The furniture in the third-floor hall had been cleared out. Only a printing press the size of three bedboards stood there, operating nonstop.
Behind the press, the stone floor was covered with an old, faded carpet bearing the sigil of a direwolf.
An Unsullied lifted the carpet, and Jon frowned as he realized that the Dragon Queen had actually opened up a passage between the second and third floors, cutting a small window through the ceiling.
This was his home, and she was merely a guest.
The lord of Winterfell was not pleased.
However, when the Unsullied removed the redwood panel covering the window, the King in the North's earlier irritation vanished completely.
He was stunned by what he saw.
Not only him—everyone craning their necks to look cried out in shock.
"A wight! That ox pulling the mill is a wight!" Jon turned back, staring at the Dragon Queen in disbelief.
Dany smiled and nodded casually. "I've always wondered. Wights don't eat or sleep, yet they can keep running without stopping. Where does all that energy come from?"
Melisandre withdrew her gaze from the wight ox "pulling the mill" below the window and said calmly, "What's there to wonder about? The Others and the wights are creations of magic. They draw power from cold and darkness, just as you harness the fire beneath the earth to build your magic towers."
"Indeed. Energy is still conserved." Dany nodded and sighed with emotion. "When I saw the blue light flickering in a wight's eyes, I should have guessed.
That is the effect of magical runes in operation. They absorb the power of ice.
It's just that, subconsciously, I didn't want to believe it, because magic that reverses entropy like this is far too unscientific."
Dany was filled with emotion, but the others could not make sense of her stream of incomprehensible words.
"Why does the wight ox obey you and keep pulling the mill without stopping?" Stannis asked in confusion.
"Didn't you see? It doesn't have a brain."
Stannis stared at her woodenly.
Was she mocking him for having no brain?
"You deliberately cut off the wight ox's head?" Jon, however, caught the implication. "Without a head, it loses memory and even simple thinking ability. It can only rely on bodily instinct—no, on the wight's instinct to chase the living."
"Who is it chasing?" Perestan frowned. "Shouldn't we hang a live chicken in front of its neck? But the floor below is empty. There's only that ox, and even the doors are tightly locked."
Melisandre glanced at the Unsullied sorting the freshly printed indulgences and said, "There's no need for a live chicken. The living people on the third floor are its target."
"Boom—clatter—creak—"
As they were speaking, something suddenly went wrong in the "power room" on the second floor. The wight ox, which had been running in circles, abruptly collapsed, like a charging buffalo shot in the head.
Black blood flowed from its severed neck, quickly soaking a large patch of the floor.
The wight ox stopped. The drive shaft ceased turning. The gears screeched as if jammed, then fell completely silent.
The guillotine blade, the steel printing plates, and the rollers that fed the paper all came to a halt.
The printing press on the third floor stopped working.
"Did the wight ox work itself to death?" Alysane Mormont asked blankly.
"It seems it reached its limit. But it was fine just moments ago," the Greatjon frowned.
"No." Melisandre's expression turned grave as she shook her head. "The Others sensed what was happening in the castle and released their control over the wight ox."
As she spoke, she returned to the window and lifted the redwood panel again, her pale fingers tipped with bright red nail polish brushing lightly across it.
"A warding array…" The red priestess suddenly turned and stared at the Dragon Queen. "You sealed the entire lower floor?"
Dany nodded lightly, helpless. "It had only been a short while since we opened the window, yet the Others sensed something amiss and canceled the magic on the ox's corpse."
"What now? Have we printed enough indulgences?" Jon asked.
"Drag the ox outside and cook it, then replace it with another and keep working. The North lacks many things, but wights are not one of them," Dany said casually.
"Cook it… eat it?" Everyone's eyes widened in horror.
"The moment a corpse turns into a wight, its body stops decaying. Only after the wight is destroyed does the corpse resume rotting, continuing from the stage it was in when it transformed.
In other words, the ox downstairs is no different from one freshly slaughtered," Dany explained.
"But eating a wight seems a bit…" Although the Dragon Queen spoke logically, not everyone was like Samwell Tarly.
Well, the fat man probably did not even know what he had eaten before.
"The Children of the Forest even use this method to preserve food. They've been eating it for thousands of years. What are you afraid of?" Dany said dismissively.
"Have you eaten it many times yourself?" Stannis asked, his face ashen.
"No. I never eat wight meat." Dany wrinkled her nose in disgust. "Just hearing about it makes me sick. How could I swallow it?"
"Then why are you letting us eat it? Don't we feel disgusted too?" muttered a goateed northern lord.
"Why are you unwilling to drink brown soup yourselves, yet make the common folk eat it?" Dany shot back.
"The peasants are poor. If they don't eat brown soup, they'll starve. But we are nobles!" the goateed lord declared proudly.
"Since you understand that logic, why even ask?" Dany rolled her eyes. "I have dragons and a legion of wyverns. Tonight I'll be eating braised deep-sea lobsters in oil, and tomorrow morning I'll sip golden wine while savoring freshly roasted squid steaks. Can you compare yourself to me?"
The goateed lord's eyes widened, his face frozen in stunned silence.
The northern men around him were equally dumbfounded, resentment swelling in their chests yet leaving them speechless.
"Ahem." The King in the North coughed twice, breaking the awkward silence. "We don't know when the Long Night will end. We must conserve every bit of food. Drag the ox down. The soldiers will have an extra dish tonight."
Nobles will always be nobles. Even if they are not qualified to compare themselves with the Dragon Queen, could they really be inferior to those commoners under her command?
