"My Lord, we have confirmed that the Harmonist Faction has been mobilizing mobile land siege forces!"

"We have confirmed mobilization of aerial elephantine forces, My Lord."

"We have spotted unusual patterns in their long-range heavy artillery that lead us to suspect discreet mobilization over the past five days, My Lord."

The voices of the dragon men and women reporting to the Dragon Emperor were laced with fear. They gazed at him with a sense of dread in their eyes, along with a hint of respect for the symbol of power that he represented.

While they cowered before him, his power allowed them to dominate others on the continent. The Ryu Clan was the mightiest of them all, and nobody dared to look down upon them.

While the Dragon Emperor was personally unpleasant, many in the clan would rather have him than not because of what he brought them. However, when they stood before him, the only thing they could feel was both a physically and mentally oppressive force that forced them to obey and adhere, even if they might not have wanted to.

The power of the Authority of Alpha was strongest within the Ryu Clan, after all.

RUMBLE…

The world shook as Lord Shenlong's heartbeat sent periodic seismic radiations and tremors through the land around him. At the same time, his normal breathing created titanically powerful wind gusts that pushed everything away from him, countering the immensely powerful gravitational field that his extraordinarily dense body created.

Those who stood before him felt a tremendous crushing pressure from two forces born from his very existence. A force that he exerted on all that was around him simply by virtue of his being. It was a level of power that was difficult to fathom in practice.

His yellow, reptilian eyes opened, pinning them where they knelt before him, sending shudders down their spine.

"What is that elephant thinking about…?" Lord Shenlong's eyes sharpened. "Does that harmony-loving fool truly intend to go to war with me when I have so graciously allowed him to carve out his own place and maintain it?"

Lord Shenlong couldn't understand what the leader of the Gajanan Clan was thinking. He knew the elephant to be a pacifist who hated to fight in war as if he were an elf. However, he couldn't deny the elephant's power. It was enough that Lord Shenlong did not simply spontaneously pick a fight with him to subjugate him.

Not only was Lord Vakratunda powerful enough to resist his Authority, he was even powerful enough to project his resistance to others in his faction, allowing them to resist the Dragon Emperor through means that he didn't quite understand.

Regardless, it was not enough.

Lord Vakratunda was barely strong enough to deter action, but he was not strong enough to push for anything further. Lord Shenlong was the most powerful therianthrope in existence, and Lord Vakratunda couldn't push for more.

And yet, here he was, mobilizing his faction for war.

It didn't make sense to the Dragon Emperor insofar as the calculus went. It didn't make sense unless Lord Vakratunda had some reason to believe that he could win.

However, it wasn't as though the leader of the Gajanan Clan had grown stronger by a large margin.

There must have been something else that gave him confidence.

Or rather, someone else.

Lord Shenlong's eyes lit up with a hint of ecstasy as the truth fully dawned on him. 'He's here… and he's ready to attack me.'

Lord Shenlong had suspected that the Dawnbringer had come to his continent discreetly in the form of the anomaly from before and was currently cooperating with the Gajanan Clan.

However, what he didn't understand was why the entire Harmonist Faction was mobilizing for war. He expected that the Dawnbringer would try to ambush the Dragon Emperor with an assassination attempt to kill him, along with the woman he was with.

He didn't quite understand why they were trying to maintain a large-scale conflict between the two factions. Even if Rui could fight the Dragon Emperor head-on, it did not mean that the Harmonist Faction could compare to the War Coalition.

In fact, it wasn't even close at all. The War Coalition was powerful enough to steamroll all the harmonists with their net military power, and the Dragon Emperor looked forward to proving that.

"The fools have overplayed their hand," the Dragon Emperor remarked. "Begin mobilizing. When the time comes, we will utterly demolish them in war."

"Yes, My Lord!"

Lord Shenlong couldn't help but look forward to this conflict. The Dragon Emperor had been growing impatient and hasty ever since the Unfolding to progress with the takeover of the immense resources that existed in the Panama Continent. Prior to the Unfolding, the true world had been a sludge where political deadlocks were extremely difficult to break. The Harmonist Faction had the support of many powerful entities around the world, including the dark elves, which allowed them to pose an extraordinarily tough resistance to the progress of any of the other factions. Each faction had proven to be very stubborn and solid, leading to stalemates.

However, the Unfolding proved to be absolutely perfect for his faction, reinvigorating a desire for war with both greed and fear combined. It was about time that they actually put that bloodlust into practice and purged harmony from their species and took over the entire continent before proceeding to subjugate the entire world.

'I will consume Rui Quarrier, then I will subjugate his continent and extract its finest resources and monsters and assimilate its miraculous power into my being. Then I will defeat the great serpent and finally…'

His yellow, reptilian eyes lit up with greed.

"Finally, I will have the ability to soar to a higher world of power. The power that I felt that day."

The brief moment that Mother Maeria had achieved Transcendence had sent a powerful signal to all of the most powerful pathwalkers in the world of the existence of a whole new dimension of power beyond their fathoming.

The race to Transcendence had already begun, and the Dragon Emperor intended to win it.

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