The two preparatory students

Li Lin deftly moved his mouse and tapped his keyboard, controlling the rogue on his screen as he pulled the monsters together to execute them.

The story mission abruptly ended, quickly giving way to a cinematic cutscene. By coincidence, "Descendants of the Dragon" was playing in the internet café's noisy main hall, its music faintly filtering through the wall into their private room.

Watching the black dragon twist its enormous body and command earth elements to destroy the land, he suddenly turned to his childhood friend with a grave expression.

"Xia Mi, there's something I've been thinking about for a long time. Do you think I could actually be a 'descendant of the dragon'?"

Xia Mi, who was sitting beside him doing her summer homework, answered offhandedly.

"Didn't our advisor from Cassel College already explain that? We Mixed-Bloods are born with dragon genes..."

"No, I mean... maybe my bloodline comes from Deathwing, lord of the Black Dragonflight, the Earth-Warder, the great Neltharion."

He had barely finished speaking when an eraser struck his forehead.

"You haven't even awakened your Word Spirit yet. Quit muttering that nonsense!"

"I'm praying, aren't I? The 3E Exam is next week, but my bloodline assessment still hasn't come back. I don't want to go all the way to the main campus in the United States, awaken some garbage Word Spirit, and get stuck with the lowest scholarship."

At that, the girl merely looked immensely pleased with herself, then held out her hand for the eraser.

"Relax. My bloodline assessment came back A-Rank, you know~ Whatever Word Spirit I awaken is bound to be amazing. There's still time for you to become my lackey, Toppasa L. Lee. When yours truly becomes rich and famous, you'll be a distinguished founding supporter..."

She rattled on with nonsense that Li Lin ignored completely.

Her slender, delicate hand opened beneath the light, as white and lovely as an orchid.

Following that slim wrist upward, his gaze immediately reached a delicate, youthful face whose beauty not even a plain school uniform could suppress.

No matter how many times he saw her, Li Lin had to admit that Xia Mi was a girl of flawless beauty.

Like a masterpiece that exhausted every ounce of an artist's skill, she possessed a magnificent splendor and delicate refinement that seemed to bring all the world's beautiful fantasies to life. No one could say a bad word about that face. She looked like an enchantress who had stepped out of a painting, so beautiful that she seemed utterly out of place in the internet café.

If there was one thing that could qualify as a flaw...

It was probably that she had a mouth.

After ten straight years of Xia Mi's influence, along with the intertwined memories of two lives that had merged throughout his childhood, even Li Lin-a Bender his friends in his previous life had described as quiet and reserved-had been cured of his expressionless face and bottled-up cheekiness.

After listening to Xia Mi's boasting,

Li Lin secretly rejoiced that his Word Spirit now had some hope. He placed the eraser in her hand, then turned back to fiddle with his well-worn mouse and keyboard, polished shiny from use.

Many years had passed since Xia Mi had shoved Li Lin into the world of Mixed-Bloods. Even now, concepts such as the dragon race, Cassel College, and its preparatory program-and even this planet covered in networks, steel, and concrete-still gave him a disorienting sense of unreality.

It felt as though, just a moment ago, he had still been the blind-born legitimate son of the Beifong family, a spirited fourteen-year-old following the current Avatar, an airbender, into the Fire Nation to stop Ozai's plot.

Yet in the blink of an eye, he had become a child in a Beijing orphanage, raised by a group of kindhearted men and women. Not only had he gained a pair of eyes that could see clearly, he had also received the name Li Lin.

Just as Li Lin was working hard to fit into this world, preparing to spend six orderly years in elementary school, get into a good secondary school and a good university, then return to repay the orphanage once he had built a successful career...

Xia Mi's arrival had derailed all his plans.

He clearly remembered that morning in first grade. Lemon-yellow sunlight drifted across the desks, curtains stirred in the cold breeze, and a short-haired little girl dozed with her head resting on a textbook.

Li Lin noticed their homeroom teacher's displeased gaze and was about to warn his deskmate.

But the moment he looked at Xia Mi, he froze.

An enormous Windows pop-up framed Xia Mi's entire head, rapidly filling with Chinese characters in a Fangsong font:

[Dragon-Slaying Binding System activating... activation successful!]

