The Foreigner on the Periphery

When he felt that something had changed, Congressman Choi Pan-seok was waiting for the prophecy as usual. He took his eyes off the document he was reading. He then tilted his head and took off his multifocal glasses. He couldn’t figure out the identity of this discomfort. 

He then looked around. The daughter, who was lying in a comfortable position on her bed, had her eyes closed as if she was still seeing the future. ‘What has changed?’ 

She felt as if one of the two axes that filled his inner world had disappeared. However, she wasn’t sure what it was. After feeling awkward like a mirage, the lawmaker eventually gave up further analysis. He turned his eyes back to the papers. In it, the winning strategy of the Orc candidate to be expelled from the party in the upcoming by-election was written. The detective he picked eventually agreed to the offer. 

When he said that he wanted to have a more positive influence on the tribal community, Choi Pan-seok replied that there would be no more suitable job than this.

All that remained was to do your best and win. The congressman’s eyes, lost in thought, stopped at the clock this time. It was right before the alarm went off. 

‘It’s already this time.’ With her consciousness fixed on the future, the daughter did not respond to the noise or smell around her. Knowing this, Choi Pan-seok left the door open and headed for the kitchen. He then opened the refrigerator door and took out something frozen. 

Heating it in the microwave, Choi Pan-seok smiled with anticipation. The identity of the feeling he had just received was a phenomenon in which the brainwashing that took place when he was stabbed with a dagger was released. 

However, the Orc was still faithfully following Minjun’s instructions. Staying by his daughter during the prophecy and eating it on time were all as he had commanded. Minjun had already discovered that his brainwashing was very powerful, in the form of injuring his opponent, but that way he could only control one person at a time. It was inefficient to continue using such brainwashing only for Choi Pan-seok. And so, he presented a large number of (similar) dishes to the councilor. 

Ding! The thaw is over. She moves the plate to the table and smiles. He couldn’t guess. 

Just now, an old dragon from a foreign country was stabbed in the back by a magical tool and was subjected to mental manipulation, and that he himself was also affected by it. However, in his case, the brainwashing caused by being stabbed has disappeared, but the brainwashing caused by eating itself had been maintained.

Choi Pan-seok held a spoon with a bright face. From there, he scooped up an unknown organic substance and put it in his mouth. 

“…!” Deprived of the right to think freely, this old Orc became the happiest person in Korea at that moment. 

***  

“What’s this!” A scream echoed from Raymond Wong’s mansion, where the owner was away. 

“Mo, my body is strange!” 

The employees still didn’t know that what they were wearing was the dragon’s blood. He just assumed it was the blood of something magically manipulated. The reason Raymond Wong cleaned it before disappearing was also attributed to the unbearable stench. 

Balaur’s blood was managed very strictly, and it was a substance that could not be traded in the sun. There had never been a person on earth who has had the experience of putting something like that all over the body in a fresh state, and few people know what the blood smelled like. However, the characteristics of dragon blood, which they did not know about, did not stop there. 

“Ugh, aaaagh!”

This time the troll gardener screamed. Boils were forming on his skin. It was the part covered in dragon’s blood. The troll, experiencing skin disease for the first time in his life, was overcome with unrealistic fear. If the trolls were that much, the other races were even worse. 

The area where the hemorrhage was buried cracked, and this time there were some who wet the spot with their own blood. If it was Carbite that boasted the worst compatibility in this area, it would have been covered with radioactive fallout, but the employees gathered here stopped at that level. 

It was not a life-threatening reaction. However, it was unavoidable that the scene, which had barely been repaired, fell into chaos again. People were terrified and screaming. However, there were also exceptions. 

“···Why me?” An Asian man blankly touched his face. Also, the man did not feel anything other than the usual bloody smell when the other employees smelled bad and vomited a moment ago. 

He was the butler who delivered the invitations to Minjun and Kentius. The butler turned his head and looked around. In addition to this, he was able to identify some colleagues who didn’t react much like himself. 

“Right.” Men noticed their commonalities. Employees who were fine even after being showered with blood… They were all human.

