"Wen'er!"
Feng Bingwen's thoughts were still attached to the white dragon's image in the clouds, looking down at the earth covered by the rain curtain below, still pondering, when he heard the old man's worried shouts from beside his main body.
As his thoughts shifted, Feng Bingwen looked around. In the torrential rain, three hazy figures entered his courtyard, their presence only amplified by the dim oil lamp in the night.
Such a scene naturally did not frighten Feng Bingwen. He had driven away all the demons and monsters in this area. He saw through the rain at a glance and saw the old man whose clothes were soaked by the rain, but who was still stubbornly carrying an oil lamp and accompanied by two farmhands who came to find him.
"Grandpa, why did you come here? It's raining so hard, what are you doing out here? Don't get wet and catch a cold."
Feng Bingwen looked surprised and moved to go out to greet him.
"You're still awake? Well, with this heavy rain, you can't sleep either. Don't come out, the rain is too heavy, you'll get soaked in no time. I'll come in."
Seeing that Feng Bingwen was about to come out, the old man who had come with a lantern quickly stopped him. He then went under Feng Bingwen's eaves and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that Feng Bingwen was safe and sound.
"It's good that you're alright."
"What's wrong? What happened?"
Although he didn't sense anything unusual, Feng Bingwen's heart was still touched.
"It's nothing, it's just that the rain is getting heavier and your grandma was worried, so she sent me to check on you."
Feng Lingjun, who was nearly fifty years old, smiled. Under the light of the oil lamp in his hand, a face that was very different from his age was revealed. Although the hair on his head was gray, it was mostly black.
Since their son passed the imperial examination and built a new house in the village, the two elderly people in the Feng family have been getting better and better, and seeming younger and younger. Everyone in the village believes that this is because of the series of happy events.
"Is everything alright here? Is the roof leaking?"
As he spoke, the old man held up a lamp and shone it on Feng Bingwen's room.
“Our house was only built a year ago, how could it be leaking so quickly?”
Upon hearing this, Feng Bingwen was speechless. He guessed that this was just another excuse for the old man to come and see him, because he was still worried about him.
"Who told you that new houses don't leak? The kitchen is leaking. The basin we use to catch the water was filled up in no time. The rain is too heavy."
"Well."
This response seems to suggest that Feng Bingwen is overthinking things.
"Yes, sir, this rain is so heavy. I've never seen such heavy rain in all my years of life. Is the Dragon King angry?"
At this moment, a burly farmhand who had been invited by his parents to serve the two elderly people and take care of him couldn't help but chime in.
“Acha, how old are you? I’m almost fifty. I’ve hardly ever seen rain this heavy.”
Having grown accustomed to his comfortable and leisurely life as a lord in a large mansion, Feng Lingjun casually replied that as a schoolteacher, he was kind and gentle, and therefore, the dozen or so farmhands who came from the prefectural city respected him greatly.
"As for the Dragon King's anger, you're overthinking it. Although our Longchuan Prefecture has many anecdotes about dragons and snakes, they are mostly just local tales and can't be considered highbrow."
"If there really is a Dragon King with a name, then it could only be the Water Lord of Xuanting Lake, which is a full six hundred miles away from our Qingshan County. That's far too far. How could the clouds and rain stirred up by that Water Lord in anger possibly reach us? Besides, it's questionable whether this Water Lord even truly exists."
What was said in jest was taken seriously by the listener. Feng Bingwen, who had been racking his brains trying to find the source of this incredibly vast cloud and rain, was suddenly struck by what he heard.
Although he couldn't determine the extent of the cloud cover, based on the boundaries he found, he could basically deduce that the origin of the cloud cover seemed to be in the south, and the Xuanting Lake that the old man mentioned was also in the south of Qingshan County.
"Could this really have been caused by the Dragon King of Xuan Ting Lake?"
Feng Bingwen couldn't help but ponder, because of his cooperation with the government, he had already learned a lot of strange and unusual stories.
For example, the world he is in now has nineteen continents, and Da Gan is only in a corner of one of them.
Such news only made Feng Bingwen feel incredulous, because the territory of Da Gan was already unimaginably vast. The huge territory was divided into forty-nine states, and the population of each state ranged from tens of millions to hundreds of millions.
In the entire country, the number of people registered by the government alone is in the hundreds of millions. This does not include the population privately kept or concealed by nobles, powerful families, and local clans, nor does it include the wild people who live in seclusion in the mountains.
Upon first hearing such data, Feng Bingwen was truly shocked, for in his view, nothing in this great empire could compare to the productivity of the industrial age, and with the productivity of the feudal era, how vast a territory would be needed to support such a large population?
Based on this, if Da Gan only occupies a corner of a continent, then the extent of this world must be unimaginable.
But it is something to yearn for!
Of course, the dream of traveling to the North Sea in the morning and to Cangwu in the evening is still far from his current reality, and it's not something he should be thinking about right now.
Xuan Ting Dragon Lord—well, to ordinary mortals, this Lord of the Waters is merely a deity who frequently appears in stories and tales. But for Feng Bingwen, a remarkable individual who has come into contact with the vast cultivation world, this Lord of the Waters is a real person, though he has never seen him in person.
According to his understanding, this Great Lake Dragon King has an extraordinary background. His biological father is a true dragon that roams the nine heavens. His background is no less than that of his master, and his strength ranks among the top in this vast land.
For cultivators at the lower levels, the Great Lake Water Lord is someone they can hardly look up to, and becoming his disciple or his henchman is something they can be quite proud of.
"This great god is indeed qualified to stir up rain of this scale, but this is provoking a major conflict. If such torrential rain continues for several days, the prefectures within a radius of hundreds of miles around Xuanting Lake will likely suffer heavy casualties."
Feng Bingwen was completely baffled. The water lord of a great lake was indeed powerful, but if he were to go head-to-head with a prosperous dynasty, he would inevitably meet a tragic end, even if his father was a true dragon.
Feng Bingwen wasn't just a nobody in the government; he had vaguely heard that the founding emperor of the Great Gan Dynasty was of extraordinary origin. Otherwise, how could a mortal dynasty have continued for three hundred years and still be at its peak without any decline? It would have collapsed long ago and entered the final years of the dynasty.
"Is this going to be a war between humans and dragons? That's ridiculous!"
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com