Dragon Raja: Lu Mingfei finds a Freylian

Only Kazama Ruri's voice remained, melodious and lingering, flowing through the white curtain of smoke, as if he were a firsthand witness to that tragedy, recounting his past life in a ghostly, calm tone.

"Finally, Bondarev boarded the Lenin with the ancient dragon embryo. The giant ship turned east, crossed the Arctic Ocean and the Bering Strait, and sailed south along the Kuril Islands toward Japan. In the end, it sank into the divine realm. It did not sink accidentally, but was drawn by a certain will, precisely shattering the seal of Takamagahara. All the crises that Japan faces today can be traced back to that winter twenty-one years ago. And from beginning to end, there is only one person who has witnessed and participated in this crisis from its inception to the present day: Tachibana Masamune."

Kazama Ruri finished telling the story.

This story is indeed more chilling than Japanese mythology.

The terror of the Yamata no Orochi belongs to the distant ancient times, and the details have long been blurred by the mists of mythology, making people feel half-believing and half-doubting.

The story of Black Swan Harbor is meticulously detailed, with verifiable dates and locations, and all the characters are named. Every clue seems to have been carefully preserved for over twenty years, waiting only for this moment to be laid out on the table. It all feels like it happened just yesterday.

For a full minute, neither Caesar nor Chu Zihang uttered a sound.

"The horde of Dead Servants you encountered at Genji Heavy Industries did not attack from the outside. They were already inside Genji Heavy Industries; they were not attacked by enemies, but rather like pets that had escaped their cages."

Kazama Ruri pulled out a few more photos from the file folder and placed them on the tatami mat in front of Chu Zihang. The photos were in color, and their vividness stood out starkly against the backdrop of the black and white files.

"This breeding pond is located directly below Genji Heavy Industries. It utilizes the existing drainage system to create a water circulation system, forming a complete breeding chain that can operate for a long time. The place is called 'Naraka,' which is the name of hell in Buddhism, a place where raging fires burn eternally and sinners are repeatedly tormented."

A picture is worth a thousand words; no testimony can be as powerful as a photograph.

These photos documented every nook and cranny of that bloody breeding pool; each one was like a hammer blow to the retina.

The human-faced fish swam slowly in the transparent tank. Their faces were almost identical to those of human babies, but their bodies were covered with bluish-gray scales, and the gill slits on both sides of their necks were opening and closing. In close-up shots taken close to the glass wall, their eyes had no pupils, only a murky golden yellow.

The iron bed and restraints used for dissecting them were covered in dark bloodstains, and the leather of the restraints was severely deformed from repeated struggles and tugging.

The bloody scalpels were neatly arranged in a stainless steel tray. Next to the scalpels was a standard operating procedure posted on the wall, with step-by-step instructions printed on A4 paper. Each step was accompanied by a simple diagram and a number, a chillingly calm display.

What's most chilling is the dissected Deadpool specimen.

Some are complete Deadpool specimens, their internal organs removed and suspended in formalin, limbs outstretched like a butterfly pinned to a display board; others are just individual glands or brains, with clean cut surfaces, immersed in specimen bottles.

There was even a female individual carrying a fetus that was longitudinally dissected, revealing the curled-up embryo inside the uterus, whose scales had not yet fully developed. The embryo's face was also that of a human baby.

Chapter 786 King General

“Hell.” Caesar turned the last photograph over and gently placed it on the tatami mat.

His day job was to clean up these bloodthirsty monsters. In the mission briefings of the Kassel College Executive Department, Deadpool was always just a number that needed to be crossed out, a time bomb that needed to be pulled out on time.

But as he watched helplessly as they were sliced ​​up piece by piece, hollowed out, and categorized for study in the photographs, their bodies still frozen in their struggled, lifeless state on the stainless steel dissection table, Caesar felt something churning up from deep within his stomach.

