Dragon Raja: Lu Mingfei Returns from Elden Ring
Author: Water and Salt
Synopsis:
As the king of the Lands Between, a god who commanded the Golden Order, Lu Mingfei sat upon the lofty throne at the roots of the Erdtree, yet often found himself filled with regret.
Had he really made the right choice back then? Perhaps he could have become the Dark Moon Witch's consort and embraced the stars;
perhaps he should have tried harder to mend the flaws in the Order completely, rather than hastily restoring the Elden Ring;
perhaps he could have accepted that frenzied blessing beneath Leyndell and saved that girl...
The Greater Will would never allow a second Marika to emerge. All Lu Mingfei could do was continue growing older as the Age of Fracture wore on, until one day...
Lu Mingfei returned to Earth, to the tender age of eighteen.
A strange boy who brought dreams with him and Cassell College, whose members called themselves elite dragon slayers, came looking for him. This time, Lu Mingfei would see his own will through, bestowing salvation, destruction, and destiny by a king's decree. Never again would he be a god's puppet. Never again would he permit senseless sacrifice and tragedy.
Chapter 1: Return
Fallen leaves carried the news: beyond the fog, in our homeland, the Lands Between, the Tarnished had become Elden Lord.
Beneath the towering Erdtree stood the throne of the Lands Between, the seat of the Elden Lord. A hundred years of the Age of Fracture had passed since the Tarnished repaired the Elden Ring.
Lu Mingfei sat upon his throne, often spending his days asleep. The bloodshed buried deep in his memories gradually faded. Only a few faces occasionally flashed through the darkness of his dreams, stirring the king to reflection.
The Tarnished who had fought his way through the Lands Between as they teetered on the brink of destruction after the Shattering, killing demigods and seizing fragments of the Order, had become a shadow in his memories, just like the timid high school boy he had been at the beginning.
Now he was the Greater Will's agent, the god of the Golden Order, the king of the Lands Between, and its strongest warrior. Or rather, he was the Greater Will's puppet, no different from the Erdtree and the beast that had first descended from the heavens.
Had Marika, the god who once shattered the Golden Order, felt the same way?
Throughout his long years upon the throne, Lu Mingfei had asked himself countless times: Had I really made the right choice back then? Perhaps I could have become the Dark Moon Witch's consort and embraced the stars; perhaps I should have tried harder to mend the flaws in the Order completely, rather than hastily restoring the Elden Ring; perhaps I could have accepted that frenzied blessing beneath Leyndell and saved that girl...
He no longer had that chance. He commanded the Golden Order, but the Golden Order had also permeated his body, and the Greater Will would never allow a second Marika to emerge.
The city's evening breeze carried the sweet scent of pineapple through the boy's short black hair. As his eyes slowly opened, the lights of the entire city reflected in them.
Over a hundred years ago, Lu Mingfei had sat just like this on the edge of a rooftop, admiring the nightscape of a small southern city. In the blink of an eye, he had found himself in a dim, oppressive church. A maiden's corpse lay against the wall just inside its doors, and bloodstained words carved into the floor glowed faintly: Even if guidance has long been shattered, please become Elden Lord.
That had been the beginning of a legend.
It had been a long time since he had dreamed like this, ever since setting out again from the Rose Church.
Traffic surged along the elevated highway, its lights merging into streams that raced forward.
He tried to concentrate, hoping to escape this somewhat unfamiliar dream. Then his expression changed, and he lowered his head to stare at his hands.
With a little probing, he could tell this was no dream. He had once visited the world of dreams and even slain the dead dragon that guarded his dear friend. He knew the difference. This was reality, the place someone had desperately yearned to return to countless years ago-Earth.
After more than a hundred years, had I become an ordinary person again?
For no apparent reason, a faint smile appeared on Lu Mingfei's face.
Would the Greater Will, the true master of everything, be troubled to find its king missing from the throne? Even a little? Now that would be something to look forward to.
He stood on the edge of the rooftop and spread his arms, as though embracing something: the city's evening breeze, a long-delayed yearning, the freedom of escaping a god's shackles.
"Brother," someone said softly.
At that moment, Lu Mingfei opened his eyes with a frown. Molten light flowed through his golden pupils.
