Chương 15: Reborn as the Dragon: — Chapter 15 - Kobold Bolikri

As a young man of his generation, Su Nian had grown up watching more and more girls swear off cooking. The result was inevitable: guys had quietly become the ones who actually knew their way around a kitchen. In his past life, Su Nian had been unremarkable in every direction. Average face, average height, average grades. His only real merits were an iron patience in games and a genuine talent for cooking he'd picked up from his grandmother. His grandmother had died too soon.

After that, it was just him and his grandfather. His parents — those two divorced strangers — had contributed nothing to his life except the fact that he existed. After producing him, they each went off and built new families. No contact. No warmth. Nothing. He pushed the memory aside. The rabbit was already cleaned and ready. He wasn't planning to keep this Dragon's Nest anyway, so he didn't bother with the bloodstains on the ground.

He arranged the dry branches he'd gathered into a pile, then reached over and grabbed the living Blaze Rabbit kit. He pinched it by the ears, angled its mouth toward the kindling, and jabbed one sharp dragon claw directly into its backside. (The Blaze Rabbit: hahaha,) The kit let out a tiny shriek and reflexively spat a Fireball straight into the branches. The kindling caught immediately. Su Nian nodded in satisfaction and tossed his little "lighter" to the side.

Pinned under the full weight of his Dragon's Might, the Blaze Rabbit could do nothing but lie there in a boneless heap. Good enough. The secret to roasted rabbit was heat control first, seasoning second. Fortunately, seasoning was no problem at all. The System Store didn't carry anything impressive, but it stocked every daily necessity imaginable, and cheaply. Cumin ran one System point per bag, about half a pound. Salt and sugar were roughly the same price. Vinegar and soy sauce cost a little more.

He'd crossed into another world and turned into a dragon. That was no excuse to eat badly. The first rabbit was for Anna. He began turning the spit with practiced ease, occasionally dragging the tips of his claws across the meat to score it, the cuts let the spices sink deeper. Before long, the fat and tender rabbit was sweating oil under the heat, each drop hissing as it hit the flames below. The smell was incredible.

It spread through the Dragon's Nest in slow, rich waves, and even Anna — who rarely touched meat, wrinkled her little nose and breathed it in. The admiration in her eyes had gone soft and starry. [Mr. Dragon is so amazing~] [Roasted bunny smells so good, it has to be delicious!] Hearing her thoughts, Su Nian grinned and flipped the spit faster. A few minutes later, the rabbit was done, golden, gleaming, perfect in color and smell and everything else.

He drew a long breath, then exhaled sharply through his nostrils. The blast of air rushed over the meat and cooled it quickly, dropping the temperature down to something a person could actually eat. Not a single drop of Dragon Saliva touched it. He wasn't finished. He extended one "cat paw" and popped his claws, then stripped the meat clean off the bone in a few efficient strokes and set it on the Lotus Leaf he'd prepared earlier. The bare skeleton he dropped aside without a second glance.

Then he held the Lotus Leaf out to Anna.

"Wah!" Anna stared at it.

"Th-this is for me?" If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Her large dark eyes caught the light in a way they hadn't before. Warmth rose up through her chest, steady and quiet, and the feeling of being genuinely cared for pressed against something inside her that wasn't used to it. Her eyes went red at the rims. Tears gathered at the corners, not quite falling.

The feeling was sweet and soft and slightly overwhelming, sweeter, somehow, than the milk candy from yesterday. She had assumed the cooling and the careful deboning were just things the Black Dragon did as a matter of habit. It hadn't occurred to her that all of it had been for her. She couldn't have imagined it. Even in the Elven Forest, her parents had loved her, but not like this. Not this quietly thorough.

