Chương 47: Chapter 21 part 4

The Royal Palace of Elyndria was a sprawling, majestic fortress of white marble, reinforced dwarven steel, and towering stained-glass windows, situated at the very highest elevation of the capital. Tonight, it was locked down tighter than a dragon's hoard. Hundreds of heavily armed, elite Royal Guards patrolled the perimeter in the freezing rain, while dozens of battle-mages stood watch on the high balconies, their staves glowing with high-tier detection spells.

Inside the massive, vaulted expanse of the Grand Foyer, Crown Prince Theron stood at the head of a massive, map-strewn oak table serving as his temporary command post. He was surrounded by his highest-ranking generals and Chief Spymaster Elias Veyne. The atmosphere in the room was boiling over with frustrated panic as they deployed search squads into the lower rings. BOOM. The sound was not a knock. It was a catastrophic detonation of pure, concussive force.

The massive, heavily reinforced, solid-oak front doors of the Royal Palace, doors explicitly designed to withstand a direct, sustained hit from a battering ram, did not just swing open. They were violently sheared entirely off their foot-thick iron hinges. The colossal slabs of wood and metal crashed into the pristine marble floor of the foyer, sliding a dozen feet inward and throwing up a massive cloud of splintered wood and pulverized stone.

"INTRUDER!" a Royal Guard Captain screamed, his voice cracking with pure adrenaline. Instantly, the grand foyer erupted into motion. Fifty elite Royal Guards drew their longswords in perfect unison, a terrifying wall of dwarven steel forming between the shattered doorway and the Crown Prince. On the interior balconies above, twenty royal battle-mages raised their staves, their mana crystals flaring with lethal, high-tier elemental energy, ready to incinerate whatever had just breached the palace.

As the dust slowly began to settle, a figure walked out of the freezing rain and into the grand hall. Ming Xuan Ji stepped over the shattered remains of the doors. Her black-and-crimson silk hanfu was completely immaculate, untouched by the torrential downpour outside. The rainwater simply sizzled and evaporated inches from her skin, repelled by the intense, ambient heat radiating from her body. She didn't draw a weapon. She didn't drop into a martial arts stance.

She simply stopped, looked at the wall of heavily armored guards blocking her path, and unsealed her Dantian. She allowed the absolute, unadulterated weight of her Heavenly Demon Aura to flood the room. It was not a spell. It was not a physical attack. It was the pure, unrestrained gravity of a supreme martial artist imposing her existence upon the physical world. The air pressure inside the grand foyer instantly skyrocketed.

To the Royal Guards, it felt as though an invisible ocean had just crashed down onto their shoulders. Men who had trained their entire lives to fight trolls and wyverns suddenly found they could not pull oxygen into their lungs. Their heavy steel armor, which they usually wore like a second skin, abruptly felt as though it weighed a thousand pounds. Clatter. Clatter. Clatter. Swords slipped from trembling fingers, ringing loudly against the marble floor.

One by one, the elite soldiers of the Zareth Kingdom were forcefully, inescapably pressed to their knees. The sheer weight of Xuan Ji's aura buckled their legs, forcing them to bow before a superior existence. Up on the balconies, the battle-mages gasped in horror. The glowing mana crystals on their staves flickered wildly and then died completely.

The overwhelming density of Xuan Ji's supreme Qi was so aggressively absolute that it physically snuffed out the ambient mana in the room, actively suffocating their magic before they could even finish a chant. Xuan Ji didn't even look at the kneeling soldiers. She walked slowly, methodically down the center of the foyer, parting the sea of paralyzed, gasping elites simply by existing. Her boots made no sound against the marble. At the far end of the hall, Crown Prince Theron stood frozen behind the war table.

His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. Beside him, his generals had already collapsed to the floor, clutching their chests and gasping desperately for air. Only Theron and Spymaster Elias managed to remain standing, though their legs were shaking violently under the oppressive, mind-breaking weight. Theron remembered Lynx's terrifying warning from earlier that night. She doesn't cast spells. She is a walking siege weapon. Ming Xuan Ji stopped exactly ten feet away from the Crown Prince.

The terrifying, glowing golden light of her Divine Eye locked onto him. It was the gaze of an apex predator patiently waiting for a trapped king to acknowledge his reality. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Crown Prince Theron," Xuan Ji said. Her voice was completely calm, smooth as silk, utterly devoid of the exertion that should have accompanied subduing an entire battalion simply by breathing.

"Lady... Lady Ming," Theron choked out, forcing his spine straight, refusing to kneel in his own palace, though it took every ounce of his willpower to meet her burning gaze.

"I ordered my men to protect your estate, ""And for that, Apothecary Vane was able to properly save my disciple without interruption. You have my acknowledgment," Xuan Ji replied, her words cutting through the heavy silence like a scalpel.

"But your quarantine failed." Spymaster Elias flinched as if he had been physically struck.

"Failed? My shadow operatives have the gates entirely sealed."

"While you were busy locking your gates to the outside world, your Nobility Faction sold you out from within," Xuan Ji continued, crossing her arms. The silk of her sleeves rippled slightly in the hyper-dense air.

"The Blood God Cult utilized ancient smuggling tunnels beneath the noble district. A high-ranking traitor within your own nobility gave them the keys to bypass your walls." Theron's face drained of all color, his eyes darting to Elias. The Spymaster's earlier report echoed in his mind. The eastern aqueduct grates... the structural access point beneath the wine cellars of Duke Valerius Morvant.

