“Gyeoul said she’s going to sleep,” said Kaeul.
“Really.”
Yeorum on the other side of her, gave a fairly dry response, even though she should be fully aware of what she meant by ‘sleep’.
“What. Why are you so cold?”
“…Hmm. For how long.”
“I don’t know. But I think she’s going to sleep for quite a while.”
“Mhmm.”
“What have you been up to, unni?”
“Me? Well…”
Crossing her legs, Yeorum placed a cigarette between her lips. Raising her fingertip, she lit it on fire and took a deep breath in as the cigarette started to be tainted in red.
A dense smoke soon left her mouth.
“Just, doing nothing much.”
“Are you not going to do anything? Like going out on Amusements and stuff?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“What would I even do there.”
“Uum. Going to a casino drunk and high on drugs? Losing all your money and doing it with dozens of men? Kyahaha—!”
‘The fuck,’ said Yeorum while grabbing Kaeul’s hair. ‘Ang! D, don’t…!’ Feeling like she would be seared with the tip of the cigarette, Kaeul had to quickly lower her head.
“What about you,” asked Yeorum.
“Uun?”
“Are you not going out? You can do more Amusements can’t you.”
“Uun. I’m, well…”
“I guess you and I are the same there.”
Yeorum sucked in through the cigarette again. There was not a single gentle taste to it unlike the one on Earth, probably because the chemicals hadn’t been processed. Although either side would have their pros and cons, Yeorum liked the cigarettes from Earth a little bit more.
“But you’ve only been on one right? Even Gyeoul went out on two though?” Kaeul asked.
“I’m fine. I’ll do it one day.”
“Did the adults allow that?”
“So what if they don’t allow that, when I don’t want to go myself.”
Kaeul smiled. It was exactly what Yeorum would say.
But even though Yeorum was acting confident, she was in a fairly precarious position. She was simply keeping her mouth closed because she got annoyed by just thinking about it.
“Gyeoul said she missed unni.”
“Uhh, that stinks like a lie.”
“I’m serious. She was very worried as well.”
“About what.”
“Your selection ceremony. You haven’t done it yet right.”
“Far out. There’s no need to worry in the slightest.”
Yeorum said while shaking her hand. That was when a question suddenly popped up in her mind.
“By the way, is she taller now?”
“Un un. She’s about the same as us.”
“And her body size?”
Kaeul knew what she was talking about. Size here meant her body size as a dragon.
“She’s about one and a half times bigger than you, unni.”
“Hmm…”
Yeorum nodded before biting on her cigarette again.
“What about her face?”
“She looks the same as the Gyeoul we know. But she looks slightly more mature.”
“That does make me a bit curious. Show me your memories.”
Soon, Yeorum grabbed onto Kaeul’s wrist as memories related to Gyeoul were transferred over to her.
“Hya, this kid…”
“Kuhihi. How is she? She’s grown up nicely right?”
“She looks fucking egotistic. So much I wanna snap it.”
“You’ll lose though? Your attributes–”
‘Kuangg! I’m sorry…!’ Kaeul crawled with her nose pinched. How was she exactly the same even after 300 years? Yeorum curiously wondered by herself.
After the conversation about Gyeoul, the topic was naturally shifted to Bom.
“You went to help the green dragons in the war right?” Kaeul asked.
“Yeah. It was a mess. Those lunatics were really crazy this time around. I saw the head of a 7000-year-old old man bursting from a large axe right in front of me; we were close like how we’re sitting right now. I could have died there as well.”
“Wow… Isn’t that too dangerous? I wanted to ask before but, didn’t your parents stop you?”
“You didn’t know? My mum and dad have zero interest in me.”
“But even then…”
“Anyway it was chaos. Thousands of protectors died and three whole kingdoms were wiped out…”
Yeorum described the atrocities of the long war. The war of the green dragons against the quons was still going on, and was expected to last at least a few more centuries.
Listening to her story, Kaeul could not help but raise a question.
“What about Bom-unni?”
In response, Yeorum turned silent. It was a question she had been expecting but was nonetheless a very awkward one to reply to.
“Do you want me to be honest?”
“Nn nn.”
“Hmm. Yu Bom. She…”
Yeorum scratched her head, not knowing how she was supposed to explain the situation.
“Umm, she’s a bit, weird now.”
“Uun?”
“Like, she became super weird.”
“How?”
While distractedly scratching her head, Yeorum continued.
“So like, you know how she has control over the military now, right.”
“Nn nn.”
“She became literally weird after that. The way she commands the operations is strange, she doesn’t sleep, her eyes are all red and she goes around everywhere all day. I’ve never seen her rest for almost 200 years by now.”
“Ehng? What’s wrong with that?”
“I’m telling you; she doesn’t rest.”
“I’m sure she does when you’re not there.”
“No that’s not it. That’s not the stuff I’m trying to say.”
“Then?”
“With her wrist cut off, legs crushed and one of her eyes and ears missing, she crawled into the ancient forest and tracked one of the quon’s great warriors for 71 years. We didn’t hear any news from her so we thought she was dead inside but no. After tracking him for 71 years, she finally ripped that great warrior to pieces. That Yu Bom.”
“…”
“I was there when she returned with his head. And you know what? Her face…”
A bizarre look appeared on Yeorum’s face as she cast her memories back to that time.
“The way she moves the troops around is also weird. She is in charge of three troops, and two of them have green dragons inside. She moves three times more than others while commanding them all the time.”
“Wow…”
Kaeul couldn’t find any other words to say.
