Chapter 98
The noble and great Gold Dragon.
Estea Golden Lintberius loved art.
This was also a trait of the bloodline carried by the noble and great Gold Dragon clan.
Everything beautiful is mine.
Art is beautiful.
Therefore, art is mine!
It was a perfect syllogism that would have made Aristotle sigh, and by following it, Estea once enjoyed herself while taking in every kind of art.
But.
- Where your wings come to rest, all humans shall become brothers!
That night. At the concert.
Beethoven’s choral music ended up beautifully coloring her frontal lobe in its distinctive hues.
So many instruments.
And to think that adding human voices to them could create music like that!
For Estea, who had lived so long that she could no longer remember the moment of her birth, it was a new form of perfect art.
So.
Without even remembering either to commend the Beethoven Orchestra and Choir for creating such a fantastic stage or to give Kim Yul’s head a nom-nom bite for designing it.
After that, Estea wandered not only throughout the Empire, but across the entire continent.
“I’ll find one too……!”
A composer and performer who might be hiding somewhere, capable of writing unknown yet breathtakingly beautiful pieces.
In search of a second Beethoven.
It was only natural.
“Your name’s Liszt! You! You play the piano well!”
“What’s a piano, dear?”
“I finally found you! Mozarrrrrt!”
“Huh? My name is Charmot.”
Someone like that was not going to be discovered easily.
It would have been much faster to grab Kim Yul by the collar and shake him, or bury herself in Historié’s arms and bawl her eyes out, but.
How could a noble and great Gold Dragon, with her dignity to uphold, do such things?
“Grrr……!”
Estea’s grand dream of finding raw gemstones herself and polishing them into jewels had unfortunately run aground.
But the wisdom she had accumulated over a life approaching immortality immediately led her to another solution.
Come to think of it.
Did this noble self really need to go around excavating some obscure talent buried in the countryside?
No!
Therefore, Estea’s next move was.
To visit the “sponsors” of the first Beethoven concert.
“I’m not interested in ordinary humans! Bring me musicians, composers, performers—whatever they are! That is all!”
Naturally, Duke Schnaisen and Duke Vertus could not resist that tyranny, and before long, unemployed musicians and aspiring talents who had been scratching their bellies at home gathered at the ducal residences.
And once they had been abducted to the dragon lair.
“The person who plays the most beautiful music and moves me will be today’s winner! Gold and treasures await you all!”
“Woo! Woo! Woo!”
“Gold! Gold! Gold!”
At the bold offer to put an end to their unemployed lives, they had no choice but to join their voices and cheer, whether they liked it or not.
At most, they had expected some sort of piano competition that would heat up the imperial capital, a battle like that.
Alas, Estea was also an avid reader who had been deeply moved by the novel ‘Beethoven.’
“Hearing is unnecessary for art! Sonum non audio!”
A wide-area Silence spell imbued with dragon words, utterly impossible for human mana to dispel, came to dominate the participants.
A Silence Survival Battle transcending time and space.
She was the living embodiment of ‘I Am a Musician.’
* * *
“Nureongi.”
“Mhm?”
“Even so, isn’t this a crime?”
“Nope.”
People say that pain is the source of art.
But Nureongi’s idea was closer to, ‘If you cause pain, art will come out!’ so I was simply left speechless.
But what was truly amazing was this.
The performers, having gone deaf, stubbornly continued playing melodies in the silence despite Estea’s declarations of disqualification.
And whenever Estea finally grew sick of it, dispelled the magic, and shouted, ‘You poop lumps! Get out!’
“Just one more chance to try again……!”
Even though they had clearly been abducted, imprisoned, and dragged all the way to the dragon lair, a bizarre phenomenon was unfolding in which the performers were instead clinging to Estea.
Was this that Stockholm syndrome thing?
Unable to contain my curiosity, I approached one of the eliminated contestants and asked why.
The answer was.
“Just for participating, we received enough of a reward to devote ourselves to music for at least three years without worrying about money……. And if we happened to win, we’d have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make music without ever worrying about money…… That…… that priceless opportunity……!”
Hmm.
I felt it last time too……
A life spent as Nureongi’s slave.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Seeing Chloe’s ears perk up beside me, it seemed that the terms and the sum were quite attractive even to a duke’s daughter.
“First lure them in by promising a fortune if their manuscript passes…… then, if you don’t like it, find fault with it and reject it…… heehee…… hyaaagh!”
How could anyone cure this crazy elf’s vicious streak, which threatened to turn her into an exploitative boss the moment I let my guard down?
Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi.
Please show me the way……
For now, before that.
“Nureongi?”
“Mhm?”
“Instead of wasting your strength on something like this, how about you join me in pursuing a great cause?”
“Mmm, no!”
Gasp.
I hadn’t expected to be rejected so cleanly.
But I had a way.
“Estea Kongming, I need your wisdom……! I need it……! I need it……!”
