Mutter, mutter.
Roar!
Mumble...
Growl?
Snap!
Rooaar!
“...”
Blair stared at Jenkinson, lost for words.
He had been rolling on the floor in agony just moments ago, but now he seemed to have regained a sliver of calm.
He gaped into the air as if he had just heard shocking news, then spoke again to an empty corner of the room.
Mutter, mutter.
Then, as if enraged—
Roar!
He shrieked again.
It sounded closer to a bark than a dragon's roar... meaning it was the first time the elf had ever heard a dragon bark.
“Ah...”
Despair washed over Blair's face.
“Chairman!”
He had been acting strange from the moment he woke up.
She couldn't sense any magic around him. That meant he hadn't activated a message spell.
Even so, Jenkinson kept muttering. It was as if he were talking to an imaginary friend.
It was terrifying. What if this wasn't mere imagination, but a pathological delusion or hallucination?
‘What do I do?’
She had barely stopped crying, but her composed expression crumbled once more.
Tears welled up in her eyes.
‘The Chairman...’
Blair wanted to bawl her eyes out.
‘The Chairman... has really lost his mind!’
*
Am I crazy?
Have I lost my mind?
‘My god!’
The Red Dragon clutched his head.
Crazy? Jenkinson? Me, an Ancient Dragon? Good god, a dragon with a mental illness!
“This makes no sense!”
He didn't even feel shame. Just utter bewilderment.
He replayed the voice he had just heard inside his head.
“It failed ambiguously?”
His ego was perfectly split in two.
Even his memories were divided, completely isolated from one another.
Having experienced the entirety of two completely different dragon lives, his mind refused to fuse them, manifesting the dissonance as a psychotic symptom instead.
“Minjun—that guy was right!”
He recalled the theory Minjun had muttered before his disappearance.
The Dragon Lord had wanted to live even after death.
Minjun had guessed the method was possession, but...
“Right, a soul doesn't necessarily have to hijack a body! If I am swayed by a dead man's personality, harbor his memories, and live my life exactly how he intended!”
Wouldn't that dead man effectively be living after death?
Borrowing Jenkinson's body.
“You!”
The Red Dragon was furious. In truth, it was a fight against himself, but he couldn't stand it. He shouted at Rod's personality.
“I was a fool to mistake you for a person of character! You hideous, insidious old man! I'm ashamed I ever considered you my role model and guru!”
- Well, thank you for rating me so highly, even if just for a time. Don't get worked up. Hear me out first.
“Hear what?!”
- That's not what I meant by ‘failed.’
“Then what?!”
The voice in his head leaked an emotion akin to a sigh.
- The magic cast on my Dragon Heart was a spell meant to be completed ninety-nine days after my death. But you touched it before then. I never anticipated that.
That was true.
Because of those young thieves...
- It's a shame. If I had the power of foresight, I would have prepared more thoroughly. No, if I had that, I suppose I wouldn't have died in the first place.
The two egos sharing one body simultaneously looked at the human present there.
Judging by the abilities she had proven so far, Choi Panseok's daughter was undoubtedly a formidable prophet.
- It would have been nice to know of that human's existence beforehand. A pity.
“Don't change the subject! So what the hell was your goal?!”
- The orc was right. If you had gone back to sleep, you would have been completely swallowed by my personality. Jenkinson's ego would have been extinguished. However...
Before Jenkinson could flare up again, Rod's personality spoke quickly.
- That wasn't my intention.
“You expect me to believe that?”
- Do you think I'm crazy enough to want to lay bare thousands of years of my dragon life for others to see? It's practically the most explicit pornography in the universe. You saw everything about me—emotions I never wanted to reveal and shameful acts I committed. Even my most secret desires...
“Don't even mention those ‘secret desires’ in front of me! When I think about how you made me misunderstand...!”
- Anyway, if that magic had matured for ninety-nine days and activated properly, the result would have been beautiful. Your personality and memories would have been preserved, and the thoughts, feelings, and memories I wished to convey would have been inherited as a seamless addition. Like plugging an auxiliary storage drive into a PC.
“What?!”
- The inheritor would have perfectly distinguished it from their own mind. There wouldn't have been the side effect of experiencing thousands of years of life as if in real time.
Jenkinson felt dizzy.
No, wait a minute.
