Game of Thrones: Rise of the Supreme Dragon Queen

A bald woman with two faces squeezed onto her narrow head, a man with one large and one small head growing front and back, a hunchbacked child with three legs, and a girl with a crooked mouth, slanted eyes, and upturned nostrils.

Even the captured wild boar had protruding lips, resembling a crocodile that had been run over by a car.

"Go, leave here immediately!"

Before Little White could reach the village, Dany twisted her face and loudly urged him to turn east.

"Damn it, isn't this a fantasy world? How is there nuclear radiation here?!"

She cursed loudly, venting her nearly maddening emotions.

Suddenly, Dany looked up, realizing with a jolt: the dust in the sky was all radioactive particles, no wonder it hadn't disappeared for hundreds of years!

"Could the Valyrians be so advanced that they even created nuclear power plants? Or did aliens invade, with technological civilizations battling dragon riders, and the Valyrians got nuked?"

A string of questions filled Dany's mind, along with a burning curiosity: What secret was Valyria hiding?

"What's going on? Your Majesty, why did you suddenly turn back?"

About twenty minutes later, Big Black reunited with Dany in the Bay of Grief.

"I'll explain later."

"Aren't we heading to Westeros?"

"Sigh, first we need to change clothes... no, throw away the backpacks immediately, along with the scarves and cloaks."

As she spoke, she sat up on the dragon's back, removed the blue canvas hiking backpack, and took off the wool scarf covering her face.

Finally, she discarded her helmet, lobster gauntlets, skirt armor, and any other removable parts, throwing them into the sea.

Barristan, though confused, could only follow suit under the queen's repeated urging. As he stripped, he muttered, "Luckily that guy didn't lend me his Valyrian steel armor."

Uh, before they left, the old knight had tried to borrow armor from Jorah.

"Wearing Valyrian steel armor would better protect the noble queen!" he had declared righteously.

But although Jorah hadn't heard the story of Liu Bei borrowing Jingzhou, he understood that the old man had been eyeing his armor for a long, long time.

"This armor is too conspicuous, it would expose the queen's identity," he had refused.

"Screech—"

"Screech—"

The afternoon sunlight was blocked by two dark shadows. Jorah Mormont shaded his eyes with his right hand and shouted towards the sky, "Your Majesty, it's been less than a day—why are you back? Did you see the allied forces heading towards Slaver's Bay?"

"Help us remove our armor and put on deerskin gloves!" Dany ordered the Unsullied.

Once the cloth-wrapped iron armor and gloves were carried away by Big Black towards the northern sea, Dany inspected Little White. Though no obvious dust was visible, she still instructed Irri, "Have Quaro summon the dragon guards to the docks, and prepare cotton-padded coats, gloves, boots, masks, and hats for them."

Then she rode Little Green, leading Little White and Big Black to the beach, where dozens of tightly bundled horsemen scrubbed the dragons with sand—leaving no crevice untouched, not even under the armpits.

They worked until the red sun sank into the horizon before Dany finally returned to the Great Pyramid with her three dragons.

"What happened?" Barristan and Mormont asked in unison, full of confusion.

Dany's expression turned peculiar—part shock, part fear, part relief—but mostly bewilderment and helplessness.

"The Lands of Long Summer are cursed," she exhaled slowly.

Once she calmed down, she began doubting her earlier speculation.

Aliens battling otherworldly mages?

Too absurd.

As for nuclear power plants...

Radiation couldn't spread that far. The Fukushima nuclear leak only affected sixty thousand square kilometers, while the entire Lands of Long Summer definitely covered over a million square kilometers—how many Fukushimas would that take?

And after four hundred years, wouldn't the wind have blown the dust away?

"Wait, Slaver's Bay and Volantis are right next to the Lands of Long Summer—why haven't they been affected at all?"

Another question rose in Dany's mind. If it were truly nuclear radiation, the dust should have spread in all directions.

Yet the curse was confined solely to the Lands of Long Summer—leave the coast, and even the Bay of Grief a few hundred meters away was untouched.

"Everyone knows Valyria is cursed—nothing grows there, and no livestock survive," the fat eunuch Belwas muttered.

"But we did see people, likely near Oros!" Barristan frowned.

Belwas's eyes widened in disbelief. "There are really people in Oros?"

Though the Lands of Long Summer stretched six hundred kilometers wide and fifteen hundred kilometers long, it was still considered a peninsula in the Summer Sea.

Near the peninsula's center stood several active volcanoes, forming the "Fourteen Flames" along with those encircling the southern Valyrian capital.

During the Doom, all fourteen volcanoes erupted simultaneously, annihilating Valyrian civilization in an instant and fracturing the peninsula into four large pieces: the relatively intact northern Lands of Long Summer, a chain of tiny islets known as the Smoking Sea, and three large islands to the south, split along the remnants of the Fourteen Flames.

The most valuable island for exploration was naturally the central Valyria Island.

But for centuries, no ship but Euron's had ever returned from the Smoking Sea.

Desperate explorers had settled for scraps, entering the Lands of Long Summer via the ancient Valyrian roads, hoping to find the ruined Valyrian cities like Mantarys and Oros.

Considering the wealth of Volantis, one could imagine how prosperous those cities once were.

However, in Mantarys, explorers encountered countless horrific monsters—barely one in ten returned alive.

Those who ventured deeper into the Lands of Long Summer fared even worse, with only a handful returning—madmen raving about Oros still having living inhabitants.

Yet few believed the rumors, as too many had died exploring the cursed land. Despite abundant water, food, and bearable temperatures, even the strongest would inexplicably perish.

Coughing blood, vomiting, skin ulcers—noses, ears, tongues, and eyes rotting and falling off...

