Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

  It could be seen that Snow had been thinking about a raise in her salary for a long time.

  However, she wanted to keep her pride intact, so she didn’t want to talk about it in public. She wasn’t a follower of Sui Xiong, so she couldn’t contact him through the Channel of Religion. As for contacting him through magic, she hadn’t mastered powerful enough magic that she could make contact from the human world to the God’s Kingdom.

  Thus, she had delayed for several years until that day, when she finally found an opportunity to talk to Sui Xiong about it.

  Sui Xiong had never been mean to his subordinates. He thought about Snow’s request for a while and realized that compared to her contribution to the Republic of Northwest, her salary was indeed low—Snow was one of the governors of the Republic of Northwest now. If she hadn’t been too lazy to do more work, she could even have become one of the Great Governors.

  Sui Xiong had planned to have only one Great Governor in the Republic of Northwest, but that had turned out to be unreliable. It would be too heavy a workload for just one person to do, unless this person was willing to exert their utmost to fulfill the duty until their death, like Zhuge Liang. Thus, Sui Xiong simply set Great Governor as a position for the highest-ranking civil servants, and these Great Governors were similar to important leaders back in Sui Xiong’s country on the earth, with names that couldn’t even be casually mentioned in a novel.

  However, all the important leaders in Sui Xiong’s country together wouldn’t have been able to beat just one of the Great Governors of the Republic of Northwest in a fight, while the total work of all the Great Governors here was less than that of the least busy one of the important leaders in Sui Xiong’s country.

  After all, the size of the Republic of Northwest was similar to a prefecture-level city on the earth, and its total population was even less than a single county on earth. The Republic of Northwest boasted a territory almost as large as Canada on the map, but most of it was Ashes Woods, mountains, and snowfields. Thus, it was meaningless to have such a large territory.

  At present, there were three Great Governors in the Republic of Northwest in total: Madame Teague, who was in charge of the civil affairs of Void City, Leonard, who was in charge of the military affairs, and Felix, who was in charge of the civil affairs of the Four Towns in the Northwest. There were supposed to be seven governors under them: three in the Void City and four in the Four Towns in the Northwest, but Sui Xiong hadn’t found enough of them. Instead, he had almost finished the recruitment of lower-rank officials and civil servants through the civil servants examination.

  After much careful estimating, Sui Xiong offered Snow a higher salary.

  “That isn’t enough.” After she heard Sui Xiong’s offer, Snow murmured, “That would be enough for a human official, but I’m not a human. If there are any emergencies, I could help fight, so you should at least pay me as much as a bodyguard.”

  Sui Xiong was speechless about that and raised her salary to a higher number.

  Then he paid her an extra sum to make up for the salary differences of the past years, from roughly the start of the Void Mask Land to that time.

  Snow had never expected something like that, so she was stunned for a while. Then she said, “If you don’t want to be a God and decide to be a king, I think you’d do a better job.”

  “Maybe.” Sui Xiong smiled and didn’t talk about it too much.

  A king? There wasn’t much difference.

  Hadn’t Crick Keane made greater achievements before than the king of a small country?

  After he settled everything for Frost and Graupel’s dormancy, Sui Xiong sent a fighting doppelganger out into the Void City.

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  The Underground Adventure Park, Dragon and Dungeons, had to be governed by a dragon. This dragon didn’t need to be very powerful, but they had to have a good personality, or at least couldn’t have a bad habit like eating people.

  To think it through, if tourists found the Underground Dragon Nest and wanted to take an adventure inside, and then were eaten by the dragon…… That would be a great scandal!

  Thus, evil dragons couldn’t be chosen by Sui Xiong, so he targeted the kind dragons.

  There were divisions in dragons—kind dragons, evil dragons, and neutral dragons. The kind dragons were represented as Metal Dragons. It didn’t mean that they were made of metal. They just had a metallic luster on their dragon scales. The evil dragons were represented as Five Colors, which had thick and heavy dragon scales like colorful stones. The neutral dragons were represented as Gem Dragons, whose dragon scales were as sparkling and crystal-clear as a gem.

  It might have sounded weird but there were huge differences between dragons and their subspecies in character. For example, a White Dragon was a kind of evil dragon. Instead of settling down somewhere, they loved to travel around and bully others. However, its subspecies, Ice Dragons, preferred to find areas to be their territory and become a Hill Lord there. Besides, Ice Dragons were generally neutral in character and sometimes tended to be kind. As for the most cunning, Black Dragons, their subspecies were Rock Dragons. The Rock Dragons were famous for being simple, loyal, and honest. The relatively cunning ones among Rock Dragons were like Frost.

  Sui Xiong wandered around the Main Plane for almost a week. After some searching, he finally came to a mountain pass located in the southwest of the Mountain of Broken Cloud, close to the Kingdom of thousands of Springs.

