**Chapter 715: Elder**

However, what surprised even Jie Ming was… this fat supervisor turned out to be far more cautious than the previous Dragonman merchant.

For the next two months, the other party lived an utterly regimented life.

Work.

Approvals.

Inspections.

Meals.

Off duty.

Precise as a construct.

Jie Ming trailed behind him for several days before simply using Great Void Step to follow alongside while retrieving two books from his inner world to study. This continued until a certain day in the third month.

After finishing lunch, the fat supervisor returned to his office.

Once he had handled the documents, he glanced at the clock beside him, then bent down, took out a key, and opened the cabinet storing energy crystals. Seeing this action, Jie Ming’s eyes lit up.

As usual, the supervisor went to the tavern after work.

He sat in a corner seat for a full two hours, drank three cups of fermented scale-fruit wine, and played several rounds of dice with some familiar coworkers. In the end, he lost over a dozen copper coins, cursed under his breath as he got up to settle the bill, and while shaking his head on his way out of the tavern, he even complained to the owner that his luck tonight had been ridiculously bad.

Everything was normal—exactly the same as every other night over the past two months.

After the gathering ended, he walked along the late-night streets toward home.

Thick clouds completely obscured the moonlight. The houses on both sides had long since extinguished their lights, leaving only cold, hard stone walls standing silently in the darkness. At the end of the street, he turned into a pitch-black alley as usual.

This was his regular shortcut; cutting through here saved time compared to taking the longer route.

And in the alley, a Dragonman was already waiting for him.

This Dragonman had a slender yet sturdy build, with deep iron-gray scales that nearly blended into the walls in the darkness.

His dragon wings were not pressed tightly against his back like those of ordinary citizens, but were slightly spread, casting two long, narrow shadows on the alley walls with their tips. His vertical pupils glowed with a faint golden light in the night, like two stars lit by cold flames.

The fat supervisor walked forward without any surprise and handed over a bag containing purified energy crystals. “These are the gains from this recent period. Also…”

After hesitating briefly, the fat supervisor continued, “After this, don’t come looking for me anymore.”

The fat supervisor lowered his voice, his tone carrying the pain of someone backed into a corner:

“I’ve already repaid all the favors I owed you. You should have heard too—new wizards have arrived, and many people have already been caught!” “The previous lower contact who supplied me with energy crystals has completely cut off communication recently. He’s most likely been captured. I can’t take any more risks!”

The iron-gray Dragonman was silent for two seconds, then let out a short, cold laugh. “If not for us, you would have died several hundred years ago.” He took a step forward, his faint golden vertical pupils leaving light trails in the darkness.

“What were you back then? A low-blooded lizard with less than five percent purity. Even the lord’s guard dogs could step on you. Now, after merely a few decades, you’re already planning to cut ties?”

The fat supervisor’s throat bobbed, and fine cold sweat seeped from between his scales.

The iron-gray Dragonman stared at him, his tone growing even colder. “Moreover, do you think cutting off contact will make you safe?”

“Don’t forget, you signed a blood contract during the bloodline awakening ritual back then. That contract is still in our hands. If we die, we die together.”

The fat supervisor’s face turned pale, his vertical pupils contracting violently in the darkness, as if an invisible force had seized his throat.

After a long silence, he forced out a sentence through gritted teeth.

“…I’ll help you collect one more round at most.”

“The last round!”

“After this round, return the blood contract to me, and we’ll owe each other nothing! Otherwise… I won’t mind cooperating with the wizards!”

The iron-gray Dragonman looked at him and gave a cold laugh without replying.

He simply handed over the now-empty leather pouch, then turned and vanished into the shadows at the other end of the alley.

The fat supervisor stood in place, gripping the leather pouch tightly, his knuckles turning slightly pale from the force.

Moments later, as if all strength had been drained from him, his shoulders slumped, and he staggered away, disappearing down the other side of the alley.

Jie Ming watched the two part ways while in his ethereal state, his expression calm to the point of indifference.

He raised his hand and sent the fat supervisor’s information back to the constructs via the magic network terminal.

This included the location and time of tonight’s meeting, the other party’s physical description, and a complete record of the conversation in which the fat supervisor admitted to long-term collection of energy crystals for the resistance army.

Once the message was sent, Jie Ming did not pause for a moment and immediately followed the iron-gray Dragonman.

The other party did not leave the town immediately.

