Coiling Dragon

by welyjesch

“Alice, here.” Alice lifted her head up in response, and she did, she saw a brilliantly beautiful rose in front of her.

  Her face blushing, Alice accepted the rose. Looking at Alice, Linley thought that the red rose complimented her blushing pink face perfectly. She was an unspeakably moving picture. This image was burned into Linley’s mind forever.

  Holding Alice by the hand, the two of them continued their walk.

  The snowflakes continued to fly about. The two youths slowly strolled about the night streets of Fenlai City. The rose in Alice’s hand was so beautiful, so vibrant.

  In one of the superior rooms of the Jade Water Paradise, there were seven people; Yale, George, Reynolds, and four beautiful ladies.

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into Third Bro. Last time he went missing for an entire night also. This time, he hasn’t come back even now.” Yale shook his head helplessly.

  “Hey, that guy looks like Third Bro.” Reynolds, who was seated next to the window, suddenly let out a surprised shout. “And he’s holding hands with a girl. Damn! Third Bro managed to find himself a beauty behind our backs.”

  “Whoosh!” Yale and George also ran to the window, staring down at Linley below them.

  At this moment, Linley, who was drunken in the beautiful throes of young love, didn’t even notice that they had reached the Jade Water Paradise! Linley and Alice walked right past the Jade Water Paradise, continuing onto the Fragrant Pavilion Road.

  “Man, when did Third Bro become so formidable? Yale’s eyes were sparkling.

  George and Reynolds were both excited as well. Reynolds immediately suggested, “Haha, when Third Bro comes back, we have to give him a proper interrogation.”

  ….

  The next morning, Linley happily returned to the superior room in the Jade Water Paradise. Per their usual habits, Reynolds and Yale should’ve each retired to their own private rooms with their beauties. But…

  Upon opening the door, Linley stared inside with surprise. “Boss Yale, why are you all here?”

  “You ask me why we are all here?” Reynolds began to chortle. Scheming looks were on the faces of George and Yale as well, and they began to creep closer to Linley.

  “Tell!” Reynolds stared at him. “Who was that beauty who was with you last night?”

  “Quick, tell!” Yale and George also demanded.

  “Whu…..you guys…?” Linley was totally flabbergasted.

  Book 4, The Dragonblood Warrior – Chapter 7, Experts Everywhere (part 1)

  Under the forced interrogation of his bros, Linley was very honest and revealed the entire story behind him and Alice. This story made those two playboys, Yale and Reynolds, sigh in amazement.

  Ever since becoming boyfriend and girlfriend with Alice, although he was separated from her physically during the school term, they made an agreement to meet with each other at the end of every month.

  In the blink of an eye, another month passed. December 28th, Linley was in an exceptionally good mood, because he was going to meet with Alice again in Fenlai City.

  “Hey, Linley.”

  “Yo, David [Da’wei].”

  Walking along the road within the Ernst Institute, Linley greeted a number of familiar faces in a friendly fashion.

  “Boss, you’re as happy as this, just because you sealed the deal with Alice?” On Linley’s shoulders, Bebe wrinkled his nose. Condescendingly, he said, “Look at that stupid grin. This entire month, you’ve been smiling like an idiot.”

  In the past, although Linley wasn’t exactly cold and emotionless, he wasn’t particularly friendly either. But this month, Linley was in an extremely good mood, and so he was often laughing and smiling.

  “You little punk, what do you know?” Linley glared at Bebe, before strolling casually into the library. After flipping through two books on wind-style magic, Linley entered a reading booth and began to read.

  The reading room was extremely quiet, and in the entire reading room, there was perhaps just twenty or thirty people, spaced far apart from each other.

  Linley selected a location off to the side and began to read. At the Ernst Institute library, Linley would read almost anything regarding history, magical beasts, politics, magic…but most of his time was still spent on wind magic.

  After all, Linley primarily relied on earth-style and wind-style magic. His earth-style magic had a Saint-level Grand Magus for a personal trainer in the form of Doehring Cowart, but the same couldn’t be said for wind.

