Chapter Ninety: The Dragonbone Seal

Heavy earth cut off the world within from the world without, forming a natural barrier.

The voices from outside reached in like a Wi-Fi signal passing through three walls, weakened to the extreme; ordinary people could not have heard a thing.

But Old Wang could.

In the countless nights he had once spent in the World of Warcraft, he had heard bed-shaking, ship-shaking, earthquake-shaking, air-shaking, and cloud-shaking sounds again and again; and over the past eighteen years, he had heard similar sounds in different tongues. By the time he became a language expert, he had long since honed his hearing to the point where he could hear blossoms opening and snow falling, blood coursing and hearts beating.

A month ago, apart from sight, his other senses may not even have matched those of the Dark Knight, Matt.

But today, after a month nourished by the essence of the young lady, his skin was finer, fairer, and smoother; his cultivation had recovered to the level of his earlier life, and his senses were in no way inferior to Matt’s.

Yet if he could see it with his own eyes, why trouble his ears through a wall?

What the eye sees is not necessarily true, but what the ear hears is even more likely to be false.

Most importantly, among the six senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mind, his hearing was actually the weakest.

And of course, his best was not his eyesight.

Nor, in matters of the soul, did “seeing” rely on eyesight at all.

The body was real, material; the soul was illusory, made of energy.

The thick layer of earth was both a prison blasted into being and the body’s best shelter.

Old Wang’s soul and body could be separated; the Buddhist pilgrimage and the twin-control technique had originally been one and the same. Back then, in order to let those unreliable adventurers use it, he had divided soul projection and dual control of soul and body into two parts, simplifying them while also weakening them as needed.

Now that the two had reunited, Old Wang guided true energy to protect his flesh from harm on one side, while his soul left his body on the other, passing through walls and layers of earth.

He saw everything.

He heard everything.

He sensed everything.

“Well, well, this is quite lively... looks like an internal fight!”

It was a vast space, about the size of a basketball court, with supports, beams, and columns holding up the ceiling everywhere. Four groups of people stood in different positions.

Closest to the entrance were about twenty black men, carrying the same black submachine guns and shotguns, some with individual rocket launchers or grenade launchers on their shoulders. In the dim light, they blended into the surroundings, as hard to distinguish as charcoal.

To the left of the black men were roughly the same number of Japanese men, dressed in black, holding Japanese swords forged from refined steel, pistols hanging at their waists.

On the right were even more white men, in white clothing, each one armed with a sword.

At the back were more than fifty white men in suits and ties, each carrying a gun.

Each group had a leader, the four fingers of the Hand:

Sowanda, the dark-skinned African warlord with curly hair; the swordsman master whose face was always fixed in a smile, Baku; the top-tier ninja Murakami, as cold-faced as Baku was cheerful; and the dignified, elegant lady of high society, Alexandra.

They stood far apart from one another, clearly on guard.

And behind them all was a wall.

More precisely, it was a colossal stone prison, over a hundred meters long and wide and more than thirty meters high. The area around it had been cleared, and it looked like a vast cube of stone, the largest coffin in the world.

Every wall was carved with an intricate mass of writing.

It was a pictographic script Old Wang did not recognize at all, somewhat resembling the traditional Chinese characters of antiquity, akin to the most ancient oracle-bone script: an abstract expression of concrete things, though the actual meaning was evidently different.

They were the writings of Kunlun, and more than that, Kunlun’s runes.

Each rune contained extraordinarily powerful energy, a rather special kind of vital force unlike anything he had ever seen, giving ordinary symbols an almost miraculous power, somewhat akin to the inscriptions and spell-runes of the World of Warcraft.

All the runes together turned this immense stone prison into a seal.

The seal of the dragon bone.

Only the power of the Iron Fist could open it.

The ground was littered with traces of explosions. The shallow tremor from a few hours earlier had clearly been caused by those blasts, yet even such powerful explosions had failed to leave so much as a scratch on the stone prison. One could imagine its solidity.

“Incredible,” Old Wang murmured.