*** 

When Raymond confided his secret, Kentius doubted his ears. What? 

“A genetically similar body?” Meanwhile, hearing Raymond’s words, Minjun remembered Changcheon. An old dragon who kidnapped a dragon that looked as much like her deceased ex-husband as possible and tried to possess her ex-husband’s soul in its body. 

However, the experiment failed repeatedly. The dragon did not accept Ryuho’s soul which had become a specter. So, Changcheon tried to precede the work of changing the specter into a ghost. She tried to overcome the difficulty by sacrificing a number of goblins, but Minjun caught her and broke her head. 

In addition to this, Raymond’s experiment didn’t seem to be smooth either. “If our guesses were true, and if there was any progress in Lord’s experiments, we wanted to steal them. Experiments with my helpers were failing again and again. So I tried to extract information from Lord, but…” 

Sparks flew in Minjun’s eyes. “You said you were already experimenting?” Read the most updated version of this novel and other amazing translated novels from the original source at Novel Multiverse – “NovelMultiverse dot com”

“Yes. It was already in the works for a long time without anyone noticing.” Kentius was listening to the conversation in a daze. It was a story that was difficult to accept with his common sense.

There was even a possibility that Rod was like that too. “If it’s a body that is genetically the most similar to yours, you can’t even clone your own body…” Kentius then stopped talking and closed his mouth. 

He felt a shudder run through his body. There was a much simpler and easier way than cloning. In fact, it was something Rod had repeated over and over again. To be exact, that thing he did 17 times on Earth alone. 

“It is not easy to clone a dragon’s body. I had an easier way.” Kentius remembered the name of a certain dragon. The person who was curious about the whereabouts of the other person. 

“No way?!” Although not as much as the Dragon Lord, Raymond also had several children. Even after only one of them has grown up, he had packed up a rare in Hong Kong and lived close to Raymond. This was because his father encouraged him to do so in this city, which was too small for even one ancient dragon to live in. In addition to this, he was the thunder dragon that most resembled his father among his children. 

Kentius spoke with trembling lips. “···Leo?”

The old dragon spoke in a plain tone. “The child you saw today is not Leo.” 

“That nut is the horse.” Kentius screamed. He glared at Raymond with astonishment, horror, and disgust. “Then, what is the real Leo’s soul?!”

“That child is the closest test subject to success so far. The real soul was ‘extracted’ out of the body shortly after hatching. He had a hard time dealing with him without his mother knowing…” 

“Then you killed Leo!” Kentius shouted with a blue face. If his death was defined as the departure of his soul from his body, then the real Leo was killed by Raymond. He was now watching his father, who preyed on his offspring to prolong his life. 

Raymond murmured calmly. “Before transplanting my soul, an experiment to transplant another soul needed to be preceded. This is all due to the characteristics of the dragon’s body. No matter how many talents were consumed, the dragon’s body strongly rejected the soul that did not belong to it. The success rate of the transplant was very low. It was to the extent that the helpers commented that it looked like someone had put a lock on the dragons. So, first of all, the process of extracting a soul of a race other than a dragon and inserting it into the body was repeated. Because that was easier than getting a dragon soul. In the process, the dragon will become accustomed to accepting the souls of other individuals regardless of type…” 

“Crazy bastard!” Such was the way he chose to prolong his own lifespan. Kentius was also a dragon, but he was completely unbelievable. How far could an alternative dragon go to satisfy its own desires? 

Raymond asked again with an expression as if what was wrong. “I just used life that could not have been created in the first place without me, as I intended. What is the problem?” 

Kentius felt like throwing up. The reason why he was so angry was because the old dragon’s wrathful behavior was disgusting, but at the same time, it was because Raymond and his father overlapped. And it was because he realized that he too could have become like Leo. 

