The Great Thief

However, what made everyone disappointed was that this raven mount couldn’t fly.

When a lot of those players who hoped to see the raven fly left soon in disappointment, just a few girls stayed behind to admire the raven with drooling mouths.

Lu Li shed tears of sympathy for these girls’ boyfriends, just wishing that they wouldn’t be bothered to

death.

After the three Auchindoun Instance Dungeons were cleared, there were still more left to attempt. The Caverns of Time on the old continent released two more Instance Dungeons. One was the old Hillsbrad Foothills, while the other was Dark Bog. It was a repeated storyline that got the players to come back to join the plot.

Lu Li had already encountered the former. At that time, he was one of the top adventurers that was netted in as part of a large-scale quest.

Now, the official game was moving from quests to Instance Dungeons. Anyone could go through an Instance Dungeon to finish off this part of the storyline of saving Saar.

As for Dark Bog in the Caverns of Time, that was another story.

The old Hillsbrad Foothills in the Caverns of Time had already been taken by Ruling Sword three days ago. After all, a lot of people knew this Instance Dungeon well. The main thing was just to see who was quickest and was willing to spend resources on it.

However, because no one had been able to break open Dark Bog the entire time, everyone had reached a deadlock there.

Lu Li knew how to open it up, because this Instance Dungeon had another name –’The Opening of the Dark Portal’.

According to the game settings of the world of Azeroth, the concept of time was like a crisscrossed net. Each strand of time was like a long, thin stream that flowed together into a time node, before splitting off and going its separate way again. In the countless different strands of time, the heroes of Azeroth all had different fates.

These strands of time could be envisioned as a scattered network. For some of them, there was only ever one timeline that was the correct timeline, able to carry on the continuation of history. The final point of all these timelines was the destruction of Azeroth and the death of all creatures.

There was a similar principle in real life. The most famous one was naturally the time paradox, which was also the so-called grandmother paradox.

The theory questioned whether someone would continue to exist if they really ‘went back,’ and killed their grandmother before she were pregnant with their mother.

The problem was very obvious – if the grandmother didn’t exist then the mother wouldn’t have existed, and if the mother didn’t exist, then he couldn’t have either. Moreover, if he didn’t exist, how could he ‘go back’ to the time before his mother was born to kill his own grandmother?

This was the ‘grandmother paradox’.

Shuttling back and forth from the past and now, trying to capitalize on missed opportunities and alter mistakes – how could you be sure that these changes wouldn’t lead to even bigger consequences?

As for the times of Azeroth, Nozdormu and his Bronze Dragon force had to be considered.

The Bronze Dragon Nozdormu was one of the five Dragons that the titans created. He was bestowed with the power to travel through time by the Highfather of the titans, Aman’Thul. Responsible for keeping time and fate, he was known as the Infinite King.

The Bronze Dragon legion had been protecting Azeroth’s time since ancient days, making sure that time was heading in the right direction. What was more, they led many people time travelling, guaranteeing that certain events happened in the past, as well as ensuring that the current timeline was correct. However, the way time flowed was tangled up and complicated, and it was easy for people to get lost inside. It wasn’t clear what was reality and what was an illusion, even for Nozdormu himself.

There were a lot of members of the Bronze Dragon legion, but it looked like most Bronze Dragons didn’t like to be revealed in public.

When Nozdormu was lost in the flowing times, his Prime Consort, Soridormi, led the Scale of the Sands to garrison the Caverns of Time, supervising the flow of time there.

There was no Bronze Dragon that players were more familiar with than the little Chromie. She would often transform into a female dwarf and appear in various places in Azeroth to give adventurers help.

When the Bronze Dragon king was dormant, the Bronze Dragon legion and a mysterious dragon clan called the Infinite Dragons made war with each other. It was so mysterious that even the Bronze Dragons themselves didn’t know what their opponents were actually like.

Later, at the end of time, the Infinite dragon king Nozdormu appeared and explained everything – the Infinite Dragons were the evil version of the Bronze Dragons. They had been seduced into doing wrong by the Old Gods, departing from their faithful selves who protected time.

Their goal was to bring the timelines to the end of time.

Actually, there was a relationship between the birth of the Infinite Dragons and Nozdormu. The Bronze Dragon king had seen his own end in fate in front of the Highfather Aman’Thul – he was going to turn into the Lord of the Infinite Dragons, Murozond, and would be killed by one of the adventurers he led himself.

It was just this lengthy torture that made Nozdormu become one who was later deceived by the Old Gods. The timeline of him turning into the Lord of the Infinite Dragons to destroy Azeroth, as well as trying to lead him to join the Wings of Death, was a successfully destroyed future.

Actually, Lu Li had always been skeptical towards this explanation.

Why couldn’t it be another situation?

It was actually correct for him to be an Infinite Dragon – they were future Bronze Dragons who had travelled back to the current time.

At a certain point of time in the future, the Bronze Dragons realized that what they had been keeping all along was a mistake. Because of these keepers, Azeroth was soon going to be devastated. In order to edit this tragedy, they travelled back in time, trying to rewrite history.

As such, they were called the Infinite Dragons.

They were the ones who were truly fighting to keep the spirit of Azeroth alive, while stopping those who unyieldingly urged on Azeroth’s demise.

Actually, this logic was solid enough.

After all, if you didn’t have any reason to, who would go back in time to kill themselves? Even if you tricked by the Old Gods, you still wouldn’t.

However, the players would follow whoever gave them EXP, Reputation and gold. Because of this, they would only block the Infinite Dragons from ruining the timeline with the help of the Bronze Dragons.

At the moment, the main thing with the two Instance Dungeons in the Caverns of Time involved the storyline of repairing the timelines.

The first was when the Infinite Dragons wanted to block Saar from escaping and imprison him forever in Durnholde. In continuing to bear with his strength, the new Horde would not appear, and the plotline would take a massive turn.

The other was when the Infinite Dragons tried to stop The Dark Portal from being opened. That way, the Orcs would naturally would have no way to invade Azeroth.

In this Instance Dungeon, players would be supported by the Bronze Dragon legion to be by Medivh’s side when The Dark Portal was about to be opened. Here, the Infinite Dragons used some direct methods to affect the flow of time – they sent out assassins to attack Medivh.

Although the battle that was instigated by the opening of The Dark Portal led to the loss of tens of thousands of lives, if the Orcs never came to Azeroth and the timeline was broken, then history and the future would be changed.

The players were to become Medivh’s assistants until Gul’dan’s underlings could successfully go through The Dark Portal to arrive in the world of Azeroth.

The players had no choice, because this was an Instance Dungeon!