It should be noted that dragon’s breath doesn’t really look like a gas, something floating and ethereal, but rather more like a viscous liquid. If one hadn’t seen the Cadith dragon open its mouth wide and spew it out, one might have thought the big black dragon had caught a cold and was dripping snot everywhere.
But things weren’t much better now. Watching the large mass of green liquid plummet from the sky, Yang Hao felt sick and shouted in disgust, “You stinking dragon whose entire family died out, if you’re going to vomit, don’t do it on me!”
Yang Hao didn’t realize how many creatures had willingly risked certain death just to be touched by dragon’s breath. Although the chance of survival was only one in millions, those who did survive would undergo a transformation and gain the power of a dragon.
The mass of dragon’s breath fell onto Yang Hao like a glob of thick phlegm, splattering all over his head and body with a loud splat.
The darkness inside the dragon’s lair suddenly changed. A dense and distant green glow erupted violently and decisively, enveloping Yang Hao’s entire body.
“My…,” he tried to speak, but couldn’t utter a word.
Pain!
Excruciating pain, the kind that makes one wish for death, surged from Yang Hao’s head and rapidly spread through his nerve endings to every limb and organ. This pain felt completely different from anything Yang Hao had ever experienced before.
Yang Hao had fought many battles and getting injured was commonplace. Whether stabbed or blasted from a cannon, no matter how painful, it had always been physical trauma. Even being pierced through, it was merely an external wound to the flesh; at the time of injury, he hadn’t even felt that much pain.
But now, everything was different. Yang Hao was fully conscious. He could clearly feel and even hear the sound of his skin and muscles being torn away from his bones by the dragon’s breath.
What kind of feeling was this? Every nerve in Yang Hao’s body seemed to be enduring pain at a level fifty times greater than usual. People often said that having a sword pierce your heart was only a level five pain, but every single nerve in Yang Hao’s body was experiencing ten times that level of agony.
But even this wasn’t the worst part. What truly threatened to break Yang Hao’s mind was the passage of time. It felt endlessly prolonged, as if the pain would never end. The dragon’s breath didn’t hurry to kill Yang Hao. Instead, it slowly and methodically separated his bones, nerves, blood, and muscles, tearing and corroding bit by bit.
Yang Hao felt like a prisoner exposed to the desert sun, feeling the merciless rays scorch his body while his life slowly drained away. He was completely helpless, able only to stand there watching, even hoping desperately for death to come sooner.
But how long would it take for the thick dragon’s breath to flow through Yang Hao’s entire body and truly take his life?
Even the Cadith dragon sensed Yang Hao’s fading will and began to lose interest. Obviously, Yang Hao wasn’t a being capable of enduring the dragon’s breath. The black dragon only paid a little attention before folding its wings and preparing to retreat alone into the depths of its lair.
It seemed that Yang Hao’s life, the life of Hun Yuanzi, and the fate of the Dan Ding dual cultivation sect were all about to end here.
But people often say that in the vastness of the universe and the changes of time, what seems accidental is actually guided by divine forces working in the shadows. People used to believe these divine forces were the gods themselves, but later realized that gods were merely beings with greater abilities than themselves, so the true deities must be above even the gods.
In fact, whether there are true deities in the universe isn’t really important. Because the turning points of events, even the fate of the entire universe, might simply be the result of a shift in people’s thoughts.
If one says that true deities reside in people’s hearts, many would probably agree. And for Yang Hao, this was especially true.
Because just as the dragon’s breath was about to melt away Yang Hao’s flesh and bones and take his life, a sudden thought arose in his mind. He seemed to hear a voice. Soft yet firm, it said:
“Survive!”
Survive! This was the voice of Hun Yuanzi, the voice of Shi Ming’ai, the voice of Yang Hao’s friends and brothers, and also the voice from deep within himself.
Survive! He must survive. The world might keep turning no matter who was gone, but Yang Hao still had his own glory to uphold.
He could die on the battlefield, beneath a warrior’s sword, but how could the last heir of the Dan Ding dual cultivation sect, a great swordsman of the universe, be suffocated to death by a glob of dragon spit in a dark, damp cave?
Summoning his last reserves of strength, Yang Hao almost used every ounce of power left in his body. He forced the true energy from his inner elixir to surge forth, sending wave after wave of warm currents up from his dantian to counteract the dragon’s breath at his head.
The real battle began now. When Yang Hao injected his true energy into his head, attempting to resist the dragon’s breath, he suddenly discovered that he wasn’t as helpless as he had thought. At the very least, he had slowed the dragon breath’s rate of consumption and significantly reduced its power.
