Chương 195: Reborn as the Dragon — Chapter 195 - Washing the Lambs

With the enhanced Polymorph active, everything got a lot simpler. Any part of the dragon too large and unwieldy to scrub properly had been transformed into a small, plump little lamb. They filled the space around Anna, bleating softly, four stubby legs kicking in the air with absolutely no dignity.

"Hehe~ So cute~" Anna looked at the flock of fluffy, well-behaved lambs and broke into a delighted grin. She couldn't help herself — she scooped one up and started kneading it. Soft. Chubby. Indistinguishable from a real lamb in every way, and the texture was frankly excellent. Su Nian's experience was something else entirely. His dragon wings had become those lambs. Under normal circumstances, Anna washing his thirty-meter wingspan would have produced basically zero sensation, the surface area was simply too vast.

But now it felt like countless tiny hands were kneading and stroking him all at once. The experience was dialed straight to maximum. He narrowed his eyes in pure, drowsy contentment.

"Good little lambs~ Mama Anna is giving you all a bath~" The task had quietly changed its nature somewhere along the way. It was no longer washing a Black Dragon. It was giving lambs a bath. And the lambs, for their part, were remarkably cooperative — bleating affectionately, making the softest, most pitiful little faces — which melted Anna's heart completely and made her pour even more care into the work. There were a lot of lambs, though. Anna adapted. One in each hand. One curled against her tail.

And her two bare feet, soft and nimble, were each hooked around a lamb's head, gently scrubbing away. Efficiency improved considerably. Except for one. The lamb pinned under her foot was not cooperating. It squirmed constantly, always on the edge of breaking free. By the time every other lamb was clean, rinsed, and fluffy, this one was still only half-done.

"Hmph!" Anna sat up with a pout, focus narrowing. She was tired, but she wasn't going to let this one win. She half-lay back, poured a generous glob of shower gel directly onto the lamb's fleece, and then pressed her soft toes into the wool, working slow circles until foam bloomed up in thick white tufts.

"Baa baa~" The lamb protested loudly. It made a break for it. A pink foot hooked its chin and dragged it right back. Another round of scrubbing. Its face was kneaded into a series of increasingly ridiculous shapes between Anna's toes. Her other foot swirled foam into the wool at the top of its head, then migrated to its soft belly, claiming the territory entirely and doing whatever it pleased. The lamb endured this for as long as it could. Eventually, its big dark eyes went glassy. Then vacant.

Whether it had inhaled too much shower gel, or whether the sheer dizzying chaos of Anna's footwork had overloaded its tiny brain, there was no way to know. The poor little lamb had hit its absolute limit. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. It let out a faint "baa." Then it vomited all over the floor.

"Ah!" Anna sat bolt upright, alarmed. She leaned in to examine the half-dead creature and found it had only fainted. She let out a slow breath of relief. Then she looked at the mess. The whole wash was ruined. She'd have to do it again....... SSSSSST. Milky-white liquid erupted outward in a wide, pressurized spray. Darabengba's expression shifted instantly. He sheathed his sword and leapt back. Ghost Poison Giant Frog. Tier three monster.

The venom was brutally potent, a single drop on the skin would seep through the pores, and within hours the flesh would begin to rot. The one in front of him was the pack leader, faster than the rest and carrying a stronger toxin. None of that was new information at this point. Darabengba had carved his way through monsters all across this region, and the combat instincts he'd built were nothing like what they'd been before.

He dodged the first spray clean, then did the opposite of what the frog expected: he charged straight in. The Ghost Poison Giant Frog wasn't bothered. The human wasn't even trying to dodge now, just running at it in a straight line. A free kill. It opened up with multiple streams at once, saturating every possible angle of escape, cutting off every direction the human could possibly move. Generous coverage. Thorough. This one was already food.

"Instant Step Flash!" Darabengba's growl was low and sharp. The skill fired. At the last possible distance, he dissolved into a streak of gold and threaded the needle through the venom grid, the final stream clipping the air just behind his skull as he came through the other side. He didn't charge head-on again. Instead, he snatched a vine hanging from the canopy and swung upward in a clean, swift arc across the sky.

"Die." He twisted mid-air to avoid the leader's tongue, then came down hard. His sword drove straight into the top of the Ghost Poison Giant Frog leader's skull. The fight was over. He stepped into the nest and found it: an old, worn treasure chest, identical in every detail to the one buried in the goblin territory.

"Second Virtue Gold Coin." He said it quietly, mostly to himself, and opened the chest. There it was. The face of the coin showed a group of knights kneeling in prayer before a statue of the Winter King. The statue itself, however, was posed with its backside jutting out at a frankly undignified angle. Darabengba stared at it for a moment. Strange. He flipped the coin. The back read: Loyalty.

"That's the last one available in the Anlius Empire," he murmured, pulling up the map.

"The next one is in..." The Eirilan Empire. His expression became serious. Every Virtue Gold Coin location so far had been remote. Isolated. The difficulty kept climbing. The goblin tribe had been the easiest: hard to locate, but not genuinely dangerous once found. After that came this swamp, this frog clan, this rotten tree stump that somehow contained a treasure chest nobody would ever think to look inside. The Eirilan Empire was going to be something else entirely. He could already see it.

"Truly worthy of His Majesty the Conqueror King," Darabengba said.

"Even the training method is one of a kind." He had never met the Conqueror King. Didn't need to. His reverence for the supreme deity didn't require a face to go with it.

"Clear each obstacle. Raise the difficulty, one step at a time." He tucked the coin away carefully.

"By the time I collect all twelve, I'll be more than ready to wield hero-grade equipment. That's the whole design." He stood.

"This is the life of a hero. The challenges a hero is supposed to face." The corner of his mouth twitched.

"Until the day I slay the dragon." He got to work breaking down the frog leader's corpse. Efficient, practiced cuts. Monster materials of this quality would fetch decent coin in the nearest town, and even a chosen hero needed to eat, needed to repair his gear. Heroism didn't come free. Autumn was settling in, but the heat hadn't fully released its grip yet. The cicadas called out from somewhere in the trees, ragged and half-hearted.

Darabengba rested briefly in the shade of a large tree at the swamp's edge, leather bag heavy with materials slung over one shoulder, then stepped back into the sunlight and walked on. ➤ Next: Approaching Players