Chapter 22

1

A huge iron hammer slammed down beside the little island, smashing out a deep pit right next to me and splashing mud all over me.

“Master, these people from ‘Raku’ are gonna be at it for a long time. They’re not like normal fishermen or sailors—they all hit pretty hard.”

“Let them. They asked for it.”

“Qin Yang, this girl’s new, right?” Perra poked Lan’s cheek with her one-of-a-kind rapier, looking like she really didn’t care for her.

Seawater dampened my cheeks. The salty, sticky feeling wasn’t great, but out here, it was the only thing that could wash the dust and grime off my face.

“My new maid… the first one.”

Perra lifted Lan’s arm with her pale hand, dangling it like she was examining a small animal.

“Someone like you having a maid just makes your face look begging-to-be-punched. The extra-begging kind.”

“I know. That’s why I only brought one with me.”

“Your little maid’s healing way too fast. That divine flame really works—whitening, anti-wrinkle… will the beauty effect make her young again too?” Perra “slipped” and let Lan’s arm fall.

“Give it a few hundred years and we’ll see. Not that you need it. Remember when we first met in that run-down church? Just a bit of blood and you bounced back to this youthful beauty.”

“My beauty comes from you. You’d better take responsibility for it.”

Perra pressed down on my hands as I was washing them. Her fingernail lightly slid over my wrist. She lifted my right wrist and licked the salty water off with the tip of her tongue. Her long fangs were already showing. She didn’t bite right away. Instead, she toyed with my wrist—with the vein in my wrist—using her tongue and fangs.

“If you’re gonna eat, just eat. Since when do people tease their food before they start?”

“But people eat dead things.”

Perra bit into my wrist. It hurt, but with such a beautiful queen right in front of me, no man would scream.

2

We sat together on the sand at the edge of the island. Perra still refused to wipe the blood from her lips. She seemed to think a queen with blood at her mouth looked even more queenly.

“‘Raku’ really suffered this time. These people are all gonna die.”

“Then be merciful and drag out that dragon that’s stuck. They might walk away with a tiny sliver of life. Or hand them to me, so I can grow my clan.”

“No rush. What I’ve been wanting to ask is—what are you doing here?”

“For us vampires, returning to The Demon Realm is fulfilling the wish written into our blood. But the future of the vampires is in my hands. I want to find a land of our own. We won’t keep leeching off the dark corners of humans anymore. We’ll live under the light. We’re actually not afraid of sunlight at all.”

Perra’s tone turned upright and serious. She wanted to carve out land from humanity’s hands. That meant going up against humans all over again. In an age where every patch of earth had a border, any race that wanted territory had to grab it from others. In The Demon Realm they’d be fighting demon kings; in The Human Realm they’d be fighting humans. Unless Perra could somehow open up a brand-new continent in this almost saturated world.

“So, you picked this place?”

Perra shook her head.

“I was just passing by. Happened to find this place empty, except for that weird dragon roar. If this queen hadn’t hinted to those dumb islanders, they’d never have realized it was a dragon.”

“You hinted them? So if you hadn’t told them it was a dragon’s roar, no one would’ve linked it to me?”

“Qin Yang, I wasn’t the one who said all that stuff in the worldwide stream. People only linked you to it because you’re tied to the Dragon Clan. And they already wanted an excuse to go after Othrie—if it wasn’t you, it’d be someone else.”

“Then let them all kill each other over there.”

The dragon roar rolled across the sea again, sounding more anxious than before.

“There it goes again. I’ve been here for days and still haven’t found where it is.” Perra drew a circle on the ground with her rapier. “But it’s getting more and more frantic. As descendants of the Dragon Clan, we can refuse to help humans or demons, but we can’t just ignore a dragon.”