Even stranger, Yang Hao’s true energy was actually seeping into the dragon’s breath, drop by drop. This was an unprecedented phenomenon. Not only had Yang Hao never encountered anything like it, but even among the warriors of ancient dragon-slaying legends, such a bizarre occurrence had never been recorded.
Yang Hao’s true energy, glowing faintly pink, intertwined with the pale green glow of the dragon’s breath, creating a brilliant radiance. Although the dragon’s breath was thick and dense, the true energy was like water seeping into sand, penetrating every crevice and scattering the entire mass of dragon breath into chaos.
This incredible scene not only inspired Yang Hao to continue pouring more of his true energy into the fight, but also startled the resting Cadith dragon. The great black dragon had originally thought the job was done and was dozing off with its eyes half-closed. It never expected Yang Hao to be so tenacious—tougher than an indestructible cockroach, persisting in an endless struggle with the dragon’s breath, showing no sign of weakening.
The black dragon had never encountered such a situation before. In the past, when it had sprayed dragon’s breath on those sacrificial victims, they always died after three screams of agony, never even making it to a fourth.
But Yang Hao’s current vigor was enough to make him seem capable of reproducing and living for hundreds more years.
Even the Cadith dragon hadn’t anticipated that Yang Hao was not only able to resist the dragon’s breath—he had actually uncovered a tremendous secret.
A real secret.
He had found what Hun Yuanzi had left behind. Hun Yuanzi hadn’t sacrificed his thousand years of cultivation in vain, nor had he been swallowed by the great black dragon for nothing. He had completed his mission—he had truly forged the Dragon’s Breath Pill.
Yang Hao didn’t know how Hun Yuanzi had done it. Perhaps at the moment the Cadith dragon swallowed him, or maybe when the black dragon exhaled its breath, Hun Yuanzi must have gambled all his centuries of cultivation on a single spell to forge the Dragon’s Breath Pill. It had been an enormous gamble, one that consumed all of Hun Yuanzi’s life force. The spell itself had never been tested before—it was merely a legend from ancient times.
Hun Yuanzi had been a gambler willing to bet his very life.
But he had won.
As Yang Hao injected the true energy from his inner elixir into the dragon’s breath, it was as if sunlight pierced through clouds, dispelling the thick fog. Yang Hao suddenly realized that deep within the mass of dragon’s breath, in the most hidden and secret place, lay a small pill.
This pill was so tiny, no larger than a fingernail, but Yang Hao nearly wept. Because he knew very well that this pill was the embodiment of Hun Yuanzi’s entire life and emotions.
The Dragon’s Breath Pill radiated a soft golden glow. Though surrounded by the green of the dragon’s breath, its golden light—so familiar, the same golden glow as Hun Yuanzi’s—shone steadily, as if foretelling Yang Hao’s future.
“Survive!” Hun Yuanzi would surely say, if he were still alive. “Survive, and do it strongly.”
With tears streaming down his face, Yang Hao swallowed the Dragon’s Breath Pill. He understood that what he had just consumed was not merely an ancient legendary pill, but also the very life and hope of Hun Yuanzi.
Would the heavens and earth change color? As Yang Hao felt the Dragon’s Breath Pill slowly dissolve in his throat, sending a warm current flowing down his body, he raised his head to stare at the dark ceiling of the dragon’s lair. Would the outside world witness storms and upheaval, divine weeping and demonic howling?
Because this was likely the first divine pill ever forged by humanity, and Yang Hao was the first ordinary person to ever consume a Dragon’s Breath Pill.
An ancient alchemical method passed down through the ages, thousands of cultivators who had died pursuing it, combined with Hun Yuanzi’s thousand years of cultivation, and the dragon’s breath of the most powerful dragon in the universe as the key ingredient—this was the pill that Yang Hao had just swallowed.
Now, it was the Cadith dragon’s turn to be shaken.
This great black dragon had seen many things in its time. So old that it could barely remember, it had lived at least several hundred thousand years. Though it had missed the era of dragon slaying, it had personally participated in later divine wars and demonic battles, often as a leading force of destruction. One could say that nothing in this world, no matter how strange or bizarre, could catch the black dragon’s interest anymore.
But the scene before it now caused the Cadith black dragon to involuntarily rise to its feet, tightly drawing in its wings and adopting a defensive posture toward Yang Hao, its expression tense.
In this universe, how many beings could make a black dragon feel this nervous? Even among the gods, those capable of matching it were extremely rare—after all, the black dragon was among the most powerful of dragonkind, second only to the golden dragons.
Yet at this moment, the dragon stood as if facing a formidable enemy, treating Yang Hao as if he were some possessed demon.
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