After carefully examining this body, he immediately realized it was no mortal vessel. It harbored a power akin to the Crucible. The first god of the Lands Between had been the Crucible, where all primordial life intertwined. Those who came later had separated them, and the Golden Order was one of those later arrivals: a power the Greater Will had sent through the stars-a seed and a beast. The seed had grown into the Erdtree, which all but blotted out the sky, while the beast was the Elden Beast that dwelled at its base.
Thus, the Aspects of the Crucible were more primitive, closer to the very source of life. The power he now felt boiling within his body and blood was something similar.
Earth wasn't such a simple world either.
"Shall we trade?" the boy's voice sounded beside him.
The light around him suddenly turned cold and clear. The rooftop breeze vanished, as though a silent domain had unfolded. Time stood still within it, and a mistlike shimmer veiled the things of the waking world.
Lu Mingfei turned his head.
At some point, a little boy in a black evening suit had sat down beside him. He looked about thirteen or fourteen, his youthful features as delicate as a porcelain doll, his eyes a dazzling gold.
A dream?
Lu Mingfei immediately realized he was inside a dream domain, and the child before him was its master.
"Shall we trade?" Ignoring Lu Mingfei's wary expression, the boy softly repeated his strange question.
"I have nothing to trade." Keeping his gaze on the boy, Lu Mingfei hopped lightly backward, landing on the rooftop from the railing.
An unknown entity with a domain...
Lu Mingfei assessed his chances of winning.
He was unfamiliar with the power inside his body and had no suitable weapon at hand. All he could rely on were his memories of battle, the combat techniques honed through countless brushes with death, with which he had slain demigods and gods.
The boy continued gazing out over the city beneath the night sky, a faint shimmer veiling his profile.
"Brother, this time, you really do seem different."
With that, the light-footed child rose and turned around. His Golden Eyes suddenly blazed like erupting flames.
Lu Mingfei felt an overwhelming pressure rush toward him. He immediately lowered his center of gravity and planted his feet, ready to face an attack. The blow he expected never came. Instead, a tearing pain flashed through his head, as though he had been forcibly awakened from a deep sleep. At the same time, the sounds and light of reality struck like stones thrown into water, shattering the dream.
The light around him abruptly dimmed. The sweet scent of pineapple drifted into the dream, and the city's bustle and clamor once again became the night's background noise.
Lu Mingfei looked toward where the boy had stood. There was no one there.
He relaxed his fighting stance, pondered for a moment, then looked toward the distant city lights where they met the skyline. His gaze grew calm again, and his blazing Golden Eyes went dark.
The power of the Crucible, a child who controlled dreams...
This delighted him far more than returning to an ordinary person's peaceful life would have. Supernatural power meant a supernatural world. He was no longer the boy who had wandered the Rose Church like a ghost. The Elden Lord's throne had been built upon the corpses of countless enemies, and throughout the long years after repairing the Elden Ring, he had held himself back for far too long.
He was a warrior, a warrior burdened with bone-deep regret. If he could not die in battle, could not roar at his enemies and unleash his fury, the flames in his heart would only burn him to ashes. How could returning to a world like this not delight him, compared with becoming a skeleton and a puppet upon a throne? He hoped this world had a few demigods in need of slaughtering, preferably with a lofty god, an embodiment of the end itself, waiting as his final enemy.
Faces flashed through his mind, one after another: people he could have saved, or might have been able to save, who had died in the chaos caused by the Order's flaws because he had drifted with the tide, lost and uncertain. This was the darkness lurking in the heart of Marika's successor, the exalted Elden Lord, the fuse that would sooner or later spark a second god's rebellion against the Greater Will.
This time, he would see his own will through, bestowing salvation, destruction, and destiny by a king's decree. He would never permit senseless sacrifice and tragedy. At the very least, he could no longer accept an ending in which he alone survived.
Far across the city, dark figures whispered by the windows of a high-rise.
"He awakened his dragon blood on his own."
"Strange."
"He's a monster. Look, he extinguished his Golden Eyes himself. With adaptability like that, he's practically a pureblood dragon hiding among humans."
"What do we do?"
