Chapter 51
Previously.
Estea had already attempted teleportation once before, in order to invade that obnoxious author Ulysses.
But the result was a disastrous failure.
Because the noble dragon failed to cast her spell, a tragedy occurred: she plummeted from the air to the floor with a crash and a thud.
The first such incident in her long dragon life!
To get to the bottom of that mystery, Estea didn't bother making full use of the dragon wisdom and sagacity accumulated over her long, long years.
She just.
“Kyaruk, kyaruk!”
Well, it'll come out tomorrow, won't it!
While she lounged around comfortably.
She just gorged herself on all sorts of feed dumped on her from all over the place.
As expected of the pinnacle of all lifeforms.
The effortless non-action that the noble and great dragon personally practices!
If Zhuangzi had seen Estea's childish little behavior, he would have clapped, polymorphed into a butterfly, and ascended to immortality.
But, tragically.
Unless you were on the level of some angelic former Shine Muscat farmer or higher, the foolish common folk needed the king's correction.
[“Using the linked-ship stratagem and then a fire attack is certainly a good plan. But the wind is blowing toward our side now, so wouldn't our losses be greater?”
“I have a way to change the wind.”
Zhuge Liang gently waved his white feather fan.
- To be continued in the next chapter.]
“Right hereee! Stoooop──!”
The wicked Heavenly Demon Kim Yul's severing technique had cleanly cut Estea's train of thought.
Nureongi was furious!
But.
Thud!
“Ughk!”
She had been handed the bitter report card of a season-two teleportation failure.
Rubbing her butt, which wasn't actually sore, Estea mentally sprouted a mustache.
The literary world is rotten.
Interesting novels are, by law, supposed to come out three times a day.
Morning edition! Midday edition! Evening edition!
Shouldn't they be published and serialized like that?
With that anger.
Estea huffed and puffed and charged straight toward Kim Yul's house.
.
.
.
Rather than teleporting to the front of the house, Estea had run all the way here on her little pitter-patter feet and yanked the door open as if she meant to break the handle.
But there was no one there, nothing at all.
Instead.
“Hmmm!”
A trace, as though a very slight amount of mana still lingered there.
An aura was wafting about, so high-level that only a transcendent being like a dragon could possibly detect it.
“Aperi ianuam et ostende mihi veritatem!”
Estea had declared proudly with a hand on her hip, but regrettably nothing happened.
“Grrrr.”
And that fact set the berserk dragon off.
The horns she'd been suppressing went pop, popping out.
From the tailbone that had been left only as a vestigial remnant, a long, soft tail swayed out.
It wasn't remotely comparable to her true body.
Nureongi, transformed into full-power Estea, chanted the spell again.
Only then.
“Oh!”
A tiny crack opened up.
There were, of course, some trivial side effects—the surroundings shook violently as if an earthquake had struck, rain and wind suddenly roared through the streets, and the sky turned black as though the end of the world had come.
But to Estea, those were trivial anyway.
She immediately shoved her horn into that tiny gap.
* * *
Forgotten childhood memories came drifting back, one by one.
When the family was fairly harmonious and relations with relatives were still decent, relatives would often come over to visit.
In particular, there was one cousin her own age.
Thinking about it now, that brat was utterly vile.
- Hey, Kim Hyun! Don’t eat that!
- Ebe-beb!
He'd snatch up precious mini cream puffs I'd briefly frozen in the freezer to bring out their sublime flavor and gulp them down.
- Let's sword fight!
- Too much trouble. I want to read.
- Take my sword!
- Ack!
He was such a nuisance that I could have written a whole book about his crimes.
Still, we were fairly close, but after we became adults we almost never kept in touch.
Well, I'm sure he's doing fine.
His shamelessness was truly at lunatic level.
Anyway, why the sudden flashback to the past?
“Kraaagh! My cola!”
“Delicious……! Bring more! No, bring it all!”
“Don't spill cookie crumbs on my bed……!”
“Wow! It moves up and down! It's fluffy!”
The bratty Nureongi was rummaging through the whole lab like a little relative who'd shown up for the holidays, swishing her tail back and forth.
At least she wasn't going around smacking everything with her tail, so I suppose she had some conscience.
At the end of that vandalism.
“Good! Consider it an honor! I hereby recognize this place as equal to my dragon lair!”
Nureongi proclaimed proudly, holding my off-the-books Nin■do Switch 2 in her hand.
It felt like she was roaring, 'Get lost! From now on, this is the Manches■ter United gallery!'
Actually, my lab.
Was it a dead gallery……?
.
.
.
“Estea is nice and cool.”
“Yep! A noble dragon's blood runs cold!”
For a cold-hearted being, the sight of her coiling her tail around the waist of that puny tin can and stamping her feet was just...
Maybe it's just that reptiles are cold-blooded, so they're cool to the touch.
Thinking that, I let out a sigh and turned on the laptop.
What needed doing needed doing.
Just as I started typing,
a horn suddenly popped up beside me.
“What's this? There are so many really interesting magic tools!”
“Careful. If this breaks, I can't write.”
Ignoring my warning, Nureongi kept wandering around like a cat despite being Nureongi, constantly getting in the way and disrupting my concentration.
It couldn't be helped.
Time for special measures.
1. Lift Estea up.
“Uunngh……!”