The people in the hall nodded slightly, very satisfied with Duke Stark's arrangements.
Melisandre walked to the printing press that had stopped running. She leaned her delicate nose close to the steel stamp stained with ink and sniffed it. Then realization dawned on her. "So that is it. Your ink is formulated primarily with dragon blood."
Dany glanced at her sideways, neither confirming nor denying it.
Drawing indulgences by hand was too time-consuming and exhausting. She certainly could not manage it alone.
Moreover, inscribing runes required attaching intense spiritual power at the moment of writing. A printing press using ordinary ink would produce nothing but waste paper.
These past few days, Dany had frequently communicated with Quaithe of the Jade Sea, learning from her various techniques for using the blood of magical beasts to create effective runes.
Afterward, she used the dark blood infused with the divine power of the Stranger to prepare ink suitable for mass-printing indulgences.
The ink for the gray-light Warrior scrolls contained the divine power of the Stranger, while the dragon blood used for printing the red-light universal scrolls held only the ordinary magical power of a demigod dragon.
"Dragon blood is this powerful? It can be used to mass-produce indulgences?" Lord Eel exclaimed in shock.
"That is no ordinary dragon." The Red Priestess cast a glance at the calm-faced Dragon Queen and said meaningfully, "The blood of the Stranger God naturally has astonishing effects."
That remark struck the heart of the matter.
Who was Drogon?
He was the Seven. He was the Stranger.
His blood was the blood of the Stranger.
What could be more suitable for drawing indulgences than the blood of the God of Death?
"Why would a dragon's blood be the blood of the Stranger?" Jaime's eyes flashed as he asked in uncertainty.
"You should ask the High Septon of the Faith of the Seven." The Red Priestess stared intently at Dany.
Stannis frowned, hesitating to speak.
Seeing everyone's curious gazes turn toward her, Dany remained calm and composed. "In fact, my Drogon is the representative of the Seven in the mortal world. You could also say he is the incarnation of the Seven in this world."
"Your Majesty, is it appropriate for you to say such a thing?"
"Isn't the black dragon the Great Protector of the Light?"
The nearby nobles were shocked by what sounded like blasphemy from the High Septon of the Faith of the Seven.
However, several knights from the south did not cry out in alarm. Instead, they looked thoughtful.
A handsome young man with a soft gray beard lingering at his lips hesitated before speaking. "When the High Sparrow preached from the pulpit and explained the Seven-Pointed Scripture to the masses, he seemed to have said something similar.
"The Seven are too distant from our world. Their will cannot descend directly upon the mortal realm, which is why divine miracles were rarely seen in the past.
"The dragon is the conduit between the divine and the mortal realms. If the mortal world is one pool of water and the astral realm where the gods reside is another, then the dragon is the pipe connecting the two pools.
"Whenever the Seven bestow any miracle, even the most basic Holy Light spell, it must pass through the body of the Great Protector as an intermediary.
"It can be said that the will of the Seven is realized through the Great Protector. Her Majesty's black dragon is both the Great Protector and the incarnation of the Seven in the mortal world."
"Yes, that is exactly it!" the Old Crab exclaimed in sudden understanding. He examined the gray-bearded youth in surprise and praised him, "Ser Dickon, I did not expect that not only are you formidable in martial skill, but you are also so well-versed in the doctrines of the Seven."
Dickon Tarly smiled bashfully. "You flatter me, Count Celtigar. I have only attended a few of the High Sparrow's masses and merely repeated what I heard."
Dany cast a sidelong glance at the Red Priestess, her eyes filled with triumph.
The Red Priestess happened to be looking back at her, her expression calm.
"Your Majesty, may I study the Faceless Men's Scripture of the God of Death?"
That evening, while Dany was cultivating and burning ravens with fire, Danys stepped out from the shadows in the corner and asked hesitantly.
That morning, Jiqi had presided over the distribution of indulgences in place of the Dragon Queen. Also that morning, the Dragon Queen had decided that Arya would serve as a subordinate deity of the Stranger. After lunch, Stannis, Jon, and a group of nobles and knights, curious about why there were so many indulgences, visited the third floor of the guest hall to see the printing press that "Blacksmith Dany" had forged with hammer and dragonfire.
After they dispersed, Arya, the "little white mouse," automatically reported to the Dragon Queen's cultivation chamber.
From the entire afternoon until nightfall, Dany used Arya's body to study the True Scripture of the God of Death.
The effects were powerful.
The enhancement of physical constitution and spiritual power, along with the "ice-clear state of mind" that erased emotions, made the little assassin Danys envious.
"If I learned the Scripture of the God of Death, even without Valyrian steel chainmail, I could easily defeat the little princess of Winterfell," Danys said resentfully.
Dany reached out and tapped her lightly on the head. "Is something wrong with your brain? Why do you think Arya volunteered to be my test subject? It is precisely because the True Scripture of the God of Death has enormous side effects. Do you want to become half-Other?"
"In that case, let Arya test it first. After the Scripture is perfected, I will learn it," Danys said with a smile.
"Keep dreaming. You do not even have the talent of a transcendent. What are you planning to learn?" Dany mocked.
"Uh…" The smile froze on Danys's face.
She recalled that she could not light a glass candle.
"So I will never surpass her?" she asked dejectedly.
"Not necessarily. You could change your path and become a priestess of the Stranger." Dany's expression turned strange. "A shadow assassin? A shadow priest? Or perhaps… a wraith?"
"What are those?" Danys asked blankly.
(End of Chapter)
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