Chapter 36 - I've Been Waiting for You

How much time had passed?

“Ugh...”

As Minjun slowly came to, he clutched his head and opened his eyes. ‘I was definitely in the imperial tomb before I passed out.’ Where on earth was he?

A stone floor covered in strange patterns lay around him, with weeds growing thickly beyond it. Before losing consciousness, he had been deep underground in the tomb. Now, when he looked up, blue sky stretched overhead.

But something else was stranger still. In an open expanse this vast, he should not have been able to see its end. Yet at a certain point, space simply stopped, as though there were a boundary between dimensions. Beyond that boundary lay nothing but pitch-black darkness, stirring a primal fear in him.

And there was one more thing. He could not say exactly what it was, but he sensed an energy filling the place that felt both familiar and strange.

“What...?”

Nothing made sense. Before Minjun could get his bearings, the ground suddenly began to shake. Startled, he tried to move away from the source of the tremor, but it soon stopped, and a figure began to rise from beneath the ground.

It was...

“... The emperor?”

Dark brown hair and eyes of the same color. A masculine face and a tall, broad build to match. It was the emperor as Minjun had seen him in his youth through the recording magic.

“You look upon His Majesty the Emperor and call him ‘the emperor’? You have no manners.”

Minjun had never heard the language before, yet he could understand him. It was the same unfamiliar language he had heard and understood in the recording. He swallowed hard and watched the emperor warily. Despite calling him rude, the emperor did not seem particularly angry. If anything, he was looking Minjun over with keen interest. Minjun sensed no immediate hostility.

‘Still, I can't let my guard down.’ That was only a guess, after all.

“Then should I call you... Your Majesty?”

“Forget it. I'm already dead; what use have I for ‘Your Majesty’? Just call me by my name. I am Minos.”

As if he had no use for ceremony, the emperor continued. “I'll dispense with the preliminaries. There is only one reason you came here.”

Minos pointed to Minjun's Dragon Bone Sword lying beside him. “You wield a Dragon Bone Sword, as I did. No one who does not wield such a sword can reach this place.”

Minjun realized that some of his suspicions had been right. ‘Of course. None of this could have been a coincidence...’ But why?

Before Minjun could ask, Minos slowly explained, as though he already knew what Minjun wanted to know.

“You saw it in the recording magic. I used the dragon power dwelling in my sword to change not only my own fate, but my homeland's as well.”

The recording Minjun had seen was one Minos had ordered the royal mages to leave for whoever might find his tomb. It told them who lay buried there and what kind of life he had lived.

“I, who had been furthest from the line of succession, became king and transformed a weak kingdom into a vast, united empire.”

To Minos, those events lay in a past so distant it was now impossible to measure, but his memories of them remained vivid.

He remembered the first time the strange visitor had placed a Dragon Bone Sword in his hands. The visitor had not revealed who he was, but Minos had sensed that he was probably one of the dragons he had only heard about. With time, that intuition became certainty. Only a dragon could possess both the confidence to overwhelm anyone and the immense power to prove it was no empty boast.

‘You have a talent others do not. Let it blossom.’

The strange man had turned away, telling Minos not to disappoint him. Watching him go, Minos became utterly fascinated by dragons.

‘If I were a dragon.’

The words about his talent had barely registered. His mind was consumed by dragons.

‘If I'd been born a dragon instead of a feeble human...’

His brothers and his subjects would never have humiliated him so. If he had been born a perfect being—a dragon—he would never have endured experiences so shameful he wanted to erase them.

From then on, Minos began to harbor a dream he could tell no one: he wanted to become a dragon.

Defeating the brothers who had scorned his martial skill and ascending the throne, then turning a weak frontier kingdom into a vast, united empire—these were merely accomplishments he had gained along the way toward his goal. They meant nothing to him.

The true dream he carried in his heart until his death was to become a dragon: a perfect being with the same powerful body as theirs, gifted in every field and able to live for thousands of years, perhaps nearly ten thousand. That was his dream.

