Sesako needed to return to the mountains that he’d flown away from early this morning to find and awaken the Great One from the depths of her slumber.

She had to know that her doom approached.

The dragons of Yatamo had lived in the high mountains for far longer than humans had been present on the island.

Sesako knew that because he had once asked her how old she was.

She had thought seriously in that long rumbling manner with which the matriarch of the dragons contemplated, and then she said, “I count not days nor times in such a manner as you do. I do not memorize these numbers of cycles. But I had already lived many, many cycles of snow and growth before I saw the first humans.”

The dragons were gentle creatures — at least to humans. As far as it was known to the Yatamo, none of them had ever killed a human. They hunted the biggest whales and sharks in the oceans, and giant elephants in the mana enriched jungles on the south lobe of the island.

They also liked fruit a lot.

The great dragons had aided the first human settlers. That was a firm part of the legends and lore of Yatamo. The great matriarch herself had warmed the village of the first settlers during the great winter, and she provided the starving villagers with meat.

Mana flowered thickly in the settled lands of Yatamo, and a larger portion of the people of this island awakened their spark, and then went on to form a golden core than any other country in the world. It was generally believed that this was a blessing from the dragon, that they exuded highly concentrated mana into the land in which they lived.

Yatamo was not a true paradise, but there was something about the presence of the nine great dragons which allowed the land itself to cycle, grow greener, and the ley lines to become thicker than almost anywhere else in the world.

Certainly, the strength of the magic in the islands was part of why the dragons thrived and grew vast. But all scholars agreed with what the earliest settlers knew by intuition: The presence of the dragons fed the magic of Yatamo.

Now there were only seven of the Great Ones.

The leaders of the eleven clans of the islands had bent their knees to the emperor when he conquered the continent that sat three hundred miles away from the western shore of Yatamo.

There had been a brief fight before the submission, but the clan chiefs had not tried seriously to defeat the great force of cultivators which the emperor brought with himself — the army had included what was at the time a nearly inconceivable number of eleven profound souls, and more than a thousand purified cores.

And the emperor had been young then, brave, and full of vigor, throwing himself eagerly into every conflict, and happily testing his mettle against the greatest warriors that each nation he came to conquer tossed against him.

It would be many generations before he was wounded and burned.

The defeat of the clans was quickly achieved, and Yatamo simply became another province in his vast empire. But it was a province upon which the hand of the empire fell lightly.

They became wealthy in this time from trade, and from their superior magic. More of them awakened their spark than amongst other peoples, and more of those who awakened established their foundation, their golden core, and then successfully opened their second dantian without dying.

And so, the island grew powerful.

And then one day, nearly nine hundred years after the emperor had forced Yatamo to join his domains, he came to visit the island for a second time. He came ‘to hunt.’

The ancient man had perhaps not aged at all — or perhaps the aging for a celestial was slow enough to be invisible to ordinary eyes.

He was feted, celebrated, crowned with a surfeit of wine.

Sesako had been fifteen — already a prodigy, but he had not yet distinguished himself in any great way. His father and mother still lived. It had been a time of happiness amongst the children due to the holidays from school, the endless feasting, the massive processions, and the sheer fascination of the emperor being there.

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But in his memory of those last happy days of childhood, Sesako saw that his parents had all been anxious.

With his guard of five profound souls, the emperor went into the mountains.

To meet the Great One.

None on the island had known what he meant to do.

For all their immense size, power, and wisdom, the dragons could not fight the most powerful human cultivators with any hope of success.

The problem was simple: They were too big to miss.

When attacking a city cultivators flew high in the sky and hurled great blocks of marble, with thousands of enchantments carved into them against the city at incredible speeds.

When they struck the ground, the destruction they unleashed was enormous.

The problem from the standpoint of someone who wished to conquer land and kill his enemies is that these strikes almost never killed the enemy cultivators. They just destroyed his prepared defensive position layered with extensive runes.

Those with a purified core flew at more than a hundred miles per hour, and they their skin was hard enough to break steel swords. Arrows that had not been specially enchanted and empowered simply bounced off them.

With his third dantian open, Sesako moved twice as fast as a purified cultivator, and he was twice as difficult to injure.

It was no easy feat to kill a great cultivator in combat.

The only practicable way to kill a profound soul was if he was foolish enough to fall into a trap set by a group of purified cores where at least one of them was willing to use a suicide attack to detonate himself while within ten feet of the profound soul.

other profound souls, even a group of them, found it nearly impossible to kill another cultivator because it was always easy to flee.

Entire countries and empires might be wiped out, occupied for decades, and then, when the occupying armies were called elsewhere, almost the entirety of the cultivators who had lived there before could return from where they had lived hidden, cycling, and developing themselves for decades, stronger than they had ever been.

Killing humans was hard, but dragons weren’t like cultivators.

Dragons were big.

Really, really, big. Humongous. Gigantic. Almost unimaginably sized.

Even though a dragon flew twice as fast as a profound soul, they couldn’t dodge an enchanted hunk of marble that had been hurled at many thousands of miles per hour.

When he came to hunt, the celestial emperor brought weapons powerful and well suited for the task.

And at the meeting, before the astonished eyes of the onlookers amongst the clan chiefs of Yatamo, the celestial emperor slew without warning the largest though not the greatest of the dragons, the ancient one, the mate of their matriarch.

That the dragon was greatly armored, and ten thousand times the size of the emperor made no difference, for he was like a pointed dagger, sliding into the Great One’s heart.

And then once more, before the others amongst the dragons had opportunity to flee, the emperor slew the eldest son of the great matriarch of the dragons.

And then he laughed, “Two of nine, hopefully the rest will give me better sport.”

Sesako’s father who struck the first blow against the emperor — he was not a clan chief himself, but sufficiently high in the councils that he had been chosen to be one of those given the dignity of being amongst those who accompanied the emperor to meet the dragons. He had struck the first blow, deprived Sesako of a father, and ensured his place in legend.

He had used the famed suicide technique that allowed a cultivator with a purified core — if he got close — to destroy himself to harm a cultivator with a profound soul who otherwise would be invulnerable due to the use of power from a greater and more powerful dantian.

Never before, nor since, had such a technique been used against the celestial emperor, but it was possible because the attention of the emperor and his four sworn guards was fully upon the dragons which gathered high in the sky to perhaps return, and the emperor was preparing his hurler to send out a mighty strike once more.

Thus, Sesako’s father, who had always been a master of stealth, and being inobtrusive, was able to reach close, only a few feet from the emperor before his target began to respond.

Even a celestial could be wounded.

And though the blow was not fatal the emperor was grievously wounded near to death, and it was many a year before he recovered full his health and his power.

To this day, those few who had seen him without his ceremonial robes reported that the upper back and neck were horribly scarred.

As though Sesako’s father had killed himself as a signal to the rest of the assembled notables of Yatamo, all the clan chiefs and horrified nobles who had gathered to see this meeting between the emperor and their beloved great ones hurled themselves as one upon the emperor and his guards, to kill, to maim, and to fight.

A third of these cultivators of Yatamo — outmatched for none of them had a profound soul — died. But in their attacks, with the use of the suicide techniques, two of the emperor’s guards were killed.

They all would have been destroyed, if the emperor himself had not recovered from his swoon and struck back.

But rather than killing the desperate attackers once he gained a slight space for reprieve, he fled.

Sesako’s mother died as he fled.

Not from an attempt to fight.

As the emperor fled, he flew high, high, high in the sky over the land of Yatamo, far outpacing his guards and the grief-stricken pursuers. So, he had enough space of time to take a pause in his ever-quickening flight as he hurtled high over the great city of Kyita.