The Foreigner on the Periphery

Assemblyman Choi Panseok was waiting for a prophecy, just as he always did, when the sudden feeling that something had changed hit him.

He looked up from his paperwork. Tilting his head, he slipped off his multifocal glasses. He couldn't place the source of the strange sensation. He scanned the room. His daughter lay comfortably on the bed, her eyes still shut tight as she gazed into the future.

'What's different?'

If he had to put it into words, it felt as though one of the two pillars anchoring his mind had vanished. Yet he couldn't quite grasp what it was.

After grasping at the mirage-like unease for a moment, the assemblyman gave up on analyzing it. He turned his attention back to his documents. They detailed the party's winning strategy for fielding an orc candidate in the upcoming by-election.

The detective he had handpicked had finally accepted the offer.

Not long ago, the detective had visited the assemblyman to express his ambitions. When the man said he wanted to be a more positive influence on his species' community, Choi Panseok had replied that there was no job more suited for the task.

Now, all that remained was to give it their all and win.

Lost in thought, the assemblyman's eyes drifted to the clock. His alarm was just about to go off.

With her consciousness anchored in the future, his daughter wouldn't react to ambient noise or smells. Knowing this, Choi Panseok left the door open and headed into the kitchen. He pulled open the refrigerator and took out something frozen.

As he popped it into the microwave, an expectant smile spread across his face.

Choi Panseok was completely oblivious. That strange sensation from moments ago was the feeling of the brainwashing—inflicted when he was stabbed by the Dagger—breaking apart.

Yet the orc was still faithfully following Minjun's instructions. Guarding his prophesying daughter, eating that specific food right on time—it was all exactly as commanded.

Minjun had already figured out that while brainwashing triggered through physical injury was extremely potent, it could only control one person at a time. Keeping that kind of brainwashing permanently locked on Choi Panseok was wildly inefficient. So, he had gifted the assemblyman a large quantity of quasi-cooking instead.

Ding!

The defrosting was done.

He chuckled as he carried the plate to the table. He had no way of knowing that, just moments ago, an Ancient Dragon in a foreign land had its back shredded by a Magic Tool and suffered mind control, and that he had been affected by the fallout. The only difference was that while the brainwashing from the stabbing had vanished, the brainwashing from his meals remained fully active.

Choi Panseok picked up his spoon with a bright expression. He scooped up a generous pile of the unidentifiable organic matter and shoved it into his mouth.

"..."

Stripped of his right to free thought, the old orc was, for that fleeting moment, the happiest man in South Korea.

   *

"What is this!"

A scream tore through Raymond Wong's estate in the master's absence.

"M-my body feels weird!"

The servants still had no idea that what had drenched them was the fresh blood of a dragon. They assumed it was just the blood of some magically altered creature. They also figured that Raymond Wong had scrubbed it clean before vanishing simply because of its unbearable stench.

The blood of the Dragon Race was strictly regulated, utterly impossible to buy or sell on the open market. No human on Earth had ever been drenched in it while it was still fresh, and vanishingly few even knew what it smelled like.

But the properties of dragon blood didn't stop at a bad smell—and the servants were about to find that out.

"Aaaagh!"

This time, it was the troll gardener screaming.

Boils were erupting all over his skin, specifically on the areas where the blood had landed. Having never experienced a skin disease in his entire life, the troll was overwhelmed by an almost surreal sense of terror.

If it was that bad for a troll, it was far worse for the other species. The areas struck by the Blood Rain split open, and some were now drenching those same spots in their own blood. If a Kavite—a species with the worst possible biological reaction to the substance—had been present, they would have looked like they'd been bathed in radioactive fallout. Fortunately, the servants gathered here only suffered mild flesh wounds. None of their reactions were life-threatening.

Still, the barely restored order of the estate inevitably spiraled back into chaos. People panicked, consumed by fear.

However, there were exceptions.

"...Why am I fine?"

An Asian man absentmindedly touched his face. His body was completely unharmed. Furthermore, when the other servants had been gagging at the stench earlier, he hadn't noticed anything beyond the metallic scent of ordinary blood.

He was the butler who had delivered the Invitation to Minjun and Kentius. He turned his head and looked around, spotting a few other colleagues who were just as unaffected as he was.

"I see."

The man realized what they all had in common.

The servants who were completely unbothered by the rain of blood.

Every single one of them was human.

   *

The moment Raymond confessed his secret, Kentius couldn't believe his ears.

What?

Unable to hold back, he cut into the conversation.

"A genetically similar body?"

