In an old residential building in Beijing, the air was thick with mist.
Naga emerged from the bathroom, drying her wet hair as she casually slipped into a pink bathrobe and collapsed into her gaming chair.
StarCraft, launch!
She logged into the game with practiced ease. In her QQ list, the icons for "Mingming" and "Lao Tang" were both gray. Her mouse hovered over "World's Cutest Fenrir," and she typed: "Want to play StarCraft?"
"Sure," Fenrir replied succinctly. "But wait a bit. This match is about to end."
"I'll wait for you." Naga hit Enter.
While waiting, she idly opened Tieba. Her fingers scrolled the mouse wheel as her gaze lazily swept over post after post. Suddenly, her fingers stopped.
A glaring word leaped out from the screen—dragon.
She clicked into the post before even reading the title. A photograph filled the entire screen:
On a river beneath torrential rain, muddy waves surged toward the sky as a savage black shadow tore through the gloomy heavens. The instant its long, bone-spiked tail swept across a helicopter, the explosion bloomed like a crimson lotus.
The photograph was somewhat blurry, yet its savage beauty struck her head-on. A dragon's head appeared and vanished amid the curtain of rain, Bone Wings pierced the clouds, and the entire image brimmed with motion and destruction.
Naga's eyes sharpened abruptly. She unconsciously sat upright and leaned forward slightly.
Below the image was the poster's analysis, claiming that this might be the Kui Dragon from ancient legends.
"Keep making things up. It's obviously photoshopped. How could dragons exist in this world?" someone mocked in the comments.
"It's real! Two fellow hikers and I saw it with our own eyes, near the Yangtze Three Gorges," the original poster argued.
"What era is this? You're still making up stories