The air in the slums of Oakhaven didn't smell like the crisp ozone of the high peaks or the metallic tang of noble blood. It smelled like rancid grease, overflowing gutters, and the intoxicating, spiced aroma of roasted boar skewers.
"STOP! THIEF! SOMEBODY TRIP THAT LITTLE RAT!"
Valerius—now simply Val—didn't look back. He couldn't. If he turned his head, the momentum of his sprint might falter, and he was currently operating on a body that felt as fragile as a wet paper doll.
In his right hand, he clutched a bundle of scorched meat wrapped in a greasy rag. It was hot enough to blister human skin, but to his dormant draconic nerves, it felt like a lukewarm pebble.
'My kingdom for a single breath of fire,' Val thought, his lungs burning with a rhythmic, stabbing pain.
'If I were in my true form, I wouldn't be running. I would be swallowing the stall, the cook, and the entire city block in one go.'
[Warning: Heart Rate 162 BPM]
[Sync Rate: 92%... 91%...]
"Shut up," Val hissed under his breath, dodging a pile of horse manure with a nimble skip. "I'm doing... cardio."
It had been seven days since the "Great Purge." Seven days since he had woken up in a nursery bed in a frontline military camp, surrounded by the very soldiers who had just finished butchering his kin.
They had assumed he was a traumatized survivor of the nearby village. The moment the healers turned their backs to attend to a "real" soldier, Val had vanished.
Only a fool stayed in a cage of iron and sunlight when they were a monster in disguise.
He rounded a corner into a maze of hanging laundry and rotting wooden crates. He didn't use a map; he used his nose....
He doubled back through a butcher's shop, slid under a cart of cabbages, and finally vanished into a narrow crevice between two leaning tenements.
The shouting faded. The owner of the stall, a man who outweighed Val by a hundred pounds, stood at the mouth of the alley, cursing the "black-haired brat" to the heavens before giving up.
Val waited in the shadows, his chest heaving. He looked down at the meat.
"I could have worked the docks," he muttered, his voice cracking with the pitch of a seventeen-year-old. "I could have hauled crates for two months, saved every copper, and bought this legally. I'm a "Modern" Human..."
He took a massive, feral bite of the boar. The hot grease dripped down his chin.
"But I'm also a dragon," he whispered through a mouthful of fat.
"And we don't wait for things. We take them...."
***
Val made his way toward the "District of Rust," the outermost edge of Oakhaven where the sunlight struggled to pierce the smog of the industrial furnaces.
He stopped at the entrance of a dead-end alley.
On the wall, there were fresh scuff marks and a splash of dried blood. Val smirked. That was from two days ago, when a gang of twelve-year-old orphans had tried to "tax" him for sleeping here.
He had beaten them with a broken chair leg, moving with the terrifying, predatory efficiency of a creature that knew exactly where the jugular was, even if his arms were now thin and pale.
The mighty Obsidian Prince had become a city rat, fighting children for a damp corner of a slum.
He pushed open a sagging door to a room that smelled of damp paper and ancient dust. This was his "hoard."
It was pathetic. In the corner, piled on a warped wooden table, were his "treasures":
A handful of dull silver coins he'd looted from the orphans, a collection of shiny colored glass shards he'd found in the gutter, and a stack of discarded newspapers.
He shouldn't have kept the coins.....
To a human, they were currency. To him, they were a sickness. Every time he looked at the silver, his "Draconic Greed" hummed in the base of his skull, urging him to bury them, to sleep on top of them, to kill anyone who glanced at them.
"Status," he thought.
A screen of translucent light flickered to life.
###
Name: Val (Valerius)
True Form: Prince Valerius (The Obsidian Drake) — [SEALED]
Current Form: Human
— [VITALS] —
HP: 45/100 (Malnourished)
Sync Rate: 94% (Stable)
— [CORE STATUS] —
Human Core: Awakened
Obsidian Dragon Heart: [DORMANT]
* Note: If Heart Rate exceeds 180 BPM, the Heart will "Leaking," causing temporary Physical Mutation and Scent Emission.
— [PASSIVE TRAITS] —
Draconic Greed (Curse): Compulsion to hoard shiny objects. High Wealth = High Insanity.
Apex Predator's Aura (Suppressed): Animals and low-level monsters will feel instinctive dread.
Reader's Omniscience: Knowledge of the "Original Plot" and "Hidden Pieces."
— [ACTIVE SKILLS] —
Human Metamorphosis (Rank: Forbidden)
Dragon's Pupil (Level 1): Enhance vision for 3 seconds. (Cost: 25 MP).
Primordial Reflexes (Level 1): Use 0.01% of Dragon speed. (Cost: 50 MP - Warning: Strains human muscles).
###
His other dragon skills were locked. He didn't really understand the state of his dragon core—perhaps it had shattered. What he did know was that the forbidden spell had created a new core for him—a human core.
In this world, humans used mana to strengthen their cores and advance through mage ranks:
Dormant → Awakened → Ascended → Saint, and so on.
Dragons also possessed cores, but theirs were vastly greater than those of puny humans. Once, Val—the Dragon Prince—had held a core equivalent to a Saint-rank human. Now, suddenly reduced to an Awakened core, he felt nothing but fury.
"Awakened," Val spat, sitting on the floor with his back against the cold stone. "In my kingdom, this level of mana wouldn't be enough to light a candle. Here, they call it 'talent.' Pathetic."
In this week of loneliness—better than going mad—Kael, as he was once known on Earth, had finally accepted his role as an arrogant dragon prince.
Sometimes, he even roared in his sleep and declared his "territory," which he now found completely normal.
I'm mad, he thought.
He looked into a cracked mirror propped against a stack of books. The face staring back was a mess—black hair matted with soot, a jawline too sharp for his age, and eyes that were a deep, unsettling violet. He looked like a tragic protagonist from a low-budget opera.
In this world, magic was everything. Mundane humans were like grass—easily stepped on, easily mowed down. He was a rare blade of grass, perhaps, but grass nonetheless. He had sacrificed 99% of his power to survive, and now he was stuck in a "Time Skip" mode he hadn't expected.
In the original novel, The Era of Heroes, the protagonist Leon had spent this entire month in a coma, his body mutating as it absorbed the Dragon Prince's heart. By the time Leon woke up, the Royal Academy selections were already starting, and the main cast was already in place.
"I don't know where the Hero is. I don't know where the others are," Val muttered, chewing the last of the meat. "I'm blind… the plot's moving without me."
He grabbed a newspaper and began to read, his eyes moving with unnatural speed. He needed to track the events of the Kingdom.
He couldn't stay in the shadows forever.
If danger was inevitable, then he'd better be the kind of danger that others feared first.
If he was going to grow in the dark, he needed to know where the shadows were deepest.
He flipped through pages of tax hikes and propaganda about the "Heroic Slayers." Then, his gaze fell on a small headline on the back page.
His eyes widened. The "System" let out a sharp ping of warning.
[Warning: Heart Rate 178 BPM]
[Sync Rate: 85% - Danger!]
The headline read:
"TREASON AT THE BORDER: MARQUIS FALCONER FOUND GUILTY. EXECUTION CARRIED OUT BY HANGING. SURVIVING DAUGHTER TO BE SOLD AT THE SIN-STALLS AUCTION TONIGHT."
"Fuck," Val whispered, his voice trembling—not with fear, but with a sudden, sharp realization.
"She is here. Now?"