Dragon Heart: Land of The Enemy. LitRPG Wuxia Series: Book 8

by Kirill Klevanski

  Hadjar had always sensed a certain hostility from the Enemy, but now he felt nothing. It was as if the Black General didn’t care about him anymore.

  “All right, tell me your story, Darkhan,” Hadjar agreed after a moment’s hesitation.

  “It isn’t my story, descendant.” The shadow began to dissolve and it gradually filled the entire space around them. Hadjar felt a wave of suffocating fear overwhelm him, but it left as quickly as it had appeared. Perhaps they really had made a truce today.

  Closing his eyes, he allowed the darkness to engulf him. When he could see again, he was standing on a wide, stone road that looked vaguely familiar. It took him a couple of seconds to realize that he was standing on a road in the middle of the Wastelands. However, unlike the one they’d ridden down, which was ruined and hidden beneath a layer of dry earth and red sand, this one was brand new and beautiful. Even the Imperial road, which spanned almost the entire Empire, looked like a dirt path in some forsaken village by comparison. Wide enough to let ten carts pass each other with ease, it was paved with red and white stone. Forty rows of twenty warriors each marched toward the setting sun and the golden sky.

  “The fires of war,” Hadjar guessed at once.

  Even in these ancient times, when magical gunpowder hadn’t been invented yet, people had still found other ways to set fire to fortresses and settlements from a safe distance. So, even back then, one could see columns of thick smoke obscuring the sky, rising from the blood-soaked battlefields. The sky itself seemed to be burning.

  “Where are we?”

  The Enemy, having assumed his raven form once again, perched on Hadjar’s shoulder. They suddenly moved up a hill, where they had a better view of the battlefield. In the modern world, an army of about a hundred thousand would be considered pitifully small. But back then, such an army was huge and able to strike terror into the hearts of many kingdoms.

  “This is the age of the Hundred Kingdoms,” the bird croaked. “Or rather, its end — the War of the Hundred Kingdoms.”

  Hadjar tried to remember everything he knew about this era, and even asked his neural network for additional information. But even with their combined efforts, they couldn’t find anything about it in his memory.

  “Don’t waste your time.” The raven’s chuckle was hollow, like the noise of a pipe being struck by a piece of iron. “This all happened so long ago that even those who rule the Seven Empires don’t remember anything about it.”

  “The Seven Empires?”

  “Did you think Lascan and Darnassus are the only Empires in your region? They aren’t. There are seven of them. Your two Empires are just a pair of bickering neighbors whose quarrel goes back to the time of the Hundred Kingdoms.”

  Hadjar looked at the soldiers marching along the road. They were dressed in simple armor, the kind that only mortals wore. Even the most powerful of them weren’t above the initial stage of the Heaven Soldier level. The most powerful of all, of course, was their General, easily standing out thanks to his Mortal level plate armor and Spirit level sword.

  “Back in those days, the path of cultivation wasn’t as widespread among humans as it is now,” the raven continued. “But make no mistake, this army, the army of king Eranos, was one of the strongest in the Hundred Kingdoms.”

  This was what the strongest army at that time looked like? Hadjar wondered, baffled. Luckily for the cultivators of modern times, progress hadn’t stood still. It was amazing to see just how far they’d come in comparison to their ancestors.

  “And the Immortals?” Hadjar asked, suddenly remembering them.

  “The Land of the Immortals will come to be long after this,” the raven croaked. “I’m showing you the days when I myself walked amongst the mortals.”

  Hadjar turned around abruptly. Beside him, atop the hill, stood an old man wrapped in a black cloak. His white hair, peeking out from under his hood, was caked in dirt. He was leaning on a dry branch that served as his walking stick.

  “I was old by then, so old that I didn’t remember when or how I was born.”

  Hadjar turned to the raven.

  “Didn’t the gods imprison you on the Mountain of Skulls?”

  “They did,” the bird answered. “But they only locked away a large part of my soul. Many fragments got into the bodies of ordinary mortals and became my bloodline. There were also those bits that were scattered among the humans. Incapable of cultivation, they lived a simple life and then dissolved into the energies once they died. The one you see before you now was the last fragment that wasn’t trapped in the prison of someone else’s blood.”

