Chapter 6: A Total Bully Dragon
The student council president's assistant interview was Thursday afternoon—the last department to hold its first round.
Coursework had been light lately, so Zhu Rong lay in his dorm and played to his heart's content.
The anniversary celebration of Otherworld Judgment was coming up, and event rewards were richer than usual. On top of that, just logging in daily got you three hundred sign-in experience points and fifty dimensional coins from the guild.
Zhu Rong's spending in the game had gone up a lot since before—at least now he wasn't standing at the bridge haggling with the seed vendor until his throat went dry over a few water lilies.
He lay on the rock beside his little wooden cabin, watching the water lilies he'd just planted poke their tender green sprouts out of the pond, already imagining how gorgeous it would look once the flowers bloomed—
"Boom!"
A flash of lightning, a crack of thunder.
The blinding white light made Zhu Rong squeeze his eyes shut on instinct.
Everything around him had turned freezing cold.
A gale tore through, frost and ice crawling from his fingertips up half his arm. Zhu Rong had to grip the edge of the rock to keep from being blown away.
What the hell?
Wasn't this his private cabin?!? Had monsters already made it all the way here!?
When he opened his eyes again, his face was smeared with wet mud.
A massive black dragon was crouched on his roof, its long slender tongue flicking out to lick his face, as if checking whether he was still alive.
Zhu Rong nearly scared himself stupid. It took him ages to restore his appearance to something clean through the settings.
He clambered up slowly and saw the wilted water lily sprouts lying by the shore.
"…………"
The flashy, dazzling Rank 1 badge was still blinking after the giant dragon's ID overhead.
"Hiding out here every day." Jingzhe shifted back to human form and leaped down from the eaves. "Plant me an anchor point in your house, or I can't find you."
Zhu Rong lowered his eyes, full of complaints.
But didn't dare voice them.
He crouched down and picked up the sprouts he'd just planted from the ground.
The tender wet seedlings had died outright in the sudden cold, lying wilted in Zhu Rong's palm.
"You can get in just fine though…" Zhu Rong muttered under his breath.
The black dragon walked straight up to him, his voice dropping from above, contemptuous and cold: "If you want me to come like this every time, that can be arranged."
"……"
A complete and utter tyrant dragon.
Zhu Rong buried the poor water lily seedlings under the tree nearby and walked into the room.
His retreating figure looked like a pathetic little worm.
It wasn't until Jingzhe saw a new location marked with a little pink heart on his map that he felt inexplicably better.
"Come on, I'll take you dungeon grinding."
-
Zhu Rong had recently unlocked quite a few map modules, so he had more places he could teleport to.
—Though mainly for flower picking.
This time Jingzhe brought him to a snow mountain dungeon. Before they'd even properly entered the mountain, Zhu Rong was already being blown so hard he couldn't open his eyes.
Withered branches and broken ruins surrounded them, blue text drifting past his vision from time to time, though Zhu Rong had no attention to spare for anything like story prologues.
He followed behind that black silhouette, climbing with great difficulty. If he looked away for even a moment, he'd lose sight of the person ahead.
After the last stretch of stairs, a circular floating platform opened up before them.
Zhu Rong peered down—
And saw a level 90 giant red lava boss.
He didn't have time to steady himself before a powerful gust of wind and snow nearly blew him into the lava boss's pit.
"Whoa!"
Midair.
A strong arm grabbed Zhu Rong's little vest. Jingzhe had appeared out of nowhere, scooping him up from above the pit in one motion.
Zhu Rong was so scared that the slender incubus tail at his lower back popped out. He gasped for breath, the pink heart at its tip flailing wildly through the air.
Jingzhe let out a snort, holding him up in front of his face like a chick being carried by its scruff:
"A lava monster scares you this badly?"
Zhu Rong still hadn't recovered, his tail instinctively wrapping around Jingzhe's calf.
Dragon scales didn't feel like skin—at least far rougher than this little incubus's. As the tail rubbed against them, going against the grain of the scales gave a slight scraping sting.
In that position, Jingzhe walked to the edge of the cliff and lit a charcoal fire.
The cold value dropped, and Zhu Rong gradually calmed down.
He poked Jingzhe's calf with his tail.
Jingzhe merely raised an eyebrow: "Scared mute?"
Zhu Rong pressed his lips tight, embarrassed at being teased.
The pink heart moved up and poked Jingzhe's lower abdomen. Zhu Rong's voice was hoarse and muffled.
"Put me down."
An incubus's tail tip was usually two or three degrees warmer than body temperature, and pressed against dragon scales, Jingzhe could feel the heat too.
He set Zhu Rong down and asked casually, "You play this game alone—why'd you pick an incubus character?"
Zhu Rong huddled by the torch, his tail tip still swaying in the air.
"Thought it looked nice at the time, so I picked it."
Jingzhe: "You didn't read the newbie character intro?"
Zhu Rong paused, then asked very seriously, "Is that mandatory? When I registered my account it was lagging so badly the character intro got skipped entirely."
Jingzhe: "……"
Even without reading the character intro, wouldn't a normal person search up the name "incubus" at least once?
Was he really this dumb, or just too innocent?
Jingzhe's gaze swept over his face again.
It really was a beautiful face—not like the paid character customization data in Otherworld Judgment, but a very natural kind of good-looking.
Delicate, refined features, especially those eyes. When they looked at someone, they were harmless and pure.
Completely unfitting for an incubus.
Zhu Rong was still huddled by the fire, with not the slightest desire to continue exploring downward.
Jingzhe simply put out the fire.
The next second, Zhu Rong shot him a completely non-threatening glare.
"What?" Jingzhe's voice was cool. "Didn't you not turn on sensory synchronization? Standing next to a snow mountain makes you cold, but casting a skill to charm me while I'm getting laid—that you can feel just fine, huh?"
"…………"
"You—you—!"
Jingzhe looked utterly unbothered: "Me what? Didn't you say it yourself?"
That wasn't how he'd said it at all!
A word like "getting laid"—how could anyone say that so brazenly out loud!
Zhu Rong went red from his neck to the tips of his ears, unable to squeeze out a single word for ages.
How could anyone talk like that?
Was this really a human from Earth?!
There was no way he was human, right!?!?
Zhu Rong opened the game search and typed in a few words:
[Can I report my contract-bound partner for sexually harassing an incubus and apply to dissolve the binding relationship?]
The system spun a few circles:
[Unfortunately, no!]
[A contract is the crystallization of love running both ways between an incubus and their master. Player Rongrong may choose to save the chat log. If the review is successful, the system will deduct 50 experience points from player 'Jingzhe' as punishment!]
Zhu Rong: "……"
A mere 50 experience—deduct three years' worth and Jingzhe probably wouldn't even notice.
While he stood there in disarray, Jingzhe pulled an ice-blue spear from the void and tossed him just one line:
"Get down there."