“Frantic is for sure. That dragon isn’t stuck in some deep-sea trench or underground crack. It’s stuck in a rift to another world—space torn open beyond the three realms. The way to open that kind of rift is insanely complicated, almost impossible to come by for gods, humans, or demons. But dragons can do it. Not just any dragon, though. Normally a dragon strong enough to do that wouldn’t get itself wedged in the crack. A dragon that ends up like this had the rift forced open by some special external power. And a rift opened by outside force will slowly narrow and disappear over time.”

Perra turned her head, not understanding why a dragon would use outside power to open a rift like that.

“A dragon’s wisdom wouldn’t allow something that stupid, right?”

“Some dragons really aren’t that smart. There are dragons here that were sealed by humans. Of course, the methods to seal dragons came from war spoils left from a distant God–Demon War. But I don’t think this one did it because it’s stupid.”

“So it did it on purpose, or it was forced?”

“In my memory, way back in ancient times, there was a whole batch of dragons living in these three realms. But they weren’t born here. They came from other worlds through rifts like this. Them, and me—we dragons don’t even remember where we came from. Only recently did we realize this was basically ‘banishment.’ Maybe the only one who really knows is Marutian.”

At the mention of Marutian, the fear buried at the bottom of Perra’s heart flickered across her face. As a queen, she still had to act composed.

“So there weren’t any other dragons in your memory who came here this way?”

“To be honest, up till now, this one’s the first. After that batch of dragons, every dragon that appeared was their descendant.”

“And this ‘up till now’ of yours… starts from how many years ago?”

“Huh? How many years…? More than ten times thirteen million, at least.”

Even if I wanted to count from the time I started keeping track, there was no way to count that far.

The dragon’s roar came again, a miserably lonely sound. Wedged in the rift, its lower body might be sliced off any minute and lost somewhere in space, drifting who knows where. In its place, anyone would struggle to choose anything else.

Perra kicked off her shoes and lay down on the sand, letting the seawater wash over her ankles. At a glance she looked like she was on vacation.

“Qin Yang, now that you’re here, there’s nothing more for me to do.”

“It’s a pain for me too. Only Reisgolo can handle this.”

A golden greatsword appeared in front of me. Night had fully fallen, but the light from the ancient dragonbone blade was anything but dim.

I took off the ring and set the Demon Dragon’s sword into the dragonbone ancient blade. Power surged through me all at once. I could feel the dragon’s anxiety even more clearly. I—Reisgolo, Dragon of Time and Space—was about to rescue a chubby dragon stuck in a rift.

“That ring’s the famous ‘L Particle Ring,’ right? Looks like plain iron to me.”

“These ones are all busted. The starter rings never had their systems tuned. Push them a bit too hard and they overload.”

A burnt smell seeped out from inside the ring. The particles wouldn’t even activate.

“Ah, it’s roaring again.”

“All right then. Watch me.”

A ball of white light rose in the center of my left palm. It was bright enough to wake those foreign fighters who were still going at it like crazy on the island.

I flicked the white light out. It weaved between them, lighting up their eyes.

“People of ‘Raku’, I’m only giving you one chance. Leave.”

As many of these foreigners as could run would run. Either way, they were dead or crippled. The ones who made it far wouldn’t necessarily get away with all their limbs, and the ones who didn’t… that was just their bad luck.

3

The seafloor was cold as steel. Wrapped in magic, I could move freely under the crushing pressure. The deeper I went, the closer the dragon felt. I didn’t know if this newcomer was a Sky Dragon, a Sea Dragon, or an Earth Dragon, but for it to get stuck in a rift, I’d bet on a chubby earth dragon. Sea Dragons are more flexible, and Sky Dragons don’t like going underwater.

The deep sea was pitch-black. The only light came from a few glowing fish—and, deeper still, a pair of half-closed dragon eyes. The light in them was dim with exhaustion. Dragon eyes always glow, but when they’re tired, that glow goes dull.

There weren’t many fish around its body. Looked like it had already swallowed most of them. This dragon had clearly been here a while.

My dragon soul spoke out in dragon tongue and began to converse with it…