Dragon Clan: I'm too lazy to talk to you, you're not worthy to listen!

"Don't you understand yet?" The voice beneath the mask echoed for three thousand years. "The Battle of Muye has never ended; each of us is a living sacrifice on the Investiture of the Gods..."

A bright light suddenly flashed from the phone, and Xia Mi's crying voice mixed with a dragon's roar came through: "Boss... Black Egg knocked Old Tang to the ground and is now making him dance on top of him..."

Her voice was drowned out by the sound of the bronze sword shattering.

On Ying Zheng's side, the black king's eggshell in the center of the Zhou family courtyard suddenly exploded!

The flying fragments formed an armillary sphere in the air.

When the instrument's sight tube pointed towards the Purple Palace Enclosure, all the golden eyes of the Jiang family members went out at the same time—their pupils turned into bronze sundials, and the gnomons all pointed towards the empty shell of the Black King's Egg!

Ying Zheng gripped the hilt of the nameless sword tightly and suddenly understood the meaning of the dragon patterns at the bottom of the Three Gorges.

The sword reflected his current appearance:

His skin was covered with bronze patterns, and his white hair was entwined with mercury vines—he looked exactly like the shaman offering sacrifices in the murals of the Bronze City!

"This is the destiny you've been running from." Jiang Cheng pressed the measuring ruler against his throat, and the full text of the "Blood Petition" appeared on its surface: "From the time King Wen buried the black king's egg into Ji Chang's bloodline, from the time Jiang Ziya injected mercury into his own heart..."

The phantom of the World Tree suddenly shrank into a point of light.

The moment the light exploded, spacetime was like a child's torn exercise book, each fragment presenting a different historical scene:

Jiang Cheng saw his ancestor Jiang Ziya running across the battlefield of Muye, carrying a black egg.

I saw that Old Tang had inscribed his younger brother Constantine's birth date and time at the Tomb of King You.

Finally, there's the scene of Jiang Ziya stabbing the jade tablet into Norton's heart—and on Jiang Ziya's face is the bronze mask that Jiang Cheng is wearing at his waist right now!

The moment the measuring rod pierced Jiang Cheng's throat, mercury suddenly flowed from his pupils.

The silvery liquids intertwined in the air to form the hexagrams of the "Lianshan Yi", and each change of the line rewrote the awakening process of the Black King's Egg.

When the "Gen" trigram covered the "Kun" trigram, the entire bronze city began to collapse, and countless corpses of the Jiang family members fell from the bronze branches, turning into oracle bone script and dissipating during their fall.

"You've lost." Jiang Cheng didn't know who he was talking to. He gripped the measuring ruler, letting the mercury seep into his palm. "King Wen performed the Later Heaven Bagua, while the King of Bronze and Fire wields..."

The blood that gushed from his throat suddenly stopped, each drop reflecting the true appearance of the bronze tree—it was not a sacrifice at all, but a torture device stuck in Nidhogg's skull!

The mask around Jiang Cheng's waist suddenly cracked.

Deep within the dark purple-gold eyes, the image of Norton carving his chisel in the Bronze City appeared—it turned out that the chisel was forged by Norton using his own dragon bones!

The threads of fate suddenly snapped.

Amidst the deafening roar of snapping strings, Ying Zheng heard a voice, sometimes aged, sometimes childish, sneer:

Who says a marionette can't cut its own strings?

The silvery-white blood droplets flowing from the measuring rod suddenly flowed back into the conspicuous wounds on Jiang Cheng's body.

The mercury hexagram in Jiang Cheng's pupils was frozen at the moment of "Mountain and Lake Loss".

In Ying Zheng's ears, he seemed to hear the sound of the Black King's Egg shattering, a sound that pierced through three thousand years of time and space.

The shards of eggshell, scattered by the moonlight, transformed into oracle bone script, each character scorching the bronze mask on Jiang Cheng's face—

It turns out that the inner layer of the mask was not engraved with ancient cuneiform script at all, but with sacrificial prayers written in dragon script...

In Beiping, the "villa" is the living room.

Norton, rejected by the big black egg, quickly left Ye Jingchen's bedroom.