No earthly curse, no matter how tied to sorcery, could compare to a stroll through the Lands of Long Summer.

Gradually, terrifyingly shaped monsters began appearing even near the Valyrian Road.

The sorcerers sent by Volantis to investigate nearly collapsed in fear: the Valyrians had opened the gates of hell, and demons and ghosts were crawling out along the Valyrian Road!

Centuries passed before people realized that the monsters in Matarys were merely deformed creatures by birth and did not eat humans—well, some had been eaten by them, but ultimately, these creatures were still mortals without demonic powers.

Even so, the "Golden Road," which once connected Slaver's Bay to Volantis, became the infamous "Demon's Road," a name that struck fear into many.

Even Dany never considered stepping onto the ancient Valyrian Road to conquer Matarys next door.

Matarys was, after all, not far from Slaver's Bay.

"Sigh, so this is what the so-called demons really are... But where did the nuclear radiation come from? Or… is it really nuclear radiation?"

Dany sighed, feeling deep sympathy for the Valyrian people of the Lands of Long Summer. It would have been better for them to perish in the Doom itself!

"You mean the people in that village are not human but demons?" Barristan Selmy asked in shock.

At the time, Drogon was flying more than a thousand meters high, and from a human's perspective, they could only see thatched huts and human figures on the ground. Unlike a dragon, they couldn't adjust their focus to see the details of those figures clearly.

"Something like that… I wonder if they have retained any remnants of civilization," Dany pondered aloud.

"Are we still heading to Westeros?" Jorah Mormont asked with a frown.

"Go to the warehouse and bring me some lead ingots. I need to forge a fully enclosed lead armor suit," Dany instructed Irri beside her.

Astapor had lead.

Like the ancient Romans, the Ghiscari had used lead pipes to build their pyramid-based water supply system.

After capturing the city, Dany dismantled all the lead pipes and melted them down into lead ingots for storage.

Though lead pipes could last for millennia, the lead itself was harmful to humans.

"You plan to explore the Lands of Long Summer?" Barristan was surprised.

"Westeros can wait. There are a few things I need to figure out first."

"The curse..."

"As long as the dragons are fine, I won't be affected by any curse."

In Drogon's spiritual perception, the curse-like radioactive mist posed no real threat to him—unless even a dragon's senses could be deceived.

Lead was soft, so in just two days, they forged two fully enclosed plate armor suits, even embedding crystal lenses over the eye slots.

Shiny silver, they looked like two giant tin cans.

Besides the lead armor, Dany also had the city's textile women sew two sets of gold-threaded innerwear and two gold-threaded cloaks.

After all, radiation protection suits on Taobao were also made of metal fibers, weren't they?

Initially, Dany had not planned to bring Whitebeard along, but the three White Knights and even her Bloodriders insisted on stopping her. Barristan himself also stated bluntly that he did not care about his own life if it meant ensuring the queen's safety.

On the morning of the third day, two people and two dragons once again arrived at the village near the Valyrian Road. This time, Dany made sure to bring along the Dragonlord's identity plaque she had excavated from the Red Wastes.

Perhaps it was just psychological, but after donning her medieval-style DIY "anti-radiation suit," she felt much lighter, as if even magical nuclear fallout no longer posed a threat.

"I suggest we move a bit farther," Barristan said gravely. "There isn't a single normal person among them. I fear you won't get the information you seek and might not even be able to communicate with them."

He had binoculars hanging from his neck, allowing him to see people and houses clearly even from a thousand meters high.

Not a single person looked normal.

Dany thought for a moment and agreed with his assessment.

Wherever there was a large enough population, there would always be a few mutants unaffected by the "curse."

But this village was too small; the population base wasn't large enough for such exceptions to exist.

Thus, the two dragons continued south along the Valyrian Road.

Half an hour later, she breathed a sigh of relief. The previous village was not an isolated case—along the way, she discovered more than a dozen scattered groups of Long Summer "demons" and three slightly larger villages.

Finally, after nearly an hour of flying, a small "town" of over two hundred households appeared beside the stone road.

Even the blazing sun couldn't penetrate the thick smog. Under the pale afternoon sky, a pitch-black lake lay quietly five kilometers east of the Valyrian Road.

Between the black lake and the gray-white stone road, hundreds of mud-brick thatched huts were neatly arranged in a square formation.

Most importantly, at the center of this square settlement stood a four-meter-high circular red clay platform, upon which sat a stone statue of a Valyrian Dragonlord.

Though roughly carved, it clearly depicted a Valyrian riding a dragon.

It was evident that the people here had intelligence and could communicate.

"Ser, I'll fly down first for a quick look," Dany called out to Whitebeard before patting Rhaegal.

"Skreeee—"

A rough dragon roar echoed over the town, and the powerful gusts from its flapping wings made the rooftops' thatched coverings rustle, lifting a thin red dust cloud from the dirt streets.

The inhuman figures walking through the streets froze in place, raising their deformed and grotesque faces to stare at the sky in shock.

As if someone had pressed a pause button, the scene below turned into a black-and-white photograph.

"A dragon!"

An old man leaning on a hardwood staff broke the silence, speaking in High Valyrian.

"A Dragonlord! Our Lord Balerion has manifested! A Dragonlord has come to break the curse!"

If someone were to sketch a pencil portrait of each person, this old man's face would look as if someone had aggressively erased the area between his nose and mouth.

"Dragonlord! Dragonlord!"

Hundreds of ghostly, monstrous figures emerged from their mud-brick homes, joining those already on the street. One by one, they knelt on the ground, loudly chanting the title of "Dragonlord."

"So obedient?" Dany thought to herself, forming a plan in her mind. She signaled Drogon, and the two dragons spiraled downward toward the earthen square at the town's center.

(End of chapter)

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