"Duke Morvant," Elias hissed, his voice trembling with sheer, venomous rage.

"He allowed them in. What did they smuggle?"

"An Ancient Dragon's egg," Xuan Ji stated coldly, laying out the brutal, apocalyptic reality.

"It is currently hidden somewhere in the lower rings of your city." Theron couldn't breathe. The politics, the factions, the border wars, all of it meant nothing in the face of an Ancient Dragon. If the mother tracked the resonance to Elyndria, the city was dead.

"Find it," Xuan Ji commanded, pointing a slender finger at the Crown Prince.

"Tear the noble district apart. Execute whoever you must. Secure that egg before the mother arrives to burn this capital to the bedrock."

"And if she arrives before we find it?" Theron asked, his voice hollow.

"Our army is fundamentally unequipped to handle such a calamity."

"I am highly motivated to preserve this city's infrastructure. If the mother attacks, I will punch her out of your sky," Xuan Ji declared, her golden eyes flaring with a dark, battle-hungry thrill.

"However, I do not work for free. After I take care of the dragon, I require your highest-grade monster processing facility and the best artisans of the Royal Crafter's Guild. I have some materials that needs immediate dismantling, and I have an idea on how to use them."

"You have my word," Theron swore without a second of hesitation.

"Save my city, and the Royal Guild is yours to command." Xuan Ji nodded once. Without waiting for a formal dismissal, she turned on her heel, her heavy aura retracting instantly. The Royal Guards gasped, collapsing to the floor as oxygen rushed back into their lungs, but Xuan Ji was already stepping back out into the freezing storm, blurring out of sight.

Instead of heading to the forges to prepare, Xuan Ji utilized her supreme Qinggong to rocket straight back to the Vael estate. She already possessed the absolute pinnacle of gear for her Heavenly Demon build; she didn't need newly forged dwarven steel or enchanted talismans to fight. She needed to prepare her internal world.

Landing softly in the courtyard, she verified that the heavy infantry shield-wall was still flawlessly holding the perimeter, and that Durgan and Axel were successfully standing guard outside Evanthe's room. Satisfied that her disciple was finally safe, Xuan Ji moved to the master bedroom of the ruined guest wing. She sat in the center of the room, crossing her legs into a perfect lotus position, and closed her eyes. She drew her consciousness completely inward.

The physical toll of her hypersonic flight and her terrifying, twenty-floor dive through the Grand Abyss had been immense, but the profound rewards were astronomical. As she circulated her Heavenly Demon Scripture, she felt the roaring density of her newly refined Qi. She had slaughtered countless high-level monsters in the Twilight Zone, forcefully absorbing and purifying their ambient energy. She had grown stronger. Much stronger.

Her meridians had widened, and her internal Qi reserves had deepened into an unfathomable ocean of golden power, surging with the destructive force of a captured sun. Floating quietly in the sub-space of her storage ring was the ultimate prize: the SS-rank Core of the Abyssal Frost Wyrm. It was a catalyst of pure, unadulterated Yin energy that could undoubtedly push her into the next major stage of her cultivation. Xuan Ji observed the frozen core in her mind's eye, but she didn't attempt to absorb it.

Her Heavenly Demon constitution required absolute, pristine equilibrium. If she absorbed an SS-rank Yin core without a Pinnacle Yang core of equal density to perfectly counterbalance it, the resulting thermal shock would violently tear her internal universe apart. I can't power up with the Wyrm core just yet, Xuan Ji thought pragmatically. But that is fine. I have enough raw stats for now. In her past life, she had built a legendary reputation on hunting raid bosses that mathematically out-scaled her.

Fighting an enemy that was larger, stronger, and hit harder than her wasn't a death sentence; it was simply a mechanic to be conquered. She knew exactly how to parry colossal strikes, how to exploit elemental weaknesses, and how to outmaneuver massive hitboxes. She was supremely confident. Xuan Ji settled into a deep, profound meditation, drawing the ambient energy of the capital into her lungs to refine her physical condition to 100% peak efficiency. She meditated for an entire day and night.

Outside her window, the capital descended into chaos. The Crown Prince's royal battalions ruthlessly stormed the inner rings, battering down the reinforced gates of the Morvant estate and turning the entire noble district upside down in a desperate, frantic search for the hidden dragon egg. But as the sun began to set on the following day, painting the sky in bloody streaks of orange and crimson, the egg was still unfound. Suddenly, Xuan Ji's eyes snapped open in the darkness of her room.

The golden light of her Divine Eye flared so brightly it illuminated the scorched walls. She felt it. It wasn't a physical sound, but a crushing, atmospheric omen pressing down from the stratosphere. It was a threat approaching from afar, something impossibly massive and suffocatingly powerful. The sheer, psychic weight of the presence far eclipsed the Archmage she had felt residing in the ivory tower, and it dwarfed even the terrible, primordial chill of the Abyssal Frost Wyrm. The mother had arrived.

Ming Xuan Ji slowly stood up, casually brushing her garment despite not a speck of dust staying on her crimson silk. A feral, deeply excited smile touched the corners of her lips. She cracked her knuckles, the sharp, popping sound echoing like a gunshot in the quiet room. She was ready to face the apocalypse.