Over the next few days, he moved about the city like an ordinary merchant caravan member: purchasing goods at the market, haggling with several merchants, taking a bath at the public bathhouse, and even watching half of a Dragonman artisan forging competition in the central square.

His disguise was flawless.

Only after several days did he load up a pile of goods, mount a pack horned dragon beast, and leisurely set off toward the city outskirts.

Jie Ming followed him all the way, crossing a large portion of the central plains of the Dragonman Plane, until they arrived at a town that appeared decades old. The town was roughly the same scale as the previous one, but its style was noticeably more antiquated.

New-style wizard-standard buildings mixed with old-era Dragonman stone towers. The streets were still paved with old stone slabs, while the drainage ditches beside the roads were newly built. As soon as the iron-gray Dragonman entered the town, he greeted the people around him familiarly, able to call every shopkeeper and neighbor by name.

He delivered his goods at the market, ate lunch at a corner restaurant, and then returned home.

Jie Ming floated above the roof of his house and brought up the map of the Dragonman Plane, comparing it with the town’s coordinates.

The color marking this area on the map was completely different from the locations of the previous Dragonmen.

This region was marked as a green safe zone on the map.

According to Wizard Broadleaf’s definition, a safe zone meant this place had never been affected by resistance army activities, had never experienced any dimensional channel attacks, and had no intelligence records of any resistance army strongholds.

Furthermore, there was very little circulation of outsiders—it was a typical closed old town.

Jie Ming put away the map, a cold glint flashing simultaneously through all three of his eyes.

Interesting.

Extremely interesting.

A core liaison for the resistance army was actually living in a place that had never been touched by resistance army activities?

And outsider traffic here was minimal?

In other words, the people of this town had probably long grown accustomed to this “safe” environment.

So long that no one would suspect that the always-smiling merchant next door would trade smuggled energy crystals with a factory supervisor in a dark alley at midnight.

Jie Ming did not rashly use spiritual power to probe.

Since the other party had been able to lurk here safely for so many years, their concealment methods were clearly more sophisticated than anticipated.

Although spiritual power probes were discreet, if the other side had specialized protections against spiritual fluctuations, probing rashly would be equivalent to exposing his own position.

He released Prowlers from his inner world, having them establish a patrol network around the town’s periphery and the surrounding hills.

Then, he himself used Great Void Step to turn ethereal and silently infiltrated the iron-gray Dragonman’s home.

From the outside, the house was a rather spacious two-story stone building.

The first floor was a shop, and the second floor was the living quarters.

After returning home, the iron-gray Dragonman first went to the backyard to feed the horned dragon beast, then went upstairs to exchange a few words with his wife, and afterward checked on the sleeping young Dragonmen in the children’s room.

Only after everything was settled did he unhurriedly walk to the storage room on the first floor, pull open a hidden door in the floor, and enter the basement.

The basement itself was unremarkable.

A few old boxes, some dusty tools hanging on the walls, and piles of old miscellaneous items in the corners—it looked no different from an ordinary resident’s storage room.

The iron-gray Dragonman walked to the very back, moved aside a brick that looked identical to the surrounding stone bricks from behind a pile of junk.

He pressed his hand against it. The scales in his palm grew slightly warm, and the brick silently sank downward.

The entire wall slid inward like a door, revealing a staircase leading downward.

He did not pause and continued descending.

Jie Ming followed behind, floating down the stairs for quite a long distance.

The staircase had been carved directly into the rock layer. The chisel marks were rough yet orderly, and every step was worn smooth from frequent use—clearly, this place saw regular traffic.

The air was filled with the damp, stony scent typical of deep underground, mixed with a faint trace of sulfur.

Finally, the stairs ended, and the view suddenly opened up.

It was a natural cavern.

The dome rose dozens of meters high. Stalactites hung from the ceiling, intertwining with stalagmites rising from the ground to form an underground landscape.

However, the interior of the cavern had clearly been artificially leveled. The floor was paved with polished stone slabs, and the cave walls were densely engraved with magic arrays. The array patterns emitted a faint dark red fluorescence in the darkness, like countless blood vessels clinging to the stone walls, pulsing slowly.

Jie Ming only needed a glance to recognize some of the structures.

But another portion of the runes belonged to none of the systems he knew.

The patterns were primitive and ancient, and the way the energy flowed carried a strong bloodline resonance, more like totem imprints inherited from distant antiquity. At the center of the array, an old Dragonman sat cross-legged.

His build was not much different from other Dragonmen, yet the state of his scales was unlike any Jie Ming had seen before.

