Ch.282Solution (5)

The Dragon King who lost her name had a dream.

It was a happy dream from a time when she still had a name, and when the dragon people had not yet been cursed.

In that dream, she stood upon a snow-covered field as snowflakes fell.

It was a familiar landscape.

The familiar stretched horizon, with tents and huts scattered sparsely across it.

Large bonfires and people gathered around them.

But within this familiar scenery were several unfamiliar elements. The Dragon King stared blankly at these strange things and realized this was a dream.

And in this dream where she recognized its falsity, the Dragon King pondered what had happened to her.

Her memories were hazy. Not much came to mind, and even her final memories remained only as vague sensations.

Overwhelming pain, agony that felt like her very flesh was being melted and reforged.

How she had come to experience such a thing was too unclear.

To make matters worse, despite her efforts to recall, nothing surfaced. The Dragon King finally gave up trying to remember and wandered through her dream.

With each step she took, her tail swayed from side to side, and the flesh-cutting cold touched her scales.

A cold wind like a blade, far from a gentle breeze.

Yet to the Dragon King, it was a familiar and heartwarming wind.

The wind of her homeland, one might say.

The Dragon King loved that homeland. Indeed, few humans dislike the place where they were born and raised.

They might want to leave because they’re sick of it, or want to see other places, or feel adventurous.

But no one wishes for their homeland to burn down or be devastated by a plague-like curse.

Even if they dislike it, they don’t hate it to that extent. In that sense, the Dragon King was a typical person.

Just an ordinary person with exceptional qualities and great strength.

A woman who, without grand goals or dreams, set out on a journey out of duty, killed a dragon, and became cursed.

For a long time, she believed her actions had cursed her entire race.

Though outwardly stoic, she suffered and despaired over this.

She believed her race was doomed to extinction because of her.

It was this compulsive thought that she must be the one to solve it that drove her forward.

The curse laid by three clans, the deeds done by three clans.

She believed the answer and solution would be found there. She wandered aimlessly, killing assassins who came after her.

She killed them until they stopped sending more, but ultimately found no clues.

Though she didn’t know it, it was only natural that finding those who dwelled in the atmosphere would be nearly impossible.

Even without knowing this, she understood her efforts were in vain.

She stayed at an elven monastery ruled by someone she could call a friend.

There, with her overflowing talent, she refined the elves’ martial arts and occasionally passed time repelling intruders and monsters as a pastime.

She couldn’t return to her homeland. The scenery of home remained vivid in her mind, but she didn’t know how much it had changed.

She didn’t know who the current true Dragon King was or how they fared.

Responsibility prevented her from going back.

Her conscience seemed to whisper, asking how she could even think of returning after all she had done.

Though she knew no one would actually blame her like that, she had within herself an executioner more honest and unrelenting than anyone else.

Herself.

So the Dragon King decided. She would not return until she found a solution and resolved the calamity that had befallen everyone.

Despite this resolution, her homeland spread out before her eyes.

A homeland not much different from the day she left. A homeland that had waited for her just as it was, even though at least a hundred years had passed.

The feeling was different, even knowing it was a dream. She took a step amid the long-stretching white breath and then—

Belatedly realized something was different about her body.

“…Ah.”

Martial artists are those who make weapons of their bodies.

They master their physical forms and understand them perfectly.

They remember the alignment of their limbs, the position of their knees, the size and weight of appendages like tails, and even the texture of their muscles.

The Dragon King was a martial artist who could be called the continent’s finest without exaggeration, and as such, she knew the unnaturalness of her body.

Something was different. She reached behind to her tail, which felt lighter than usual.

The hard, steel-like texture of scales. A plump, elongated tail.

‘Something’s strange.’

As she thought this, she reached out, feeling along her tail and then to her buttocks.

And froze.

“…Huh?”

It was soft. It shouldn’t be, but it was incredibly soft and pleasant to touch.

The size was different too. Somehow larger. It wasn’t this big before.

Dragon people are an egg-laying race, so their pelvises are quite large, but—

Their buttocks aren’t particularly developed. The Dragon King merely had some curves in her chest and buttocks due to her pronounced femininity.

Female dragon people with less femininity than her mostly had bodies not much different from males.

Without the Dragon King’s experience of living among elves, her compatriots probably couldn’t even distinguish the difference.

But even so, it wasn’t to this extent. With a confused expression, the Dragon King moved her hands from her buttocks to explore the rest of her body.