It wasn't because of the gore—he'd seen far more gruesome scenes—but because of the chillingly calm, methodical slaughter, like dismantling a scrapped engine. The perpetrators were human, and those lying beneath the blades were once human too.

“They were originally human. They were forcibly turned into Deadpools under the stimulation of drugs. Once you think about it, isn’t that even more cruel?” Kazama Ruri said.

“But you can’t prove that this breeding pond is located inside Genji Heavy Industries.” Chu Zihang looked up from the photos and stared directly at Kazama Ruri. “These images only show the pond itself, not any reference points that could be used to pinpoint its location. It could be under Genji Heavy Industries, or it could be under one of the Demon Clan’s strongholds. Perhaps you built this pond, or perhaps you produced these Dead Servants, while the Snake-Headed Eight Families were merely studying specimens seized from you. These photos alone cannot distinguish between these two possibilities.”

“If you don’t believe me, no matter how I explain, it’s all in vain.” Kazama Ruri was extremely indifferent to Chu Zihang’s doubts, not even raising an eyebrow.

He placed his pipe beside the celadon dish, picked up the cup of tea that had long since gone cold, and took a small sip. "Then let's continue with the third story. It's about the 'King General' of the Fierce Ghosts."

"The King is the highest piece in shogi, so the person codenamed King must be the head of the Oni Clan?" Chu Zihang asked.

He was familiar with the rules of shogi. In shogi, there is no difference in size among the pieces, but the king is the soul of the whole game. The side that is checkmated by the king loses the entire game.

“That’s right.” Kazama Ruri nodded, placing the teacup back on the tray. The bottom of the cup tapped against the porcelain saucer with a light, crisp sound, like a clean and crisp period being struck at the end of the previous paragraph.

"The King is the supreme leader of the Oni Clan, and also my teacher, the one I should be loyal to. But I have never seen his true face. He wears a mask all year round, a real mask that covers his entire face. You can imagine what he looks like if you think of the masked priests in the Genji Heavy Industries murals. No one knows his name, and no one knows where he comes from."

Kazama Ruri picked up her pipe again, but this time she didn't fill it with tobacco. Instead, she casually tapped the wood grain on the tatami mat with the mouthpiece.

"About twenty years ago, this man appeared before the Demon Clan. At that time, the Demon Clan had just been nearly wiped out by the Snake-Headed Eight Families, and the remnants were hiding in an abandoned mine in Hokkaido, like a group of trapped beasts driven to the edge of a cliff by hunters, with nowhere to go. It was the King who found us. He walked into the mine alone, without any weapons in his hands or any followers behind him. He walked through layer after layer of guards with his empty hands and came to us. From that day on, the Demon Clan began to turn the tide. He was both intelligent and ruthless, always able to anticipate the Snake-Headed Eight Families' every move, and always able to lead us to tear a path to survival in desperate situations. It didn't take long for him to win everyone's trust and be elected as the King."

He paused for a moment, pointed his pipe to his temple, and lightly tapped the pipe stem twice with his fingertips.

"The King will propagate a theory. He says that genetic technology is mature enough that hybrids can evolve into pure-blooded dragons without relying on sacred remains or withered bones, solely through science. This news has us ecstatic. The vast majority of the Demon Clan are people branded as 'demons' by the Snake Clan, lowly, dangerous, and destined to be abandoned by humanity. If one day we can truly evolve into pure-blooded dragons, our 'demon' identity will be erased: we will no longer be lowly demons, but noble dragons. Some have voluntarily taken the evolutionary drugs provided by the King."

"At first, they truly reaped the benefits. Their bloodlines improved like never before. Some discovered they could see in complete darkness, some could hear sounds a kilometer away, and some could tear steel plates apart with their bare hands. Most importantly, they didn't lose their minds. They didn't become Deadpools, they didn't turn into mindless killing machines; they became stronger versions of themselves. This gave everyone hope. But the good times didn't last long."

