The Dragon Qilin was about to spit out the fire-attribute spirit pellets lodged in its cheeks, but the kindly smile on Shen Mu's face frightened it into gulping them all down with a single gulp.

"What a pity. Come New Year it should have been fit for the table," Shen Mu said softly.

The Dragon Qilin shuddered again and again and trotted obediently along behind them. Snow Fox, perched on its great head, kept cheering it on: "Fat Dragon, run slow and you'll be slaughtered at New Year!"

Shen Mu relaxed. Mishui Pass was not so very far from Crimson Dragon City, and according to the charts of the Wasteland, the Constellation Sea lay in the Heavenly Dragon Star Palace north of Crimson Dragon City, a good two hundred li off; on the charts it was named the Star Sea, though the folk around Crimson Dragon City called it the Constellation Sea.

In the Wasteland, many places bore ancient names quite unlike their present ones, a state of affairs owed, no doubt, to the civilizational rupture of the Kaihuang era.

From what Shen Mu had gathered, after the Kaihuang era ended, human history suffered a vast rupture lasting roughly a thousand years and more, and of all that happened in those thousand-odd years, very little was ever recorded and handed down. Apart from scattered mentions in the Three Great Holy Lands and Little Jade Capital, no other sect or nation retained any memory of those years.

Shen Mu summoned the ink flood dragon, and the creature meekly opened its jaws, revealing the True Dragon Nest, which the Dragon-Rearing Lord had refined down to a mere five feet square.

Relatively speaking, the nest was still large; even a deity like the Dragon-Rearing Lord could refine it only to the size of a round table, and to shrink it further would demand still greater power.

With his cultivation, the Dragon-Rearing Lord could not take that step.

"And yet the True Dragon Lord was refined into something like a jade pendant. Does that not mean the one who refined it into the Heaven Emperor Jade Tablet stood far above the Dragon-Rearing Lord in cultivation and strength?"

Shen Mu was dumbstruck. Who had taken the True Dragon Lord and refined it into the Heaven Emperor Jade Tablet? Why had it been given to the Ling family? What did that person intend?

The ink flood dragon spat out the nest. Shen Mu had just reached to catch it when a crushing, dead weight came down on him, and he cried out in alarm, "Put it back, quick..."

Bang.

The two young women saw the Great Cult Master Shen, both arms wrenched from their sockets, pinned by the nest against the flood dragon's back, and were left startled and unnerved.

"This great basin of a rockery seems a good deal heavier than the Cult Master's sword pellet." Si Yunxiang stuck out her tongue, remembering how she had forged Shen Mu a sword from mystic gold essence and ended up pressing him into the ground, and whispered the words under her breath.

Shen Mu gave a muffled groan and with effort drew his ten fingers, crushed into a bloody blur, out from under the nest. Fat Dragon hurried over and fawned, "Cult Master, I can lick your hands for you."

"No need."

Shen Mu's arms swung limply. He circulated his vital essence and forced the joints back into their sockets, endured the pain, took out a bottle of dragon saliva and smeared it over his fingers, then let out a breath.

With the True Dragon Nest revealed, the Heaven Emperor Jade Tablet at his chest at once began to stir, turning scalding hot, and it began to stretch its "body," writhing like a little dragon, struggling to fly from his breast and return to the nest.

This had happened once before: when Shen Mu had nearly been slain by a horde of flood dragons, the Heaven Emperor Jade Tablet had put forth a tiny dragon head and made them all submit.

But the True Dragon Lord had already been refined into the Heaven Emperor Jade Tablet, and the Dragon-Rearing Lord had said it could never become a true dragon again.

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?"