Chapter 145: There Are No Evil Dragons in the World (17)
When Choi Pan-seok felt that something had changed, he was waiting for a prophecy as usual.
He looked away from the documents he was reading. Tilting his head, he removed his bifocals. He couldn't identify the source of this sense of unease. He looked around. His daughter, lying comfortably on the bed, was still with her eyes closed, presumably viewing the future.
'What's changed?'
It felt like one of the two types of forces that filled his inner being had vanished. But he wasn't sure what it was.
After fumbling with the mirage-like discomfort, Pan-seok ultimately gave up further analysis. He returned his gaze to the documents. They detailed the winning strategy for the orc candidate the party would put forward in the upcoming by-election.
The detective he had marked had finally accepted the proposal.
The detective had recently come to Pan-seok with ambitious plans. When he expressed a desire to have a more positive influence on the racial community, Pan-seok had responded that there was no more suitable job.
Now, all that was left was to do his best to win.
The politician's eyes, lost in thought, were now fixed on the clock. The alarm he had set was about to ring.
'Already, is it that time?'
His daughter, with her consciousness fixed on the future, did not react to the surrounding noise or smells. Knowing this, Pan-seok left the door open and went to the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and took out something that had been frozen.
As he heated it in the microwave, Pan-seok smiled with anticipation.
Pan-seok had no idea. The sensation he had just experienced was the effect of brainwashing wearing off from being stabbed by a dagger.
Yet the orc still faithfully followed Min-jun's orders. Guarding his daughter, who was in the midst of a prophecy, and eating the item at the right time were all according to his commands.
Min-jun had discovered that brainwashing activated by harming someone was extremely powerful but could only control one person at a time. Using such brainwashing continuously for just Pan-seok was inefficient. Thus, he had gifted a large quantity of (pseudo) food to the politician.
Ding!
The defrosting was complete.
Pan-seok moved the plate to the table with a smile. He had no idea. The great dragon from a foreign land had just had his mind manipulated by magical tools, and he too had been affected. Although the brainwashing caused by being stabbed had disappeared, the brainwashing caused by eating was still in effect.
With a bright face, Pan-seok picked up a spoon. He scooped up the unidentified organic material and put it in his mouth.
"······!"
The old orc, deprived of the right to think freely, became the happiest person in South Korea at that moment.
"What is this?!"
A scream echoed through Raymond Wong's mansion, where the owner was absent.
"M-My body feels strange!"
The employees still did not realize that what they had been covered in was dragon's blood. They only suspected it was some magically manipulated blood. They assumed that Raymond Wong had cleaned it up before disappearing due to the unbearable stench.
Dragon blood is strictly controlled and cannot be traded openly. No earthling had ever experienced being covered in it while fresh, and few knew what it smelled like.
But the properties of dragon blood didn't end there.
"Ugh, Aaaah!"
This time, the troll gardener screamed.
Sores were breaking out on his skin, exactly where he had been covered in the dragon's blood. The troll, experiencing skin diseases for the first time in his life, was overwhelmed with an unreal sense of terror.
If the troll was affected this much, other races fared even worse. Areas contaminated with the blood cracked, and some were now staining those spots with their own blood. If it had been a Kabaite, known for its worst compatibility, it would have been as if covered in radioactive fallout, but the employees gathered here were not affected to that degree. It wasn't life-threatening.
However, the barely stabilized scene fell back into chaos. People were terrified and in disarray.
But there was an exception.
"...Why?"
An East Asian man touched his face in confusion. His body was intact. He also had not felt anything other than ordinary bloodstains when other employees felt the stench and vomited.
He was the butler who had delivered the invitations to Min-jun and Kentius. The butler turned his head and looked around. He could see a few other colleagues who, like him, had no reaction.
"I see."
The man noticed their commonality.
Employees who remained unaffected by the blood rain.
They were all humans.
When Raymond revealed the secret, Kentius doubted his own ears.
What did he just say?