  Hadjar stared at the trembling old man. It seemed like he’d be blown away by the next breeze that came along.

  “My Lord!” one of the riders shouted as he rushed down from a high hill. “My Lord! We found them…”

  Judging by his pale and mournful expression, they hadn’t found anything good. Eranos spurred his snow-white horse and rode toward the quarry.

  The raven suddenly grew bigger and lifted Hadjar into the air. Before they left, Hadjar saw the old man turn his head toward them. Their gazes met for a brief moment, but that was all it took for a shiver to run down Hadjar’s spine. The deranged look in the man’s eyes was frightening.

  Chapter 649

  T hey landed in front of a burning village. During his time in the Moon army, Hadjar had seen something like this many times: flames greedily consuming the wooden huts, corpses burned to ash and bone, blood sizzling on the heated stones, barns burning like huge torches, and fields turned into bonfires. The rancid smell of burnt meat that would get under your skin couldn’t be washed away or masked by incense, lingering forever to remind you of the horror that you’d witnessed. Scattered all over the blood-soaked ground were corpses, so badly burned that they were no longer recognizable. Empty eye sockets stared into nothingness, their crooked mouths forever frozen in a scream. The whiteness of their teeth seemed almost unnatural when contrasted with their charred skin. The fire had been so hot that it had burned away all the plaque, but hadn’t been able to destroy the bone. No matter how many times one saw such a sight, it always penetrated to the very depths of their consciousness, leaving a deep mark and manifesting in one’s nightmares.

  “Sister!” Eranos took off his helmet. Golden hair spilled out over his broad shoulder pads, hiding the firelight beneath it. “By the ancient Spirits, what did they do to you? My dear sister…”

  Tears ran down his cheeks. Capturing the orange glow of the fire, they looked like liquid gold streaming down his rough skin.

  Hadjar had seen many horrors in his life, but still couldn’t stand the sight. Turning away, he cursed both the gods and the Heavens. Eyes and ears cut off, cheeks and teeth torn out, a young girl hung from the branches of a dead tree. Her scarred and scorched body was proof that she’d been subjected to tortures that only a sick and twisted mind was capable of enacting. Her swollen belly had been cut open and its contents left to spill out. Nestled among her internal organs was a small, bloody lump. The girl had been pregnant.

  “Fucking hell, I’m gonna be sick!” Hadjar swore, feeling the bile rise in his throat. Even though he knew that this was someone else’s memory, he couldn’t help but feel disgusted.

  “Those were hard times,” the raven said, turning into a cloud of darkness.

  Hadjar stood on the edge of the hill and watched the old man move toward the burned out village, hiding behind the roadside trees and bushes.

  “We need to leave, my Lord.” The pale officer reached out to touch Eranos’ shoulder. “The soldiers will worry… You’re their leader. You’re the only one keeping our Kingdom safe from the flames of war.”

  Holding the dead girl’s hand, Eranos, lost in his grief, stroked and kissed her mutilated fingers.

  “My sister… My nephew… Those monsters… Who could have done this…?”

  He continued whispering to himself, his voice so thin that no one could hear him speak, and Hadjar saw his energ
y grow weaker and weaker.

  “I couldn’t cultivate,” the cloud of darkness said. “I was just a fragment of the true soul, one that could do nothing but maintain its physical appearance as it slowly withered away.”

  Hadjar didn’t understand why the Enemy was telling him this. What he saw made him thank the Heavens for sparing him from such horrors during the wars in Lidus.

  The old man, who was still hiding behind the trees and bushes, suddenly reached into his pocket. He took out a bundle and unfolded it, revealing a single pill. It shimmered slightly in the firelight and looked more like a gem than medicine. Thin, wrinkled fingers closed around it, turning it into powder. The man held out his hand and blew on it. The powder, carried by the wind, formed a narrow ribbon and entered the woman’s torn abdomen.