[The system has automatically bound to the ■■-Blood with the highest bloodline rank near the host.]

[After binding, whenever the target demonstrates progress, if the host is weaker than the target in that area, the host will automatically be synchronized to an equivalent level...]

Before Li Lin could make sense of this mysterious Dragon-Slaying Binding System, the homeroom teacher called on Xia Mi, fixing her with a hostile look.

"Xia Mi, where had we gotten to in the lesson?"

Determined to teach this child a lesson for daring to sleep through Chinese class in the very first week of school, the teacher at the front put on her sternest expression.

Li Lin was instinctively about to pass over his open textbook and point out "Quiet Night Thoughts." To his surprise, Xia Mi not only recited the poem without hesitation, but also spoke confidently to the whole class about the life of the Green Lotus Recluse, as though she had met him herself.

Immediately afterward, a jumble of historical documents flooded into Li Lin's mind out of nowhere, leaving him staring blankly at the flashing system pop-up before him.

[Xia Mi has shown off her "pre-class preparation." You have completely mastered "First-grade Chinese, Volume One." You have gained a profound understanding of Li Bai's historical image and life.]

In the days that followed, as Xia Mi gradually revealed her absurd talents in every area,

Li Lin's life also went careening off in a direction he could never have predicted.

He suddenly gained a photographic memory, physical abilities far beyond those of his peers, and a head that would abruptly fill with everything he needed for an exam just before he took it.

That life continued until the summer after his school entrance exams, when an old Italian man who called himself the admissions director for Cassel College's preparatory program brought Xia Mi to find Li Lin at the orphanage.

Then, without any say in the matter, Li Lin was stripped of his status as a human. After a series of revelations that overturned his entire worldview-the Black King's Reign, the Rebellion of the Kings, the Rise of the Mixed-Bloods, and more-

He accepted reality.

First, Xia Mi was a Mixed-Blood.

Second, thanks to this damned Dragon-Slaying Binding System, he, an ordinary human, had been labeled a Mixed-Blood too.

For the next several years, Li Lin's job was to disguise himself as a little dragon-person as convincingly as possible.

Although the system's help brought both his physical abilities and his capacity to learn close to Xia Mi's,

He had neither horns nor a tail, nor even the signature Golden Eyes. However he looked at it, he felt certain he would be exposed someday.

Sure enough, during the summer after the second semester of his first year in high school, the preparatory students underwent their first bloodline assessment.

Li Lin's assessed rank was [?].

Blood tests could find only an exceedingly faint trace of dragon genes in his body.

Fortunately, Mixed-Bloods were always arrogant. Once they realized that neither Word Spirit: Emperor nor Word Spirit: Bloodline Jero had any effect on Li Lin,

They preferred to believe he might be a once-in-a-century S-Rank rather than accept that he was an ordinary human.

Especially with so many of Li Lin's extraordinary feats to support their theory, their suspicions only hardened into conviction.

The teachers who had traveled all the way to China promptly reported his unusual situation to the principal back at the main campus.

Since Xia Mi was also a promising student who had received an A-Rank assessment in this year's preparatory class, a special 3E Exam had been arranged for the two of them.

Fortunately, Xia Mi and Li Lin would be taking the exam together.

With the Dragon-Slaying Binding System, perhaps Xia Mi's awakening of her bloodline and Word Spirit during the exam would actually refine the dragon blood inside Li Lin along the way.

Thinking about the "thirty-six-thousand-dollar annual scholarship" their advisor kept mentioning every day, Li Lin could not help feeling nervous.

If the system failed this time and the college discovered that he was merely an ordinary human, they would probably erase his memories and send him home. That enormous scholarship would be out of his reach forever.

If he was lucky, they might consider keeping him on probation or even create an entirely new bloodline rank just for him. But he certainly would not qualify for a scholarship worth more than two hundred thousand yuan a year...

Bloop, bloop... a string of bubbling notification sounds interrupted the game's narration.

Li Lin looked at the PowerPoint window that had suddenly appeared on his screen, along with the illustrated mission speedrun guides. The college secretary, Norma, had hacked into the internet café's computer again, urging him to finish his game quickly, then pack his belongings with Xia Mi for tomorrow's flight.