Chapter 180: The Ashes of an Empire
The silence of death now hung over what had once been the Middle Kingdom. In the weeks following the massacre at Black Dragon Valley, the last pockets of human resistance were methodically crushed under the iron heel of draconic rule. Ignivara’s armies, galvanized by Syléane Ignivara’s imperious assumption of command, swept across Chinese territory with the relentless precision of a perfectly oiled war machine.
The new Patriarch had inherited her late father’s tactical genius, but had added to it a cold, calculated cruelty that surpassed even Varnor’s. Where her predecessor sometimes sought to spare non-combatants out of pragmatism, Syléane made no distinction. For her, every human represented a potential threat, a seed of rebellion that had to be uprooted before it could germinate.
Shanghai, the pearl of the modern Orient, was the first major city to fall after Beijing. Once a brilliant symbol of Chinese economic power, it was now nothing more than a heap of smoking ruins stretching as far as the eye could see. Its iconic towers, those spires of steel and glass that had once challenged the heavens, now lay gutted, their metal structures twisted like broken bones. Draconic flames had left indelible black scars on their facades, silent witnesses to the fury that had descended upon the city.
In the final hours of resistance, local hunters had fought with the energy of desperation. Led by Chen Wei-Ming, a graying veteran who had survived three decades of dragon hunts, they had organized a fierce defense from the skyscrapers of Lujiazui financial district. Armed with their last enchanted weapons and intimate knowledge of the urban terrain, they had held out for seventy-two hours, inflicting surprising losses on the draconic vanguards.
But their bravery, admirable though it was, could do nothing against the raw, coordinated power of the Ignivara legions. When Syléane herself appeared above the city, riding her ancestral dragon with scales the color of molten bronze, Shanghai’s fate was sealed. With a single breath, the Patriarch set an entire district ablaze, transforming the defenders’ last refuges into deadly furnaces.
Chen Wei-Ming died standing, his blade still smoking with draconic blood, refusing to bend the knee even in the face of certain death. His last act had been to hurl a challenge at Syléane in ancient Mandarin: "Our ancestors watch us! We will never yield this land to you!" The Patriarch had responded with an icy laugh before reducing him to ashes with a negligent gesture.
Guangzhou followed quickly, its defenses broken in less than a week. The port city, once a commercial gateway to the West, burned for three days and three nights. The columns of black smoke rose so high they were visible from Hong Kong, spreading terror among the civilian populations still free.
Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, attempted a more organized resistance. Local authorities had managed to evacuate part of the civilian population to the surrounding mountains and establish defensive lines in the hills. But dragons knew no terrain obstacles. They swooped from the sky like vengeful meteors, their flames transforming forests into blazes that drove refugees from their hiding places.
One by one, China’s great metropolises collapsed in systematic and inevitable chaos. Xi’an, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Wuhan... Each name that disappeared from the map represented millions of broken lives, millennia of culture and history reduced to dust.
The human survivors, those unfortunate enough not to die in battle, quickly discovered that their fate was hardly more enviable. Syléane Ignivara had instituted a ruthless classification system: humans were sorted according to their potential usefulness to the nascent draconic Empire.
Specialized craftsmen, engineers, doctors, and all those possessing rare technical skills were branded with red-hot iron and assigned to forced labor. Chained in makeshift labor camps in the ruins of former factories, they toiled relentlessly on the construction of draconic infrastructure. Their days began before dawn and ended long after sunset, under the constant surveillance of merciless wyverns who did not hesitate to strike down any offender.
The weakest, the sick, children and the elderly were considered a useless burden. Their fate was sealed in an expeditious and brutal manner. Mass graves were dug on the outskirts of each conquered city, silent testimonies to draconic administrative efficiency.