Unable to contain himself, he interrupted the conversation.
"Genetically similar bodies?"
Meanwhile, Min-jun recalled Chang-cheon from Raymond's words.
The great dragon who had tried to kidnap a dragon as similar as possible to her deceased former husband and transfer her former husband's soul into that body.
However, that experiment had failed repeatedly. The dragon entity could not accept the soul of the ghostly Liu-ho. So, Chang-cheon had attempted to convert the ghost into a spirit before overcoming that obstacle by sacrificing many goblins, only to be caught by Min-jun and had her head smashed.
And it seemed Raymond's experiment hadn't gone smoothly either.
"If our guess is correct, and if there was any progress in the Lord's experiment, I wanted to steal it. My and my collaborators' experiments were repeatedly failing. So, I tried to extract information from the Lord but rarely succeeded..."
Min-jun's eyes blazed with anger.
"You were already conducting the experiment?"
"Yes. Secretly, it had been in progress for a long time."
Kentius listened to the conversation in a daze. It was a story so hard to accept by his standards.
Raymond had already been implementing it, and the Lord might have been doing the same.
"If it's a body most similar to himself genetically, then he was replicating his own body..."
He stopped speaking mid-sentence.
At that moment, Kentius felt a shiver running through his entire body.
He knew a much simpler and easier method.
It was something the Lord had done repeatedly. To be exact, it was something done seventeen times only on Earth.
"Wait a minute."
Kentius recalled a dragon's name.
The person he had been curious about until just moments ago.
"No way?!"
"Replicating a dragon's body was not easy. But I had a more convenient method."
Though not as much as the Dragon Lord, Raymond also had several children.
Among them, one lived in Hong Kong and set up a lair close to Raymond after becoming an adult. His father had encouraged him to do so. In this city, even a single dragon had trouble finding space.
And he was the dragon among Raymond's children who resembled his father the most.
Kentius muttered through trembling lips.
"...Leo?"
The great dragon spoke in a neutral tone.
"The child you saw today is not Leo."
He casually added.
"That child's core, you see."
Kentius screamed.
He glared at Raymond with a face filled with shock, fear, and disgust.
To think that such a method was chosen to extend his lifespan. Although Kentius was also a dragon, it was an unbelievable act.
How far can a dragon go to fulfill their desires?
"Where is the real Leo's soul?!"
"That child is the closest to being a successful test subject. The real Leo's soul was 'extracted' from the body shortly after hatching. I had trouble dealing with it secretly, without his mother knowing..."
"Then you killed Leo!"
Kentius shouted with a pale face.
If defining death as the soul leaving the body, then the real Leo was killed by Raymond.
He was now witnessing a father who had consumed his own child to extend his lifespan.
Raymond muttered calmly.
"Before transferring my soul, it was necessary to conduct preliminary experiments by transferring other souls first. This is all due to the characteristics of a dragon's body. No matter how many talents were consumed, a dragon's body strongly rejected any soul that was not its own. The success rate of the transfer was extremely low. My collaborators even commented that it seemed like someone had put a lock on the dragon's body. So, we repeated the process of extracting and inserting the souls of non-dragon species. It was easier than saving a dragon's soul. The goal was to make the dragon body accustomed to accepting souls from other beings, regardless of their type."
"Crazy bastard!"
Raymond looked back with a questioning expression as if nothing was wrong.
"I used a life that could not have been created otherwise exactly as I intended. What's the problem?"
Kentius felt like he was going to vomit.
His anger was not only due to the abhorrent actions of the great dragon but also because Raymond overlapped with his own father.
And he realized that he too could have ended up like Leo.
Kentius felt no special attachment to the Lord but took pride in having inherited the most genes from him among his siblings. He was confident that he would become a powerful dragon in time.
But if Raymond's guess was correct, and if the Lord had also sought to extend his lifespan in that way...
It was fortunate that he was only this similar. If the colors that painted his body had been more monotonous, the Lord might have targeted his body instead of producing more children...
