Cursed? What?

In the six months since he had crossed over, he had spent the first two months lying awake night after night. Why? He wanted to play on a computer! He really wanted to play on a computer! More than anything, he wanted to play on a computer! A traveler without a computer to play on was going to die!

But there was no chance of that happening.

His fingers trembled as they touched the familiar keyboard. Zheng Yichen opened a game on the desktop, only to find, to his disappointment, that it was stuck on an endless loading screen. The games that did load were ones he knew inside out. He had already mastered everything in them.

As for online games, not a single one would open!

"What's a computer?"

"Well, how do I explain it..." Zheng Yichen scratched his cheek. How was he supposed to explain a computer to someone from another world? He knew how to use one and play on one, but explaining it was another matter. "I'm just a user."

"Oh." The little girl nodded calmly, staring at the computer as Zheng Yichen kept working it. What a curious thing...

After losing himself in it for a while, Zheng Yichen remembered that an unfamiliar and rather strange little girl was beside him. He gave up on playing any longer. This was only a dream, after all. "What do you want?"

They had been unable to communicate before. Now that they could, there were things he needed to clear up.

"I just wanted to confirm a few things." The little girl studied Zheng Yichen for a moment before saying slowly, "You're very special."

"..." As someone who had crossed over, wasn't he special to begin with? What he had crossed over into was pretty unusual too. He had popped out of a rock, though unfortunately he was a dragon, not a monkey.

"Entering your dreams is troublesome, so from now on, you need to learn the Common Tongue."

"From elementary school through university, I tried to learn a foreign language. I failed." Zheng Yichen rubbed his head. Learning a new language? He thought of how he had failed to do it in all those years. Before crossing over, he had kept hearing about people who taught themselves English in a few months. He knew he just wasn't cut out for foreign languages.

"That's all right. I'll put the Common Tongue into your head." A point of light appeared on the little girl's fingertip. "Don't resist."

"...That's a tall order," Zheng Yichen said uneasily. What if it was something that could control him?

"Then read it yourself." The light on her fingertip turned into a black-covered book. "As long as your mind can bear it, you can stay in the dream until you've learned it all."

"Have mercy..." Despite his words, Zheng Yichen took the black-covered book she offered. It was much like the Primer he had used in elementary school, with a Chinese equivalent written above every character of the Common Script.

Huh? What was going on? Since when was my brain this sharp? After all the trouble he had suffered from being unable to communicate, Zheng Yichen settled down and read several pages. When he tried to recall them, it seemed he had remembered... every single thing he had seen!

Not a word forgotten. Holy crap, this is incredible! If I'd had a memory like this before crossing over, I could've at least become a high-level translator, no matter how badly things went for me.

And so Zheng Yichen lost himself completely in this "easy-to-learn" book. It wasn't thick, but once he reached the halfway point, no matter how many pages he turned, its thickness stayed evenly divided.

While he was too absorbed in studying to stop, the little girl followed his earlier example and sat down at the computer. Because it was a dream and Zheng Yichen's memories of it only went so far, much of the software would not run. Some of it did, though...

"Ah~" A sudden, breathy moan beside him snapped Zheng Yichen out of his thoughts. Hey, wait. That sound couldn't be...

He whipped his head around. Sure enough, something indecent was playing on the computer. Oh God! How had she found that!?

"Uh! This—kids can't watch this!" Zheng Yichen hurriedly pressed a button on the computer tower to shut it down, then cried out in a fluster.

Why?

The little girl looked up at Zheng Yichen. She said nothing, but the displeasure in her eyes asked the question clearly enough.

"You're still little."

"I'm twelve hundred years old."

"What!?" Zheng Yichen's eyebrows twitched. He suddenly felt he might have underestimated the world he had crossed into. He glanced around, pulled open the computer desk drawer, and took out the headphones inside. After putting them on the little girl, he planned to leave his bedroom and study in the living room.

But when he opened the bedroom door, he saw nothing but darkness beyond it. He promptly shut the door again. Ah, best not to go poking around in darkness that looked so dangerous.

Every so often, he glanced at the little girl staring at the computer. His divided attention cut his study efficiency by a full fifty percent... Even so, as time passed, the book that had seemed impossible to finish gradually grew thinner. The instant he turned the last page, the little girl took off her headphones.

"..." Perhaps he was imagining it, but Zheng Yichen thought her cheeks looked a little flushed now... Ignoring his gaze, she vanished from the dream without a word.

Zheng Yichen stood there in a daze. Um... if she was leaving that quickly, shouldn't she at least have told him how to get out?

Was he supposed to just think about waking up? The moment he did, everything went black. When he opened his eyes again, he was back in his dragon body. He looked down at his claws. Hm, waking up that way was certainly convenient. But it seemed a dream that vivid came at a price.

He lacked the refreshed feeling he usually had after a night's sleep. There was also new knowledge in his head: the Common Tongue he had learned in the dream.

"I..." Zheng Yichen realized he was still speaking Chinese. He shook his head and switched, somewhat awkwardly, to the Common Tongue he had learned so quickly through the little girl's unusual method. "Can you understand me?"

"Yes." The little girl rubbed her cheek against Zheng Yichen's hand as she answered. The inexplicable affection still left him at a loss. It had come so suddenly, and surely his appearance couldn't attract a soft, delicate little creature like her?

Even if she claimed to be twelve hundred years old.

"What do you really want? I don't think there's anything about me that would attract you," Zheng Yichen asked, puzzled.

"Everything about you attracts me." The little girl shook her head slightly and stared straight at him. "A forbidden thing that should never have existed. A cursed dragon."

"...What are you talking about? I'm cursed?"