Red dragon egg, 4 feet tall, weighing 18 stone.
Appears capable of absorbing starlight before hatching.
...
Inside the dragon egg, Lin Feng was still browsing through the draconic heritage. The lives of countless predecessors, whether magnificent or tragic, played out in his mind like a movie. This flood of information, potent enough to reduce an unborn wyrmling into an idiot, felt surprisingly gentle to him—or rather, just right.
“No, I have to get out,” a sense of crisis welled up in his heart.
Front-kicking, claw-slashing, headbutting—Lin Feng exerted nearly every ounce of strength and method at his disposal.
Crack!
The sound of cracking eggshell rang out as a round dragon head poked out from within.
His dragon claws shattered the surrounding shell, and his body fully emerged from the egg.
Opening his eyes in a daze, Lin Feng instinctively roared his true name: “Kael Traven Kragor.”
Immediately after, a hunger ravenous enough to obliterate his sanity flooded his brain, and his body began desperately searching for anything edible.
Before long, a fragment of eggshell was cupped in his claws and shoved into his dragon maw. Mm, it tasted like a biscuit—though hardly a delicacy, it would do for now.
Gazing at the eggshell shards strewn across the floor, Kael began to gorge himself frantically.
In the end, he even took a bite out of the rug beneath him.
“Ptooey! Ptooey! Ptooey!”
This wasn't edible.
Having eaten all the eggshells, his hunger receded slightly. As reason reasserted control over his dragon brain, Kael began observing his surroundings.
Tables and chairs, bookshelves, a crystal lamp, glass vials, a room full of herbal scents, and a grayish-white-haired lady writing something in a notebook held before her chest.
Kael swallowed hard. From the draconic heritage, within the memory of a certain tragic predecessor, he found a similar setting. He seemed to know where he was: a witch's workshop.
(For dragons, the draconic heritage was much like our libraries. The total volume of information was simply too vast to cram all at once into a dragon's head. When they encountered something recorded in the heritage in daily life, they simply looked it up. As for whether a dragon was willing to look, it was just like whether anyone wanted to visit a library when they were young.)
Pondering whether he would end up as a red dragon specimen or be chopped into thousands of pieces to be tossed into potion vials for the benefit of adventurers across the continent, his body began involuntarily shuffling backward until he curled into a corner.
“Hmm? Little fellow, have you regained your senses?”
Elise waved her hand gently, causing the notebook to scatter like starlight as she smiled at the calf-sized wyrmling before her.
What gibberish is she babbling? Kael shrank back as far as he could.
“Oh, little fellow, you don't understand the Continental Common Tongue yet.”
Then, the witch tapped her quill forward slightly, sending a wisp of starlight sinking into the top of the wyrmling's head.
Comprehend Languages, a Mid-Tier spell modified by witches that enabled the target to understand the Continental Common Tongue and speak it fluently.
“Little fellow, can you understand me now?”
Elise asked the wyrmling with a smile.
Perhaps in hopes that she would make it quick when she slaughtered him, Kael nodded.
Seeing the wyrmling cooperate so willingly, Elise's smile deepened.
To Kael, however, that smile was like a demon's.
“Ah,” he sighed. Recalling the witches he had seen in the draconic heritage, he resigned himself to his fate. At least in this life he wouldn't be a beast of burden again. He only hoped his parents back on the Blue Star could take his compensation payout and not have to live out the rest of their lives in such exhausting toil.
Before his thoughts could finish, a pile of bright red chunks of meat suddenly appeared before him.
Shaping, a Mid-Tier spell modified by witches that could conjure food out of thin air, including magical beast meat.
Kael was taken aback at first, but then he caught the scent of the meat, observed its grain, and quickly flipped through the draconic heritage.
This was...?!
The meat of a Third-Tier magical beast, a quill-furred bison—and the tenderloin at that, perfectly suited for restoring stamina.
Third-Tier magical beast meat was already the upper limit of what a newborn hatchling could digest.
Immediately after, several more cuts of the same magical beast meat materialized before Kael.
A last meal as well?!
“Don't worry, little fellow, I won't hurt you.”
“Your name is Kael, right? That's what I'll call you from now on.”
“Mm... as for you, just call me Elise.”
Wiping the dragon drool from the corner of his mouth, Kael looked into those eyes full of goodwill and lowered his guard slightly.
He was too hungry. The eggshells were nowhere near enough to fill his furnace-like stomach.
Besides, she was simply offering way too much.
Without hesitation, Kael pounced on the magical beast meat like a hungry wolf and took a bite.
What first flooded his tongue was a warm, rich meaty sweetness, accompanied by the luscious flavor unique to magical beasts steeped in mana, devoid of any gaminess. The meat was firm; with a slight tug and chew, a savory freshness carrying primal wildness burst in his mouth. What followed was a near-frenzied bout of tearing and swallowing.
Elise quietly watched the wyrmling eat, grayish-white strands of hair falling from the brim of her hat. Holding her quill, she began jotting down notes in her notebook once more:
Third-Tier magical beast quill-furred bison tenderloin, positive taste feedback from the wyrmling.
Consistent with red dragons' carnivorous nature and affinity for mana.
Seeing that the wyrmling was about to finish the magical beast meat on the floor with no signs of fullness, she tapped her quill, and several more cuts of quill-furred bison tenderloin appeared out of thin air.
In the middle of eating, Kael also began pondering the source of that earlier sense of crisis. It seemed it had not been the witch before him, but rather the seemingly bottomless hunger welling from his stomach, as well as the craving for energy from every cell in his body.
What Kael did not know was that this deadly hunger was entirely of his own making.
For an ordinary red dragon egg, it took roughly twenty-two months from being laid to hatching.
Kael, on the other hand, had spent a full three years inside the egg. The fusion of souls and the study of the draconic heritage had prolonged the incubation period.
Yet the energy within a dragon egg was not infinite. Once depleted, what was consumed next was the wyrmling's own fat and muscle.
It could be said that Kael surviving at all was already a miracle.
After the magical beast meat on the floor vanished and reappeared three times, the wyrmling's belly began to bulge.
Swallowing the final bite, Kael flopped onto his back, utterly exhausted. He had never imagined eating could be such a frantic ordeal; his swollen belly now blocked his view of the witch.
By now, a hint of astonishment had surfaced on Elise's face, and she added one last line to her notebook:
Appetite exceptionally large, approximately three times that of an ordinary red wyrmling.
Before the witch could put away her quill and notebook, the red wyrmling on the floor struggled onto his side, pushed against the ground with his front claws, and used his waist and hind claws to clamber awkwardly to his feet.
The red wyrmling stepped to a suitable distance in front of Elise, arched his back slightly, bent his slender neck, and lowered his head—this was the way dragons expressed gratitude, which he had found in the draconic heritage.
Following that came words blurted out in Draconic:
“Beautiful, dignified, generous, magnanimous... Lady Elise, thank you for your bounty! Might I ask if there is anything I can help with?”
Kael believed he had exhausted every complimentary word he could think of.
Shocked a second time, Elise used the light of the crystal lamp to carefully inspect the color of the wyrmling's scales.
Vibrant scarlet, tiny and dense, the surface glossy and moist, soft in texture, not yet hardened into armored scales.
This was indeed a red dragon, not a metallic dragon or any other dragon of a good alignment.
Before the witch before him could speak, an irresistible wave of infantile drowsiness washed over Kael.
Watching the wyrmling collapse before her once more, Elise could no longer maintain her calm composure. She stored the notebook back into her dimensional bag, the quill transformed back into a staff, and she cast a detection spell directly upon Kael.
Rate on N.U.
