"You better start stretching. Soon it will be you bowing to me."
Fang Xun is known to all as the great dragon king and Emperor of Wuzhen. However, to the elemental mages, he is nothing more than an obstacle standing in their path. After the brutal a...
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"The humans need to be dealt with, Bìxià. See how they repay you for providing them refuge in our land? They curse your name and spread falsehoods about our people. To make matters worse, they're in cahoots with those damn mages. They ought to be punished for these acts of insubordination," Councilman Liu Luoyang argued.
Anyone that took notice would think the Councilman an unattractive, belligerent, and arrogant man. His pointed nose couldn't be raised any higher in the air, even his long gray mustache was filled with haughtiness as he stroked his beard. He was dressed in a gold and black xuanduan with a gold belt and a black headdress tied around his head with a thin, black string. His outfit signified his high rank as a member of the Wuzhean Council, droplets of sweat speckled his forehead. It was a common reaction whenever he spoke of the humans.
His outward appearance was just as unappealing as the hollow organ that beat inside his chest. A darkness lingered in the depths of his hazel eyes; they spoke immeasurable volumes of war and masked fury. It was as though he was staring at a human at this very moment and prepared to burn them down with a torrent of flames.
If I didn't know any better, I would have thought yaoguai blood coursed through his veins and not that of a Celestial dragon. I believed it was his impartiality and indignant nature towards the humans that managed to persuade his predecessor into passing the position along to him. I couldn't make claims as to whether it was a horrible decision because he still managed to be meticulous with every task assigned to him and he displayed an incredible amount of loyalty. And that was good enough for me.
He began to pace around the room, his face turning redder with every step. Images of a volcano, with Luoyang's face plastered in the center, filled my mind as I thought how he looked like he was ready to erupt. I tried to distract myself by reviewing the new set of scrolls placed to the right of my wooden desk for my review, but soon enough, the words on the scroll began mixing around to read 'Luoyang, the volcano.' A chuckle escaped me, my body shaking from my attempts to contain most of my laughter.
"Bìxià, are you listening to me?" his shrill voice asked in a raised octave. My laughter interrupted his rant and now annoyance was etched into his features. "This isn't something that should be taken lightly."
I nodded and let out a single grunt of acknowledgement and said, "Yes, I know that well enough. What do you propose we do then?"
He adjusted his robes proudly and replied, "I'm glad you asked. The humans are nothing but insects who are following what they believe to be the winning side out of fear of being squashed. We simply need to remind them whose territory they reside in. And should the need to squash them arises...well, we handle them like we've handled the mages."
Luoyang was always itching to go to war. He had been one of the many dragons who were captured by the mages and forced to endure the painful procedure known as scale harvesting. Dragon scales were a great source of magic, it granted the mages the ability to go beyond their limitations, control over all the elements as opposed to the one they were assigned at birth. Unfortunately, removing a powerful object of that magnitude was just as painful as receiving it because a dragon could not live without its magic.