She couldn’t bring herself to look down. She just blankly checked her body with her hands.

Her thighs. Firm and thick yet soft. A different texture from her buttocks, where her fingers seemed to sink in.

Her abdomen. Muscular yet with a prominent lower belly. Touching it felt strange.

And then her chest.

She knew her breast size for certain. After all, she was the greatest martial artist.

And she knew her breasts couldn’t possibly be this large.

The Dragon King’s pupils trembled chaotically as she blinked.

Soft breasts not covered in scales.

Something huge and pleasant to touch that deserved to be called breasts rather than a chest.

A fullness that couldn’t be covered even with both hands.

How?

“…Eh?”

As she became aware, that wasn’t all.

She wasn’t breathing. Even without consciously breathing, there was no inhaling or exhaling.

She could breathe if she wanted to, but each time she did, a ticklish power spread throughout her body. Her breath grew hot.

As she lowered her head, feeling the dream gradually turning into a nightmare, what she saw was—

“No, it can’t be.”

Snow-white skin like white jade, with scales sparsely attached to it.

And breast mounds that protruded prominently, blocking half her view.

She woke up screaming.

“…Huff, huff…”

Upon waking, she found herself in an unfamiliar place.

It was a bedroom, but strangely barren, as if no one had ever used it.

She blinked blankly in such a place.

Light gradually illuminated her hazy memories.

“…Ah.”

Now she remembered.

She had found a solution. More precisely, she had found the path to a solution.

A rising new star, something massive that foretold both hope and despair, future and destruction.

Something impossible to ignore. She believed she needed to find that star as soon as possible and fight the three clans to break the curse.

Her friend, the monastery head, had gladly offered to help. So the two set out.

They couldn’t find the right path immediately and had to wander for a long time.

But they eventually found it. And then what happened?

Hadn’t she heard that all her searching, efforts, and hardships had been meaningless?

Words that felt like they were threshing her soul. A terrible truth.

That it wasn’t a curse at all, but a natural disease due to their inherent nature.

That even necromancers couldn’t overcome it and had fled in that manner.

Then what meaning was there in her hatred and “dragon slaying”?

She had pondered and suffered through time, and in the end, she had fallen for the suggestion that there might be a solution.

She agreed even knowing that the method involved changing her race and avoiding death.

She consented despite knowing it was dangerous, painful, and could result in failure and death.

And so she had been placed on the operating table.

Leading to now.

‘Was it successful? Or…’

It’s uncertain. She doesn’t feel much. The Dragon King rose with concern.

The blanket covering her body slipped down, and her soft, seemingly ready-to-burst chest, freed from the pressure of the blanket, swayed up and down.

She placed her feet on the floor and flinched at the sense of dissonance she felt.

Something was wrong. She felt like she absolutely shouldn’t look down.

Yet the Dragon King summoned her courage. She was the king of dragons and, moreover, the strongest martial artist.

And then—

A scream erupted from the room.

A “feminine” scream that was impossible to believe came from the Dragon King. People came running in response.

“What? What happened?!”

The door flung open, and a familiar face rushed in.

The Dragon King faced that face while gasping for rough breaths.

And what Llewellyn encountered was—

A Dragon King different from the one who had been lying quietly after the procedure, one with vitality and life.

Her chest rose and fell with ragged breaths, her breast mounds pressed under her hands and splayed to the sides, exerting an attraction impossible to look away from.

Behind her large buttocks rested a long, plump tail.

Moreover, her sharp gaze and stoic, sturdy eyes were filled with faint fear and confusion, transforming her sharply handsome face into that of a “woman.”

A vulnerable appearance that stimulated carnal desires. A look that, if one didn’t know she was the Dragon King, wouldn’t seem strange even with physical changes.

Nevertheless, Llewellyn suppressed his feelings. He faced the Dragon King.

“What… what have you done to me…!”

Llewellyn couldn’t find words to answer.

The intention was clear. He could have answered that he changed her race to a homunculus to save her life.

But looking only at the result, at the face value of what was before him, something was clearly felt.

Llewellyn had, unintentionally, made the Dragon King into a “woman.”

So after moving his lips for a while, Llewellyn closed his mouth.

All he could do was close the door again.

As the door closed, the Dragon King stared at it with a bewildered expression.

Two weeks after the Dragon King lost consciousness.

She opened her eyes in the skies above the land of the dragon people.