Translator: AnubisTL
The Rock-Chewing Tribe was rigidly hierarchical. Every goblin knew their place, understanding who they served and who served them.
Above all the goblins stood two figures:
Broken-Tooth Goruk, the chieftain who controlled the Giant-Arm Miners, and Pustule Groz, the tribe's shaman and alchemist, who wielded what other goblins considered profound and magical Alchemy Spells.
At this moment,
Broken-Tooth Goruk stood in the tribe's open-air square, brutally impaling a goblin who had challenged his authority. He mounted the body on a wooden frame, lit a bonfire beneath it, and began roasting it alive, forcing the other goblins to share in the feast.
The chieftain was ancient, nearly thirty years old.
Goblins lived for about fifty years, but thirty was considered old age.
Survival in the wilderness was harsh, and the Rock-Chewing Tribe's resources were scarce. Very few goblins lived past thirty; most died in their teens.
Normally,
a goblin as old as Goruk would have been challenged and replaced by younger rivals.
Yet through his brutal killings and the cunning of his age, he maintained absolute control over the Rock-Chewing Tribe, clinging to his throne of power.
Only it could operate the Giant-Arm Miner.
The Rock-Chewing Tribe had paid a tremendous price for it, starving many of their kin to gather the funds and purchase it from a passing merchant caravan.
The Giant-Arm Miner was a humanoid alchemy golem.
Standing eight meters tall at the shoulder, its exposed steel plates and riveted seams gave it a crude, primitive look. Its massive arms, long and thick, ended in shovel-like hands that could reach the ground. It seemed that with a gentle tap, it could shatter marble.
As its name suggested, it was designed for mining, but its sheer size and weight also made it a formidable weapon of war.
Seated in the cockpit on the golem's chest, Broken-Tooth Goruk felt himself grow tall and mighty, looking down upon the other puny goblins. A sense of superiority washed over him, the intoxicating feeling of being able to casually decide the fate of others.
Especially after recently scaring off a young dragon.
This inflated Broken-Tooth Goruk's ego to the extreme. He felt that dragonkind were nothing special. If he had a better alchemy golem, he'd even dare to hunt young dragons, or even adults.
"Pity that young dragon got away," he grumbled.
"If I'd caught it, I could have bought a superior alchemy golem."
"I wonder if the wolf riders have tracked it down yet," Broken-Tooth Goruk thought to himself.
Suddenly, he thought he saw a dark shadow flit across the sky, vanishing in an instant.
"What was that?"
Goruk's heart skipped a beat, but he quickly calmed himself. The shadow seemed to have been an illusion, already gone, and the sky remained as peaceful as ever.
Meanwhile, in an alchemy workshop, an extremely ugly goblin was poring over something.
Its gray-green skin was riddled with cracked fissures, from which oozed a yellow-green pus, emitting a pungent odor like a mix of rotting flesh and sulfur. Dozens of fist-sized boils dotted its back, their translucent surfaces like blisters filled with pus of various colors.
This was Pustule Groz, shaman of the Rock-Chewing Tribe.
He was completely absorbed in flipping through a thin booklet in his hands.
The cover of the booklet bore several words:
Elementary Alchemy Manual
This alchemy manual had been found by Groz. Unfortunately, due to his limited literacy and lack of guidance, he could mostly only understand the diagrams. Over the years, his own fumbling attempts had left him covered in boils, but through sheer trial and error, he had accidentally mastered a few basic alchemy runes.
Each time he leafed through the alchemy manual, Groz felt a different sensation.
Unlike the other foolish tribesmen, content with their current lives and muddled existence, Groz loved knowledge, research, and conversing with intelligent beings.
He believed he might be a genius.
If only he hadn't been born in a place like the Rock-Chewing Tribe, he could have had a far more promising future.
Through rare exchanges, he learned of a civilization beyond the wilderness called the Lothurn Federation. Within it lay a goblin kingdom where the goblins were said to be intelligent and civilized, unlike the crude and ignorant goblins of the Rock-Chewing Tribe, which he detested. That was the place he yearned to visit.
After flipping through the Elementary Alchemy Manual for a while longer,
Groz slowly set it down and carefully stored it in a black wooden box to prevent damage.
Only then did he notice the message stone at his waist glowing faintly.
He picked it up and pressed it to his ear.
Groz's expression immediately changed. The violent shift in his features caused many of the pustules on his face to burst.
"Dragon! A powerful black-red young dragon!"
"It's slaughtering us!"
He had just heard desperate shouts, wails of agony, pleas for mercy, and the whistling sound of dragon wings cutting through the air.
Beyond the voice, the message also contained a vague direction.
"A black-and-red young dragon?"
Groz paced the room, realizing the gravity of the situation—the wolf riders had likely been annihilated.
"Tell Goruk and launch a surprise attack under the cover of night?" Groz considered this.
But it quickly dismissed the idea.
A young dragon capable of wiping out the entire wolf rider force, leaving no survivors, was no ordinary creature. Even with the Rock-Chewing Tribe's goblins and a Giant-Arm Miner, a surprise attack might not be enough to kill it.
"I can't tell Goruk. He's grown arrogant and foolish, no longer aware of his place."
"What about selling the information to a merchant caravan?" Groz pondered.
It still had contact information for the caravan that had sold it the Giant-Arm Miner. Perhaps selling the young dragon's location to them would bring some profit.
But... it was a dragon.
A dragon meant wealth, and more importantly, the hope of escaping this desolate wilderness.
Groz pondered deeply, finally deciding to send some skilled goblin scouts to investigate. He would spare no effort to hunt the young dragon if there was even a sliver of opportunity. If that failed, he would notify the merchant caravan and sell the information.
But just as Groz was thinking this,
a sudden commotion and startled cries erupted outside.
Then,
Boom!
A deafening roar shook the ground violently, as if a meteorite had fallen from the heavens. Cracks spiderwebbed across the earth beneath Groz's feet.
He lost his balance, stumbled backward, and fell to the ground.
"What happened?"
Panicked, Groz scrambled to his feet and dashed out of the alchemy workshop.
The moment he burst through the door, his vision was filled with swirling dust and flames. Amidst the chaos, a black-and-red silhouette flashed through the smoke. Groz's pupils finally locked onto the source of the disaster.
It was an unknown dragonkind, its body encased in scales like molten black steel, etched with patterns resembling dark red magma.
It was slowly rising to its feet, its massive limbs crushing the circular pit below. Within the pit lay mangled corpses, reduced to pulp.
Massive wings, covered in feather-like scales and edged like blades, unfurled.
With a gentle flap, they sliced through several goblins who couldn't dodge in time, cleaving them in half. The leather armor they wore proved as fragile as paper.
It was Garos.
He had come after all.
Initially, Garos had dismissed the goblin tribe, thinking that if they couldn't even capture Samantha, then they couldn't pose a threat to him. But on second thought, he realized he might be arrogant and couldn't afford to underestimate them.
Arrogance was the greatest downfall of dragonkind, without exception.
Garos pondered that goblins were intelligent beings, not demonic beasts or ferocious creatures. The presence of an alchemy golem in their tribe strongly suggested they had interacted with the outside world and might have channels for communicating with other intelligent beings.
This realization made Garos, who cherished his life, a little fearful. He didn't want to abandon Hemlock Hills, but he also didn't want to be ambushed unexpectedly.
This fear.
Garos decided to eliminate the source of his anxiety completely, to put his mind at ease.
(End of the Chapter)
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Translator's Corner
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