Chapter 948 — The Kingdom of Dragons

They saw towering mountains ahead, their outlines wholly transformed by the marks of "artificial" remaking; countless tier upon tier of vast buildings, like palaces and castles, had been raised along the mountainsides, and the pillars and walls between the halls were covered with exquisite and imposing sculpture, while carefully placed lights and projection devices were scattered among those palace walls and domes. Enormous holograms and lamplight shone in mutual brilliance, filling those ancient and splendid palaces with the singular atmosphere of classical architecture fused with modern technology—but beyond these grand structures on the mountains, what astonished Gaoyang even more were the urban buildings at the feet of the ranges, spread across the plains and river valleys.

These were vast cities such as he had never seen in this world—vaster than any he remembered even from the age of Gondor. He saw countless towering man-made structures laid out across the plains like a forest; those grand edifices were built to dragon scale, nearly every one of them surpassing the Silver City of Saint Sunil. Between the high-rises were gardens and artificial jungles supported by giant columns or anti-gravity devices, each with its own ecological dome preserving a landscape of a different season; and in the broad spaces between the cities could be seen other structures of exceptional size—factories, perhaps, or some other infrastructure—their main bodies upheld by a multitude of pipes, support beams, and tanks, with countless ribbon-like bands of light linking them to the cities.

It was the polar night, yet the lights among those factories and palaces and towers made the cities of Tarrande bright as day. In that seemingly never-extinguished illumination, Gaoyang saw great streams of light moving along the city roads, and even many lights moving in neat several-tiered ranks above the cities—some of them dragons in flight, others vehicles of every description, all in good order under the unified traffic control of numerous signal devices floating in midair; and beside the busiest aerial routes could be seen enormous holographic projections, displaying...

Advertisements—advertisements of every kind, along with promotional shorts for grand events, art snapshots of indeterminate meaning, even sheer scrambled characters—which likewise seemed to be a form of "dragon art."

At this distance Gaoyang could see the images but could not hear the sounds rising from those bustling districts; yet merely looking at the scene before him, he could read a great deal from it.

At last, in this world, the well-traveled transmigrator opened his eyes wide for the first time and was truly, genuinely astonished.

Amber, beside him, was on the contrary somewhat less astonished—because everything in Tarrande already lay wholly beyond the half-elf lady's compass of common sense, and past a certain limit there is no "degree" left to speak of; to her, whether Tarrande's dragons lived in volcanic craters or in apartment blocks made little difference—it was all equally incomprehensible, all equally "oh my god what is this impressive thing"—so after her initial exclamations she seemed rather composed, and could do nothing but gaze curiously about her.

As for Virodai, she showed the same astonishment as Gaoyang: as an ancient Defiant who had lived through the glorious age of Gondor, though she had never seen a place like Tarrande, she could read much hidden information from these urban facilities—and plainly, this "kingdom of dragons" presented itself in a manner vastly different from what she had imagined before setting out.

And vastly different from what Gaosong had imagined as well.

"Well? Magnificent, isn't it?" Metzen's proud voice came from ahead. "This is one of the most flourishing places in all Tarrande—Aurora City, 'Agundor.' The headquarters of the Council is here, and so is the headquarters of the Mithril Vault."

"...This is nothing like the kingdom of dragons I imagined," Gaoyang said at last after a few seconds of silence, shaking his head. "And nothing like what any bard or scholar in the human world imagines, either."

"Ah, don't tell me you also thought we built castles in magma and icebergs?" Metzen said teasingly. "And that we filled those castles with gold and with princesses carried off from every corner of the world..."

"My imagination was not quite so extravagant—I had guessed that you possessed a high civilization, I simply never expected your cities to develop to this sort of..." Gaodai trailed off, suddenly at a loss for words, for what he felt upon seeing those cities was not only shock; as a "satellite spirit" who had witnessed far too much, he also glimpsed in these cityscapes a certain... constraint. So he spent several seconds gathering his vocabulary before he finally found a fitting phrase: "I never expected your cities to develop to this degree of 'limit.'"

It was the most neutral wording he could think of.

Metzen had probably assumed that Gaoyang, as "an emperor of the human world," would feel only shock and amazement at the sight of Tarrande for want of experience—and had not expected his first assessment to be "limit." The word sounded full of praise yet was in truth richly ambiguous, and Metzen, long accustomed to dealing with humans, at once tasted Gaosong's true meaning in it.

She was somewhat startled, somewhat taken aback; then her gaze could not help but sweep across that city which had already spread over the whole of the land, across the colossal factories and corporate conglomerates standing between the cities, across those advanced, flourishing, exquisitely beautiful vistas that had not seen any fundamental change in countless years.

"...It really is rather extreme," the dragon lady said, her voice somewhat muffled. "See it too often, and one begins to feel it lacks variation."