Chương 23: What's in the egg???

Ch 23: What's in the egg???

The egg sat on my desk for two full days before I worked up the nerve to actually look at it properly. Part of that was exhaustion a bloodline confession involving two warring Courts of Creation tended to leave a person needing a night or twelve to simply lie still and stare at a ceiling. Part of it, if I was honest with myself, was a small and slightly embarrassing reluctance to find out that a reward this strange came with strings attached I wasn't ready for.

It was smaller than I expected, barely larger than both my fists together, its shell a deep, banked charcoal color shot through with thin veins of something that caught the light like buried embers. It didn't feel like Qi when I held it. It didn't feel like anything the System had a category for, which, given the week I'd had, was starting to feel less like a surprise and more like a personal theme.

"System," I said.

"What am I holding?" Item: Egg of Unknown Origin Species: Unconfirmed — Draconic Lineage Suspected Vitality: Dormant Incubation Condition: Sustained exposure to Draconic Qi Recommended Method: Dragon Slayer Art cultivation, performed in proximity Estimated Time: Variable I turned the egg over once in my hands, something between a laugh and disbelief building in my chest.

"Draconic," I repeated.

"Of course it's draconic." Dragon Slayer had put half my meridians through hell more times than I cared to count, torn my own arm off once for the privilege of using it, and now, apparently, the universe's idea of balancing the ledger was handing me an egg that needed exactly that technique to wake up.

"You'd almost think," I told it, setting it carefully on a folded cloth at the center of my floor, "that somebody up there has a sense of irony." Given what I'd just learned about who exactly might be watching, that thought landed less funny than I meant it to. I started that same evening, dropping into the opening stance of Dragon Slayer's First Verse with the egg positioned close enough to feel whatever bled off the technique during practice.

Cosmic-Wave hummed to life beneath it exactly the way it always did, drawing Qi into me with every completed motion except now, for the first time, a thin thread of that gathered Qi curled visibly sideways instead of settling into my own meridians, drifting toward the egg like it recognized something in the technique that belonged to it specifically. The shell warmed, barely. A single ember-thin vein along its surface brightened, held a moment, and faded again.

"... Progress," I said, and meant it as encouragement, though I wasn't entirely sure which of us needed to hear it more. I kept at it every evening after that, folding a few minutes of proximity into my usual training instead of treating it as anything separate one more form, one more circulation, one more quiet ritual bookending a day already full of duels and bloodlines and letters from home I still hadn't fully finished sitting with. Some nights nothing happened at all.

Some nights the veins along the shell lit fully gold for a few seconds before dimming, and I found myself holding my breath each time without quite meaning to. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. By the fifth night, the whole egg had gone warm to the touch, permanently now, like something inside it had finally stopped merely listening and started actually stirring. By the seventh, it moved on its own.

I was halfway through the closing form of Dragon Slayer's First Verse when the egg gave a single, sharp lurch against its cloth, hard enough that I nearly tripped over my own stance catching it before it rolled off the desk entirely.

"Easy — easy, I've got you—" A crack spread across the shell, thin as a hair, and then, all at once, a dozen more branching off it like frost spreading across a window. Something inside pushed once, twice, a small muffled sound of effort that did something entirely unreasonable to my chest for a creature I hadn't even seen yet. Hatching Sequence Initiated. Do not interrupt. I didn't need to be told twice.

I knelt there on the floor, sword forgotten against the wall, and watched the last of the shell fall away in uneven pieces. What climbed out of it was, without any real competition, the single most ridiculous thing I had ever laid eyes on across two entire lifetimes.

It was small enough to fit into both cupped hands, scales a deep obsidian black shot through with the same faint ember-veins as the shell it had just abandoned, two stubby, half-formed wings pressed damp and useless against its sides, and a pair of enormous, unfocused golden eyes blinking up at absolutely nothing in particular.

It made a small, indignant chirping sound, wobbled sideways on legs that clearly hadn't been informed yet that they were meant to hold weight, and promptly faceplanted directly into the cloth. I laughed before I could stop myself a real laugh, the first one that had come easily in longer than I wanted to admit.

"... Okay," I said, gathering the tiny, damp, thoroughly unimpressive-looking dragon into both hands with far more care than its dramatic entrance had suggested it deserved.

"That was not the entrance I expected." It blinked up at me, tilted its head at an angle that shouldn't have been physically comfortable, and let out a small huffing noise that sounded suspiciously like it was already judging me for the comment. Species Identified: [DATA CORRUPTED] Bond Status: Imprinting... Imprinting Complete. A new bond has formed.

"Imprinting," I repeated, and looked down at two golden eyes now fixed on me with the single-minded devotion of a creature that had apparently decided, roughly four seconds after birth, that I was the single most important thing that had ever existed.

"That feels like it should have come with more warning." It didn't seem to care what I thought about warnings. It shuffled closer across my palm, pressed its small, warm head against my thumb with a soft, satisfied huff, and promptly fell asleep, snoring in a way entirely too loud for something the size of a large teacup.

I sat there a long while, watching it breathe, something in my chest loosening for the first time in weeks that had otherwise been entirely composed of grief, revelations, and the quiet dread of a bloodline two Courts of Creation apparently still wanted erased.

"You're going to need a name," I said quietly, more to myself than to the sleeping creature currently drooling faintly on my hand.

"Something that doesn't sound like it belongs to whatever tried to erase my family for three generations." I considered, briefly, the sheer, absurd contrast of it a hatchling born from the very technique built to slaughter its own kind, curled trusting and unguarded in the hands of the boy who'd once killed one of its ancestors on another world entirely.

"Ember," I decided, watching one small vein along its scales pulse faintly gold in its sleep, like it approved of the choice even half-conscious.

"Close enough." Ember didn't wake to confirm the decision. It simply shifted closer, tucked its damp, half-formed wings tighter against its sides, and slept on, utterly unbothered by Heaven, Hell, or anything else that might currently be searching for either of us. For the first time since a hawk had landed on my windowsill carrying news I didn't want, I let myself, for one small, ridiculous evening, simply be glad about something instead of afraid of it.