  What followed made Hadjar step back in shock. By the High Heavens, had this been real, he would’ve vomited. A thin, high-pitched scream came from the gore and soon turned into a wail. The soldiers recoiled and drew their weapons. Horror gradually turned to disgust. Hadjar couldn’t help but agree with them.

  Eranos, clearly not himself anymore, stuck his hand into the mass of internal organs and pulled out a fetus. It was covered in blood and had thick, black hair.

  “Demon…” The officers whispered. “Cursed…”

  Having a dead mother give birth to a living child wasn’t a good sign. Superstition wasn’t just strong amongst mortals, but practitioners and cultivators as well.

  “She wanted to call you Erhard — Lost Heart,” Eranos whispered. He cut the umbilical cord and wrapped the baby in his snow-white cloak embroidered in gold. “Your father was the greatest warrior in the Kingdom.”

  The child was silent.

  “We’re going back to the capital!” He ordered.

  “But, my Lord… Our ally is being besieged!” One of the officers protested. “We promised them our support. Without us, they won’t be able to withstand the onslaught! Dayckared will destroy them!”

  “We’re going back to the capital.” Eranos’ eyes flashed with renewed vigor. “That’s an order!”

  Cradling the child in his arms, he leapt into the saddle and then swung his sword. Flames shot out from his blade, completing the work begun by their enemies. His sister, who would never be able to hear her child call her mom, burst into azure flames. The riders disappeared around the bend, leaving the ashes behind to be scattered by the wind.

  Hadjar was surprised to see that Eranos’ sword swing contained mysteries that were deeper than the Weapon’s Heart level. He also realized that the strike would’ve easily sent both him and Master Orune to their forefathers.

  “What the-”

  The surroundings changed abruptly.

  “-hell?” Hadjar asked, staring at the sarcophagus once more. Next to it stood the same humanoid blob of darkness from before. The runes and hieroglyphs that covered the ancient chains shone brightly. When he’d first seen them, he’d presumed that they’d been put there to fend off tomb raiders, but now he suspected that the chains served a very different purpose — to keep whatever was inside the sarcophagus from ever getting out.

  “Back in those days, people didn’t know much about the path of cultivation,” the Enemy went around the sarcophagus and leaned over it, “but endless wars gave them the opportunity to learn more about the essence of battle and weapons. Why do you think the Weapon Kingdom level is called that?”

  “I have no idea,” Hadjar replied honestly.

  “Because only the one who’d mastered it could be a King.”

  Hadjar nodded. That made sense. After all, in the entire Empire, where there were more cultivators and practitioners than there were grains of sand in the desert, only a few dozen of them had reached the Weapon Kingdom level.

  “Erhard was the greatest King the world had ever known.”

  “And what brought this great King down?”

  Hadjar lowered his gaze. The figure carved into the lid of the sarcophagus looked like the visage of a young man of about twenty-two or so.

  “The same thing that’ll one day kill us all.” The Enemy’s voice was filled with sadness again. “Remember, my glorious descendant, that the greatest of us don’t die by the sword, or by the hands of mortals and immortals, but by the hand of something that was never born.”

  Hadjar shuddered, feeling a chill run down his spine. He remembered the Tree of Life and its prophecy. He could now remember being told that he’d die at ‘the hand of one who was never born’.

  Chapter 650

  “A nd what or who is that, exactly?” Hadjar asked warily.

  The darkness looked at him. Having the void stare at you was eerie to say the least.

  “That which we love, Hadjar,” the Enemy replied. “We all die because of what we love.”

  Hadjar remained silent. He had no intention of arguing with the Enemy, but he suspected that the Tree of Life had had something else in mind when it had issued its prophecy. He highly doubted that the matter at hand was so complex and philosophical, and that a being like the Enemy was capable of understanding love, let alone feeling it. It didn’t matter what Steppe Fang had told him about the Black General, or the fact that he’d taught humanity so much. From the very moment he’d appeared, the world hadn’t seen a single day without war. Some would say that this was a small price to pay for such a vast amount of knowledge, but such people had clearly never been in a war.

  “Erhard was talented,” the darkness said with a note of tenderness to its voice. “He was truly great.”

