intense mental focus came crashing down at once. "Yawn... let's call it a day. Everyone's tired after all this running around in the dead of night. Except for those currently on watch, everyone go back and rest."

The gathered personnel dispersed one by one. Amber also yawned and vanished from everyone's sight with a Shadow Step. Gao Yang took one last look at the "dragon egg tent" being watched from a distance by the soldiers, shook his head, and turned toward his own tent.

Once inside, he sat on his bed but didn't sleep immediately. Instead, out of habit, he focused his attention and called up in his mind that "mana imaging map" viewed from above.

Only after confirming there was no major fluctuation in the energy distribution on the mana map, no high-energy reaction nearby—especially around the "dragon egg"—and no new alerts from the satellite, did he let out a slight breath of relief and prepare to sleep.

But in the very instant before he lay down, a faint glimmer at the edge of his vision caught his eye, flickering in and out of sight within the darkened tent.

Gao Yang rubbed his eyes and confirmed it was no illusion; what was more, the glimmer was coming from the large basket beside the desk.

Those were the discarded byproducts of Rebecca's "cement-burning" process, clumps of hardened matter whose purpose was impossible to guess.

Gao Yang leaned in, curious, and saw tiny points of light glittering among those hardened lumps.

The glow was faint, yet it was like a host of stars.