His sufficiently powerful spirit allowed him to sense with ease just how immense the energy within the stone prison was, far surpassing that of the Brewmaster Chen and the Vomiting-Blood Headmaster Zhu, and even compared with his own peak state, it was only three to five tiers lower.

More importantly, the stone prison was not independent.

No matter how powerful a seal was, time would wear it down and weaken it little by little.

Perhaps hundreds or thousands of years had already passed, yet the stone prison remained intact because it had never stopped receiving energy from within, from the sealed dragon bone.

The stone prison and the dragon bone had formed a single whole.

To force the prison open would mean forcing through the combined might of that generation’s Iron Fist and the dragon bone itself.

That was by no means something ordinary people or ordinary bombs could accomplish. Not even those superhumans who were not especially powerful could do it.

Such a colossal dragon bone, this divine dragon from Kunlun, must have lived for centuries, perhaps millennia, while alive. The accumulation of a thousand years was absolutely not something a man like Danny Rand could defeat. A thousand Dannys would not be enough.

“No wonder an Iron Fist is needed...”

The Iron Fist was a key, a password.

Even a key carved from wood, so long as it fit, could open the seal.

Old Wang even began to suspect that the sealed dragon bone had very likely been prepared by some earlier Iron Fist, or by the elders of Kunlun, for future Iron Fists.

“Black Sky isn’t here?”

Old Wang looked around but did not find the teenage boy the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division had been investigating, another Black Sky besides Elektra.

“Could it be upstairs? Is Black Sky... personally taking part in the slaughter?”

Old Wang frowned slightly, then let it go.

The four fingers, four masters of kung fu who had mastered vital energy, each possessed roughly the strength of a widow, and together they even had the qualifications to challenge the Defenders.

That was nothing.

The problem was that there were still more than a hundred elite fighters with blades, swords, and guns.

That too was nothing.

For a grandmaster who had recovered one percent of his true energy, it was merely the difference between a Dark Temple graduate solo-running Deadmines and solo-running Scarlet Monastery.

The only enemy he truly feared was one:

Black Sky.

In the television series, the newly resurrected Black Sky Elektra had single-handedly beaten down the Defenders, and the weakest Iron Fist had been no match for her at all.

But Black Sky was not here.

Old Wang thought for two seconds, then drifted behind a sharpshooter and blew gently on the back of his neck.

...

...

With two rings of chains wrapped around him, Robbie followed Skye’s guidance and walked alone toward a sewer passage.

Though the Spirit of Vengeance strongly objected, insisting that a dignified Ghost Rider could not crawl through sewers like a mouse, Robbie had already begun to practice meditation after learning it from Old Wang, and had taken to the path of spiritual cultivation.

If compared, the Ghost Rider was not really like the Death Knight; rather, he was somewhat like a warlock. Both could borrow the power of other evil beings, but whether they ultimately controlled that power or were controlled by it depended on their own efforts.

With the Spirit of Vengeance not yet strong enough, Robbie, by virtue of his connection to his fleshly body, held the upper hand.

But just as he reached the entrance to the sewer, Skye’s voice came through the earpiece:

“Robbie, hurry to the upper floors of the building! Black Sky is upstairs, Agent Romanoff is getting wrecked, and Matt and the others are almost holding out no longer!”

“The Beast’s target is Elektra! She’s a better vessel for the Beast than that little boy. She’s more mature, healthier, stronger, wilder!”

“The Beast has already killed a lot of people and gathered a great deal of power. Once it abandons its current vessel and takes over Elektra’s body, New York will be thrown into a massacre!”

At those words, the Spirit of Vengeance’s voice immediately rang out in Robbie’s mind: “Listen to me, kid. We cannot beat the Beast right now. There’s a saying in China: a gentleman’s revenge can wait ten years. I think we should hide somewhere first. I’ll take you out to judge the wicked, and after we’ve killed a few thousand or tens of thousands of people, we can come back and settle accounts with the Beast!”

Robbie paused mid-step. “You know Chinese too?”

The Spirit of Vengeance chuckled. “Of course! I’ve lived for billions of years. I know every language on Earth. Counting dialects, there are at least several thousand...”

Robbie snorted and quickened his pace. “Do you count as a gentleman?”