The pipe stopped tapping and lay quietly between his fingers.

"The effects of the evolution drug became increasingly unstable. From the initial perfect enhancement, it gradually turned into intermittent loss of control in the users, with brief amnesia, violent impulses, and completely uncontrollable killings during the gaps in their consciousness. In the end, the test subjects inevitably slid towards becoming Deadpools. Their bloodlines surged past the critical threshold, and dragon blood finally overwhelmed human blood. Their genes began to spontaneously mutate in the direction of dragons, irreversibly. Those Deadpools who escaped from the laboratory were scattered in major cities, hiding deep in the sewers and in abandoned factories, climbing up to kill indiscriminately as soon as it got dark."

“You are creating the devil artificially,” Caesar said.

“That’s right. But the power of dragons is just too tempting,” Kazama Ruri said, placing her pipe on her lap.

"From ancient times to the present, mankind has never stopped researching how to evolve into dragons. Qin Shi Huang sent people eastward to Penglai to seek the elixir of immortality. Medieval alchemists tried to extract the Philosopher's Stone from dragon blood. In modern times, Nazi Germany secretly conducted all sorts of occult experiments. In every era, there are people who want to become gods. We are not the first, nor will we be the last. We originally wanted to create gods, but what we created over and over again was always a devil."

"How does Wang Jiang explain this? His theory failed?" Chu Zihang asked.

"The king declared that the evolution drug was missing a crucial ingredient: divine blood. Only divine blood could provide the ultimate complement to hybrids; without it, all genetic modifications would be futile. So he halted the research on the evolution drug and instead focused on resurrecting the gods."

As Kazama Ruri spoke, she refilled the pot with tobacco but did not light it.

"But just then, more and more Deadpools appeared out of thin air. They didn't come from our lab, they weren't under our control, but appeared in the streets and alleys of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. Monsters roamed freely under the Japanese night sky. Some of them were indeed our out-of-control test subjects, but many more were not. That's when we realized that others were doing the same thing. The researchers who created Deadpools were not just the Oni Clan."

He took the pipe from his lips and looked directly into Caesar's eyes.

"Those people have improved the King's evolution drug. The drug is much more potent. At least our drug can keep the user stable for a few months, but their drug can turn a living person into a dead servant in a few weeks or even days. But we can never find out where those drugs came from. They seem to have appeared out of thin air, and we can't trace their source with any clues."

"Are you implying that those Deadpools were secretly created by Tachibana Masamune?" Caesar asked.

“Yes.” Kazama Ruri’s tone was flat. “Within Japan, besides us, which other force has this kind of mass production capability? Don’t forget, the Snake-Headed Eight Family holds all the files on ‘demons’. There are a total of 821 files. Every hybrid who is identified as a ‘demon’ has their name, bloodline rating, type of incantation, address, and family members recorded clearly in the Snake-Headed Eight Family’s database.”

"Only they know how to find those 821 potential test subjects, how to get close to them, and how to lure them into becoming samples for drug testing. I suspect that Tachibana Masamune is operating two teams at the same time, one dedicated to creating monsters and the other to cleaning up the mess. And my good brother, who is determined to be a friend of justice, still doesn't know that the monsters he leads people to eliminate every day are precisely those created by his own family."

He raised his pipe to his lips and finally lit the bowl of tobacco that had been packed for a long time.

"There has never been such a thing as justice in this world. So-called friends of justice are nothing but moths drawn to the flame," Kazama Ruri said softly, turning her head to look at the flickering flame inside the paper lantern.

“You can’t see the light, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist; you can’t see justice, perhaps because you’ve gone blind first,” Caesar retorted. “Even a moth drawn to a flame at least opens its eyes to seek the light.”

The room fell silent.

Kazama Ruri was silent for a few seconds, then smiled.

