Chapter 940: Chapter 478: Dragon of Imagination and Red Moon Princess
The elves’ ancestors set a terrible precedent.
If they pulled something like this off without paying any price, then all the other nations would just copy them, and we could forget about maintaining any kind of order.
Might as well fast-forward straight into the Dark Forest era.
Fortunately, the Grand Speaker’s stance was still relatively clear.
At the very least, the Hidden Grove side didn’t raise many objections.
They were already fully following the instructions he gave.
By the time Louis found out about this, a full day had already passed.
That same day, while he was accompanying Beatrice to feed Kaelin, he spoke bluntly:
"These elves really are old monsters in every sense of the word."
Beatrice calmly cut the steak and used knife and fork to send it into the mouth of the Kaelin in her arms.
She sighed and said:
"Looks like the elves had long been prepared to bear the cost; otherwise they wouldn’t have moved this fast."
Put simply, the attitude the Grand Speaker showed was more like taking a swing whether there was fruit on the tree or not.
Whether it ultimately worked or not, they had already steeled themselves to pay for what their ancestors did back then.
If Louis had really been talked around by that old fox the Grand Speaker, and chose to relax his demands, they’d be laughing about it in private for days on end.
Unfortunately for them, Louis didn’t give them that chance at all.
Once he moved, he was as swift as the wind.
It hadn’t even been that long before the other side had already given a response.
To convince both upper and lower ranks that quickly, it definitely wasn’t because every elf knew the whole story.
You could only say the three elven nations had long since jabbed a "preventive shot" into their elves under their command.
"Revive the glory of the elves—this is our unshirkable duty."
"Resist natural calamities, fight human-made disasters, the armies charge into the desert!"
Anyway, they pumped them full of every kind of chicken-blood slogan first.
No way would they tell the elves below that they were being threatened and had no choice but to fight this war.
Otherwise, if the people below asked, "Threatened with what?"
What are you going to say?
Say the other side is going to expose the ugly things we did back then?
Then what the hell are we even playing at.
So Louis had the Grand Speaker dead to rights from the start.
The Grand Speaker’s attitude was actually very clear.
He knew they definitely had to bear a cost, but what cost exactly?
Different prices carried different weight in his heart.
For him, the most crucial thing was preserving the pride of the elven race.
All these years, call it brainwashing if you like, or re-establishing elven customs.
The present elves really do have little to do with the Demon Race anymore.
They are a long-lived race with fairy blood, possessing a racial dignity that has been forged, generation after generation, by elven forebears staking their lives on it.
This dignity has been passed down to the present day, becoming a sense of honor etched into the bones of countless elves.
To let elves die on the battlefield, rather than have it exposed that the whole mess was their fault and that they were being forced onto the battlefield by other races—this mattered greatly to the Grand Speaker.
Maintaining elven pride was the core that allowed their cohesion to continue.
If that breath of pride dispersed, the elves would likely scatter in all directions.
On that basis, anything else could be negotiated.
You could only say that, although the Demon Race left a ton of pits back then, the "custom-made" traits they built into their elven descendants indeed provided the foundations of a powerful race.
Long-lived, honor-bound, proud, unafraid of sacrifice...
And even more frightening, they’re good at Magic and archery.
It’s only thanks to the elven race’s abysmal birth rate that other races still have any hope of competing with them; otherwise, the difficulty would be on a whole different level.
...
War preparations on the Great Desert front were in full swing.
Although the other battlefield was entrusted to several other great powers, that didn’t mean Louis had nothing to prepare on his side.
The ruined Golden Land still required intensive remote surveillance.
He had originally thought that while he went to deal with Helmer, the fairies in the Golden Land would seize the chance to make a move.
But whether it was because those fairies were being affected by that thing in the Golden Land, or because they themselves had little rationality left to begin with, they showed no intention whatsoever of taking this opportunity to pour out in full force.
This bought Louis and his people precious time.
Holding to the principle of "if the enemy doesn’t move, we don’t move," Louis had no intention of taking direct action.
Time was on their side.
The longer the Seven Great Calamities were dragged out, the more they could bring the power of total war to bear.
Setting everything else aside, from the moment the Seven Great Calamities began, the nations participating in the supply-chain plan started cranking their productivity up to the limit.
In just this short time, all kinds of strategic materials were already in place, everyone looking like they were ready to fight to the death at any moment.
Fair enough—everyone was in this with the mindset of staking their lives.
In the old days, the resources needed to ascend to Demigod required the great Legends to pay an enormous price, often meaning they had to serve various powers for life just to obtain a chance at climbing toward Demigod.
But now, things were different.
No one had expected that the coming of chaotic times would bring such a devastating impact.
The Seven Great Calamities—news that had once circulated only among national high commands—finally, inevitably, began to spread among the common folk.
Many still didn’t understand just how severe the Seven Great Calamities would be.
But they weren’t blind.
When the Cosmic Serpent swept across the heavens, at least one-sixth of the world’s countries could directly see that phantom stretching across the sky.
And although the Cosmic Serpent didn’t often fly directly over cities, there were still thousands of cities along its flight path.
Its mere passage through the high skies left aftershocks that turned into storms, sweeping across the surrounding towns.
In an instant, houses collapsed and trees were torn up by their roots.
The entire world seemed to fall into silence.
Even with their shallow understanding of the Extraordinary, they could all see how terrifying that kind of monster truly was.
Comments