  While reading, Linley continued to learn and improve, and he often nodded unconsciously.

  In the reading room, two hours passed by very quickly. Linley closed the book in front of him. “Grandpa Doehring, it would be a very difficult task to understand all of the profundities of wind-style magic, much less devise a brand new spell of my own.”

  When casting magical spells ,usually one would need to have the assistance of a magical incantation to stabilize and launch the spell. Generally, one would just recite the incantation as taught, without needing to understand it. But if one was able to understand the principles behind a spell or perhaps even refine the words to an incantation, or perhaps further refine the usage of spiritual essence, one could allow the efficacy and power of one’s mageforce to reach new heights.

  “Naturally. Do you think spells are so easily created?” Doehring Cowart’s voice sounded in Linley’s mind.

  “Forget about inventing them for now. I wish I could at least see or learn some spells of the seventh rank. Unfortunately, the Institute is too stingy. Spells of the seventh, eighth, and ninth ranks are restricted and not open for public viewing at all.” Linley was rather dissatisfied, but he also knew very well that behind the Ernst Institute was the Radiant Church. The Radiant Church was not willing to disseminate its most powerful spells to people from other countries.

  Linley was fortunate. Thanks to Grandpa Doehring’s guidance, at least for earth-style magic, he had nothing to worry about.

  Flipping through the other book on wind magic, Linley continued to read…

  “To summarize, all styles of magic, including wind magic, share a commonality in that their spells are formed from mageforce. For example, our wind style’s ‘Wind Blades’, the higher level ‘Chain of Wind Blades’, or the even higher level ‘Wild Dance of Wind Blades’, all the way up to the ninth level spell, ‘Void Extermination Technique’, are all considered to be in one chain of spells. But of course, if the ‘Wind Blades’ spell was developed and advanced in a different direction, down that path, in the end, it will transform into the ‘Dimensional Edge’ spell, that fabled forbidden spell…”

  Upon reading this portion which provided details on the ‘Wind Blades’ spell, Linley grew interested.

  This book was written from a viewpoint at the highest levels of magic, that sought to classify it systemically. This book was extremely useful to someone who had a narrow grasp of the fundamentals, as it would help them gain a more complete, thorough, systemic grasp of magic.

  “The Floating Technique is actually a very simple technique, but using it isn’t simple. That’s because this technique has a strong emphasis on one’s elemental affinity for wind essence. The higher the affinity, the easier one will find it to control wind mageforce and wind elemental essence. This will allow their Floating Technique to be much faster. But by comparison, the ‘Soaring Technique’ is a level higher than this technique. The Floating Technique only allows one to levitate up or down, while the Soaring Technique allows one to soar and fly in the air. Although it looks like it’s omnidirectional, in reality, the Soaring Technique just has a few extra components compared to the Floating Technique, allowing the user to also go forwards, backwards, left, and right. For example, if you want to fly down and right, all you have to do is to control yourself to go both down and right. Frankly speaking, from this line of training, and based on the incantation the Floating Technique uses, in principle it should be fairly easy to figure out what the incantation to the Soaring Technique is
.”

  Upon reading this, a light went on in Linley’s mind.

  Right. The Soaring Technique, compared to the Floating Technique, really just added the additional directional components of left, right, forward, and backward. In essence, it was still controlling wind elemental essence around the body to propel one in the various directions.

  “Right, it just adds the components of forwards, backwards, left and right. If this hypothesis is correct, shouldn’t be too hard to extrapolate the incantation for the Soaring Technique.” Linley immediately began to try and mentally work out what the incantation should be.

  But of course, whether or not the extrapolated incantation would be correct was something which only experimentation could prove.

  Previously, Linley had been under the impression that the Soaring Technique had to allow a person to fly in any which way, and thus the incantation would be quite complex.

  But now, given that it just had four more directions compared to the Floating Technique, the level of difficulty for extrapolating the Soaring Technique was much lower.

  Linley continued to read, excited.