Meanwhile, upon hearing Raymond's words, Minjun immediately thought of Changcheon.

The Ancient Dragon who had kidnapped a dragon bearing a striking resemblance to her late husband, all so she could forcefully implant his soul into the new host's body.

But that experiment had failed time and time again. The host body repeatedly rejected Ryuho's specter-turned-soul. As a workaround, Changcheon tried converting the specter into a ghost first. She had attempted to bypass the soul-rejection problem by sacrificing a multitude of goblins, only to get caught by Minjun and have her skull bashed in.

And it sounded like Raymond's experiments hadn't exactly gone smoothly, either.

"If our theory was correct, and if Rod had made even the slightest progress with his own experiments, I wanted to steal it. My assistants and I were facing failure after failure. I tried to extract the information from Rod, but I just couldn't succeed..."

Sparks flew in Minjun's eyes.

"You were already conducting experiments?"

"Indeed. I had been doing it in secret for a very long time."

Kentius listened to their exchange in a daze. It was a story completely outside the bounds of his common sense.

To think that Raymond had already been putting this into practice, and that Rod might have done the same.

"A physical body most genetically identical to your own... Don't tell me you tried to clone yourself..."

He cut himself off, snapping his mouth shut.

In that instant, Kentius felt a violent shudder ripple through his entire body.

He knew a method far simpler and easier than cloning.

It was something Rod had actually repeated countless times. Seventeen times on Earth alone, to be exact.

"W-wait a minute."

Kentius suddenly thought of a certain dragon's name.

The very same individual whose whereabouts he had been wondering about just moments ago.

"You couldn't have...!"

"Cloning a dragon's body is no easy feat. But I had a much more convenient method at my disposal."

While he hadn't sired as many as Rod, Raymond still had quite a few offspring.

Of those, only one had established a Lair in Hong Kong and stayed close to Raymond even after coming of age. He had stayed because his father had urged him to do so—even in a city that was already too cramped for a single Ancient Dragon to comfortably reside in.

And out of all of Raymond's children, he was the Lightning Dragon who most closely resembled his father.

Kentius spoke, his lips trembling.

"...Leo?"

The Ancient Dragon replied in an entirely flat tone.

"The boy you saw today is not Leo."

He added the next words as if discussing the weather.

"On the inside, that is."

Kentius let out a scream.

He glared at Raymond, his eyes swimming with pure shock, terror, and unfiltered disgust.

To think he had chosen that method just to extend his own lifespan. Kentius was a dragon himself, but this was a sickening act he simply couldn't fathom.

Just how far would a dragon go to satiate their own desires?

"What happened to the real Leo's soul?!"

"That child was the closest I've ever come to a successful experiment. The real Leo's soul was 'extracted' from his body shortly after he hatched. I had a rather difficult time taking care of it without his mother noticing..."

"Then you killed Leo!"

Kentius roared, his face draining of all color.

If death was defined as a soul leaving its physical body, then the real Leo had been murdered by Raymond's own hands.

Kentius was staring at a father who had cannibalized his own child just to prolong his lifespan.

Raymond calmly murmured his response.

"Before transplanting my own soul, I had to run preliminary experiments by transplanting others. This is entirely due to the nature of a dragon's body. No matter how many Talents were burned, a dragon's body fiercely rejects any soul that isn't its own. The success rate for transplantation was abysmally low. My assistants even speculated that someone had placed a lock on our biology. So, as a workaround, we repeatedly extracted souls from non-dragon species and shoved them into his body. It was far easier than sourcing dragon souls, after all. The goal was to acclimatize the host body to accepting outside souls, regardless of the species..."

"You crazy bastard!"

Raymond asked his next question with an expression that genuinely couldn't comprehend what he had done wrong.

"I merely used a life that would never have existed without me exactly as I intended. What's the problem?"

Kentius felt like he was going to vomit.

The reason he was so violently furious wasn't just because the Ancient Dragon's unforgivable actions were completely nauseating—it was also because he was superimposing Raymond over his own father.

And he was struck by the terrifying realization that he could have easily ended up exactly like Leo.

Kentius harbored no special attachment to Rod, but he had always felt a twisted sense of pride in inheriting more of his father's genes than any of his siblings. He had been so sure that, given enough time, he would grow to become a comparably powerful dragon.

But what if Raymond's theory was right? What if Rod had been aiming to extend his lifespan through that exact same method?

In that case, it was a stroke of absolute luck that he only resembled his father this much. If the coloring of his scales had been just a bit more monotonous, Rod might have targeted his body instead of trying to sire more children...