"Brother...we await your return to this world, your awakening, and we will once again raise our battle flags and traverse the wasteland..."

Norton spoke slowly, stroking the surface of the little golden egg.

suddenly!

A majestic dragon's roar emanated from the wreckage of the phone.

The bounty hunter, who always had a carefree and jovial demeanor, clenched his fist silently upon hearing the dragon's roar.

Even his own voice sounded hoarse, like the rust of bronze:

"The fate of the outcasts will not end here; I will devour this world..."

Zhou family.

Xia Mi's voice came through the phone in Ying Zheng's pocket once again!

Xia Mi's scream seemed to explode within the space-time rift:

"Boss! Guess what? Black Egg is actually eating Old Tang's carving knife!"

No... is it being repaired? The surface of the large black eggshell is becoming more and more intact...

As if in response to Xia Mi's words, bronze branches suddenly rose from the ground in the Zhou family courtyard.

Among those tangled metal vines, the long spear and contradiction, forged by Norton himself, are displayed on the shelf.

It is both a weapon and a ritual object.

Jiang Cheng suddenly let out a piercing scream of extreme pain!

His measuring rod drew scorch marks in the void, and those scorch marks perfectly overlapped with the chain patterns on the murals of the Three Gorges Bronze City.

When the ninth scorch mark was completed, Ying Zheng witnessed the most absurd scene:

Amidst the mountains of corpses and seas of blood of the Battle of Muye.

Young Norton is placing a bronze coffin over the Black King's egg.

The one who helped him lift the coffin lid was none other than Jiang Ziya, who looked extremely similar to Jiang Cheng!

"This is the true covenant of bronze and fire." Silvery blood seeped from the cracks in the mask, congealing in the air into Western Zhou bronze inscriptions. "We are not sacrificing our lives, but our souls. We will exist forever with the great dragon race!"

Anyone who bathes in the blood of the Dragon King may be transformed into a living human egg of the Dragon King.

For example, Angers, who had experienced the mourning of summer, received the baptism of Li Wuyue's dragon blood.

There's also Chu Zihang, who, in the original timeline, was bathed in the dragon blood of Jormungandr.

With everyone's attention focused on him.

Suddenly, a person appeared on the scene!

It was Zhou Mingrui, the head of the Zhou family!

Zhou Mingrui, holding a huge black egg in his hands, tumbled straight into the battlefield.

He held half a black eggshell in his hand, the inside of which was drawn with a map of the Battle of Muye in blood—those winding blood lines were reorganizing into a dragon gene chain!

Zhou Mingrui walked up to Jiang Cheng, held out the black egg, and said as if dismissing a plague god:

"Jiang Cheng! Here, take this. This is what you wanted!"

Here, I'll give it to you!

"Giving it to me now isn't too late." Jiang Cheng reached out and took the black egg, feeling its texture.

Jiang Ziya's eggs.

The egg seemed to have a heartbeat; the trembling sound traveled from Jiang Cheng's palm, along his arm bones, and down his spine.

Suddenly, scalding mercury flowed from Jiang Cheng's wound, and scalding mercury also flowed from the cracks in Jiang Ziya's egg.

Those silvery liquids intertwined in the air to form a DNA double helix structure.

When the helix made its 84,000th revolution, Ying Zheng finally saw clearly the patterns on the black eggshell—those were not dragon scales at all, but a full sequence map of the "Dragon Genome Project" engraved with a microscope!

The Jiang family's scheme is far too ambitious; they actually dared to attempt to control the dragon race's gene pool!

Anyone familiar with biology knows that DNA codons can be represented using the eight trigrams and six lines of the I Ching.

At that moment, the mask on Jiang Cheng's waist exploded!

The flying bronze fragments formed a model of twenty-three pairs of chromosomes in the air, each chromosome engraved with the name of a pure-blooded dragon.

As the XX sex chromosomes swept past his eyes, Ying Zheng witnessed the most horrifying truth—

On those chromosomes are engraved "Norton" and "Constantine" respectively, and their gene loci are recombinating with the mitochondrial DNA engraved "Shami" and "Fenrir"!

