A Beautiful Day?

"..." Zheng Yichen gave the little girl an exasperated look. She had been reaching out to touch his scales ever since they met. Shouldn't a sweet little girl like her be obsessed with giant stuffed animals instead?

He had found a pond and checked his reflection. Maybe it was because he wasn't fully grown, but he didn't look ferocious. He wasn't exactly beautiful, either. Definitely not the sort of thing children liked!

There it was again!

For the second time, he caught a glimpse of mottled, blood-red marks on the little girl's arm after she took off her glove. Zheng Yichen rubbed his eyes, but when he looked again, there was nothing there. Once could have been an illusion. Twice?

"You can see it?" The little girl noticed his gaze and gently waved her hand in front of him. As her arm moved, the mottled red marks appeared again. It wasn't an illusion!

They were real, yet the harder he focused, the harder they were to see. The marks gave Zheng Yichen a strange feeling. Were they dangerous? Not quite. Harmless? They somehow seemed extremely dangerous.

Seeing his puzzled expression, the little girl shook her head and said no more. Until they could understand each other, there was no point in talking.

What should I do now? Bored, Zheng Yichen sprawled on the ground. After a night's rest, the wounds on his limbs hadn't fully healed, but they no longer hindered his movements.

The mysterious little girl must have brought him here. But how had she managed it while he was surrounded by more than two hundred fully armed people? What puzzled him even more was why the town was completely deserted.

While he lay there idly lost in thought, the little girl circled him twice. She stopped beside his left claw, which rested on the ground, and stared at the wound on his foreleg. Then, without hesitation, she pressed a slender finger against it!

"..." What are you doing?

The slight sting made Zheng Yichen raise his head. His dragon body was no less sensitive than a human one, though his tolerance for pain was much higher. Even when her touch broke the thin layer of newly healed skin, it felt no worse than a mosquito bite.

The little girl stared blankly at the drop of dragon blood on her finger. Then she noticed Zheng Yichen watching her and, for the first time, gave him a sweet smile. His heart had barely begun to melt when what she did next put an end to that.

She put the bloodstained finger in her mouth. Worse, she looked faintly enraptured, like a child tasting the most delicious candy in the world.

In Zheng Yichen's eyes, her sweet smile gradually twisted into something else. The sudden change made him blink hard. All right, that felt like another illusion.

There was something seriously strange about this little girl!

"What a... beautiful day." The little girl took her finger out of her mouth and glanced at Zheng Yichen's wound again. Thanks to the medicine, it was still healing rapidly. Even his broken scales had partly regrown overnight. Not every adult dragon could recover that quickly.

Broken skin was one thing; a dragon's healing ability could mend it quickly. Scales took much longer to grow back.

No Dragon Aura, no inherited memories, and he could even ignore the dangerous nature of her body... A faint possibility occurred to the little girl, though she would need to confirm it.

For now, she needed to solve their communication problem. She could deal with that once the dragon fell asleep. She had watched while Zheng Yichen was surrounded and attacked, so she knew something about the nature of his powers. Most striking of all was the way he had grabbed magic with his bare hand.

A spell could be dispersed, absorbed, redirected, or even countered. But very few people could catch one barehanded, much less exert "physical" control over it afterward!

It was magic, not a weapon an enemy had thrown.

After Zheng Yichen caught that Flame Burst Fireball, he hadn't used any magic-related power. He had simply closed his claws around it, physically compressing and strengthening it. The resulting increase in power was considerable, even for an enhanced Flame Burst.

How it worked... she didn't know yet.

What she had observed was that, once Zheng Yichen caught the Flame Burst Fireball, his claws seemed to isolate it behind some kind of barrier. It was a peculiar, one-way barrier: things outside could still interact with the fireball, but anything that went in could not come out.

More precisely, it was... a higher-order theft that wasn't physical at all!

He had stolen the very essence of the Flame Burst Fireball, severing its connection to both its caster and the world itself!

Otherwise, when the sight had piqued her interest, her attempt to interfere with the fireball a little would not have failed. She had managed to interfere with it later, but only after Zheng Yichen threw it again.

Once he threw it, the Flame Burst Fireball behaved like a newly cast spell, with no connection to its original caster. Without that connection, a released spell should have been easier to interfere with.

Yet she had tried to reduce the Flame Burst's power by about five percent, and had achieved less than two.

Such a peculiar power... Was it an innate ability, or something else? The little girl tapped Zheng Yichen's claw as she considered it. Powerful as the Dragon Race was, dragons stood on nearly equal footing with everyone else in certain respects. Innate abilities were one of them.

The nature of those abilities was strange, and the forms they took were varied. Some people, for instance, were born with an extra boost when casting spells of a particular element. That was a common kind of ability, known as elemental affinity. Rarer ones included the ability to communicate with animals.

But whether that sort of ability was valuable depended on the circumstances... Druids could communicate with animals too.

Most innate abilities helped their owners achieve more in a particular field. But she had never seen one as unusual as Zheng Yichen's. His "ability" seemed tied not only to his body but also to his soul. Otherwise, her attempt to interfere with the Flame Burst Fireball would not have been weakened.

Zheng Yichen noticed the increasingly dangerous look in the little girl's eyes and instinctively edged away. No matter how he looked at it, she seemed to be thinking of dissecting him!

Heh heh~ Happy Dragon Boat Festival, everyone! Though I suspect plenty of you, like me, will spend the day doing nothing much.