As the hunters planned their next move, Xingyan finally put aside his mining for a change and returned to the surface after a long absence.
He had no idea how much trouble his actions were causing the hunters. Of all the places where Kushala Daora and Rusty Steel Dragon had fought, the only place he couldn't reach was the sea. Everywhere else with even a trace of a Kushala Daora scale or scent, Xingyan had tracked down and devoured clean.
Time was short, the task was pressing, and he moved fast and worked efficiently. When it came to energy recovery, Xingyan was a professional.
In a sense, the hunters' slow progress with their investigation owed a lot to Xingyan's efforts. After breaking his tail, he'd become even more elusive—which was to say, he spent all day underground, looking for ore to eat.
The Mist Weaver.
Ahem. In any case, the hunters hadn't spotted Xingyan for a long time, so they were still using Glavenus's normal habits to predict his movements. At least, a normal Glavenus wouldn't spend all day gnawing on anything and everything like some dragon that ate rocks—not even ore.
And so they got things even more wrong.
But investigation always involved making guesses and testing them, and there were bound to be blind spots... The Commander and the scholars' troubles had little to do with the Sword Master. His nickname made it clear that fighting was the only thing he excelled at, so he didn't have to worry about too much. He only needed to know when to go where and what to kill.
Sound familiar?
This was happening all over the Great Sand Sea right now! You could be next!
—From the Love Dragon Broadcast.
Ahem. In any case, the Sword Master led a very regular life: early to bed and early to rise, meat at every meal, and never turning down a drink. When he had nothing better to do, he also offered the other hunters in the group pointers on their weapon techniques.
Though he was currently using a Female Fire Dragon Long Sword, the Sword Master was actually proficient with a wide range of weapons, including the Great Sword. Otherwise, he wouldn't have earned his nickname.
With his own adventures and hunting career behind him, the Sword Master had thought there was nothing in the world left to trouble him. He wouldn't even have been afraid to face an Elder Dragon.
But now, he was genuinely stumped.
He felt like a dragon was watching him. Yes, a dragon—the strange Glavenus.
After more than half a year, the creature had appeared before the hunters again. This time, though, it didn't ignore them like it had in the past. Instead, it sat down somewhere with a clear view and stared at the hunters from a distance—or, to be precise, it stared at him?!
As a pure combat-focused hunter, the Sword Master trusted his instincts. Especially when it came to the feeling of being watched by someone—or rather, by a dragon. It made his skin crawl and left him deeply uncomfortable.
It appeared at sunrise and vanished at sunset. When he went indoors, it left; when he went outside, it showed up. This Glavenus was frighteningly strange!!
Was this really a Glavenus?!
The Sword Master had been assigned to protect scholars investigating monsters before. He'd never thought there was anything wrong with those missions. All he had to do was follow the scholars and watch them sneak around, hiding in all sorts of corners and places to observe monsters feeding, mating, and the like.
But now, for the first time, he understood how it felt to be a monster stalked and observed by scholars. It wasn't his imagination: he really felt like that Glavenus was the scholar, and he was the monster under observation.
In fact, um, he was right.
Xingyan really was watching him, especially when the Sword Master was teaching the other hunters.
Improvements to [Strength] came purely from eating, but after racking his brains, Xingyan could only think of learning from hunters to improve his [Technique]. After all, the other dragons' fighting styles had little to do with skill.
And Glavenus was an outlier among dragons. It had a Sword Tail shaped like a Great Sword and was accustomed to using it to slash and cleave in battle, making it the perfect candidate to learn swordsmanship from hunters.
He was straight-up stealing techniques. Xingyan had no intention of working for the hunters, helping them hunt other dragons to show goodwill, and then asking them to teach him. If anything, simply not attacking them was already a gesture of goodwill.
He would never give the hunters the impression that he could be tamed, like an Aptonoth or a Popo.
He'd already decided how to deal with the hunters who came to the New World: he wouldn't hunt them as enemies, but he wouldn't get close enough to be friends, either.
Xingyan had no intention of living alongside the hunters. Not only was his path of evolution destined to keep him from settling in one place—he had to keep challenging powerful dragons—but he also didn't trust humans.
Having once been human himself, Xingyan knew all the better just how bad some people could be.
That was completely different from accepting the Detel Tribe's allegiance. The minds of humans were far more complex than those of the simple-minded Beastmen Race like the Grimalkyne.
Dragons had extremely long lifespans. Even if the humans and Xingyan got along well for now, what would happen after they died? What about a hundred years from now? What if their descendants changed their attitude?
In his previous life, Xingyan had played a game called Final Fantasy XIV. One of its story arcs was about a war between humans and dragons. The dragons and humans had enjoyed two hundred years of peace, but after the humans who had first made peace with the dragons and their children died, time passed, and later generations betrayed the dragons out of greed for their power. That was how the thousand-year war between humans and dragons began.
Up to that point, it was all fine. What Xingyan couldn't understand at the time was that, as the game's story progressed, the humans and dragons eventually reconciled a thousand years later and went back to living happily together. That was the part he couldn't understand.
Seriously, they were that carefree? They just went back to living happily together? With the dragons' long lifespans, they'd still be alive after this generation of humans died. So what if, two hundred years later, a new generation of humans stabbed them in the back again? Would they have to fight for another thousand years?
Did they never learn their lesson?
You'd think that after getting burned, they'd learn from the experience. In Xingyan's view, even if the dragons ended their war with humanity, they should have drawn a clear boundary between their lives and human lives. The best way to prevent crime was to avoid giving people the opportunity to commit it.