- Is that all? Originally, the inheritance would have ended instantaneously without you needing to sleep for days. Understand? It was an unprecedentedly intricate and colossal mental magic. It was the masterpiece of my lifetime, an astoundingly high-level spell!
“Then the reason I ended up like this is...”
- These pathological symptoms are the result of the spell ambiguously failing. Still, if the elf and orc hadn't intervened, it would have been a total failure. They saved you. Waking you with Divine Power and then, to keep you from falling back asleep, doing that to your scales down there... Ahem, you've suffered. Anyway, without that interference, Jenkinson would have vanished and simply become another ‘me.’
That was the worst-case scenario.
- Conversely, if it had succeeded one hundred percent, it would have been downloaded into your head in a stable, perfect form without harming the inheritor's ego. But look at the result now. Your personality fractured right along with the memories!
“My... god!”
He finally understood the whole truth.
Rage boiled up within him.
So, the reason he had become a raving multiple-personality case was, ultimately...
“Because of those damn thieving bastards!”
- Calm down and listen. Just as you can't easily read my memories, the reverse is also difficult. Damn it! It wasn't supposed to end up like this. How are things on the Committee's end?
“No, wait. Before that... what the hell was your goal?!”
At that, the tone of the voice in his head shifted drastically.
It became grave and gloomy.
- I wanted to pass on what I felt, what I knew, and what I desperately prayed for to the ‘inheritors’ who would be subjected to this magic.
“Inheritors?”
- Apart from my successor, there is one from the Non-Dragon Races. Two in total. Before I died, I made arrangements on my Dragon Heart. That crystallized the probability of it existing here and the probability of it existing in an entirely different space, superimposing them. So that two people in separate locations would fall under the magic simultaneously.
Jenkinson understood immediately.
“Wait, that's beyond what dragon technology can achieve.”
- I borrowed the power of the Endelion Princess. Actually, rather than it being the unique technology of those tentacled creatures, they likely learned it by watching ‘them.’ In the first place, my obsession with Endelion artifacts while I was alive was driven more by an interest in ‘them’ than the Ancient Races.
“And just who are ‘they’?”
- The member of the Non-Dragon Races this magic targets... that man is also one of ‘them.’
“Who is that?”
- In truth, it's someone you know well.
The voice in his head spoke the name.
*
“Minjun.”
This time, Dell didn't call him by the name Cain.
“I'm ready.”
She stepped out of the spaceship, set up the Communicator, and entered the access code composed of a royal cipher.
The King of Endelion had singled out Minjun and Dell for this summit.
‘What is she trying to say to me?’
When the Mother King had attempted to blow away Minjun's fleet along with the star, Dell had felt a crushing sense of despair. She had abandoned her daughter.
The Ancient Races created heirs even though they enjoyed eternal life, however imperfect it might be.
That was partly to bolster the numbers of a faction that would never betray them, and partly a precaution in case of unexpected accidents or the destruction of their souls.
However, Dell suspected that biological instincts might have been involved in the circumstances of her own creation.
The desire, driven by genetics, to give birth to a child resembling oneself and love them unsparingly.
Solely for the sake of love.
But looking at it now, it seemed that love could change as much as the situation demanded.
Did a being created for love become useless the moment that emotion was withdrawn?
No, was love something that could be so easily given and taken back in the first place?
Flash!
A magical projection popped up above the Communicator. It was a secure line prepared by the Endelion side to prevent other Ancient Races from spying.
Bzzzt!
Inside the projection, the massive tentacled creature cast a serene gaze.
The King of Endelion.
“Asif-666.”
Minjun and the King's eyes met.
She spoke in a tranquil tone.
“I imagine there is another title you would prefer our race to call you by instead of this... but we cannot use it. After such a long time, the meaning of that word has long since been twisted into an insult, so I judge it inappropriate for this summit.”
Dell could not understand the Mother King's words.
Minjun, on the other hand, seemed unbothered even though he understood her intent.
“Titles don't matter, Endelion.”
The King made an agreeable gesture with her tentacles and spoke.
“Will you permit me a brief moment before we get to the main topic?”
It meant she needed a private word between mother and daughter.
Minjun gave a faint nod. At that, the King shifted her eyes to look at her daughter standing beside him.
“$@$@^$@!#.”
A voice that other species could not mimic.
“Yes, Mother.”
