Watching Shi Feng dismount from the Holy Dragon Eibleak, the entire bastion fell silent in an instant. Every pair of eyes fixed on him in disbelief.
Macafrey and the Scarlet Witch in particular stared at Shi Feng as he approached, their eyes filled with astonishment, their mouths nearly hanging open.
Shi Feng felt like a bottomless monster to them.
Every time they thought they had some understanding of him, they discovered that what they knew was merely a fraction of the whole.
The airship he had used to storm Starlight Fortress, the domain treasure he had used to suppress the Starlight Leviathan — these were things every major superpower currently hungered for. Treasures that were practically impossible to obtain, yet Shi Feng had produced them effortlessly.
And he had successfully conquered an ancient bastion that none of the superpowers had been able to take.
And now he had produced a dragon…
A dragon!
In the Divine Realm, dragons represented destruction. Even the great kingdoms and empires found them to be a headache, yet Shi Feng could command one.
Even if this dragon was merely a Tier 4 wyrmling, it was more than enough to deter any faction and keep the major powers from harboring careless designs on Starlight Fortress.
"So this was his confidence all along?" Fethaliya glanced at the Holy Dragon Eibleak standing quietly behind Shi Feng, a sudden understanding dawning on her.
Only now did she somewhat grasp why Shi Feng had rejected her proposal without hesitation when facing the combined pressure of the superpowers and the Netherworld Empire.
With the power of a Tier 4 dragon at his disposal, if any expert from the major superpowers wanted to cause trouble in Starlight Fortress, they would simply be courting death — they wouldn't even have a hope of escaping.
Unless every last one of them had gone mad and was willing to sacrifice their own lives just to pick a fight.
And as Shi Feng rode the Holy Dragon Eibleak into the square of the Divine Tribe's bastion, the various superpower agents embedded within the Divine Tribe rushed to relay the news at the first possible moment.
"How is that possible! That's a dragon!"
"How could a dragon possibly be under a player's control?"
When the higher-ups of the various superpowers received the reports from their subordinates, they immediately suspected their agents had turned traitor.
It had to be deliberate misinformation, fabricated to make them wary of Starlight Fortress and dissuade them from going there to cause trouble.
But as one report after another came in from different insiders — even the most reluctant superpowers could not deny that all of their agents could not have possibly betrayed them at once.
After all, to keep close tabs on the situation within Starlight Fortress, they had spent considerable resources over the past period secretly bribing Divine Tribe members stationed there.
And those bribed members had no idea who else had been bought off. This layering was specifically designed to prevent any single bribed player from betraying the arrangement and feeding false information favorable to the Divine Tribe, which might skew their judgment.
Now, with over a dozen agents all reporting the same thing, the matter was undeniably true.
Once the news was confirmed, it sent shockwaves in every direction.
Some factions that had previously harbored ambitions regarding Starlight Fortress now found themselves filled with hesitation — should they still join the major superpowers in pressuring Shi Feng and the Divine Tribe to claim a share of the bounty?
Had this been before the dragon's appearance, they wouldn't have thought twice about it.