  Hadjar looked at the sarcophagus again.

  “I never became a scholar like my parents wanted me to be,” Hadjar said with a touch of regret, “but even I know that great people aren’t chained up after their deaths and that their eternal resting place should be a crypt, not a dungeon.”

  The darkness transformed into a raven that hovered in the air.

  “There are many ways to become great. Before we get to Erhard’s death, let me tell you about his life.”

  Hadjar sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Darkhan, I don’t mind hearing you out, but I honestly don’t understand why you’re telling me all of this.”

  “Do you remember the place where you meditated?”

  Hadjar frowned.

  “Is Erhard buried there?”

  The raven laughed, its unpleasant croaking sounding like a knife sliding across glass.

  “I don’t know where my disciple is buried,” it said. “What you see is only a memory, nothing more. By the time he died, the fragment of my soul that was his Master had disappeared into the energy flows.”

  Hadjar didn’t ask how his own fragment of the Enemy knew about Erhard. Even if the first Darkhan had tried to explain it to him, he probably wouldn’t have understood much of it.

  “The place where you decided to meditate… That’s where Erhard was killed and then resurrected by me.”

  Hadjar barely resisted the urge to vomit, recalling the terrible sight of a tortured girl hanging from a tree.

  “Why… Why did you help him?”

  The raven didn’t respond at first. It stared silently into the infinity of its own thoughts.

  “I don’t know, my descendant… Maybe because I wanted to see if I could pass my knowledge on to someone. Maybe because I was bored. Or maybe because I saw something in his birth that reminded me of my own. Like Erhard, I was born to a dead mother, on dead ground, and revived by those I hated.”

  So, the Enemy tried to pass on knowledge... However, according to Steppe Fang, Darkhan had once taught the entire human race...

  “Did Erhard hate you?”

  “Hate me?” The raven laughed. “Sometimes, maybe… Then again, all disciples are like that. He didn’t particularly like his Master during training. You know how that is, Hadjar…”

  The young man didn’t deny it. The relationship between disciples and their Masters, although built on mutual respect, was a complex thing
.

  “No,” the raven continued. “He hated Eranos and his Kingdom.”

  “Was his uncle strict?”

  “Not really. No more than a King should be with a crown Prince. No, Erhard hated his country for its treachery and weakness. The Kingdom that Eranos didn’t reinforce that night was conquered. Its inhabitants were turned into slaves. Many of them escaped… or tried to, at least.”

  Hadjar knew exactly what the raven meant. He had experienced the same thing himself. Back when he’d worn the General’s medallion of the Moon Army, he had often had to make difficult decisions. Inevitable as they’d been, they’d still made him wake up in a cold sweat at night for years afterward.

  “And so, the story of King Erhard’s greatness and doom began. He was a strong and intelligent young man and a good disciple. At the age of ten, he mastered the Weapon’s Heart, and at sixteen — the Sword Kingdom. Who knows, maybe he would’ve even understood its true essence given enough time…”

  Hadjar quietly listened to the story, utterly bewildered. Mastering the Sword Kingdom at the age of sixteen, especially considering the generally low level of cultivation that existed in those ancient times was... incredible. If Erhard had been born nowadays, by the Evening Stars, he could’ve conquered all of the seven Empires on his own before he’d turned thirty.

  “Then he fell in love.” The raven chuckled again. “He fell in love with a runaway slave who, in her stupidity and to his misfortune, told him about the history of her homeland.”

  Hadjar imagined a young Erhard and a dirt-covered girl in tattered clothes. She wasn’t very beautiful, but he loved her in that way that could only be seen in fairy tales told by mothers to their daughters. Such stories occupied a special place in the hearts of women even when they reached adulthood. South Wind used to say that if mothers didn’t tell their daughters these stories, the world would’ve been lost to wars long ago.

  “Erhard decided to find out the truth about his past. He considered himself the King’s son, but after finding out the truth… He wanted to bring peace to the Hundred Kingdoms. He wanted to end their many wars, so that no more people would have to suffer, so that the strong no longer tortured the weak, so that children didn’t lose their parents, nor lovers their beloved.”