  “Of course, high level magical incantations that could be easily extrapolated are in the minority. For example, the a higher level variant of the Soaring Technique is the Airwings spell, which forces the surrounding air elemental essences to form giant, invisible wings around the caster. This is far more difficult, and its incantation is very different from that of the Soaring Technique. There’s simply no way to extrapolate it at all.”

  Linley nodded as well.

  The more he read, the more confident Linley was that the author of this book was an expert in researching magical spells, because the explanations this book gave were almost all rooted solidly in the fundaments of magical theory. It gave advice on how to truly understand the mechanisms behind controlling elemental essence and in understanding each magical incantation. But it didn’t say anything about how to improve the power of one’s spells.

  Most people, upon seeing how deep and in depth this book went with regards to magical theory and usage of elemental essence, wouldn’t bother to read further.

  But Linley understood that if he could understand the reasoning behind each spell, he would naturally also learn how to better control his magic. At that time, the power behind each of his spells would be greater.

  “Linley.” Just as Linley was getting absorbed with this book, a clear voice sounded out by his side.

  Lifting his head, Linley looked off to the side, where he saw a tall, slender, beautiful girl standing next to him. It was Linley’s good friend, Delia. But the expression on Delia’s face wasn’t too happy.

  “Hey Delia, what’s up?” Linley laughed.

  Delia bit her lower lips. She was silent for quite a while, before finally asking, “Linley, I hear…you have a girlfriend?” Delia’s eyes, beautiful and large, were firmly fixed upon Linley.

  Book 4, The Dragonblood Warrior – Chapter 8, Experts Everywhere (part 2)

  Linley was slightly startled. He hesitated. In his mind, many thoughts flashed by. But in the end, he still nodded. “Yes. Her name is Alice.”

  Delia’s eyes immediately turned red. “Congratulations.”

  Delia hurriedly turned away, unable to prevent her tears from coursing down her face. She quickly ran out of the reading room.

  But Linley himself did not see Delia’s tears.

  “Sigh.” After directly telling Delia the truth, Linley felt restless and annoyed. But at the same time, he also felt relaxed.

  After this event, Linley had no desire to keep reading. After noting down the name of this book, he returned it to the shelf.

  On his way back to his dormitory, Linley couldn’t help but feel rather grumpy.

  “Boss, I get it. You also like that Delia girl, right?” Bebe said, engaging in a bit of schadenfreude. “You know, I think Delia is a great gal. She’s better than Alice, y’know.”

  “Shut your mouth.” Linley yelled at him mentally.

  “Hrmph, hrmph, I was right on the money, wasn’t I.” Bebe said delightedly.

  Linley let out a deep sigh. After a while, a hint of a smile appeared on his face. “Forget it. Since I’ve made things clear to Delia, this won’t be on my mind anymore. Mm, right. I’m meeting with Alice again tomorrow. I have to prepare a present.”

  As he began thinking about Alice, Linley felt much more happier and relaxed.

  ……

  December 29th. Evening. Linley split apart from Yale and his other bros, and headed off by himself to Alice’s house for his rendezvous. This time, Linley was going to be able to spend some extra time with Alice.

  The first day of the first month of each year was known as the ‘Yulan Festival’. This was the biggest holiday in the entire Yulan continent. On this day, every year the Radiant Church would organize a huge religious mass.

  As Fenlai City was known as the ‘Holy Capital’, with the headquarters of the Radiant Church located in West Fenlai City, naturally the religious mass in Fenlai City would be the largest one in the entire Yulan continent. When the time came, the Holy Emperor himself would officiate over the proceedings. This was always an incredible mass, and many, many people attended each year.

  January 1st.

  West Fenlai City, the headquarters of the Radiant Church. The Radiant Temple. This was a huge building that rose up nearly a hundred meters. Anyone at any place within Fenlai City could see it in the skyline.

  In front of the Radiant Temple was an enormous city plaza, over a thousand meters in length. The plaza was paved with smooth, equally sized white stones. At this moment, the plaza was filled with a sea of people, and Linley and Alice were amongst them.