After opening her mouth once, Yeorum continued pouring out all the words that had been holed up inside her heart due to having no-one to talk to.
“That’s not the end. I found this out later – there’s another troop Yu Bom is in charge of, and she herself is in a squad that protects the Dragon Lord. After her work ends in one place, she teleports to another place and fights there. After that’s over, she goes to the Dragon Lord and reports to him. Five troops… Does this look normal to you?”
There was an undisguisable look of shock on Kaeul’s face because that did not sound normal in the slightest. Even though Yeorum was worried that Kaeul might mistake her intention, she couldn’t help but say it.
“Yu Bom. She’s completely gone crazy.”
That was her conclusion.
“…How is that possible?”
“That’s what I’m saying. And that’s exactly why I’m saying she’s super weird.”
Dragons lived for a very long period of time, and thus entered a hibernation regularly to organise and tidy up the experiences they had earned with their unforgetting memories. Excessive burden to both the mind and the body was obviously a threat even to a dragon.
Moving for 300 years without sleeping for even a second? According to Kaeul’s memory, there had never been such a green dragon in the annals of history.
“…”
On one hand, Kaeul was slightly disappointed.
She had been contacting Yeorum and Gyeoul quite regularly and they had even played sometimes with her at the centre, but Bom did not answer any of their calls.
Even when Yeorum was at a nearby squad, she had requested several times for a face-to-face talk and was constantly rejected. It was clear that Bom was intentionally avoiding her.
That was the same even to the others.
Didn’t they spend a happy Amusement together? Couldn’t she come visit them at least once in the past 300 years?
Betraying their expectations, Bom never looked for them.
Not a single time.
“I don’t like how I keep thinking about it this way either, but Yu Bom that bitch, she might be living a completely different world from us.”
Kaeul widened her eyes into circles.
“…What?”
“The old man’s about to go soon, right.”
“You mean the Lord? Uun. He has been reigning for like 15,000 years after all…”
“Probably a few hundred years left for him, and at most a thousand. There’s been a talk about that among the green dragons.”
“What did they say?”
Yeorum sucked in a deep breath through the cigarette and heaved a deep sigh.
“They said Yu Bom is a candidate for the next Dragon Lord.”
*
‘Maybe she doesn’t want to be related to us anymore.’
Yeorum said something which both Kaeul and Gyeoul had also been thinking of in secret.
She had been finding it strange for a long time, but if that was to become a Dragon Lord, then she could understand how Bom couldn’t live in the same world as other baby dragons like them.
‘But that’s, very sad…’ Kaeul sighed with a teary look on her face.
Bom was the one whom she had shared the most happy moments of her life with. In a world without Yu Jitae, there were only four existences that remembered him.
Thinking of such an existence going further away to achieve her dream made her feel empty at heart.
In any case, that was the end of their conversation. Before leaving, Kaeul said to Yeorum, ‘I’m going to take a nap as well,’ as Yeorum returned a nod.
Both Yeorum and Kaeul had intentionally refrained from going to sleep ever since Gyeoul said she would look for a way to go back home. However, now that 300 years had gone by, all three of them had half given up on it.
“I don’t know when the Selection Ceremony will be held but,”
Kaeul left those words at the end.
“Please survive. Unni…”
Yeorum put the cigarette out and replied with a smile.
“You can go to sleep first. Ima take a nap as well after everything’s over.”
“Uun. Later let’s go visit somewhere together.”
“Sure.”
Saying that, Yeorum sent her off.
.
.
.
In truth, Yeorum thought the Selection Ceremony would be held immediately after her return from the first Amusement. That was why she had been trying as if she would die during the Amusement.
But when she did come back, her oldest unni did not meet her and postponed the Selection Ceremony to no end.
The first reason it was postponed was for an ‘Amusement’. Her oldest unni was going to soon leave for her third Amusement.
Everything had been prepared already and there was nothing Yeorum could do about it. So she had to wait for the oldest unni to come back after playing for 20 years.
The second reason was hibernation. After returning from the Amusement, her oldest unni said she was tired from a big enlightenment and entered a deep sleep which was irritatingly long. She slept for almost 300 years and woke up very recently, and seemed like she had zero regard for Yeorum’s existence.
“Ah, this fucking bitch…”
Bitch once and they’re a bitch forever.
That was Yeorum’s theory of bitches.
A problem that had been a result of that was that Yeorum couldn’t prove herself during those 300 years. She couldn’t even take the Selection Ceremony and had constantly been looked down on by the other dragons of her race.
The red race respects the strong but ignores and persecutes the weak.
Her strength hadn’t been proven through the Selection Ceremony – she was born especially late, had a small body, and returned in just 5 years without even filling up the 20 years of her Amusement and Yeorum was therefore treated literally like a piece of trash.
“Dude. There goes trash.”
“Uhk, is that a dragon or a lizard.”
Seeing young adults doing that for almost 300 years everyday, Yeorum had to suppress her urge to run in and rip them to pieces.
Out of those were also males who mixed their bodies with her oldest unni and they were even more annoying.
When her oldest unni was scolded by the elders of the race for constantly postponing the Selection Ceremony, they even pestered her to shoot magic towards Yeorum’s nest to kill her.
It was at least better off when her oldest unni was still sleeping but now that they began playing with her again after she woke up, their bullying turned even worse.
“Oi, you fucking catterpillar of a bitch! Go kill yourself! Kill yourself! Suicide!”
But one of their voices was especially noisier today.