Chapter 736 - Surreptitious Actions (Part 1)

Chapter 736: Chapter 736 - Surreptitious Actions (Part 1)

Back in Vlaelmundr, my little purple dragon assistant has been preparing things thoroughly on his end. He specifically requested to delay the start of our plan due to an important event that happens for dragons every hundred years. It slipped his mind that this event was soon when we previously talked.

This event is important and will involve all dragons and the eggs inside the cave so he can’t move the calcified eggs out of the cave just yet. He also don’t want to be too suspicious-looking as more dragons mean more eyes watching his every move.

Originally, the plan is to burry several mana stones around the cave and within it, creating an ancient array that will let us teleport the whole thing straight into the new world tree realm. I have already given him a storage ring filled with the said stones but he opted to use it on his personal residence first which I found funny and stupid at the same time.

The important event he was pertaining to is called "Vethirak". In draconic language, it literally means "Undying Flame".

During the period of Vethirak, all dragons both living within Vlaelmundr and those who have chosen to live outside, come back and visit the said sacred cave where the unhatched eggs were being kept. As a collective, they would pray to all the deities for the souls of the dragons that were not born. They would also wish, though chances are slim, that someday, these dragons inside these unhatched eggs will have a chance to be born and walk in this world again.

(A/N: I borrowed the word "Vethirak" from the lexitranslator.com website’s draconic translator. Thanks for your work!)

The dragons believe that their members who have passed ages ago will eventually be reborn after a few centuries inside an egg from a more recent generation from the same family they came from. The fact that dragons are born with the innate knowledge and wisdom which was passed down from their ancestors seemed to support this belief as well.

It was like a rebirth with all your memories intact, I guess. And here I thought that only phoenixes can do these rebirth things though they are from ashes.

Vethirak was a commemoration of these draconic lives that have not been given a chance to be lived again as of yet. It was also like a sign of solidarity for dragons and a huge family reunion too.

According to Alstein, most of the eggs in the cave have calcified (looked like dark gray rocks). He also said that most have been in this unhatched and dead-like status for at least several centuries. Some were already there, long before the time he was born according to the dragon elders.

He added with a helpless tone that a dragon egg needs much more than just the right temperature, safe and attribute-matching environment and ample time to hatch. It needs a place with lots of mana too which the human realm unfortunately had a scarcity of.

Finally, he said that a dragon egg also needs a serendipitous timing to hatch. The dragon inside the eggs must find a strong reason to be born before the whole hatching process can start to happen.

As for Vethirak, given that dragon lifetimes are almost endless, it only happens once every century so he has to make sure it will be completed successfully this time as well. He said that it will be his last Vethirak with them so he might as well make things perfect since he never planned to return in the future. It seems that he has always been the one handling the Vethirak rituals much like a high priest or prophet of a religion.

On the other hand, with a scoff, he commentented that besides him, no one really bothers to visit the cave on regular days. He seems to be the only one who still checks on the eggs from time to time. Mostly, he visits the unhatched eggs of his family everyday and just occasionally visits the others.

Alstein is confident that once he moves these eggs out of the cave after Vethirak, no one would even notice that the place has been tampered with. As for his reason for leaving, it was rather simple and given. The dragon elders have long asked him to go on a trip outside their territory to find a mate so he would just use that same reason and they would surely be glad that he finally decided to leave.

Alstein and I still exchange messages continuously even after that time he sneaked out from Vlaelmundr to see me. He was giving me updates on the upcoming Vethirak and any ideas that he randomly thought of. I realized that he was the overly cautious and perfectionist sort during the course of our conversations.

We eventually decided after several weeks of discussion that we will not be teleporting the whole cave since it will cause too much of a ruckus. And though the chances of the other dragons discovering the missing eggs will be low, we decided to make copies of the eggs we will be taking away in their place using stones. It will seem that nothing ever changed inside the cave with how it would look like once he leaves.

His days in Vlaelmundr were spent inside the library. As to why I asked him to study this much, it was because our goal is to hatch all the eggs that we will be taking away. He is a purple dragon so it is given that he knows the requirements to hatch purple dragon eggs but for the other type of dragon eggs, we would need as much information as possible before we leave. I even gave him a magical tool to record all the contents of the books and we would just filter out the rest once we are in the world tree realm since he really can’t read all the written materials in the Sanctum Arcaniss (separate realm filled with knowledge on dragons) anyways.

From his previous studies, it was already specified that dragon eggs from each branch family requires different environments to hatch. The mana was already abundant in the world tree realm so that is already covered. Given the fact that the eggs are coming back to the the new Vlaelmundr which was their original home, I think will be enough of a reason for these dragons to want to hatch from their eggs. The only missing piece would be information such as time needed to hatch an egg and exact environment to do so which we would need to create as needed.