'Rod wasn't raising children all this time. He was breeding a new body for himself to use!'

Rod, who only spread his seed and never once cared about raising them after they hatched.

Kentius desperately wanted to deny it, but all the circumstantial evidence pointed firmly toward that terrifying conclusion.

While Kentius descended into a panic attack, Minjun was also wrestling with the sheer shock of the revelation.

However, armed with a far cooler head than Kentius, he could pick out a few glaring issues. Raymond's testimony directly contradicted things Minjun had personally witnessed and experienced.

'A dragon's body forcefully rejects other souls? But Ha Eunseong is using some nameless dragon's body like it's his own after burning just a few Talents.'

He questioned Raymond.

"How exactly did this rejection manifest?"

"Like I said, the body simply wouldn't accept them. They would be temporarily possessed, then violently expelled. It was a massive gamble with microscopically low odds. Honestly, it made me immediately understand why there are no prisoners running around in dragon bodies. It's a losing game that burns through maxed-out amounts of Talents. From the Committee's standpoint, it's just too wildly inefficient to ever authorize."

Minjun pondered this. Did Ha Eunseong just get miraculously lucky and beat the odds on his first try?

Or did the unique nature of that ghost somehow rig the odds in his favor?

"And even if we hit the jackpot after hundreds of attempts, the aftermath was a disaster. The transplanted soul would suffer a reaction that magnified the usual side effects prisoners experience by hundreds of times. The soul itself couldn't accept the dragon's body as its own. Eventually, they would succumb to deep self-loathing, or even violently despise all dragons. Perhaps running those experiments with dragon souls would have yielded different results, but finding enough suitable dragons for that was completely impossible."

Minjun's mind grew tangled.

For one, he now knew that Raymond had been doing something incredibly similar to Changcheon.

But he couldn't be entirely certain if Rod had been doing the exact same thing. There was circumstantial evidence that pointed the other way. Minjun could spot too many contradictions and baffling choices in Rod's past actions.

If Rod truly wanted to resurrect himself in a new body, why did he expose his hidden child to Minjun in the first place? Why leave him an inheritance?

And why use his will to pit his children against one another? Why design such an elaborate scheme where his heart would be handed over to the next Dragon Lord if they failed to meet the conditions?

Factoring all of this in, Minjun just couldn't bring himself to believe that Rod had actually done it... that he had sired eighteen children for such a heinous reason.

Part of him simply didn't want to believe it.

'The Rod I know isn't that kind of dragon.'

Aside from Jenkinson, Rod was the dragon Minjun had known and interacted with for the longest time.

Unlike the other self-righteous members of his kind, he was someone who knew how to extend goodwill to non-dragon species. He was also a dragon who truly, deeply loved his own kin.

'But what if... just what if, this theory really is true?'

What if the Rod Minjun had witnessed was just a fragmented sliver of who he really was?

What if, deep down, Rod was also a dragon fully prepared to breed and sacrifice his own children just to extend his life?

If that were true, Minjun felt like he would suffer a profound, crushing disappointment in the very species he couldn't help but admire.

'Is a dragon just a dragon in the end? Are they doomed to be a self-righteous, greed-fueled species incapable of sharing their lives with anyone else?'

Minjun sank into his thoughts.

The moment this hypothesis was confirmed as fact, he would know for certain.

Wouldn't it prove that their choice—to deny the right to free thought and the freedom to reason to those beasts, which had been modified in the distant past to house as many as six brains inside their skulls—had been completely right all along?

   *

The moment Choi Seona opened her eyes, she was greeted by a beautiful fragrance filling the room.

Struggling to keep it from snatching her focus away, she spoke to the orc sitting beside her on watch.

"I still saw the exact same future."

The orc, who had just finished his meal and looked content enough to have fattened his very soul, instantly hardened his expression.

"That scene again?"

"Yes."

The content hadn't changed, but the form of the vision had shifted slightly.

"The scene has become much sharper. It's so vivid it gave me goosebumps."

Choi Seona trembled slightly. This phenomenon only ever meant one thing.

"The probability of that scene becoming reality is steadily climbing. Something probably happened out there today—an event that serves as a building block to make that future come true."

"Then..."

"Yes. It's shaping up to be a fixed future. The chances of it deviating off course are slim."

The prophet solemnly declared to the orc.

The beings she had seen marching in formation in her dreams—regardless of whether they were exactly the species she saw in her vision, or a metaphor hinting at a certain faction...

"The dragons are going to lose their brains."

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