They continue to merge and evolve, and no one knows what will happen next.

"The Black King's Egg has never been a birthing ground for dragons." Taking advantage of Jiang Cheng's momentary lapse in attention, Zhou Mingrui suddenly plunged a dagger into Jiang Cheng's neck. Jiang Cheng's blood meandered in a double spiral on the bronze floor, unlike the blood flowing on the ground. "It's a gene furnace that we humans can freely collect..."

Ying Zheng was too late to stop it. No one expected that Zhou Mingrui, who seemed to be powerless, could have such ruthless methods!

Jiang Cheng, who seemed to be all-powerful and invincible, was actually ambushed by Zhou Mingrui!

The dagger stuck in Jiang Cheng's neck was like a water pump, rapidly drawing out Jiang Cheng's silvery blood!

No matter how Jiang Cheng tried to block it with his palm, it was to no avail.

The once silent spacetime seemed to be completely disrupted at this moment, and alternative scenes of technology, science fiction, and ancient costume appeared before Ying Zheng's eyes.

Ying Zheng saw it: Bao Si, in the tomb of King You, was using her iPhone to photograph a bronze chessboard.

Look, there it is, Jiang Ziya on the ancient battlefield of Muye, installing a cooling system on the Black King's Egg.

I see it! Young Zhou Gong is inscribing the human gene pool in the Bronze City—those inscriptions are exactly the same as those in the ice cellar archives of Kassel College!

As Xia Mi saw it, the black egg in her arms suddenly cracked open with its last fissure. What emerged from the eggshell was not a dragon's claw, but the hand of a human infant, with a faded barcode—number EVA-01—clearly visible in the palm.

"So it was you..." Ying Zheng stared at the red string tied around the baby's wrist, suddenly recalling the female corpse entangled in water plants at the bottom of the Three Gorges, Fingel's girlfriend, a poor student. "A product of the uncontrolled human gene-editing project in 2023 AD..."

"I see it," Jiang Cheng suddenly spoke in a mechanical, electronic voice. His skin peeled away, revealing bionic muscles beneath flowing with bronze liquid: "Mission restarted. Jiang family's 3012th generation gene container. Mission code: 'Godhood Ascension.'"

The Measuring Ruler disintegrated into nanorobots at this moment. The silver particles formed a holographic projection in the air: the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River in 3023 AD, where human scientists were building a gene bank on the ruins of the Bronze City. Black King Nidhogg was not a dragon king at all, but rather the codename for the AI ​​of the first generation of gene-editing projects!

"I see," Norton said, standing in front of the glass control panel. "Spacetime anchor calibration complete." Old Tang's voice suddenly took on a metallic quality, his golden luster fading to reveal rotating binary code beneath. "Thank you all for participating in the 'Battle of Muye 3.0' public beta. This round of civilization simulation data has been uploaded to the cloud."

Seeing this, Xia Mi suddenly raised the black egg high. A blood-red laser shot from the barcode on the baby's wrist, etching the final hexagram of the I Ching in the air: "Fire over Water—Welcome back to the real world, Researcher Ying Zheng."

Ying Zheng shook his head, rubbed his eyes, pretending he had misread something, and cleared his mind, saying:

"How could those things have existed in ancient times? I've watched too much of the 'Year of Joy' series."

These scenes are definitely from a parallel world, although they may not be 100% real.

However, it still has some reference value.

For example, as Jiang Ziya's grandson, Jiang Cheng must be related to the Investiture of the Gods.

As a young girl who perished in the icy sea, the AI ​​Eva must have been connected to Fingel.

Ying Zheng bent down slightly towards the two-headed dragon corpse on the ground in front of him, and grabbed the eastern dragon head with his left hand.

He grasped the head of the Western dragon with his right hand.

With one foot planted on the chest of the human body of the two-headed dragon corpse, he suddenly pulled with both hands, ripping out both dragon heads along with the spine, tendons, and some flesh!

Seeing these fine stitches hidden beneath the dragon scales, the person who sewn this two-headed dragon corpse must have been a master of needlework!