Chương 251: 47. Time Dragon 1

"… Huh?" The moment that sound dropped out of my mouth, I knew I was dead. Not because it was too loud, and not just because I'd managed to produce the single stupidest noise in the world in a setting that explicitly demanded reverence. It was because—right up until that syllable escaped my lips—everything had still existed within a range of reality I could, however barely, process. For instance: The Ancestral Lands were terrifying. The Gatekeeper was terrifying.

The fact that Ignicia had stepped in front of me even here was, in its own way, also terrifying. And the woman who had just stepped out of a rift in spacetime, whose gaze alone had nearly sent my soul skidding off its rails, was clearly some manner of dragon so far above the food chain that the food chain itself didn't apply to her. All of that, I could—with tremendous effort—accept. But— She was Ignicia's mother. That shattered every boundary of what my brain was equipped to process.

And it was only after my brilliant "Huh?" had fully escaped into the world that the woman—the one who wore time and the night sky draped over her shoulders like a cloak—finally shifted her gaze from Ignicia and let it settle, very slowly, on me. That look was cold enough to turn me inside out just to inspect the seams.

"Aeternitas Draconia." Her voice wasn't loud. But it carried a weight that didn't need volume—the weight of something ancient, cyclopean, and entirely beyond negotiation.

"I am the Warden of Time and Order. The Temporal Dragon." She paused. Those gold, eclipse-marked eyes rested lightly on my face, fine clockwork tickings turning silently within them.

"And, incidentally, Ignicia's mother." … Right. Thank you. Hearing it confirmed a second time did not make it easier to accept. If anything, I now wanted to cease existing on the spot even more than I had thirty seconds ago. My throat had gone bone-dry. I forced the breath down and managed to grind out:"I—it's an honor to meet you." Even as it left my mouth, I could hear exactly how wooden it sounded. It wasn't a failure of manners.

It was the result of my survival instinct and my last functioning brain cell having a savage brawl at the back of my throat, with my pitiable social conditioning barely winning on points—just enough to force those words out between my teeth like something extracted without anesthesia. The first thought that surfaced the moment I finished: I'm done. She definitely hates me. No—that's not precise enough. She probably never had any intention of liking me to begin with. That "Huh?"

had just dragged my first impression score from negative fifty straight down to negative two hundred. Aeternitas, however, showed no interest in tending to the psychological wellbeing of minor characters like me. She gave me one glance, then moved her attention back to Ignicia.

"Ignicia." No emotion in the voice. None at all. And yet something in my gut told me, with absolute certainty, that whatever came next was not going to be light conversation. Sure enough:"What, exactly, do you see in this one?" I nearly convinced myself I'd misheard. … Excuse me. That direct? Was this really the line a mother delivered—right after materializing from a rift in spacetime with the full gravitational presence of a Temporal Dragon—to her own daughter?

I hadn't even finished processing the absurdity of being subjected to a parental interrogation inside the Ancestral Lands when Aeternitas moved again. And she moved fast—fast enough that every word like dignity, divinity, and Warden of Order that had been hanging off her a moment ago got flung against the wall behind her. One step. She was in front of me. Not "fast" in the figurative sense. A literal, impossible single step. One moment she was standing before the altar.

The next, that face—carved from the deepest strata of time itself—was close enough to touch, and I'd stumbled back half a pace with my spine flat against cold stone.

"You." She leaned in slightly, her eyes carrying the specific energy of someone deciding how slowly to cook something.

"Where did you crawl out from?" …What? My brain went blank. She didn't give me time to recover before dropping the next line squarely on my head.

"Some no-name trash thinks he can run off with my daughter?" I froze completely. Hold on. This woman—who thirty seconds ago had looked like she could read my entire life, birth to death, with a single glance—had just transformed, without warning, into the kind of dangerous parent who corners her daughter's boyfriend in a back alley. Was this normal? Was this how a high-ranking dragon was supposed to behave? Anyone walking in right now would think she was some kind of draconian mobster.

While I was busy screaming internally, Aeternitas leaned closer, the pressure of her presence compacting against me like something physical. The markings in her golden eyes were still turning, but the feeling they gave off had changed—no longer the distant machinery of divinity, but a very concrete, very immediate threat. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. This woman will actually kill me with her bare hands.

"Come to think of it—" She stopped, brows drawing together as if catching herself on something.