Dell tensed up when the King called her true name. There had to be a reason she had been specifically summoned to this summit. Or did her mother simply want to check in on her?
Just as she was waiting for the next words in silence—
“It is absolutely impossible for us normal ones, but it should be possible for you. In fact, it is practically the same as having executed it in a very long and slow form until now.”
The King, having opened with a rather lengthy sentence, added one final phrase toward her daughter.
This time, it was in a concise, commanding tone.
“Kill yourself.”
*
“What...?”
He couldn't believe what he had just heard.
Jenkinson doubted his brain instead of his ears.
Was this actually not multiple personality disorder, but some other flavor of madness? Like schizophrenia, for instance.
“No, just now, you mean...”
- Yes, Ye Minjun. He's the other inheritor caught in this magic besides the next Lord. You remember his name was mentioned in my will, don't you?
He explained about the Cube he had left Ye Minjun as a keepsake.
- If things had gone according to plan, on the ninety-ninth day after my death, the next Dragon Lord would have observed my Heart from my corpse, and Minjun would have observed it through that Cube. It exists in two places simultaneously. As you've experienced, the magic triggers upon being observed. The act of observation itself is what affects it.
“So you wanted to plant your ideology and memories in Minjun's head too?”
- Yes, I wanted to pass them on to two people. To the next Lord, and to him.
“I get doing it for your successor, but why him?”
- You still don't know his true identity.
Rod's personality said.
- Don't be alarmed. Ye Minjun... The one the Committee calls by the name Asif-666... is actually from the Dragon Eater Tribe.
At that moment, a clump of memories squirmed inside his head.
The mysterious beings who had ruled the world long before the Ancient Races, raising dragons as livestock.
Throb!
“Dammit, what is this...”
Fighting through the headache, Jenkinson seriously deliberated.
Should he just ignore the voice?
Or should he go to a hospital? But there was no way a psychiatric clinic that accepted dragons existed...
Right, he'd be better off calling the youngest. A user with that level of Divine Power should be able to cure madness too.
- Stop avoiding this and keep listening. I'll explain bit by bit why I grew suspicious, how I researched it, and the deductive process I went through. It's a rather long story. First, I'll tell you why I reached that conclusion.
“No... hah, unbelievable.”
Jenkinson was dumbfounded.
But it wasn't like he could just plug his ears and not hear it, or run away and gain distance from it. For now, he had no choice but to keep listening.
- The first time I met him was during the celebration party for my seventh divorce on Earth. You probably remember it too.
“...Right. I introduced you to him.”
In fact, even calling him ‘you’ felt ridiculous. The other party was his own fractured personality, after all.
- In that moment, I felt a unique wavelength coming from him. It was a light... radiating brightly. Extremely brilliant.
“You saw a human man and felt a brilliant light? No wonder you get divorced so often. Looks like your real ‘secret desires’ haven't even come out yet...”
- Stop joking and keep listening. Because of that wavelength, I suspected he might be from the Dragon Eater Tribe. My psychological state at the time played a part too. It's a bit pathetic, but... I instinctively thought this: that we could be good friends.
“Why is that pathetic? You can be friends with races other than dragons. Thinking like that is what you and I have in common.”
- You'll understand if you listen to the end. Anyway, to get material evidence to prove my hunch, I conducted another experiment.
Hearing the words that followed, Jenkinson gasped.
- After meeting Minjun, over a long period, I made him ingest my blood. In minuscule amounts that no race, including dragons, could detect the flavor of, little by little.
“You crazy old geezer! Wait, how on earth?”
Belatedly, Jenkinson recalled a memory.
Rod and Ye Minjun hadn't met all that often, but they were great drinking buddies.
While he was panicking, Rod's personality rapidly fired off words that would horrify anyone.
- I once conducted an experiment where I fed dragon blood to an ordinary human death row inmate.
“What?!”
- Both showed no allergic reaction, but there was a notable difference exclusive to Minjun. After a comparative analysis, I was certain. That friend of ours, Ye Minjun... really is from the Dragon Eater Tribe.
Right then, a memory that didn't belong to Jenkinson rippled.
His friend's voice.
‘Oh? The booze tastes especially good today. Lord, I'll have my next round as this too.’
Jenkinson felt dizzy.
- What state is he in right now?
Rather than answering Rod's question, resolving his own doubts felt more urgent.
