Chapter 162: As expected of you

Perletti carefully walked to the edge of the newly opened pit and had just begun leaning forward to look inside—

when an overwhelmingly foul stench suddenly burst out from the depths below.

It was a nauseating mixture of rot, sour decay, and something indescribably rancid and fishy, surging upward almost like a physical force.

“Ugh—!”

Perletti staggered backward several steps, choking on the smell as she hurriedly covered her nose and mouth.

“S-so disgusting! Are you sure this is what a Devouring Beast smells like?!”

Scarlet Night’s face also scrunched up in disgust as she hid behind Perletti, muttering in a muffled voice,

“It smells like meat that’s been rotting forever… and… something else.”

“No…”

Olivia endured the discomfort and approached the edge again, carefully sensing the depths below. Her expression gradually turned grave.

“A Devouring Beast’s digestive fluids should only have a strong acidic stench. It shouldn’t smell this… putrid.”

She activated her magic again, pulling even more soil up from the pit.

This time, the dirt that emerged was an eerie dark purple, sticky and damp, emitting an even more pungent odor than before. Faint traces of ominous black energy even seeped out from within it.

Perletti truly could not tolerate the smell any longer.

And seeing that Olivia apparently had no intention of immediately purifying the contaminated soil, she had an idea.

A Purging Blaze spell should work, right?

Just burn all this filthy stuff clean with extreme heat!

Purging Blaze was an exceptionally effective purification spell among light-element magic. Its core principle was simple: release temperatures exceeding a thousand degrees in the form of large-scale light.

Anything touched by the radiance would be physically purified down to its very essence.

Perletti raised her hand.

Soft yet scorching light gathered within her palm before transforming into a pure, blazing stream that swept toward the pile of dark-purple soil.

Wherever the light passed, the horrible stench evaporated almost instantly.

The sticky purple earth sizzled loudly beneath the heat as its color rapidly faded, moisture steaming away until the entire mass hardened into porous gray-white stone.

Olivia turned around in astonishment just in time to see the final traces of light dissipate—

along with the pile of “purified” white rocks left behind.

For a moment, an indescribably complicated expression appeared on her face.

“Pei. Le. Tti.”

She looked utterly caught between laughter and tears.

“If you don’t know proper purification magic, can’t you at least let me handle it?!”

“Now look what happened—you directly baked all the soil into stone again!”

“Restoring these back into healthy, life-supporting earth will take several times more effort than simply purifying the contamination!”

“Again?”

Perletti immediately caught that word. She blinked.

“So that means… Qingcheng did something similar before?”

“Something similar?” Olivia looked at her with an expression mixed with helplessness, nostalgia, and faint indulgence.

“She was practically a repeat offender.”

“As expected of you. Different timelines, different souls… yet certain talents truly remain exactly the same.”

She recalled how Qingcheng, lacking proper magical references at the time, had been obsessed with inventing new spells.

Then she would excitedly run off to test them somewhere.

Unfortunately, her control over their destructive power was often terrible, leaving the forest in utter chaos—

and Olivia would always be the one cleaning up afterward.

Looking at the pile of white stone before her now, she actually felt an oddly familiar sense of nostalgia.

However, that feeling of familiarity and relaxed reminiscing did not last long.

BOOM—!!!

The ground beneath them suddenly trembled violently without warning.

Accompanied by the ear-grating sounds of cracking stone and splitting rock, an enormous skeletal claw burst out from the edge of the pit and slammed heavily onto the ground, crushing several rocks instantly.

Then came the second claw.

Under the shocked gazes of the three girls, a giant dragon consisting of nothing but bones slowly crawled out from the expanded pit.

Its skeleton was a grayish black, as though corroded by both time and some unnatural force.

Many of its bones were cracked or missing entirely, while remnants of tattered wing membranes hung limply behind it.

Yet the most horrifying sight of all—

was inside its hollow chest cavity.

Suspended only by several nearly severed black blood vessels hung a gigantic, shriveled dark-red heart.

It still beat slowly.

Heavily.

Every pulse radiated suffocating hatred and despair.

“ROOOOOOOAAARRR—!!!”

The sound did not come through vocal cords.

Instead, it directly assaulted the soul itself—a berserk roar erupting from the depths of madness accumulated over centuries, perhaps millennia, of agony.

The skeletal dragon raised its bony head toward the sky fragmented by the forest canopy and unleashed a declaration-like howl:

“Finally… finally, we have escaped that eternal hell!!!”

“A Fallen Dragon?! N-no… impossible!”

Olivia’s face instantly turned pale.

She no longer cared about the nauseating smell as she stared at the bone dragon in utter disbelief, her voice trembling slightly from shock.

“You should be sealed within the Fallen Dragon Valley, imprisoned by Lady Masha’s curse and the elves’ barrier simultaneously!”

“How are you here?! How did you escape?!”

Had the seal weakened?

No—that curse had been cast at the cost of Masha’s shattered divinity. Its stability rivaled even the World Tree’s barrier itself!

Then had the elven guards made a mistake?

Or…

had some unforeseen catastrophe occurred?

Countless questions and warning signals flooded Olivia’s mind at once.

Instinctively, she began formulating countermeasures, analyzing the bone dragon’s condition, searching for weaknesses, considering how to reseal or expel it with minimal cost—

Yet her thoughts were abruptly interrupted by a blinding burst of radiance so intense it nearly scorched her vision.

A gigantic sphere of compressed destructive light, nearly the size of a house, suddenly roared past her side without the slightest hesitation.

Carrying the overwhelming force of absolute purification, it struck the skeletal dragon directly just as it was reveling in the ecstasy of escaping confinement.

BOOOOOOOOM—!!!

A deafening explosion erupted.

Blinding white light completely swallowed the dragon’s body.

When the radiance faded—

all that remained on the ground was a scattered heap of charred and shattered dragon bones still smoking faintly.

The grotesque beating heart had vanished entirely, seemingly vaporized without a trace.

Olivia stood frozen in place.

Slowly, she turned her head toward Perletti beside her—

who currently wore an expression of relaxed satisfaction after “taking care of the problem.”

Perletti tilted her head slightly at Olivia’s stunned, almost blank stare, clearly confused by her reaction.

Her tone sounded perfectly matter-of-fact.

Even slightly puzzled.

“Why were you wasting time talking to it?”

“It didn’t exactly look capable of proper communication anyway.”

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to just kill it immediately?”

Olivia took a deep breath, trying to calm her racing heartbeat and chaotic thoughts. Her voice carried unconcealable urgency.

“It—it managed to escape both Masha’s seal and the elves’ surveillance to reach this place!”

“That means it likely retained some portion of its former intelligence and sanity!”

“At the very least, we should have tried to gather information—find out how it escaped, whether other Fallen Dragons escaped too, and what exactly happened to the seal!”

“And you—you just…”

She stared at the pile of blackened bone fragments on the ground, now utterly devoid of any soul fluctuations or lingering energy.

A headache began forming instantly.

Every single clue—had just been thoroughly purified into nothingness by one cast of Perletti’s Lumen.

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