“Heh-heh! For a mere human to try to lift this body—you're a thousand years too early!”
Failure.
Was she casting some kind of 1322.77lb weight spell or something?
The plan to just lift the determined Nureongi right then and there had gone up in smoke.
If she had even scattered killing intent at me, I could have suppressed her with equal-rank power, but the current Nureongi was basically a stray cat pressing herself against me to be adopted, so I couldn't even borrow Hector's power.
In the end.
I gave up on everything and put the brat on my lap, then boldly staged a public typing show, revealing my writing live to the readers.
“Whoa!”
Nureongi's eyes sparkled beneath my chin.
Understandably.
After only ever seeing the shabby typewriters of this fantasy world's primitive medieval civilization, of course she'd go wide-eyed over a high-performance gaming laptop.
“But what kind of novel are you writing?”
“?”
What?
What was that? Nureongi had just said something she absolutely shouldn't have?
“Of course it's a story about Sima Yi. ......Don't tell me you haven't been keeping up with it lately?”
“Yep!”
Fuck.
At that moment I firmly resolved either to wrap up the Sima Yi story early as quickly as possible, or put it on a long hiatus until after the Shu arc.
Even that crazy Nureongi was a reader who let her feed sit and age……?
This…… was just ruined. There was no answer.
* * *
Only after clapping like a seal at the midnight miracle of the cola refill.
Only then did Estea leave the lab, a cola in one hand and Pringles in the other, squealing with delight.
“Kim Yul did not know then. This was no mere lab visit. It was the beginning of a terrifying dragon occupation era and forced daily triple updates…….”
“Staaap!”
Seeing Kim Yul with even darker dark circles, History teased him to her heart's content.
That day.
She finally came to fully understand the unfamiliar emotion called Schadenfreude.
That day, too, History embodied the theories in her head through practical experience and took one more step toward evolving into a complete living being.
Now even Hamon itself would no longer be able to stop her.
* * *
“Southeast wind! Southeast wind! Southeast wind!”
Clutching Kim Yul's manuscript, Chloe danced around so exuberantly that she was practically swaying and twirling.
The white feather fan in her hand was inhabited by a wind spirit, and it rustled-rustled, sending out fanlike gusts here and there and scattering the paper as if responding to that insignificant elf's dance.
Though he snickered at that foolish sight, Kim Yul felt a heaviness in his chest.
After all.
It wasn't as if you could call it a commercial failure, though.
And it could certainly be called a work pieced together from historical records.
But the effort Kim Yul had put into the process was by no means small.
He gathered fragmented records from here and there, securing as much consistency as possible.
He cut down his sleep until darkness perpetually hung beneath his eyes, sorting, agonizing over, and reviewing the material.
What was more, without even a Romance of the Three Kingdoms reference, it had been squeezed out as much as possible based solely on the drama he'd watched before the trip.
So, with a truly miserable feeling.
“The empire's second-in-command…… looks like it'll need either an early conclusion or a long hiatus.”
“An early conclusion? A long hiatus? Hmm, that work should be fine even if you did that waaaahaaaea── whyyy──”
Seeing Chloe so readily granting Sima Yi's euthanasia, Kim Yul was swept up in fierce rage and yanked Chloe's ear hard.
And he swore it into his heart.
This humiliation.
I will definitely pay it back.
* * *
By the time the scene of Zhuge Liang reciting the spell-annihilating mantra atop the Seven-Star Altar to cast weather-manipulation magic, something only an 8th-circle legendary archmage could do, had raised tension in the imperial capital...
Kim Yul, bloodshot-eyed and feeling like Huang Gai under the lash, was devouring the 'World History in One Volume' he'd normally never even have dreamed of opening.
“A protagonist who's special…… whose life is extraordinary…… and who ultimately seizes victory…….”
Countless candidates flashed through Kim Yul's mind.
The first that came to mind was Liu Bang and Xiang Yu.
Their rivalry was certainly clear enough, but since he was already dealing with the Three Kingdoms, it was too early for that now.
Next he thought of Alexander the Great.
......But he couldn't bring himself to touch that, afraid the BL drift with Hephaestion might actually be historical fact. Kim Yul didn't want to red-pill himself with the histories.
Countless figures flashed by and brushed through Kim Yul's mind, but none of them gave him inspiration strong enough to make him smack his knee and exclaim.
Watching Kim Yul agonize like that,
“If you only think of it as a really long work, wouldn't it be hard to use any subject? Wouldn't it be better to choose something that can be finished quickly, in around a hundred episodes?”
History, whose cheeks were reddening after being pinched for suggesting 'Muguchi Renya,' offered advice.
“I don't talk to Jap scum, Lord Hitori.”
Had he been inspired by a dark independence activist?
Before he knew it, Kim Yul's chest had been packed full of Joseon pride.
And, naturally, the flow of thought veering elsewhere was inevitable.
Kim Yul was already rummaging through various sources to describe the sight of the ships battling each other as vividly as possible.
The moment the chemical synergy of national pride and sea pride—sharing electron pairs and forming covalent bonds—burst in Kim Yul's head.
“As expected, there's no one but that person.”
Looking at 'Song of the Sword' on the bookshelf, Kim Yul intoned gravely.
And then he began laying the groundwork for writing, step by step.