As for himself, Xingyan knew what the current Fifth Fleet and the fleets that would come to the New World in the future were like. They loved nature and life, and cared about preserving ecological balance. But he also knew that the Hunter's Guild had Guild Knights, whose job was to arrest or execute hunters who committed crimes, including but not limited to poaching.
As time passed, the Kingdom and the Guild would surely ramp up their development of the New World, eventually establishing a new human nation here. And by then, all kinds of people would inevitably arrive.
Xingyan had no interest in using himself to test human nature. After all, he couldn't be sure how the hunters would view him in the future—especially once they discovered that he would keep challenging and hunting Elder Dragons. Would they consider him an unstable threat...?
He'd just steal their techniques. That was all.
He wanted to learn how to channel strength—or Life Energy—into a blade like the hunters did, increasing its sharpness and hardness. That was better than relying solely on his body's natural strength, as he did now when performing Tail Bite Great Spin.
If he could learn the hunters' Great Sword techniques in the process, and charge up attacks with his Sword Tail, that would be even better.
It was like turning one unit of strength into ten units of damage. If he mastered that technique, even an Elder Dragon wouldn't be able to ignore Xingyan's blows.
These weren't little knives compared to a monster's size, like the weapons hunters used. This was a Great Sword weighing over thirty tons and more than twelve meters long!
Um, former Great Sword.
"His tail's broken..."
Standing beside the Sword Master, the Commander had come over after hearing the news. He gazed at the Glavenus standing on a distant cliff. Even from this far away, he could see Xingyan's broken tail swinging behind him.
"Those two Kushala Daora must have done it, right?" The Leader rubbed his chin. "That poor little guy looks pretty badly hurt. He still hasn't regrown his tail."
"The 'little guy' you're talking about is already bigger than every Glavenus I've ever recorded, Leader," the scholar who'd been urgently summoned said helplessly.
"Ahaha, I know, I know, but he's still little. When we first saw him last year, he was just a hatchling," the Leader said with a hearty laugh.
"So what exactly is it trying to do?" a hunter asked. He'd come today to ask the Sword Master for advice on using the Great Sword, but hadn't expected to encounter such a strange sight.
"I suspect it's watching us," the Sword Master said gravely, looking at the scholar beside him. "The way you watch monsters."
"Like we do?" The scholar's eyes widened in surprise. "You mean this monster is gathering information about us?"
"That can't be possible, can it? If it is—can we even call it a monster?" the hunter from earlier blurted out.
"Don't jump to conclusions, Kaluo." The Leader patted the hunter on the shoulder. "Nature is full of mysteries we can't explain. Isn't solving those mysteries why we sailed here in the first place?"
"Yes, but—but—" Kaluo stammered, pointing at Xingyan. "Sorry, so what should we do now?"
"Why not go over and take a look?" To the group's surprise, the Leader spoke in a solemn voice. "Standing here and making wild guesses won't solve anything. Yano and I have been up close with this little guy before, and he didn't hurt us then. So I think he's different from ordinary monsters."
As far as the Leader was concerned, Xingyan was apparently a little guy, no matter what.
"Agreed. Let's go take a look together," the Commander said. "Remember to bring your weapons."
The hunters chosen for the Research Commission were all highly capable. As long as they weren't facing an Elder Dragon, ordinary monsters weren't enough to send them running for their lives.
Standing atop the cliff, Xingyan knew the hunters had spotted him long ago. What he hadn't expected was that, after a crowd of them stared in his direction for a while, they'd all started walking toward him.
With no trees in the way, the Great Sand Sea was generally quite open, especially near the coastline.
When the hunters had come within about fifty meters, Xingyan rose from his crouch and turned to face them, letting out a warning roar to tell them not to come any closer.
The Leader and the others understood the signal and stopped where they were. Fortunately, with their eyesight and tools like telescopes, the hunters could still see Xingyan clearly from a distance.
He was a pretty big fellow, after all.
"His injuries are severe. It's not just his broken tail; the plates on his body look all jumbled too... Hmm, there seem to be two layers? Some of the plates don't seem to cover his lower body... Ah! Yes, there are two layers. The upper plates are blue-green, while the lower ones are dark red with blue-green mixed in. Fascinating. What caused the difference in color? Different mineral intake? But a Glavenus's plates shouldn't be affected by minerals..."
Fifty meters was already quite close. From the moment he'd first seen Xingyan, the scholar had pressed a telescope to his eyes and started observing him carefully, muttering away the whole time.
"Bent? Bent! Calm down!" The Commander had to smack the scholar hard on the back before he came back to his senses.
"Ah, sorry. I got a little too excited." Adjusting his glasses, Bent said enthusiastically, "This Glavenus has so many unusual traits. He'd make a great research subject."
"I understand, but he's come this close and still hasn't attacked... Hmm, and he hasn't turned and left like he did before. Is there something he wants to tell us?" As expected of the Commander, his imagination ran wild. He'd already begun to wonder whether the Glavenus had come to deliver a message.
"It is pretty strange," the scholar agreed. "A Glavenus's Sword Tail is irreplaceably important to it. So after losing it, a Glavenus usually reforges it as quickly as possible. That's the only way to keep itself safe."
"If the two Kushala Daora broke the little guy's Sword Tail, that means he hasn't regrown it even though six months have passed... Yet his plates still look intact," the Leader said, thinking quickly for once. "I don't think his plates would have come through a battle that broke his tail completely unharmed. So he chose to restore his plates first?"
"And he has two layers of plates," the scholar Bent added. "Could he have come here because he wants to ask us for help?"
Bent and the Commander looked at each other. Together, they shouted a single word.
"ORE!!"
Before you continue