A Beautiful Day?

"..." Zheng Yichen gave the little girl, who had been stroking his scales since the moment they met, a helpless look. Seriously, wasn't a cute little girl like her supposed to adore giant stuffed animals?

He had gone to a pool to look at his reflection. Perhaps because he wasn't fully grown, he wasn't exactly ferocious, but he wasn't much to look at either. He definitely wasn't the sort of creature children liked!

There it was again!

Out of the corner of his eye, Zheng Yichen once more caught sight of mottled, blood-red marks on the little girl's arm after she removed her glove. He rubbed his eyes, but when he looked again, there was nothing there. He might have dismissed it as an illusion if it had happened once, but this was the second time.

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

They really existed, yet the harder he focused, the harder they were to see... The marks gave Zheng Yichen a strange feeling. Dangerous? Not quite. Harmless? They somehow seemed terrifyingly dangerous.

Seeing the confusion in Zheng Yichen's eyes, the little girl shook her head slightly and said nothing more. Until they could communicate, there was no point in saying anything.

What should I do now? Bored, Zheng Yichen sprawled lazily 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 when more than two hundred fully armed people had surrounded him? What puzzled Zheng Yichen even more was why the town was now completely deserted.

While he lay there in a daze, the little girl kept busy. She circled him twice, then stopped beside his left claw where it rested on the ground. Staring at the wound on his foreleg, she pressed one slender finger against it without hesitation!

"..." What was that for?

The slight sting made Zheng Yichen lift his head. His dragon body was no less sensitive to touch than a human one, though it could also endure pain well. Even when her finger broke the thin layer of newly healed skin over his wound, it felt no worse than a mosquito bite.

The little girl stared absently at the drop of dragon blood on her fingertip. Then she noticed Zheng Yichen watching and, for the first time, gave him a sweet smile. His heart had only just begun to melt when what she did next stopped it cold.

She put her bloodstained finger into 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's something seriously strange about this little girl!

"What a... beautiful day." The girl withdrew her finger from her mouth and glanced again at Zheng Yichen's wound. Thanks to the medicine, he was still healing rapidly. Even his broken scales had partly regrown overnight. Not even an adult dragon necessarily had that kind of regenerative power.

Broken skin was one thing; a dragon's regenerative power could heal it quickly. Scales, though, took much longer to grow back.

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

For now, she needed to solve their communication problem. That could wait until the dragon fell asleep. She had watched the entire time Zheng Yichen was besieged, so she had seen what his powers could do—especially the feat she found most striking: catching magic with his bare hands.

A spell could be dispersed, absorbed, redirected, or even countered. But instances of someone catching one barehanded were rare, and instances of someone then controlling it "physically" were rarer still!

It was magic, not a thrown weapon.

After Zheng Yichen caught that Flame Burst Fireball, he hadn't used any power related to magic. He had simply closed his claws around it and compressed the fireball, strengthening it by no small amount for an enhanced Flame Burst.

How it worked... remained unclear.

What she had observed was that once Zheng Yichen caught the Flame Burst Fireball, his claws seemed to separate it from everything else. It was a peculiar, one-way barrier: things outside could still make contact with the fireball, but anything that entered could not leave.

More precisely, it was... theft on a higher, nonphysical level!

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 slightly would not have failed. Her later interference had succeeded, but only after Zheng Yichen threw it back out.

Once he threw it, the Flame Burst Fireball was as though it had been cast anew, with no connection whatsoever to its original caster. Without that connection, an unleashed spell should have been easier to interfere with.

Yet although she had intended to reduce the Flame Burst's power by roughly five percent, she had actually reduced it by less than two.

Was this unusual power an innate ability, or something else? The little girl tapped Zheng Yichen's claw as she pondered. The Dragon Race was mighty, but in some respects dragons were almost equal to everyone else. Innate abilities were one of those respects.

Such abilities were curious things, and they came in many forms. Some people, for instance, were born with an extra boost when casting spells of a particular element. That was a common sort of gift, known as elemental affinity. Rarer gifts included the ability to communicate with animals.

Whether gifts like that were good or bad depended on how you looked at them... Druids could communicate with animals too.

Most innate abilities let their owners reach greater heights in a particular field. But she had never seen one as unusual as Zheng Yichen's. His "gift" seemed tied not only to his body, but also closely to his soul. Otherwise, her interference with the Flame Burst Fireball would not have fallen so far short of its intended effect.

Noticing the little girl's gaze growing increasingly dangerous, Zheng Yichen instinctively shifted away. No matter how he looked at it, she had the eyes of someone planning to dissect him!

Hehe~ Happy Dragon Boat Festival, everyone! Though I suspect plenty of you are like me today: still sitting around with nothing to do.