“Well said,” he said. He placed his pipe back on the celadon dish and bowed his head slightly. “All three stories are finished. This is all I have. Based on these three stories, everyone will piece together different conclusions, and I would like to hear your opinions.”

Both Caesar and Chu Zihang remained silent.

Ruri Kazama's three gifts were indeed three heavy and substantial gifts, each one weighing heavily on their understanding. However, when they tried to piece these stories together into a complete picture, the connections between them wove into an astonishingly dense web.

The people standing at each node—Tachibana Masamune, Ohsho, Genjiro, and Kazama Ruri—are all hunters and prey at the same time, perpetrators and victims at the same time.

In present-day Japan, everyone harbors their own agenda, and everyone is like a schemer. They are capable of anything to seize control of God and that power sufficient to rule the entire world.

Perhaps only Genjiro is an exception.

The giant tortoise wholeheartedly wanted to be a friend of justice, but whose side did his justice stand on, and did justice itself even truly exist? All of these questions remained unanswered and uncertain.

Chapter 787 Survivors of Black Swan Harbor

Chu Zihang broke the silence first.

"If all three of your stories hold water, then Bondarev obtained the technology to breed Deadpools from Black Swan Harbor, escaped to Japan, infiltrated the Snake Clan, and used their resources to continue Herzog's research. Because on Christmas Day in 1991, Black Swan Harbor was reduced to ruins by a vacuum bomb, and the only person who survived was Bondarev. He took all of Herzog's research data with him, and he was the only one in the world who knew how to use genetic technology to breed hybrids."

"But I have a question. Who told you those things from 21 years ago? If Bondarev was really the only survivor of the Black Swan Port bombing, then only he knows the whole story, and he obviously wouldn't come to tell you."

“It was the king who told me,” Kazama Ruri said.

"How did the king find out?" Chu Zihang pressed on.

“He didn’t say. I’m just relaying what he told me verbatim to you,” Kazama Ruri said calmly, meeting Chu Zihang’s gaze. “But I’d like to remind you of something else. The technology that Tachibana Masamune possesses is extremely similar to the technology that the King possesses.”

Chu Zihang remained silent.

The technology that Tachibana Masamune possessed was Herzog's technology, and the technology that the King possessed was also Herzog's technology, but back then, only Bondarev brought Herzog's research data out of Black Swan Port.

If these two people possess the same technology, it means they share the same source. Either they were accomplices from the beginning, or they were the same person from start to finish, or the statement that "Bondarev left alive alone" is simply not true.

“There is more than one survivor at Black Swan Harbor,” Chu Zihang said. “Wang Jiang also witnessed the fire that turned the Arctic Ocean into daylight that night.”

“That’s right. Tachibana Masamune only has twenty years of experience. Twenty years ago, he returned to Japan as a Japanese expatriate and joined a subordinate organization of the Snake-Headed Eight Families. Then he climbed to the top step by step. It was also twenty years ago that the King appeared in front of the Demon Clan and pulled the gang back from the brink of disaster. Everything has to go back to that point in time twenty years ago. All the causes and effects started to ferment from there.”

Kazama Ruri spoke slowly and deliberately.

Chu Zihang and Caesar exchanged glances.

Although it is still just a deduction, Kazama Ruri's deductions are logically interconnected, and a thread of fate has tightly stitched together the burning Christmas night in the Arctic Ocean twenty-one years ago and the torrential rain in Tokyo today.

Having long since rotted and sprouted beneath the ruins of Black Swan Harbor, the fruit is about to hatch in the giant warm nest of Tokyo.

"Why tell us all this?" Caesar asked.

“I want to join forces with you,” Kazama Ruri said. He bowed slightly, in a proper, Japanese-style gesture of pleading.

"Did I hear that right? The high-ranking officers of the Demon Clan want to cooperate with Kassel College?" Caesar raised his eyebrows. "Your goal is to resurrect the God, hatch the White King from that skeleton, and turn all the hybrids in Japan into pure-blooded dragons. Our organization, to put it bluntly, was born to slay dragons. There is no basis for cooperation between us. It's only reasonable for us to draw our swords and fight for our respective positions."