"Nothing. Even if he really is an awakened pureblood dragon, what difference would it make? The script was written long ago."
"Heh, heh..."
The conversation ended in cold laughter.
Chapter 2: Undercurrents
Lu Mingfei's aunt, uncle, and cousin Lu Mingze were all staring at him with the same mixture of distaste and faint alarm as he "gave in to his animal instincts."
Lu Mingfei sat properly at the dining table, his hands never stopping as he brought dish after dish and mouthfuls of rice to his lips.
He had long since finished the rice his aunt had cooked for four or five people. A second batch was now cooking in the rice cooker. Watching him eat, she hesitated, then added two more cups of rice.
She disliked the nephew lodging in her home, but she would never stint on his meals. Yet... Lu Mingfei had already eaten three or four people's worth of food without so much as a change in expression. It was such a drastic change in temperament that it frightened her.
None of the family of three dared say a word.
Finally, under his wife's wide-eyed, almost fiery glare, his uncle cleared his throat twice and asked cautiously, "Mingfei, I know the college entrance exams are stressful. If something's making you anxious, tell us. Your aunt and I will help you sort it out. Please don't hurt yourself. Your health is the most precious thing you have..."
In their eyes, Lu Mingfei eating so much in one sitting was unquestionably an act of self-harm.
Lu Mingfei stopped eating and glanced over the family of three, who had somehow ended up sitting huddled together opposite him. Originally, they had been seated around the table. All three looked nervous, though in different ways. His aunt stared at his rice bowl, still somewhat shaken; his uncle wore a forced smile, like an amateur therapist, probably imitating someone from a TV show; Lu Mingze looked impatient and disgusted.
"Auntie's cooking is delicious." Lu Mingfei sounded slightly apologetic. He seemed to have frightened the family by accident.
Grain selected for texture and flavor, cooked under pressure in an ingenious electrical appliance until thoroughly tender, each mouthful plump, soft, and sweetly fragrant-this was a luxury even nobles in the war-torn Lands Between would not have dared imagine.
In Lu Mingfei's understanding, whenever supernatural powers clashed, mortals inevitably lived in misery, if not outright despair.
From the looks of it, even with a power akin to the Crucible present, Earth was different from the Lands Between. The surface of its mundane world maintained some sort of unspoken peace.
"I'm finished." Lu Mingfei stood, returned to the room he shared with Lu Mingze, and shut the door.
On the other side of the door, the family of three discussed him in hushed voices.
"There's definitely something wrong with Mingfei's head!"
"It must be all those foreign films he watches. Look at the way he ate, like he was possessed. Mingze is so much more motivated. He has refined interests and likes literature that inspires people to be good."
"Mom, I don't want to share a room with Lu Mingfei. He's kind of scary."
"It's all right. You can stay in the room next door. We only have to hold out for another two months. When you go in to get your pillow and quilt, remember not to say anything that might provoke him."
Lu Mingfei's hearing was exceptionally keen, but he paid no mind to the suspicions next door. He sat down at the computer, opened a search engine, and entered the keywords: golden pupils.
"Pictures of golden pupils."
"The six rarest eye colors-have you really seen them all?"
"The three rarest human eye colors: especially the last one, which to this day..."
"What hair color looks best with gold contact lenses?"
Lu Mingfei carefully browsed the information online, but could not find a single genuinely relevant entry. Almost all the images and videos featured characters from anime and games.
Either supernatural powers in this world were too rare to make any waves, or some force had concealed them from the public-facing internet. That force might have benevolent intentions or malicious ones, and the calm of the real world might also be something this organization deliberately maintained.
No, it wasn't necessarily a single organization.
Lu Mingfei recalled the factions and leaders of the Lands Between: the Roundtable Hold, where the Tarnished gathered; the Dark Moon Witch, who wished to escape the constraints of her Empyrean status; the Lord of Blood, who worshipped the Formless Mother; Morgott, the last king, who sought to protect the Golden Dynasty... Perhaps factions with differing ideals also lurked on this world's hidden side, merely maintaining a balance and a shared agreement to remain concealed.
Lu Mingfei opened an online forum and typed in a title: Shocking! A human's eyes can actually turn gold-he seems to have superpowers!