Chương 4: Reborn as the Dragon: — Chapter 4 - Jungle Slaughter

Su Nian burst out of the cave into the night. A cold wind cut across the dark. Far off, storm clouds were massing, a heavy rain building behind them. The moon had retreated into those clouds, exhausted, leaving the world pitch black. Only a handful of stars remained on watch. Dragon vision worked something like night vision, except the imaging background was red. It let Su Nian track moving bodies in the dark with perfect clarity. Night was the hour for hunters.

In this ordinary stretch of forest, Su Nian was unquestionably among the more lethal ones. Blood and shed scales littered the cave entrance — all his. He noted them and put himself on higher alert. His dragon face scrunched. This cave can't stay much longer. Once his body recovered, he needed a new location. If the human army followed his blood trail back here, things would get complicated fast. In the modern world, people got tracked without magic. In a world with genuine supernatural power?

Tracking someone would only get easier. And honestly, he was tired of this damp, lightless hole. He needed to move faster on all fronts. Su Nian turned the thought over once, then controlled his dragon body and shot into the jungle with a whoosh. Sharp vision, sharper nose. It didn't take long to find a lone elk. Not for Anna. For himself. His thinking was simple. In half an hour, Weakness would hit. If he hadn't eaten by then, Weakness might actually finish him.

So: fill his own stomach first, then find berries for Anna. Dragon's Might rolled outward from him naturally, no effort, no unfamiliarity. He was settling into this body more with every passing hour. Dragon's Might was one of a dragon's core weapons, for creatures of a lower tier, it hit like encountering a natural predator, triggering deep, instinctual terror. Against things with weak willpower, it could function almost like paralysis. The elk was already injured. It was barely standing.

Under Dragon's Might, it simply buckled and went down on its knees. Su Nian didn't overthink it. His tail swung, all four limbs moving, and he huffed his way over to the elk and clamped his jaws around its throat. Warm blood came in a slow, steady pour. It reached his stomach like heat finally finding somewhere long empty. The smell hit him first, sharp, metallic, filling his whole mouth. His gut turned for a moment. Then he adapted. The rawness faded, and something else took over.

The taste of fresh meat, actually good. The blood itself turned sweet on his tongue. He locked down on the windpipe and drank deep. That was when the rustling started behind him. Low, mournful howls followed. The bushes parted, and three massive silver-grey wolves padded out. They looked at him with cautious, hungry eyes, gaze moving back and forth between the elk and Su Nian. Su Nian did not let go of the windpipe. Did you know this story is from Royal Road?

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"Groooowl—" Staring at these three uninvited guests, something ugly and territorial surged up in his chest. He couldn't stop the low growl that came out of him. It reminded him of his grandfather's dog. The one that would bare its teeth if you so much as looked at its bowl. Wait. Am I guarding my food right now?! He knew what he was doing. That was the absurd part. He could see it happening and he still couldn't stop it. Dragon's Might was clearly working.

The wolves were famished, eyes glowing green, saliva hitting the ground in strings. Against almost any other creature, they would have already launched themselves forward and damned the consequences. But Su Nian was pressing down on them at something deeper than instinct, a bloodline-level weight that kept their legs locked. They wanted the meal badly. They couldn't quite make themselves take it. [Ding! System sub-function activated. Host can now view the basic stats of living creatures.] [Silvermoon Wolf: Level 25 (Tier 3 Magical Beast, 21-30)] Ah. No wonder they had the nerve. Not just pack tactics, actually decent level for this tier. Bold of them, all things considered. But Su Nian was a dragon. Even the second-weakest breed of black dragon was something these ordinary magical beasts had no business provoking. He didn't wait for them to make their move. He set the elk down, and his throat bulged slightly as a thick stream of acidic breath sprayed across all three of them in one go.

Black dragon breath came out dark green. Highly corrosive, and laced with a layer of toxin on top of that. Under normal conditions it sat as liquid in a specialized sac in the throat; when needed, the surrounding muscles contracted hard and fast, driving it out in a pressurized stream. Su Nian had complicated feelings about his breath weapon. It had no dignity whatsoever. He was a dragon. Shouldn't he at least breathe fire? SSSS— He might look down on it, but the results were hard to argue with.

Every leaf and blade of grass the breath touched went black and shriveled in seconds, thin green smoke curling up from the ruins, a sour chemical stench spreading through the clearing. The breath covered a wide area, and the three Silvermoon Wolves caught the worst of it. They twisted and dodged, but not fast enough. Acidic mist clung to their fur. Their skin began to dissolve. The glossy silver pelts went pitted and ragged, and the pain had them howling, raw, awful sounds. Su Nian moved.

The breath needed time to recharge after use. The wolves were already compromised. Close-quarters it was. His four claws bit into the earth as he charged forward, tail sweeping side to side for balance, long neck coiled back and ready. The distance was too short to bother with flight. One, two breaths, and he was on top of the nearest Silvermoon Wolf. His front claws hooked into flesh and locked.

His neck snapped sideways, nimbly clearing the wolf's counter-bite, and then he opened his maw and drove his teeth into its throat. CRUNCH! Hooked fangs with bone-crushing force. The wolf's throat tore open. First time doing it that way, and he slightly overestimated his own strength, he came away with most of the neck. It hadn't been a deliberate choice. The sequence had just happened, muscle memory already embedded in this dragon body, surfacing before he'd consciously decided anything.

With one wolf down, the other two were no longer a serious problem. They'd watched him work. They decided to run. Could they outrun a black dragon with wings? They could not. He ran them down in short order and finished them. The area around him was a wreck. Churned ground, flattened bushes, scattered debris. Su Nian dragged the elk carcass and one of the wolf bodies up into a tall tree and ate, following the instinct the dragon bloodline pressed into him. He wolfed it down.

When he was done, his stomach finally registered something that wasn't empty. Time was running short. He left the two remaining wolf corpses where they lay and moved through the forest at speed, relying on bloodline memory and the System's prompts to locate some berries edible for humans.

Then he detoured to a stream, rolled in it until the blood scent was gone, cut through a patch of tall grass and rolled again to pick up the green, clean smell of crushed leaves, and only then made his way carefully back to the lair. It wasn't vanity. The black dragon's memory had taught him this. It was how you kept your den from being found. The berries made it back safely. The new problem was waiting for him when he arrived. Anna had been holding up fine when he left.

Now she was curled in the corner against the rock wall, unconscious. Her small hands lay limp and open against the cold stone floor. The bearskin still covered her, but she looked utterly hollow, barely breathing, color gone, teetering on the edge of something much worse. ➤ Next: Depending on Each Other for Survival