"You've been enduring so much hardship all this time, haven't you?"
"Now you don't need to endure anymore, because I will absolutely not let Lia die."
"Come, devour me, and then, reign supreme over the world..."
"Ah, right, about what you said to me before, my response is... I love you too, Lia."
The crimson king awoke with a start on her throne.
Beneath her chest, her heart, long since a molten furnace, pounded violently.
The warm, rusty touch seemed to linger on her lips; centuries had not erased a single detail of that nightmare.
Ophelia opened her eyes. A dark, molten red light flowed slowly between the massive pillars and dome, illuminating her solitary figure.
She slightly curled her fingertips, her sharp nails digging deeply into the fossilized skull of an unknown behemoth on the armrest of her throne.
But this fleeting vulnerability, like a snowflake thrown into a raging fire, vanished in an instant.
As she rose, her bare feet touching the cold ground, the vulnerability that belonged to "Ophelia" vanished completely.
With each step, an invisible pressure spread, the air seemed to freeze, and even the flames bowed.
When she pushed open the colossal gate inscribed with ancient dragon language and epic war tales, the moment sunlight poured in, she was the crimson empress reigning over the land, causing all things to tremble.
The pure-blooded dragon guards standing outside the gate felt that overwhelming aura; their heads bowed even lower, unable to look directly at the figure seemingly constructed of pure power and majesty.
Ophelia didn't glance at them; her gaze was fixed on the distant territory belonging to the Blue Dragon King, her sister Elena.
The last time they met… was it decades ago? Going back further, it was measured in centuries.
For the immortal dragon race, time is both a blessing and a torment.
The recent rumors carried an ominous air.
Elena, her sister, obsessed with the mysteries of the soul, had, decades ago, created the "Undead," monsters that desecrated the cycle of life.
She knew what Elena was pursuing, that unrealistic dream that had persisted for centuries.
Perhaps, it was time to… awaken her from that doomed obsession.
With her mind made up, Ophelia flashed with red light, transforming into a blazing streak of fire that tore through the sky, vanishing instantly into the clouds, leaving only the lingering heat in the air.
The Dragon Archives, a temple of knowledge, was also a tomb of time.
When Ophelia found Elena, she was surrounded by countless floating, enormous tomes and ancient scrolls.
Unlike Ophelia's fiery beauty, which seemed capable of igniting the world, Elena's beauty was a serene and translucent beauty, like the stillness of an icy abyss.
Her long, silvery-white hair flowed like glaciers under the moonlight; her icy-blue eyes were deeper and colder than the purest gemstones; her skin was so white it was almost translucent, as if sculpted from millennia-old ice.
She simply stood there quietly, flipping through ancient parchment scrolls, emanating a chilling aura that kept strangers at bay, even causing the air to condense into tiny ice crystals.
At her sister's arrival, Elena's eyelashes didn't even flutter, as if Ophelia were merely an insignificant wisp of air.
Ophelia broke the silence, her voice ringing out clearly and coldly in the vast corridors of the Great Archives: "Have you found a way?"
Elena's fingers, turning the pages, didn't pause. Her indifferent reply, like icy beads falling onto a jade plate, was: "No."
"Since centuries have yielded no results, then, Elena, give up," Ophelia said calmly. "The dream should end. He's been dead for seven hundred and sixty years."
"...Ha—"
An uncontrollable sneer escaped from Elena's perfect lips.
She finally raised her head. Her icy blue eyes, no longer filled with unyielding ice, now blazed with a raging fire and resentment capable of destroying everything.
Her beautiful face, tinged with a breathtaking brilliance by this extreme emotional fluctuation, erupted like a frozen volcano.
"You woke me from my dream?" Elena retorted with a laugh. "And what about yourself? Ophelia, my dear sister!"
She stood up, frost spreading beneath her feet with her movement.
"Yes, that's right. You have everything! You've got everything! His love, his body, everything he had! You devoured him completely! Of course, you can wake up satisfied, sitting on your throne, as your Fiery Dragon King!"
Each word was like a poisoned icicle, piercing Ophelia.
"If you came to see me just to say these disgusting things…" Elena raised her hand, pointing directly at the entrance to the Great Archives, her eyes chillingly cold: "Then get out! Don't let me see you again, and don't interfere with my experiments!"
"Boom—!"
A terrifying, scorching dragon's might, like a tangible tsunami, erupted from Ophelia's body.
The air distorted under the intense heat, and the bookshelves near her even spontaneously combusted, their pages turning to ash.
Her crimson vertical pupils contracted, fixed on her sister, the rage within them enough to incinerate a city and destroy a kingdom.
Elena did not back down. A surge of icy aura erupted from him; her icy blue dragon might transform into a roaring polar storm that clashed violently with the scorching tsunami.
Two world-destroying forces clashed fiercely within the Great Archives. The boundary between ice and fire blurred, emitting terrifying hissing sounds.
Temperature fluctuated wildly between extreme cold and heat; even the space itself seemed to groan under the strain.
The dragon guards protecting the Great Archives were already prostrate on the ground, trembling, frantically praying that their two lords would exercise restraint.
If a full-scale conflict were to erupt here, the treasures of knowledge accumulated by the dragon race over millions of years would be destroyed!
The stalemate was suffocating.
In the end, it was Ophelia who, a complex emotion flickering in her molten lava eyes—perhaps out of a sense of responsibility as an elder sister, or perhaps out of a final respect for this sacred place of knowledge—was the first to retract her destructive aura.
The heat subsided, leaving only devastation and the lingering smell of burning.
Ophelia gave Elena a deep look, her eyes containing too many unspeakable things: pain, disappointment, and perhaps even a trace of pity.
She said nothing more, turned, and vanished in a streak of light from the entrance to the Great Archives.
Elena stood there, her cold eyes fixed on the direction her sister had disappeared, for a long, long time.
Only when the surrounding chill subsided did she slowly sit back down.
The Great Archives returned to its deathly silence, only the lingering echoes of the clash between ice and fire silently testifying to the unbridgeable rift between the two dragon empresses, a rift that had persisted for seven hundred and sixty years.