She set down the lipstick and knelt on the floor, pulling down her collar to expose her neck before closing her eyes. At first, she held her torso rigid and upright, but soon her frame began to tremble slightly, her teeth chattering uncontrollably.
When the blade failed to fall after a long silence, Nova opened her eyes just a crack. She saw lines of text formed from burning flames floating in the air.
[Follow me.]
Raven walked to the window and pushed it open. Looking back, he saw Nova following him obediently.
[Does the scenery outside look normal to you?] Raven wrote anew with his flames.
Nova stepped to the window, her eyes widening in surprise. Raven didn't need to ask; seeing her greedily gulping down the air outside, like a person surfacing from a cesspit for a breath of life, gave him his answer.
He pulled Nova away from the window and shut it. She looked as though she were about to retch again, but she forced herself to endure it.
[The outside is filled with Scarlet Rot. Your senses have been inverted. There should be a way to cure these symptoms.]
Through the window, Raven suddenly spotted the silhouette of an Ancient Dragon soaring through the sky. With a wave of his hand, he dispelled the flaming text and wrote a final line.
[Stay here. I will take you out of the contaminated zone shortly.]
He opened the door, stepped onto the street, and shouted at the top of his lungs, "Lansseax!"
Hearing the cry, the Ancient Dragon circling above dived straight toward him.
Raven soon realized that this dragon was significantly larger than Lansseax, with several distinct anatomical differences. "Fortissax?"
The Ancient Dragon landed with a thundering crash, the crimson Dragonbolt dancing across her scales like a wild thicket of thorns. She brought her massive head close, her ruby-like vertical pupils glaring viciously at Raven, and raised a single claw.
Raven took a few steps back, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword.
The dragon's claw descended, sweeping aside rubble to carve several words into the ground. The handwriting was incredibly jagged, reflecting her foul mood.
[WHERE IS GODWYN]
Looking at the dragon's claw suspended in mid-air, Raven had no doubt that if his answer failed to satisfy her, that same claw would flatten him into the earth in the next heartbeat.
Raven didn't speak. Instead, he reached out, and a slender spark of lightning leaped from his fingertips, merging into the Dragonbolt wreathed around the Ancient Dragon.
"Probably near that intersection over there. Don't worry; as long as he wasn't caught in the epicenter of the burst, this level of rot won't threaten him."
"But Godwyn hasn't responded to me—Wait!" A tiny spark of Dragonbolt also leaped from the dragon's head, striking Raven's outstretched hand. Then, she seemed to realize what she had done, her eyes widening in shock.
"Why can you use Dragonbolt? And why do you know the communication methods of the Ancient Dragons!" Another bolt of electricity snapped against Raven's hand.
"Lansseax taught me. You're her sister, right?" Raven responded with a pulse of Dragonbolt.
"Lansseax actually told you that too—!" The lightning on Fortissax's body flared brilliantly. Drawn by this kindred power, Raven's own Dragonbolt was triggered, enveloping him in a dazzling display of electrical fire. This only seemed to further incense the Ancient Dragon.
"You damned liar! You actually tricked her into sharing so much of her Dragonbolt with you! Despicable! Shameless! Utterly base!"
Through telepathic resonance, Fortissax's voice boomed in Raven's mind, making his head ring.
"I developed this Dragonbolt through my own practice. I wouldn't dream of stealing Lansseax's power."
"Lies! Dragonbolt is a power unique to the Ancient Dragons; even Demigods cannot master it on their own!"
"Perhaps my constitution is unique." Hearing that Fortissax seemed genuinely convinced of this, Raven didn't know how else to explain it.
Thinking back, the fact that he could master so many vastly different attributes of power—stealing authority from the Law of Death, and even borrowing the eerie power of the Yellow Sign—was indeed abnormal. He had originally assumed this was simply the talent of a Demigod, but the other Demigods he had met didn't seem to possess such versatility.
"I'll settle the score with you later." Fortissax swung her claws, but her urgency to find Godwyn won out. She dropped the threat with a hateful glare and beat her wings, taking flight.
She landed at the intersection Raven had pointed out and took off again in less than a minute. She skimmed low over the district, breathing torrents of roaring flame from her maw, quickly turning a large section of the area into a sea of fire.
"You'll exhaust yourself before you finish cleaning this up, and there might still be survivors in the buildings!" Raven communicated via Dragonbolt. "Use your dragon breath to encircle the area! Stop the spread of the Scarlet Rot first. The rest can be handled by the Fire Monks later."
A bolt of red lightning struck near his feet, shattering the roof he was standing on and sending him tumbling into the billowing dust.
However, Fortissax took the advice after all. She circled the area, her dragon breath cutting through the streets like a hot knife through butter, creating a firebreak to contain the contaminated zone.
Raven pushed aside a broken stone slab and pulled himself out of the ruins, patting the dust off his clothes.
"Are you alright?" someone asked from behind him, their voice ethereal and light.
Raven turned around and looked down at the speaker. He froze for a moment, stunned, before taking a step back. "You are—"
"We meet again, Prince Raven," the figure said with a smile, his eyes resembling a vibrant field of golden wheat.
Raven could find no words to describe his face. It wasn't merely the beauty of a man or a woman, nor just the innocence of a child; it was a sense of harmonious perfection that encompassed all of nature—something that seemed impossible to manifest even in a dream.
He wore a white robe and stood only slightly taller than Rya. Tassel-like golden hair hung down to his waist. Raven was certain he had never met him before and had no idea where the "meet again" came from, but based on the rumors he had heard, he had already guessed the boy's identity.
"Prince Miquella?"
"Why did you just take a step back?"
"Ahem, no reason." Raven certainly wasn't going to admit that he had almost been unable to resist the urge to step forward and vigorously ruffle Miquella's golden hair. "This place is still within the range of the Scarlet Rot. Let's talk once we're outside."
"I have come specifically to deal with the rot." Miquella shook his head and stepped toward the epicenter of the bloom. "Go and do what you must. We shall meet again."
Wherever he walked, countless verdant sprouts broke through the fungal carpet, their leaves swaying. The fresh scent of vegetation dispelled the rot spores. The fungal carpet gradually decomposed, turning into nutrients that made the plants grow even more robustly; the scarlet was being buried under a layer of lush green.
Miquella reached the heart of the rot and extended his arms. His limbs suddenly shifted at a sharp angle, like the hands of a clock.
A vast, surging golden light radiated outward from Miquella as center. All things began to converge toward a concept of unchanging stasis. The dancing spores, the spreading mycelium—everything was frozen within a brilliant, dazzling amber of gold.
Sensing the magical items on his person wailing within the radiance, Raven frowned slightly. If he allowed the light to wash over him, the Sword of Night and Flame might hold out, but the Longtail Cat Talisman and his other accessories would likely be damaged or have their magical properties stripped away entirely.
Channeling the Yellow Sign within the sea of his consciousness, a layer of imperceptible, distorted starlight enveloped Raven. As the golden tide approached him, it split down the middle under the deflection of an inexplicable force, closing back together behind him.
"The Law of Regression," Raven recognized this top-tier incantation of Golden Order Fundamentalism. "What overbearing power. However... it seems to have a poor compatibility with the Scarlet Rot."
The Scarlet Rot was merely being frozen within golden amber; there were no signs of it being dismantled or purified. On the contrary, the rot was festering in the stillness, waiting for Miquella's incantation to end so it could counterattack with redoubled force.
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Elden Ring: The Unborn One's Journey Through Elden Ring(170 Chapter - Ongoing)
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