"What was your name again?" …I'm sorry? I went rigid. You'd nearly embedded me into the masonry, and now you're asking my name? Beside me, Ignicia finally pressed her fingers to her temple, exhaustion audible in her voice.

"Mom…" That word was nothing like the "Mother" she'd forced out earlier. That one had been dragged up from somewhere she clearly hadn't wanted to visit. This one was what came out when someone had been worn down past the point of maintaining formality.

"Can you please not terrorize someone before you've even asked their name?" The practiced resignation in her voice was unmistakable. This was not the first time. I, meanwhile, was doing my best to locate my own voice somewhere inside the wreckage of this family interaction.

"I'm Cedric." I paused, then figured there was no point in half-measures at this stage.

"Cedric Rosa." The next moment, I was airborne. Not figuratively. Not "it felt like I'd been hit by something." A literal, fully committed launch. My back left the wall. My vision inverted. A single sharp crack of displaced air exploded at my ear, and then I slammed into the opposite wall hard enough that every molecule of oxygen in my lungs was evicted without my permission. White bloomed across my vision. Something hot and copper-tasting climbed toward the back of my throat. I heard Ignicia's voice.

But it came from very far away—filtered through water, through fog, through air that had just been violently torn open. By the time my vision cleared, Aeternitas was already in front of me, one hand clamped around my throat, pinning me to the stone. Her expression had changed. Not the mildly displeased mother from a moment ago. Not the distant divinity that had stepped out of the rift. Something sharper. More direct. Far more dangerous than either.

"Hey, boy." Her voice dropped to barely above a whisper, which somehow made it worse than anything she'd shouted.

"Say it again." Her fingers tightened, just slightly.

"What did you say your name was?" My breath came in broken pieces, but the only thought that made it through the static was, with complete and unfiltered honesty: Of all the— Am I some kind of walking landmine detector? How do I manage to step on every single tripwire in every room I walk into?

"Ce—Cedric…" I forced the words out through a half-closed throat.

"Cedric… Rosa…" She stared at me. Held it for one full, unbroken heartbeat. Then she smiled. It was brief. Barely there. Every hair on my body stood on end.

"Mm. There it is." Her voice was quiet.

"That's the one." The next instant, the smile was gone—cut clean, as if a blade had taken it off her face.

"You're the son of that bastard Akros Rosa, aren't you?" … I closed my eyes. Thanks, Dad. I really should have dug up your grave before I ran away from home. Clang— A streak of cold light cut across my field of vision, close enough to feel the air move. The hand around my throat—severed cleanly at the wrist. The detached hand slid from my neck, and in the next heartbeat Ignicia yanked me sideways. Without the wall holding me up, my legs gave immediately.

I slid down the stone, knees cracking hard against the floor, throat burning too badly to cough, lungs too empty to do anything but drag in air on pure reflex. Ignicia stood between us, longsword already drawn. She arrested the last momentum of the cut, blade angled low, her whole body coiled like a red dragon that had calmly decided it was about to tear something apart.

"Stop." Her eyes locked on Aeternitas, her voice gone past cold into something structural.

"Don't make me do this, Mother." … I had a comment. You already did it. Very decisively, in fact. But with my throat still on fire and my life freshly returned from the brink, I decided this wasn't the moment for commentary. Aeternitas looked at her own severed wrist. No blood. Only a brief, translucent, blasphemous fracture at the cut surface—as though what the blade had severed wasn't flesh and bone at all, but a small, isolated segment of time itself, forcibly interrupted.

Ignicia turned her head and glanced at me. The look was short, almost clinical—barely more than a confirmation that I was still breathing. And then, unbelievably, she gave me a small, apologetic gesture. Sorry about that. I sat on the floor, throat still screaming, brain too exhausted to generate a normal reaction to any of this. No, I— … Forget it. Aeternitas's gaze dropped to my hand. More precisely, to the dragon scale on the back of my left hand.

Her expression clenched again, as if someone had taken a stick to a fire she'd only just managed to tamp down.

"You bonded with Ignicia?" Her teeth ground audibly as she said it. For one moment I genuinely couldn't tell whether she wanted to strangle me, or strangle the entire concept of a universe that had allowed this to happen. Ignicia raised her blade a fraction, her tone gone flat.

"Mom." A pause. Her voice dropped even lower.