  There was a large copper mine there, but it hadn’t been exploited yet, first because of its remote location and inconvenient transportation, but also because there was a mean dragon living there, a Copper Dragon named McHale.

  McHale was about 500 years old now. For a Copper Dragon, that age was quite delicate, because it was just between middle age and old age. There was also an important division between ordinary dragons and legendary dragons.

  For ordinary dragons, after living to this age, both their bodies and mentalities would begin to age. They would become less energetic gradually and sleep for months, or even a couple years. Even if they woke up, they just looked for food and went back to sleep again.

  If they couldn’t manage to live beyond this age, the ordinary dragon would gradually grow old in this decadent state and become sleepy and less energetic by the day. Dragons at this age were also known as Twilight Dragons, and that meant their lives had almost come to an end.

  Normally, Twilight Dragons could manage to live two or three hundred years more and die of old age.

  Of course, Twilight Dragons weren’t very common to see, because most dragons could live beyond this limit easily. After that, their wisdom and magic would be greatly enhanced, and they would transfer from a warrior to a spell caster.

  This process of transformation was a bit slow. Generally speaking, they would be about 700 to 800 years old—that was the age when Twilight Dragons died—when they finally completed the transformation and became an Old Dragon.

  Although they were called Old Dragons, they were more powerful than middle-aged ones. These Old Dragons were both powerful warriors and excellent spell casters, both legendary creatures and legendary adventurers.

  The state of Old Dragon could last for a long time, as short as 1,000 to 2,000 years, and as long as 4,000 to 5,000. But after that, the dragon would still grow old and die.

  To escape from growing old and dying, the Old Dragon had to advance a level to become an Archaic Dragon.

  Archaic Dragons existed beyond time. They were all demigod masters and had a lot of powerful subordinates.

  The level above Archaic Dragons was Archean Dragons. Cladema, the God of Underground Caves and Sites, who had died earlier for no reason, was one of the most famous Archean Dragons.

  Regarding McHale, whom Sui Xiong was looking for, Sui Xiong didn’t know which stage he was in. The last time McHale had shown up was nearly 50 years earlier. At that time, he had been a Middle-Aged Dragon and never shown any powerful magic.

  Thus, people now were wondering whether he was going to become a Twilight Dragon, and many adventurers were temporarily staying in a small town less than 100 miles from the Valley of Copper, waiting for McHale to fail in breaking the limit and become a Twilight Dragon.

  It was said that some of them had been waiting for ten years!

  Sui Xiong didn’t want to meet these guys at all, so he became invisible, flew over the small town, and arrived at the Valley of Copper.

  It was quiet and peaceful in the valley, and all kinds of animal were living in harmony there. Although there was still hunting and killing there, there was still a sense of nature, making others feel pleasant.

  Sui Xiong flew into the valley, searched with his soul sensing, and smiled. He found a man in green snoring underneath a big tree with his face covered by a book.

  “Wake up, McHale!” Sui Xiong touched him with his tentacles, but the human-looking dragon didn’t get up. He didn’t even wake up at Sui Xiong’s prodding, just turning to the side and sleeping on.

  Sui Xiong was at a loss. He hadn’t expected this famous Copper Dragon would like sleeping as much like Graupel.

  After several considerations, he took out a bag of gold coins and dropped them on McHale’s head.

  When the coins slid across McHale’s neck and face, Sui Xiong clearly heard the dragon sniffing and breathing heavily.

  “It’s the smell of gold!” McHale, wearing green, threw aside the book on his face as fast as lightning and moved his hands quickly to pick up all the gold coins around him.

  “Don’t waste them!” he said to Sui Xiong seriously. “There are seven Gods behind each gold coin, so you’ll be punished if you waste money or gold coins!”

  Sui Xiong was stunned. He really wanted to ask why he had never heard that there were seven Gods behind each gold coin.

  But on second thought, he didn’t.

  Perhaps this was just McHale spouting bullsh*t.

  After a while, McHale was completely awake from his sleep. This seemingly less energetic dragon sighed sadly as he played with the gold coins he had been given by Sui Xiong.

  “Alas! How I wish that the dragon ball was from a Blue Dragon or a Water Dragon!” McHale said.

  “You’ve said that many times.” Sui Xiong sighed helplessly. “Money isn’t so necessary, and neither is treasure. As long as you work hard enough, sooner or later, you’ll have your own dragon ball.”

  “It would help me save at least 200 years if I could borrow the power of that dragon ball!”

  “If you work hard for me, I can help you save that 200 years.”

  “Really? How are you going to do that?” McHale asked curiously.

  Sui Xiong smiled and didn’t answer.

  What else could he do? It would be nothing more than special training, extremely hard training.

  If McHale didn’t want to take part in the training, it would be a pity! He didn’t want to have only Graupel involved!