The Foreigner on the Periphery

When people hear the phrase "dragon lair," the scene they picture is almost always the same.

Locations and layouts may vary, but the striking commonality among their dwellings is an abysmal lack of sunlight. What plummets real estate prices for other species is a virtue for dragons. Because a dragon's home also serves as its treasure vault, a lair inherently requires the kind of seclusion and secrecy that deters any intruder.

Thus, fire-breathing Fire Dragons, lightning-spewing Lightning Dragons, ocean-dominating Sea Dragons, and rock-dissolving Sand Dragons all build their nests underground. However, one type is an exception.

Minjun stared at that rare exception through a magical projection window. The distortion in the air revealed the lair of a Poison Dragon deep in the Amazon.

Inais's dwelling was a dome-shaped greenhouse spanning several kilometers in radius. Strictly speaking, the material wasn't glass, but it functioned perfectly as a greenhouse, letting sunlight pour in to illuminate and warm the interior. It also faithfully served its purpose as a lair: its exterior was harder than solid rock, and no one could peek inside.

'Looks like she just woke up.'

The greenhouse was blindingly bright, gathering the focused sunlight of the Southern Hemisphere jungle. She sat right in the middle of the lush tropical forest, her eyelids half-closed.

Sun-loving plants blanketed Inais's head and back. In place of scales, an assortment of broadleaf trees, conifers, blooming flowers, and thick bushes had taken root directly in the dragon's flesh to live symbiotically upon her. At a glance, her massive form looked like a verdant mountain ridge rising from the jungle—a living, breathing mountain. The sight made it perfectly understandable why some dimensional residents confused the Poison Dragon genus with the Green Dragon species.

Hearing that, Minjun scoffed inwardly. It was the typical attitude of a dragon who had lost her touch by living isolated in the jungle, far from society.

This was the result of a secluded life lived half by choice and half by necessity. Born a Poison Dragon, she had little alternative.

Back in her original dimension, Poison Dragons were not treated poorly. Their toxic breath saturated the atmosphere, forcing the Non-Dragon Races to beg for antidotes and live as slaves to the dragons.

But Earth was different. Its society was far too advanced to sustain an economy built on poisoning and extorting intelligent beings. Furthermore, it was a dimension where countless other dragons had already immigrated and settled.

A Poison Dragon's primary weapon was utterly useless against other dragons, who all possessed invulnerability to all poisons. They could flaunt their superiority before the Non-Dragon Races, but they were hopelessly outclassed by their own kind. Inais had quickly given up on competing with the other dragons; the moment she sought asylum on Earth, she built her nest deep in the Amazon and turned her back on society.

Falling completely out of touch with how the world worked, it seemed she had only belatedly realized her mistake.

Now, she had finally decided to negotiate properly.

"This should answer both of your questions," the dragon said.

Flash!

Where she directed her gaze, a prison shaped like a birdcage materialized.

"...?!"

An elf was locked behind the iron bars. Minjun didn't recognize her face at first. Her features were gaunt with illness, and her limbs were as frail as dry twigs—a terrible state by anyone's standards. She had likely been poisoned by Inais's venom.

The dragon muttered something, and the elf woman's eyes snapped wide open. She had been forcibly roused.

She stared blankly for a moment, trying to gauge the time and place, before her gaze sharpened. The confusion vanished, replaced by a steely resolve. The bound elf parted her lips, and a string of alien words spilled out. Though her voice was weak and drained of strength, the raw emotion burning within it was anything but.

"Send me... back... you filthy beast...!"

However, the elf's intense glare couldn't settle on a single spot. Her eyes darted wildly, searching everywhere. She couldn't pinpoint the dragon's location. Unlike the greenhouse lair itself, her cage seemed designed as a one-way mirror—visible from the outside, but utterly opaque from within.

The elf continued her low, venomous shouting, but Inais completely ignored her.

"This elf's name is Sirkiz Iferia," the dragon said.

Minjun searched the prisoner database for the name. A moment later, a sharp gleam sparked in his eyes. Right next to a mugshot—presumably taken before the poison had withered her—was a line of text written in a language only Minjun could read.