She had no way of knowing that Su Nian came from a planet where this kind of behavior barely cleared the baseline. There were men back home who picked the seeds off strawberries with toothpicks before offering them to a girl. That type had a name: simp. Su Nian didn't consider himself a simp. A simp puts in effort that goes unappreciated. Anna wasn't like that. She remembered everything, held onto it, and her favorability showed it clearly enough. [Anna Hathaway Favorability +3. Current Favorability: 35 (Friendly)] Getting that emotional over something this small. She was almost too easy. He laughed to himself, but quietly, because the favorability also told him something he hadn't spelled out: Anna's life before this hadn't been easy. He filed that away. Once Anna had taken the Lotus Leaf, he turned back to the fire and started on the second rabbit. Anna looked down at the golden, sizzling meat in her hands. It had been a very long time since she'd eaten meat.

She couldn't remember the last time it had been prepared like this. She rubbed her hands together, pinched up a large piece, and then stopped. She didn't put it in her mouth. She looked over at the Black Dragon, who was already hunched over the spit again, working.

"Mr. Dragon, here, ah — you eat first~" She stretched her arm out as far as it would go. Her arm was too short. She couldn't get anywhere close to his head. Su Nian heard the small, earnest voice from somewhere behind his ear and thought: worth every bit of effort. He didn't make her ask twice. He turned his head, plucked the piece of meat from her fingers, and his tongue swept across her fingertips on the way back, collecting the oil. Anna went red to her ears and dissolved into helpless giggling.

It was a quiet, warm little scene. Anna and Su Nian weren't the only ones who saw it. There was one other witness. Not a person, exactly. More of a dog. (Did my best, still couldn't get the ears right, send help,)...... Bolikri was the chieftain of a small Kobold clan. He led a few dozen ordinary Kobolds out of a cave on the outer edge of Silvermoon Forest. Kobolds were cave-dwelling reptilian humanoids, and they held one belief above all others: dragon blood ran in their veins.

Finding a dragon and entering its service, becoming its sworn vassals, was one of the great ambitions of their kind. As it happened, this was technically true. There was a trace of dragon lineage in Kobold blood. An extremely small trace. Even if you gathered every ordinary Kobold in the world and pooled their combined heritage, they still wouldn't reach one-thousandth of a true dragon's bloodline. They called themselves dragon-blooded anyway. The name "Kobold" was a little misleading.

They didn't actually look much like dogs. Their heads were closer to a dragon's or a lizard's, narrow, scaled, sharp. They had tails. Their bodies were covered in sparse scales that ran reddish-brown to dark brown. Physically, the resemblance to dogs was mostly limited to the noise they made. The strangest thing about them was that they were oviparous. Kobold young matured fast after hatching. In theory, they could live over a century. Most didn't make it to ten. They were fragile, too fragile for the forest.

Wild beasts regularly killed them. The only way Kobolds survived anything was by grouping up and throwing numbers at the problem, and even then they usually took heavy losses. Bolikri was proof of how bad it was. He was only level seven, and he was chieftain. That said everything. Tonight, he had led his brothers out to forage. The heavy rain had left blood in the air, something had died in the forest, and a fresh corpse was easier prey than anything still moving. They weren't looking to fight.

They were looking for scraps. But then the smell hit them. Meat. Roasting meat, rich and seasoned, drifting through the trees. None of them could say how long it had been since they'd last eaten anything that smelled like that. Bolikri lifted his snout, let out a series of sharp barks, and waved his group forward. They followed the scent. It didn't take long. The trail led them to a cliff face, and Bolikri pressed himself behind the trunk of a wide tree and looked.

At the base of the cliff, a cave opened into the dark, and in front of it, a dragon lay coiled around a strangely built spit, tending to whatever was roasting over the fire. That was where the smell was coming from. But the smell didn't matter anymore. Bolikri's eyes filled with tears. He forgot about the food. He forgot about his brothers. His whole world narrowed down to that single, perfect, noble creature framed against the firelight. A dragon.

(Quick note: In DnD lore, Kobolds got their name because their voices sound like dog barking, not because they look like dogs. Their actual appearance is closer to a small dragon or lizard. So the picture in the chapter isn't wrong. That's straight from the Fifth Edition Monster Manual.) ➤ Next: Kobolds Want to Become Vassals