Kentius had no particular attachment to Rod but was proud of the fact that he inherited most of his genes among his brothers. Convinced that over time he would become a powerful dragon. However, if Raymond’s guess was true, if Rod was also trying to extend his life that way… it could be said that it is a thousand luck that they resemble this much. If the color of his body had been a little more monotonous, Lord might have aimed for his body instead of having more children…

‘Rod has never had a child. He was producing a new body for his own use! He wanted to deny it, but all the circumstances were grounds for speculation. While Kentius was in a panic, Minjun was also suffering from a shock that was not small. He was at least able to point out a few things with a calmer mind than Kentius. Raymond’s statement had a different part compared to Minjun’s own witness and experience. 

‘The dragon rejects other souls? But Ha Eun-seong is using only a few talents and using the body of an unknown dragon as if it were his own.’ 

He then asked Raymond. “How did the rejection come?” 

“As I have already said, my body hardly accepted it. He was briefly possessed and then expelled. The probability of success is extremely low It was like Park. It was enough to understand at once why there were no prisoners who received the body of a dragon. It is a game with low odds in which the amount of talent consumption is bound to be maximized, and the committee will not try it because of productivity.” 

Minjun thought about it. Did Ha Eun-seong pass the odds at once by luck? Or, did the specificity of the ghost intervene with probability?

“And it was also a problem after I was lucky enough to possess it after hundreds of attempts. A reaction that magnified the problems experienced by prisoners hundreds of times appeared in the implanted soul. The soul also could hardly accept the dragon’s body as its own body. Eventually, he hated himself, or worse, began to hate all dragons. It might change if you experiment a lot with dragon souls, but it was impossible to find a suitable dragon to that extent.” 

Minjun’s thoughts had begun to get complicated. First of all, he knew that Raymond was doing something similar to Changcheon. But he wasn’t sure if Rod was like that either. There was also conflicting circumstantial evidence. Minjun found contradictions and incomprehensible points in Rod’s behavior. If Rod wanted to be resurrected in a new body, why did he expose the existence of his hidden child to Minjun in the first place, and why did he leave a legacy? 

And why did his children compete with each other through his will, and why did he make such a complicated decision to hand over his heart to the next Dragon Lord if the conditions are not met? Considering all this, Minjun couldn’t be sure that Lord would have done such a thing… that he had given birth to an eighteen-year-old child for such a terrible reason. He didn’t even want to believe it. 

‘The road I know is not that kind of dragon.’ After Jenkinson, the road was the dragon that Minjun has been interacting with for a long time. Unlike other self-righteous dragons, he was a man who was able to extend favor even to non-dragons. He was also a dragon who sincerely loved his own people. 

‘But what if… really, what if this speculation is true?’ What if the image of Lord that Minjun witnessed was just a fragment of him? What if, in fact, Rod was also a dragon who was prepared to produce and sacrifice offspring in order to prolong his lifespan? If that were the case, Minjun would feel extremely disappointed in the race he loved so much. 

‘Is a dragon a dragon? Could it be that they are a self-righteous race who do not know how to share their lives with others, burning only with greed?’ Thought Minjun. The moment this hypothesis is confirmed to be true, he would then be convinced. Wasn’t it really right for them to not allow the right to think and the freedom to think to that beast that had been modified to have as many as six brains in its skull long ago? 

*** 

The moment she opened her eyes, Choi Seon-ah felt a beautiful scent that filled the room. Trying not to let it take her mind, she said to the orc who sat by her side and watched. “I still saw the same future.”

After the meal, the Orc, who was happy with a fat expression on his soul, hardened his face again. “Was that scene again?” 

“Yes.” There was no difference in content, but the form of wisdom was slightly different. 

“The scene became clearer. It is so vivid that it gives me goosebumps.” Choi Seon-ah began to tremble lightly in her body. This phenomenon meant only one thing. “The chances of that scene becoming a reality are getting higher and higher. Perhaps today, somewhere, an event that will become the material that will make that future come true must have happened.” 

“Then···” 

“Yes. I think it will be a fixed future with little chance of going off track.” The Prophet assured the Orc. 

There were such beings who formed a procession in the dream and moved forward. Whether it was the race they saw in their dreams, or some hierarchy metaphorically implied. 

“Dragons will lose their brains.”