Dragonmen naturally had lifespans exceeding a thousand years, but the scales of the old Dragonman before him had lost all luster, turning a withered grayish-brown, as if time had squeezed out the last drop of vitality.

The gaps between the scales were extremely deep, with edges curled up to reveal the shriveled skin beneath.

The patterns on his horns were so dense they were almost unrecognizable—the growth rings left behind after his bloodline purity had been repeatedly tempered by the years.

He sat with his eyes closed, hands resting on his knees. His dragon wings wrapped around both sides of his body like an old cloak. His breathing was extremely shallow, so shallow it almost synchronized with the pulsing of the surrounding array.

The iron-gray Dragonman stopped at the edge of the array, knelt on one knee, dragon wings pressed tightly against his back, forehead nearly touching the ground.

“Elder. The items have been brought back.”

The old Dragonman slowly opened his eyes.

His vertical pupils no longer held the molten, blazing light of his youth, reduced to two dim dark red spots. Yet deep within those pupils, something that refused to be extinguished still burned.

He nodded.

The iron-gray Dragonman straightened his upper body, then reached into his throat and made several low retching sounds.

His chest heaved violently a few times before he regurgitated dozens of thumb-sized energy crystals from his stomach.

The surfaces of the crystals were still coated with gastric fluid, refracting crystalline, translucent luster under the array’s red glow.

The purity of each one was astonishingly high—completely on another level from the crude raw ores that circulated among the middlemen in the Iron Spine Mountains.

The old Dragonman casually picked up one, paying no mind to the mucus on it.

He raised the crystal and carefully sensed it for a moment before slowly exhaling.

The breath was long, as if the fatigue long suppressed in his bones had finally been released with this sigh:

“Truly… terrifying technical prowess.” His voice was very slow. “Such purity would have been treated as a national treasure to be passed down in the old days. It would have been placed on the Elder Council altar, sealed with a bloodline seal by ten elders working together, and only retrievable during approved rituals.” He casually placed the crystal back on the ground with the others.

“And now, a single factory can mass-produce them by purifying those low-quality crystals with chaotic energy.” 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

The old Dragonman let out a low chuckle, yet the laugh carried a hint of bitterness:

“Wizards… truly awe-inspiring existences.”

His gaze turned toward the iron-gray Dragonman kneeling nearby. There was no reproach in his eyes, only a calm serenity like that of farewell.

“From bloodline perception, in recent times, of the original Ten Great Elders, everyone except me has disappeared.”

The iron-gray Dragonman jerked his head up, his vertical pupils contracting sharply.

“All of them?!”

His dragon wings shook violently behind him, the tips striking the ground with a crisp sound.

“How is that possible? Every one of the Ten Great Elders has bloodline concentration above ninety percent, and there’s also the Elder Council’s inherited secret Judgment Grand Art…”

“In front of wizards, ninety percent and three percent make no difference.”

The old Dragonman interrupted him, his tone calm as if stating the most ordinary fact.

“You don’t know. After being ruled by the wizards, we elders learned some things from the ancient memories of our bloodline inheritance… things we shouldn’t have learned.” He slowly closed his eyes for a moment.

“The Judgment Art is merely one of them. The reason we could organize the resistance army was precisely these ancient legacies we dug out from our bloodline memories.”

“Yet even with such power, the other nine elders still disappeared one after another.”

A near-whimpering low sound came from the iron-gray Dragonman’s throat. “Are wizards… truly that terrifying?”

The old Dragonman was silent for a moment.

Then, he tugged at his cracked lips, revealing an extremely bitter smile.

“No, not terrifying. Superior.”

He spoke lightly, yet the weight of his words was heavy. “Guardian Dragon, do you know of it?”

The iron-gray Dragonman froze.

The old Dragonman slowly opened his eyes, his gaze falling on the distant patterns of the array as if recalling a history that had grown far too distant.

“That is the guardian deity left behind by the origin of our Dragonman bloodline—the very foundation of our entire race’s existence. It was once the strongest being in this plane. According to that wizard… it should have been a peak eighth-rank existence.”

“When Wizard Broadleaf arrived, the Guardian Dragon exchanged three moves with him.”

“Three moves!”

The old Dragonman couldn’t help repeating it, his tone still laced with terror. “Then, the Guardian Dragon was defeated—utterly and directly overpowered.”

“From then on, it never appeared again in any Dragonman’s bloodline dream.”

He paused, his voice carrying a sigh. “Those wizards are existences superior to us, aren’t they?”