Lu Mingfei, become the King of Elden!

Chapter 154, Act Two
Lu Mingze tilted his head, his burning golden eyes gleaming with amusement in the solidified gray world.

He didn't answer Lu Mingfei's question directly, but simply shook the black umbrella in his hand. The raindrops suspended on the umbrella reflected light, like a rainbow.

"elder brother."

His voice was melodious and rhythmic, like a sigh:
"Power is never a simple matter of addition and subtraction. You are strong, stronger than you think. The tempering in another world, those battles, those deaths, those 'powers' you seized with your own hands or were forced to merge with."
They truly changed you. The dragon-bone form, the storm, even that thing that resembled a fragment of the world's laws—all of these make you far surpass an ordinary S-class hybrid.

He glanced briefly at the fine black scales covering Lu Mingfei's body. Even in the stillness of time and space, those scales faintly shimmered with a metallic sheen, a gift bestowed by the dragon's heart.

“But,” Lu Mingze’s tone shifted, becoming cold and realistic, “look at you now. Your shoulder blade is still bleeding, the wound on your waist is so deep you can see the bone, and your muscles are trembling slightly.”

After the surprise attack on the manor, the siege of three pseudo-A+ level monsters, the storm, and then carrying two people out of the collapsed building... how much stamina do you have left? Thirty percent? Twenty percent?

He took a graceful step forward, his leather shoes leaving no trace on the congealed mud.

Lu Mingze tilted his head slightly, looking at the enormous, despair-inducing head, his molten gold-like vertical pupils filled with boundless rage.

“And He,” Lu Mingze’s voice lowered, like an aria of the mortal world, with a cruel poetry, “He is the direct descendant of Jormungandr, the best among the next generation, the extension of the authority of ‘Power’ in the material world.”

He had just been forcibly awakened, his spirit was wounded, and the pain made him even more violent, but it also gave him a destructive power that disregarded everything.

Every scale of His is etched with the weight of the earth, and every breath He takes resonates with the earth's veins. He is the embodiment of pure power, a moving mountain, a walking earthquake.

Lu Mingze turned his head and stared into Lu Mingfei's eyes again. His golden pupils burned with unyielding spirit, yet also clearly reflected exhaustion.

“Brother, of course you can fight. You can tear His scales with a storm, you can withstand His impact with your dragon bones, you can cut into His flesh with your two incredibly heavy greatswords… You can hurt Him, and even… severely injure Him after paying an unimaginable price.”

Lu Mingze's voice carried a subtle, almost imperceptible, seductive quality:

"But what will be the price? Will the injuries completely deteriorate? Or will we perish together in His dying counterattack?"

He paused for a moment, letting the brutal scene he was describing appear in Lu Mingfei's mind.

"or……"

Lu Mingze's lips curled into a devilish smile, carrying a deadly allure:
"Shall we make a deal? Same price as before, a quarter of your life."

I'll take care of him for you, cleanly and efficiently, leaving no loose ends. You can leave safely with your little princess and that limp mess on the ground. I can even help you find the 'mysterious person' hiding behind the scenes and eliminate this trouble.

How about that? Pretty good deal, right? Trading a tiny bit of 'future' for absolute 'security' and 'victory' in the present.

Lu Mingfei listened quietly, raindrops clinging to his forehead, a few strands of wet black hair sticking to his pale cheeks. His golden eyes were like two candle flames flickering in the wind.

He was indeed exhausted. So exhausted that every breath aggravated his injuries, so exhausted that his fingers gripping the sword hilt were numb. Facing this colossal serpent, as large as a mountain range, he felt powerless.

It's very difficult.

he thinks.

This isn't a border area.

There, he could be like an unkillable cockroach, rising from the mud time and time again, building a ladder to victory with countless failures. Death was merely tuition, the cost of trial and error was almost zero. But here… that's reality.

A cruel and unreasonable reality.

There is no blessing from the golden tree, no resurrection from the faded. Death here is the end, a complete and eternal silence.

Why should he play the hero? Why should he challenge monsters that only exist in epics and nightmares?

He was neither Siegfried, nor possessed the immortal body bathed in dragon's blood; nor was he Hercules, born with the glory of divine blood and the twelve trials. He was merely a bewildered extra, forcibly thrust onto the stage by fate.

Those heroic tales, those dragon-slaying legends, are ultimately other people's epics. They wielded holy swords, basked in glory, and were backed by the blessings of the gods or the expectations of the entire world.

And what about Lu Mingfei? All he had were his battered "skills" acquired through countless deaths and struggles to survive in another world, along with two incredibly heavy, broken swords whose power was greatly diminished under the rules of this world. He was like a mantis that overestimated its strength and tried to shake the chariot; his fate was already sealed—to be shattered to pieces.

perish together?

The ending even sounds somewhat tragically romantic, like Tyr, the Norse god of war who perished alongside Fenrir the giant wolf.

But what kind of war god is Lu Mingfei? Is his blood cold? Are his bones made of steel?
No, he was terrified. He could clearly feel the burning pain from each pulse of the wound on his side, and the groans of his arm muscles from exhaustion.

He doesn't want to die.

But isn't it precisely because they don't want to die that they fight so desperately?
Lu Mingfei suddenly wiped the rain off his face, his golden eyes flashing in the rainy night.

He said softly:
"In that world, there's a saying: 'Might makes right.'"

Lu Mingze's eyes flickered slightly.

“I have no interest in becoming king, but I find this statement very interesting.”

"Only by having power can you control your own destiny; only by having power can you avoid being ridiculed, do what you want to do as you please, and cut down those who annoy you."

"Before we went to the border, I was a loser, a good-for-nothing, which is why I made a deal with you underwater in the Three Gorges."

"But now, I have suffered so much in the border region, being beheaded, disemboweled, eaten alive by wild beasts, burned to death, thrown to death, and drowned. I have used all of this to gain strength."

Some people painstakingly taught me skills, and others repaired my armor and sharpened my swords for me time and time again.

"If it were now, I'd fucking do a deal with you—"

"The suffering I endured, the deaths I faced, and what those people taught me."

He raised his head, looked at Lu Mingze, and said, word by word:

"What meaning do they still have?"

(End of this chapter)