"You're cooperating with me. Not with the Demon Clan, and certainly not with the King." Kazama Ruri raised his delicate eyebrows, the two red creases at the ends of his eyebrows slightly upturned with this movement, adding a touch of sharpness to his pale face. "You want to kill a god, just as I do. In Japan today, you can't find any allies except me."

"You want to kill a god? Why?" Chu Zihang asked. He leaned forward slightly, his folding fan gripped tightly in his palm. "You are the second-in-command under the King, the Dragon King. If the White King's resurrection results in the entire Ghost Clan evolving into dragons, with your bloodline and status, you will be the leader of the new dragon race. The second-in-command of the new world; if the number one isn't strong enough, you might even be number one. What good would killing a god do you?"

“First of all, I don’t believe that humans can truly control gods. The King keeps saying that as long as we follow his plan step by step, the White King will obediently follow our commands after his resurrection. But I’ve seen those murals and heard the priests’ explanations; the White King has never been something that can be controlled.”

Ruri Kazama stood up and walked towards the black lacquered knife rack in the corner of the room.

A long sword lay horizontally on the sword rack, its cherry-red scabbard resembling the last, delicate crimson of cherry blossoms clinging to the branches before they fall, with dark gold ancient characters painted on its surface.

He picked up the knife, but did not draw it. He simply held the scabbard in his left hand and placed his right hand lightly on the hilt.

"Secondly, Wang Jiang is not trustworthy either. The only reason he cultivated me is because of my bloodline. My blood is irreplaceable for his research. I am the Emperor's twin brother, I am the strongest specimen among ghosts, and my blood contains both the blessing and the curse of the gods. But once he finds the gods, I will be of no value to him anymore. Things of no value can be served up and consumed by Wang Jiang at any time."

His slender fingers gently gripped the scabbard, a thin layer of white showing on his knuckles.

"The king is a ghoul. Everyone is his food. His subordinates, his test subjects, his enemies, his allies are just dishes placed on different plates. The only difference is that some are eaten earlier and some are eaten later. I am also food that he has stored in cold storage, just not yet served on the table."

Kazama Ruri turned around to face Caesar and Chu Zihang.

The light from the paper lantern spilled from behind him, casting interplay of light and shadow on his face. "Just a few days ago, he ate up a girl I liked. I can almost picture him licking his teeth behind the mask, silently thinking 'So delicious.' In that instant, I really wanted to kill him."

“Ghoul?” Chu Zihang repeated the word.

He could tell from Kazama Ruri's tone that this word had a precise definition in the world of the King.

“This is the theory that the King himself presented.” Kazama Ruri walked back to the tatami mat, but did not sit down again. Instead, she stood in the center of the room, holding the long sword with its cherry-red scabbard.

He casually tossed his pipe onto the dressing table, the wisps of smoke rising alone from the bowl like a stick of incense burning slowly.

He said that this world is a dog-eat-dog world from beginning to end, except that it's not the other person's flesh that's being devoured, but their value. How much money can your time, your labor, your talent, your bloodline, your life be worth? Street thugs extort protection money from shopkeepers, prostitutes, and drug dealers, living off their fat; gang leaders take a cut from the thugs, living off their fat.

"It's the same outside the underworld. Business owners hire workers and make their fortunes by eating their oil and fat; conglomerates devour business owners, and banks devour conglomerates; politicians are the biggest eaters in society, swallowing everything without even spitting out the bones. He said that the world is just that cruel. If you don't eat people, people will eat you. So you have to make yourself stronger at all costs, climbing up layer by layer. The higher you climb, the more you can swallow, until one day you stand at the top of the food chain, with everyone under your feet, and you alone sitting at the head of the table, holding a knife and fork, with the whole world on your plate."