  Many mounted knights of the Radiant Church were there as well, keeping order amongst the crowd. But in general, all of the people there were very orderly and obedient.

  “Big brother Linley, at eight o’clock, a group of high-level officials of the Radiant Church will appear, including the Holy Emperor himself.” Alice said to Linley in a soft voice.

  Linley nodded, glancing at the knights of the Radiant Church maintaining order. “Alice, look at all of these guardian knights here. There’s got to be at least a few thousand of them, and from the looks of it, none of them are weak.”

  “Of course. This is the Yulan Festival. The ones who are guarding the event are the elite knights of the Radiant Church. Every single one of them present is at least a warrior of the fifth rank.” Alice, having grown up in Fenlai City, clearly knew much more about it than Linley.

  Linley’s heart skipped a beat.

  All knights of the fifth rank or higher? Such a powerful troop of knights, all consisted of knights of the fifth rank, would possess inconceivable power. As a mere magus of the fifth rank, he was nothing in front of their might.

  Alice pointed at some magnificently dressed people in front. “Look, many of the highest ranking nobles have come today. In a bit, the royal clans of the six nations of the Holy Union will come as well.”

  Time passed very quickly. In the blink of an eye, it was eight.

  Suddenly, that hundred-meter high Radiant Temple began to radiate light, bathing the plaza in white. The enormous statue of an angel, located in the middle of the plaza, also began to dimly glow. At the same time, the entire plaza was suddenly filled with a beautiful song that seemed to have come from the realm of the gods.

  At this point in time, from a building to the side of the Radiant Temple, a group of people walked out. In front of them were several rows of men clad in gleaming white armor and helmets with red plumes. These were the guardian knights of the Radiant Temple itself. Each and every one of them was a majestic, knightly sight to behold. This group of nearly a hundred knights all marching in perfect unison made for an awesome, high-pressure sight which quickly silenced the entire crowd.

  “I didn’t realize the Radiant Church had this much power. Those hundred or so knights must all be warriors of the seventh rank at least.”
Doehring Cowart appeared next to Linley, carefully inspecting the people present. “And there are even Saint-level combatants here today? Forget it, best I hide inside the ring.”

  And then, Doehring Cowart promptly disappeared again.

  “Saint-level combatants?” Linley couldn’t help but also carefully inspect that group of people.

  Behind those hundred guardian knights of the Radiant Temple, there were ten or so people dressed in long, flowing white robes. And behind them, surrounded by several Cardinals wearing crimson, was a bald-headed old man dressed in silver robes.

  “The Holy Emperor!”

  Clearly, the bald-headed old man dressed in silver was the center and heart of this group of people. Linley couldn’t help but focus all of his attention on this man. The Holy Emperor was a tall man, perhaps almost two meters tall. In his left hand, the Holy Emperor was wielding a scepter that was nearly as tall as he himself was.

  Behind the Holy Emperor and the Cardinals, there were four old men all dressed in black, as well as over a hundred warriors dressed in violet. This group of people walked in an orderly fashion to the center of the plaza. None of the hundred thousand people gathered in the plaza dared to make a sound.

  “Grandpa Doehring, you said there are Saint-level combatants present. Which of these are Saint-level combatants?” Linley asked mentally.

  “I could tell at a single glance. That Holy Emperor as well as one of those four old men in black are both Saint-level combatants. They are quite self-confident, it seems; they didn’t attempt to mask their power in the slightest. I didn’t expect that after five thousand years, that little Radiant Church which was hiding within the Pouant Empire would develop to such a level.” Doehring Cowart sighed nonstop.

  “Not mask their power?”

  Startled, Linley looked at the group of people again. Honestly speaking, when looking at the Holy Emperor, the Cardinals, and the four old men in black, Linley only felt they were imposing and majestic, but didn’t sense any powerful aura emanating from them at all.

  But Doehring Cowart had just said…that those two Saint-level combatants weren’t masking their power at all?