“Hold on a minute. If you were really certain he was from the Dragon Eater Tribe...”
Jenkinson couldn't easily spit out his next words.
“Why did you...”
- Why did I leave Ye Minjun alone?
“...”
A sense of resignation lingered in the voice inside his head.
- I couldn't bring myself to harm him. You would have felt the same.
Jenkinson couldn't deny it.
- He seemed to have lost not only his memories but a significant portion of his abilities as well. That must be why he became a penal slave for the Committee. It wasn't even certain if he would ever recover.
Under those circumstances.
- Is it really justifiable to harm someone merely on the off chance they might become an entity that butchers dragons in the future? He might not, after all.
“...”
- The more I got to know him, the more I thought he was an awfully good person to those around him, myself included. That halo only I could see might have influenced me too.
Of course, aside from emotional aversion, there was also a pragmatic reason.
- Moreover, if I killed him, retaliation from the Ancient Races was guaranteed, and perhaps we might face the vengeance of even more terrifying beings.
“Ah!”
- Yes. The Dragon Eater Tribe once ruled the universe. Where did all the others go, aside from our friend Ye Minjun? What if they actually sent him here as a representative to test our ethics and humanity? If they found out that ‘bugs’ like us had killed one of their kind, what kind of punishment would follow?
Jenkinson gasped for breath.
- By the same token, I couldn't rule out this possibility either. Why did such a great being fall to the status of a prisoner? What if this... was a test to give the Ancient Races an excuse to commit a sin? Are we all currently passing through a lengthy trial designed to test a certain qualification?
“Are you saying he got caught on purpose?”
- I'm saying I considered every possibility.
And there was one option he couldn't give up on.
- If it was true that he had genuinely lost his memories, I thought it was a great opportunity. Compared to their long lifespan, his life as a prisoner would be no different from that of a newborn. It wouldn't be a leap to call his mind a nearly blank slate. It seemed like a chance that would never come again.
“Good lord, you...!”
- I'll say it again: I had no intention of harming him. I merely wanted to convey this. It was insurance for the distant future. We can't know what will happen to Minjun going forward. He might truly remain a prisoner for eternity, but what if the opposite happens? What if, on the off chance, he regains his power and begins actively intervening in the world?
What words could describe a world where a god-like being possesses subjective will and begins to actively intervene?
- To prepare for that time. Out of concern for a world where others besides Minjun return. I wanted at least one member of the Dragon Eater Tribe to know.
He quoted Earth literature that Jenkinson also knew well.
- They say that to truly understand someone, you must climb inside their skin and walk around in it.
Rod's personality muttered gloomily.
- Actually, from the perspective of other races, dragons are truly awful creatures. We have to admit that. Before the Committee's system was completed, some of the Dragon Race even ate sapient beings. But that cannot be a reason for us to be eaten. Crime and punishment should not become mirrors of each other.
Thus, without knowing the future, the Gold Dragon had tried to convey his sincerity to ‘him’.
- I wanted to have our qualifications recognized. It was the most pathetic plea and appeal. It might be meaningless, but I had to do it. So long as even a sliver of hope existed. I hoped he wouldn't abandon the expectation that dragons could be reborn as better beings. I hoped he would believe in our power to move forward.
After embracing everything that I am.
After feeling my thoughts and emotions with his own skin, and walking in the footsteps of my life.
Will you still consider dragons as food?
Will your kind still be able to eat us even after truly understanding us?
- Murder and consumption are fundamentally different. My attempt was a concept beyond the struggle for survival. Beyond the qualification to survive, it was the qualification to not be eaten. The qualification to have minimal dignity respected. The qualification to not be judged on one's value as a living creature.
The moment he recognized the faction targeting his life, Rod prepared this before anything else.
- I hoped he wouldn't attach conditions to dignity and weigh it. That being different, lacking, or flawed wouldn't become those conditions. I hoped he would show mercy even if many of us broke duties and rules, even if we failed to pass his tests. The memories of the life I lived were the basis for that argument.
We think. We possess the will to freely reason and make our own choices. We feel joy and sorrow. Furthermore, we have always progressed, and we will continue to progress. We deserve to be respected simply for existing.
- Even if we were to be punished for our wrongdoings, I hoped it wouldn't be demanded in a form that strips us of our qualifications. I prayed he would at least not take away that qualification.
In other words.
- Yes, our qualification as people.
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