-Bounty: 770,000 Talents.

The prisoner then read through her list of crimes.

"She's a type of... ideological criminal."

She had no actual terrorism charges on her record. Yet, the Committee had painted a massive target on Sirkiz's back because she had spent centuries roaming between dimensions, spreading anti-Committee ideologies.

The seeds she sowed had taken firm root across various worlds. She preached that no one should submit to the Committee's Talent-centric economy, warning that any world cooperating with them was practically surrendering to their absolute dominance.

Over time, her ideals naturally bred terrorist organizations dedicated to resisting the Committee. Minjun remembered the rebel forces that had risen up in the Ashtal dimension back when its dictator was still in power—they too had been heavily influenced by her philosophy. Realizing they could no longer ignore the threat, the Committee fabricated a few plausible charges and issued a warrant for her arrest.

She had emerged into prominence only after Minjun had already awakened as a prisoner. He knew about the massive bounty, but rumors insisted she had vanished so thoroughly that not a single trace could be found.

To think he would stumble upon her in a backwater dimension like this, under these circumstances.

'No wonder nobody could track her down. She was locked up by a dragon all this time...'

Minjun kept his voice calm as he asked, "Have you been keeping her locked up here all this time?"

"That's right. I've kept her safely tucked away inside my treasure vault since long before I sought asylum in this dimension."

"Why let her rot away for so long? If you had handed her over to the Committee back then, you could have collected the bounty."

It was a straightforward question: why hoard a captive when she could have cashed her in for Talents immediately?

Inais replied.

"To me, this elf is a sort of indefinite, high-yield savings account."

"...?"

Seeing the shift in Minjun's expression, Inais laughed in amusement. The heavy gust of her breath rustled the thick vines draping like a beard around her massive maw.

"The anti-Committee terrorists eventually started treating this woman as their founding prophet. And since her death was never confirmed, they began idolizing her as a living martyr. Thanks to that, her bounty just keeps climbing as the years go by. It accrues interest, exactly like a bank account."

Minjun clicked his tongue. He had never even imagined treating a wanted fugitive like a financial asset.

'Makes sense. A dragon living out in the jungle has zero use for a massive pile of Talents right now, so she just hoarded her captive to let the value appreciate.'

Just as ordinary humans invested in real estate or antiques, this dragon had invested in a fugitive.

"How did you get your hands on her?"

"Let's just call it a blend of coincidence and sheer luck."

Sirkiz's whereabouts were last tracked roughly a century ago.

That meant Inais had successfully captured the elf and kept her locked in this living vault for an entire hundred years.

All with the patience of a long-term investor waiting for an asset to appreciate.

It was an utterly dragon-like mindset, completely defying the common sense of ordinary races.

"If you agree to help us, I'll hand this fugitive over to you. If you turn her in to the Committee yourself... you'll get the full Talent payout without any special gift tax deductions, won't you? Of course, you'll have to handle the messy logistics of making it look like you caught her yourself. I won't bother with those petty details."

Minjun had wondered what brilliant tax-evasion scheme she had cooked up, but it really wasn't much different from what Dell and Jenkinson had proposed.

While those two had offered to assist him in capturing bounties, this dragon was simply offering him a fugitive she had already caught.

'What should I do?'

Minjun's situation had drastically changed from before.

He was no longer desperate for the Talents sitting inside his prisoner account.

He couldn't freely withdraw the money anyway, and even if he did manage to scrape together five million Talents, he highly doubted the Committee would congratulate his hard work and let him walk away scot-free.

'Why did I ever blindly trust them? Why did I think that as long as I saved up my severance pay, they'd just let me go?'

That naive trust must have also been a form of conditioning.

'From my end, the best outcome is for Inais to hand the elf over to the Committee herself. She gets the Talents deposited into her own account, cashes them out physically, and secretly smuggles the currency straight to me.'

But there were two major hurdles with that plan.

First, as Changcheon had experienced right before his death, the Committee was incredibly strict about converting Talents into physical cash. It hadn't been easy even for Changcheon, who had the ironclad justification of running a bank. So what would happen if a hermit dragon with zero economic ties to Earth suddenly asked for a massive cash withdrawal?