After years of relentless training, he achieved the remarkable feat of producing dragon speech with a human body at the young age of thirty.

“But I could not claim to have mastered it completely.”

Everyone else thought he could use dragon speech perfectly. He knew better. What he had produced was incomplete—calling it half-fledged might even have been too generous. The recording magic Minjun had seen captured that incompleteness vividly.

‘I want to use perfect dragon speech. Not half-fledged dragon speech, but the very same flawless dragon speech that dragons use!’

Unlike Minjun, Minos had no one to offer him kind advice, but he understood one thing instinctively: mastering dragon speech was, he believed, the most important prerequisite to becoming a dragon. Unsatisfied with what he had achieved, he drove himself through endless training—until mana backlash ruined his body.

‘Damn it...!’

Eventually, using his incomplete dragon speech—or even drawing the slightest amount of dragon power from his sword—made him cough up blood from the mana backlash. At first it happened only when he used his power. As time passed, it grew worse, until he suffered backlash even at rest. From that point on, Minos's body weakened beyond recovery. His dream of becoming a dragon now seemed a vain hope he could never fulfill in this life.

And yet Minos never gave up the dream he had held since he was a boy of thirteen. Was this imperial tomb, designed so that no one without a Dragon Bone Sword could reach its lowest level, not proof enough?

But the more Minjun heard, the more Minos reminded him of Icarus from ancient Greek mythology: Icarus, who was not content merely to fly, but flew higher to approach the sun, only for the wax on his wings to melt and send him falling. Minjun feared he might end up like Icarus—or like Minos before him.

“You seem to have a great deal on your mind.”

“... How could I not?”

Minos had some inkling of what Minjun was feeling.

“Which brings me to this.” He began slowly. “For a very long time, I have waited here for someone to come and fulfill my dream in my stead.”

Minos had died long ago, but his powerful longing had left behind a remnant of his consciousness. That was why he could stand before Minjun now.

Some might think his fixation on becoming a dragon had gone too far. For a human, using dragon speech was nearly impossible to begin with, and Minos had managed to use it, however imperfectly.

But his blind admiration for dragons had turned into a pathological obsession, and that obsession had given rise to a twisted dream. Though he himself had failed, he wanted to witness someone else break through the limits of their birth and become a dragon.

So he had remained here as a remnant of consciousness, waiting for someone who could fulfill that dream: someone who possessed an artifact containing dragon power, such as a Dragon Bone Sword, or who had potential like his own even without one. He had waited for an eternity almost beyond human imagining. At last, Minjun had arrived.

“So I would like you to show me your dragon speech.”

“... I'm sorry, but it hasn't even been a month since I began using this sword in earnest. I'd like to show you dragon speech right now, but at the moment...”

Minos had carried this unfulfilled longing for so long. Having heard his story, Minjun wished he could put it to rest, and it pained him that he could not.

“So you cannot use dragon speech?”

“No. I'm truly sorry. But if it ever becomes possible, I'll come back and show you, Minos.”

“No, that won't be necessary.”

Minos closed the distance between them with a chilling smile. “I'll make sure you can use dragon speech.”

“...?”

Minjun stared at him, baffled. Minos himself had failed to master dragon speech. How could he make someone else capable of using it?

Then Minos said something that left Minjun aghast.

“From now on, you cannot leave this place until you use full-fledged dragon speech. There is only one way out.”

Whether by using his sword, drawing on the power of another artifact, or trying any other method, Minjun would have to use full-fledged dragon speech to shatter this illusory world Minos had created.

“Until then, not only will you be unable to leave as you please, you won't even be able to die as you please.”

The moment Minos finished speaking, he conjured a blood-red sword out of thin air and drove it into the floor. A notification appeared before Minjun's eyes once more.

[Rank: EX

Clear conditions: Reach the lowest level of Minos's tomb and use dragon speech (0/1)]