"I'm going to count to three. If you don't let go of Cedric by then—" She glanced at Aeternitas's expression, which had achieved a level of displeasure I hadn't previously believed possible, and still, on some suicidal instinct, added:"—I won't speak to you for a thousand years." Silence. One second of it. A very strange second.

Because I had never, in my entire life, imagined that I won't speak to you for a thousand years could function as genuine emotional leverage—let alone that it would be, horrifyingly, effective. Aeternitas stared at her daughter. Ignicia stared right back without flinching. Finally, Aeternitas clicked her tongue in deep, genuine reluctance.

"… Tch." She let go. I clung to the wall and forced myself upright, still not breathing properly, and watched her lift the severed wrist and blow on it, almost lazily. No twisting flesh. No grotesque regeneration. The cut surface simply reversed, as though an unseen hand had reached into the sequence of events and rewound one specific outcome. In the next instant the hand was whole and unmarked, as if the fact of it having been severed had been quietly plucked out of the timeline altogether.

The wrongness of it sent a chill down my spine that had nothing to do with the cold. Aeternitas rolled her wrist once, checking the range of motion, then looked up at me, her expression still absolutely foul.

"You got to keep your life, brat." Her voice was sharp enough to cut.

"Make sure you thank Ignicia properly." My throat still hurt. I managed a stiff nod. She wasn't finished.

"And," she narrowed her eyes, "if you ever think about throwing her away after all this—" She paused, the corner of her mouth curling into a smile that promised nothing anyone sane would want.

"Boy. I will make you regret it until the day this world ends." …That was genuinely terrifying. And yet, for reasons I cannot fully explain, I felt a faint, treacherous flicker of relief. At least we're back to a kind of family intimidation I actually understand. No. I'd clearly been knocked senseless. Having delivered her warning, Aeternitas seemed to shove her personal feelings roughly one inch to the side. She swept a look across the two of us, visibly impatient.

"So what did you actually come here for?" My voice came out rough.

"…The Dragon Soul."

"The Dragon Soul?" One of Aeternitas's brows rose. Something in those clock-marked golden eyes sharpened, for the first time, into genuine attention.

"War, then?"

"Yes." Ignicia answered immediately.

"The Yanxia Empire, the Dragon Kingdom, and Eckhaus—""Yanxia is invading the Dragon Kingdom and Eckhaus," I cut in, almost on instinct. The reason was simple: I had a strong feeling that if I didn't clarify immediately, the Temporal Dragon would interpret "three-way war" as "you kids are making a mess again" and find a reason to strangle me a second time. Aeternitas glanced at me, but didn't react this time.

"What does Yanxia want?" Now it was my turn. I drew a breath, throat still aching, and pushed the words out clean.

"They want the Spear of Light ruins in northern Eckhaus. We absolutely cannot let them get their hands on the Spear of Light." The anger still lingering on Aeternitas's face went suddenly, genuinely still.

"The Spear of Light…" She repeated it softly—almost to herself—but the weight behind it had entirely changed.

"That is not something mortal hands were ever meant to touch." She straightened, her gaze drifting slightly aside, as if rummaging through some abyssal thread of memory she found deeply unpleasant. Then, barely audible, I heard her murmur:"That fool Wahlin…" I frowned slightly. She was silent for a moment.

Then—as if forcibly shoving her personal grudges, her daughter's love life, the Rosa family's dark history, and the urge to strangle me, all roughly one inch to the side—she reassembled herself into something resembling the Gatekeeper of the Ancestral Lands. Roughly one inch, anyway. She raised a hand and beckoned. The gesture wasn't formal in the slightest—it had all the energy of hurry up and stop wasting my time.

"Boy," she said.

"Come here." I looked at her, then at Ignicia. Ignicia had sheathed her blade. Her face was still cold, but the razor edge that had been ready to fight her own mother a minute ago had dulled, just slightly. She gave me a small nod. Go. Right. When she nods like that, I already know there's no other option. I braced myself and walked over. Aeternitas watched me approach, still visibly irritated, as if personally offended that I remained alive and ambulatory.

But she turned, finally, and started deeper into the chamber.

"I'll take you to see the ancestors first," she said without looking back, her tone flat, as though stating the most obvious next step in the world. Then her next sentence dissolved that flatness right back into something dangerous.

"As for whether you pass—" She turned her head just enough for one clock-marked golden eye to cut sideways through her hair and land on me, cold as a blade left out in winter.

"—that depends entirely on your luck."