'The Committee would dig for any excuse to deny it. The blowback might even reach me.'

And the second hurdle was...

'That elf.'

The ideological fugitive who had seeded anti-Committee propaganda across dimensions.

Since she had emerged long after "Asif-666" was created, Minjun had absolutely zero information about her from his memories as a primordial race.

Likewise, no links had ever been found between her and the Ellahu-Praga Church, another prominent anti-Committee faction.

Nevertheless... she weighed on Minjun's mind.

He felt strangely reluctant to just toss her to the Committee and condemn her to the life of a prisoner.

After turning it over in his mind, Minjun reached a decision.

"Let's renegotiate the terms of this deal."

For now, he would accept this deal.

Inais's face lit up as she spoke.

"Kentius and I have already finalized the details on our end. You just need to help him track down the evidence to identify the Dragon Lord's killer."

Minjun issued a stern warning.

"Arresting or killing the culprit will be strictly outside my job description."

Inais chuckled, as if he had stated the painfully obvious.

"Even you wouldn't be able to kill him. I'd never expect that much."

Minjun's eyes narrowed.

"It sounds like you already have a suspect in mind."

Come to think of it, Kentius had said something similar: 'I believe the culprit has no ties to the Committee.'

Neither of them would speak with such certainty without a solid clue about the killer's identity.

"The very night before the Lord died... he reached out to me. Using a magical projection similar to this one. Our conversation was normal. He asked about the egg, and I assured him it was perfectly healthy. Then he told me all about how he was passing his time in Hong Kong. But..."

A sharp, menacing glint flared in the Poison Dragon's eyes.

"He explicitly mentioned something then. He said he had played a game of Go against the Ancient Dragon who rules over Hong Kong, and as a prize for winning, he received an Ancient Race Artifact."

Only then did it hit Minjun. 'Ah, the Ring!'

"He said he still needed to figure out how it worked, but he guessed it was some kind of protective gear. So he promised that once our child hatched... he would gift it to this baby, since it would be the youngest and most fragile Hatchling among all of his children."

Come to think of it, what had happened to that Ring?

Inais's next words answered his unspoken question.

"I was overwhelmed with grief, so I only checked much later. When the Lord died, all the belongings on his person were buried under the collapsed building, and everything he kept in his subspace storage spilled out into the wreckage alongside them. I had to rush back to my lair, so I couldn't stay to help, but all the heirs and their guardians gathered under the supervision of the witnessing Ancient Dragons. Together, they recovered the items from the crash site and cataloged every single treasure remaining in the Lord's lair. But."

Could it be?

"It was nowhere to be found."

"..."

Minjun remembered it vividly. He had seen the Ring resting perfectly on the finger of the polymorphed Dragon Lord.

The very artifact that Endelion had unquestionably crafted.

Feigning ignorance, he asked, "Did the Lord happen to describe what the item looked like?"

"He never gave me the specifics. But he explicitly named it as an Ancient Race Artifact. However, absolutely nothing matching that description appeared on the inventory drafted by the heirs and the Ancient Dragons. Aside from the relics the Lord already owned before traveling to Hong Kong, there were zero new additions."

Inais locked eyes with him, practically demanding if he saw the obvious conclusion.

She spoke in a voice mixed with grief and anger.

"Right before his death, the Lord received an artifact from another Ancient Dragon. Hours later, he died in an unexplained accident. And out of the entire wreckage, only that specific artifact vanished without a trace. There are only two hypotheses that explain this. One, the Lord lied to me about an artifact he never received..."

That was impossible. Minjun had seen the Ring with his own two eyes.

"Or two, someone tampered with the artifact beforehand so that it would be automatically retrieved once a specific condition was met. In this scenario, what could that condition possibly be, and why would they go to such lengths? The acquisition of the artifact, the Lord's death, and the artifact's disappearance. Is it an irrational leap in logic to assume all of these events are connected?"

The dragon, covered entirely in living foliage, spoke with fire in her eyes.

"I am absolutely convinced it was the Ancient Dragon ruling over Hong Kong. Your only job is to unearth the evidence tying him to the murder. Kentius and I will handle the rest."

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