'The Lord hasn't been having children. He's been producing new bodies for himself!'
The Lord, who only sowed seeds and had no interest in post-hatching rearing.
He didn't want to believe it, but all the circumstances pointed to that conclusion.
While Kentius was in a panic, Min-jun was also deeply shocked and troubled.
He was able to point out several things with a clearer mind than Kentius. There were discrepancies between Raymond's statements and Min-jun's own observations and experiences.
'A dragon's body rejecting other souls? But Hae-unseong only used a small amount of talent and has been using an unnamed dragon's body as his own.'
He asked Raymond.
"How did the rejection manifest?"
"As I've already said, the body seldom accepted the soul. It was briefly possessed and then expelled. It was like a gamble with extremely low odds of success. The reason why there are no prisoners receiving a dragon's body was instantly understood. It was a game with minimal chances and maximum consumption of talent, which the committee would not attempt due to productivity concerns."
Min-jun wondered if Hae-unseong had simply been lucky to pass that probability once?
Or did the special nature of that ghost influence the odds?
"And even after hundreds of attempts, successfully possessing a soul was still problematic. The issues faced by the possessed souls were magnified hundreds of times. The soul also struggled to accept the dragon's body. Eventually, the soul ended up either despising itself or, even worse, hating all dragons. Perhaps things might change with more experiments using dragon souls, but finding a suitable dragon was nearly impossible."
Min-jun's mind grew complicated.
He had learned that Raymond was doing something similar to Chang-cheon.
But he was not sure if the Lord had done the same. There was also contradictory evidence. Min-jun found contradictions and incomprehensible aspects in the Lord's actions.
If the Lord wanted to be resurrected in a new body, why did he expose the existence of his hidden children to Min-jun, and why leave an inheritance?
And why set up a competition among his children through a will, and create a complicated scheme where failing to meet conditions meant passing on the heart to the Dragon Lord?
Considering all this, Min-jun could not be sure that the Lord did such things... that he had fathered eighteen children for such a dreadful reason.
He also did not want to believe it.
'The Lord I know is not that kind of dragon.'
The Lord was the dragon with whom Min-jun had had prolonged interactions, second only to Jenkinson.
Unlike other arrogant dragons, he was someone who extended kindness even to non-dragons. He was also a dragon who genuinely loved his kin.
'But what if... what if, just maybe, this guess is true?'
What if the image of the Lord Min-jun had witnessed was merely a fragment of what constituted him?
What if the Lord was also a dragon prepared to produce and sacrifice children for extending his lifespan?
If that were the case, Min-jun felt he would experience extreme disappointment towards the species he loved dearly.
'Is a dragon truly a dragon? A selfish species burning with greed, incapable of sharing life with others?'
Min-jun thought.
The moment this hypothesis is confirmed as truth, he would be convinced.
Had their choice to deny the right to think and the freedom to reason to that beast, which had been modified to contain as many as six brains within its skull, truly been correct?
The moment she opened her eyes, Choi Seon-ah was overwhelmed by the beautiful scent filling the room.
Struggling not to be distracted by it, she spoke to the orc sitting beside her.
"I still saw the same future."
The orc, who had been content after eating, now hardened his face again.
"Was it that scene again?"
"Yes."
There was no difference in content, but the form of the prophecy had changed somewhat.
"The scene has become clearer. It's so vivid that it's chilling."
Choi Seon-ah shivered lightly. This phenomenon indicated one thing.
"The probability of that scene becoming a reality is increasing. Something that will be the material to realize that future must have happened somewhere today."
"So..."
"Yes. It looks like it will be a fixed future with a low possibility of deviation."
The prophet reassured the orc.
The beings who had been marching in the dream. Whether they were the exact same races as seen in the dream or metaphorically suggested layers.
"The dragons will lose their brains."
< Chapter 145: There Are No Evil Dragons in the World (17) > End