Chapter 47: Dragonseal Stone (1/2)

“The Dragon Prince’s chambers?” Lu Yun was perplexed. “Wasn’t this the Tiger Prince’s territory? Where did this ‘Dragon Prince’ come from?”

Before he could fully understand what was going on, a mass of shadows pounced on him. An enormous, draconic shadow was poised a short distance behind the group.

“Back off!” An imperious command from the dragon shadow immediately dispersed the charging mass. “Where did the Tiger Prince go?” it demanded. The pressure it exerted on Lu Yun was identical to the Tiger Prince’s—both were so heavy as to be suffocating.

However, Yuying was an immortal as well, now. She could suppress these living layouts with her Panorama of Clarity, Dragon Prince included.

“The Tiger Prince? He’s dead.” Lu Yun calmed down. He lifted Qing Han off his shoulders and returned the envoy to his back, to which the other youth let out a sigh of relief.

“No, the Tiger Prince isn’t dead!” There was a hint of expectation in the Dragon Prince’s voice. “Where did you send him? Send me there too.”

“What?!” Lu Yun traded a stunned look with Yuying.

“The Tiger Prince and I share the same life. If he were dead, I would disappear as well.” The Dragon Prince was only a shadow, but his yearning was nearly tangible. “He’s not dead. Instead, he’s undergoing metamorphosis. I can feel that he’s evolving to a higher level.”

The dragon shadow’s voice was low, indistinct, and altogether strange. “I know what’s going on. He met you earlier, didn’t he? The place he’s gone to must be the reason for his transformation.”

“Yuying.” Lu Yun glanced at the brilliant envoy.

Yuying? A thought popped into Qing Han’s head. The Panorama of Clarity! No wonder. So Yuying didn’t die a thousand years ago.

He didn’t dwell on it, however. Within this burial mound, Lu Yun had displayed a wide range of incredible talents. He wasn’t strong himself, but his collection of tricks had resolved every problem so far with ease.

He must have many secrets about him.

The eighth governor of Dusk Province was rumored to have died during her heavenly tribulation, but whether she had actually died or not, who knew? That was twelve hundred years ago, regardless.

Yuying understood her master’s intentions. She extended her fingers, slowly unfurling the Panorama of Clarity. The painting depicted mountains and rivers in washed ink, but there was a new addition: a small tiger, napping in the midst of the landscape.

“There!” The Dragon Prince’s voice was filled with longing. “Send me in!”

“I can do that,” Lu Yun allowed. “But first, you need to tell me how we got here so suddenly. I’m sure we were in the Tiger Prince’s territory.”

“I brought all of you here.” The Dragon Prince calmed down once more. “If I hadn’t, you would’ve died at that undead hag’s hands.”

Lu Yun frowned, but said nothing.

“The Tiger Prince and I are spirits born of this space. He and I are bound to each other by our existences. He represents the body, and I, the spirit. The rules here force us to fight tooth and nail, but they also prevent us from ever coming face to face. We can only fight our war by proxy, as in sending other creatures at each other. Our proxies were also born of this place.”

Lu Yun finally understood the situation. The Duality of Dragon and Tiger couldn’t allow the two kingly creatures to actually come face to face. If they did, they would fight to the death. If one of them was gone, the layout would also be broken.

No wonder they were separated by the duality of body and spirit.

He recalled the tiger head outside the corpse coffin, and the venom in its eyes. That head was the tiger part of the layout, spawning the Tiger Prince from its essence. Now that the Tiger Prince was gone, the tigrine portion would disappear shortly thereafter, leaving only the draconic.

If the Dragon Prince went into the Panorama of Clarity as well, the entire layout would dissipate.

“This is the mindspace of the coffin, where I’ve taken up residence. The undead hag can’t come in here, so you’re safe for the time being,” continued the Dragon Prince.

“Aha, so that’s it.” Lu Yun nodded. If the Dragon Prince embodied spirit and thought, then his residence was a purely mental space.

“Wait a second. What mindspace? That coffin can think for itself!?” Qing Han instinctively shrank back.

“No, it’s not the coffin’s mind, it’s the undead hag’s,” corrected the Dragon Prince. “She was the one that was originally buried in the tomb. Because of what she turned into, her soul hasn’t been able to enter the wheel of reincarnation. In fact, it’s eroded to nothingness. On top of that, her mind was extracted and fused into the corpse coffin, so she would suffer for eternity. Her corpse gradually transformed into an undead hag, sealed away in the abyss by the floating summit.”

“If it were me, I would do the same.” Lu Yun nodded. “This is the only fitting retribution.”

Qing Han flattened his mouth in disgust.

“Don’t curl your lips like that,” the Dusk governor chuckled. “What would you do if your family members were refined into corpse coffins?” He meant it as a rhetorical question. “I’d wipe out the perverted race responsible, then refine the one buried in my family into a corpse coffin themselves. Give them a taste of their own medicine, so to speak.”

The suffering visited upon the coffin itself would be transferred to the mind of the buried individual.

Qing Han fell silent for a time. “My family isn’t all that kind to me,” he remarked quietly.

A strange feeling entered Lu Yun’s heart. “That’s enough of that,” he coughed softly. “What’s down in the abyss?”

He’d tried to examine it using his Spectral Eye, but the energies of life and death there were too chaotic. He could see nothing but the teeming dead.

“I don’t know,” responded the Dragon Prince. “But maybe the fox does.” He nodded at the nearby Miao, who shook his head slightly.

“I don’t know either. The abyss is outside the boundaries of the burial mound. I tried to go down there a few times in my dreams, but ended up back here every time I jumped in.”

“The burial mound might have landed here because of that abyss,” speculated Lu Yun.

“Can you let me into that painting now?” Anticipatory joy colored the Dragon Prince’s voice.

Lu Yun inclined his head. “Will we be forced to leave if you go into the painting?” he asked.

“The undead hag has already left,” the Dragon Prince answered in perfect understanding of what he meant. “Still, you need to be careful. Since you let it out by removing that floating summit, there’s not much else here that can restrain it.”