Plan B. The Three Visits.
Since I had whispered it three times, I thought she might accept right away without even needing three seconds’ consideration, but.
“Mmm, later! I’m busy right now!”
“What.”
The Zhuge Kongming treatment, with its 100-percent persuasion rate, had collapsed this easily. It was truly unexpected.
According to my original plan.
I had imagined saying something like, Be my Zhao Zilong, be my Zhuge Kongming—one line, or rather, since I needed to make three visits, three lines?
Then she would immediately giggle and squeal as she signed the slave contract…… no, the hero party membership application.
This girl.
She was more intelligent than I had thought……!
And she had quite a mind of her own……!
As I stood there frozen like a stone monument with a stunned expression.
“Dragons apparently don’t turn their attention to anything else once they get fixated on something, until they grow tired of it. So how about we play along with that Beethoven-finding game?”
Rozelyn, who had somehow come up behind me, quietly whispered some wisdom into my ear.
Hmm.
Is that so?
It made a lot of sense, so I accepted the saint’s counsel.
Come to think of it.
Wasn’t the power to end this war right in my hands?
I immediately approached Nureongi, who was growing irritated at the dissonance, and whispered a proposal she couldn’t refuse.
“It seems people aren’t showing their full abilities because the winner’s benefit is only money. How about offering a more outrageous condition too? Something like granting the winner one request?”
“Mmm? You think so?”
Nureongi’s tail swished back and forth, then smacked the floor with a bang.
“Okay!”
.
.
.
A little while later.
When Estea briefly turned off her area-wide deafness mode and announced that the rules of the game had changed, loud murmurs erupted here and there.
Among them was even one fellow who muttered a condition too vile to describe aloud and smiled with a creepy, “Heehee.”
“Estea Beam!”
“Kyaaagh!”
The moment the man who had hinted at a depraved interest in bestiality vanished from existence, an extremely strict, solemn, and serious atmosphere returned to the gathering.
Idiot.
You have to choose your target when sexually harassing someone.
Anyway, after that minor farce.
- We want to participate too.
- Really? Hmm, I don’t sense any musical energy from the three of you, but okay!
Riding the momentum, we successfully joined the hero party midway through.
- Why must I suffer such indignity?!
- Eh, me too?
Deafened, we sat in a neat little row and waited for our turns.
Of course, Chloe and Rozelyn had no particular musical talent, but wasn’t this normally what shared responsibility in a hero party was about?
『Eeeek! Dissonanceeeee!』
Well, I could understand the situation through the skill ‘Beethoven’s Heartbeat,’ which allowed me to hear the essence of sound.
『Phew, fortunately, even though it’s dragon-word magic, divine power still works. Still, Kim Yul is annoying, so should I pretend not to notice here?』
I could also hear Rozelyn grumbling after unfairly shattering even the dragon’s Silence with divine magic.
『Aaaagh! Kim Yul is stupid! Kim Yul is a poop mongrel! Kim Yul is a dwarf! Kim Yul is an ogre! I can’t hear anythinggggggg!』
I could even sense the voice of that wretched elf, who was flailing about and futilely resisting her fate, and ought to have been immediately sentenced to dangling by her earlobes for insulting the Hero.
Well, it didn’t matter.
Since I was the one who had dragged them into this, I could generously let that much backbiting slide.
Instead, I’d give her a three-hit ear-and-tail buster later.
* * *
Estea watched Kim Yul with a sulky expression until he sat down in front of the piano.
The fact that he had come all the way here to play with her counted in his favor.
However, the fact that he had dared to ask for a ‘favor’ with greed blazing in his eyes counted against him.
She had accepted because she wanted the stage she had worked so hard to produce to heat up a little more, but the truth was, she was not entirely pleased.
As the goodwill that author ‘Ulysses’ had built up through his writing was gradually chipped away.
What if he played terribly here and spouted nonsense like Heheh, music is difficult?
Then she planned to torment him mercilessly with the dragon’s fatal tail chokehold.
She would lock him in the ‘Writing Room’ in a corner of the lair, feed him only four meals a day, let him sleep only ten hours, and make him write for every remaining moment as punishment for his crime.
But.
“Huh?”
Estea saw it.
As Kim Yul closed his eyes and took a deep breath before the piano, a spirit radiating a sacred and magnificent aura briefly took up residence in him.
The figure of that spirit looked just like.
The Beethoven who had appeared in the novel’s illustrations.
Before long, when Kim Yul began to play in earnest.
After weeks of traveling all across the continent without expressing satisfaction even once, a cry of delight came from Estea’s lips.
“Whoa!”
At long last, a purr-song expressing satisfaction escaped her.
Estea’s expression instantly melted into a silly grin.
But at the same time.
A strange emotion began to shimmer in the eyes of the art-loving dragon.
That gaze was unmistakably
the gaze of an apex predator stalking its prey.