Chapter 36
[36] I’ve Been Waiting for You
How much time had passed?
“Ugh...”
Minjun slowly opened his eyes as his consciousness began to return. He held his head.
I was in the imperial tomb just before I passed out.
Where was he now?
The ground around him was paved with stone tiles bearing strange patterns, and weeds grew thickly beyond them.
Before losing consciousness, he had been deep beneath the tomb. Now, when he looked up, he saw a clear blue sky.
But that wasn’t the strangest thing.
In a vast open space like this, he should have been unable to see the far edge. Yet beyond a certain point, the space simply ended.
As if that spot were a boundary dividing dimensions.
Beyond it, all he could see was pitch-black darkness, which stirred an instinctive fear.
And there was something else, too.
He couldn’t say exactly what it was, but the place was filled with an energy that felt both familiar and foreign.
“What is this place...?”
Everything was confusing.
But before Minjun could make sense of the situation, the ground suddenly began to tremble.
Startled, Minjun tried to move away from the source of the vibration, but the shaking quickly stopped. Then a figure began to rise from the ground.
It was—
“...The emperor?”
Dark brown hair and brown eyes to match.
A masculine face and a sturdy build to suit it.
It was the emperor as a young man, just as Minjun had seen him in the recording magic.
“You address His Majesty the Emperor as ‘the emperor’? You have no manners.”
It was a language Minjun had never heard before, yet he could understand what the man was saying.
It was the same unfamiliar language he’d heard and understood in the recording magic.
Minjun nervously swallowed and watched the emperor’s expression.
Though he’d called Minjun rude, the emperor didn’t seem particularly angry with him.
If anything, he was staring at Minjun with great interest.
He didn’t seem hostile, at least for now.
Still, I can’t let my guard down.
That was only a guess, not a certainty.
“Then... should I call you ‘Your Majesty’?”
“Don’t bother. I’m already dead. What need is there for ‘Your Majesty’? Just call me by my name. I’m Minos.”
As if formalities were unnecessary, the emperor continued.
“To get straight to the point, there’s only one reason you’ve come here.”
Minos pointed at the Dragon Bone Sword lying beside Minjun.
“You’re a Dragon Bone Sword wielder, like me. No one else could have made it this far.”
At Minos’s words, Minjun realized that some of his earlier guesses had been right.
I knew all of this couldn’t have happened by chance...
But why?
Before Minjun could ask, Minos began to explain, as if he already knew what Minjun wanted to know.
“As you saw in the recording magic, I used the dragon’s power in my sword to change my fate—and the fate of my homeland.”
The recording Minjun had seen had been left behind by Minos, who had instructed the royal mages to make it for whoever eventually found the tomb.
It was meant to reveal who lay buried here and what kind of life he had lived.
“I was the person furthest from inheriting the throne. Yet I became king and turned a small, weak country into a vast, unified empire.”
Though it was a story from the distant past—so distant that he could no longer count the years—Minos still remembered those days vividly.
The day a mysterious visitor placed the Dragon Bone Sword in his hands.
The visitor hadn’t revealed his identity, but Minos had sensed what he was: a “dragon,” the kind he’d only heard about in stories.
As time passed, that intuition became certainty.
The confidence that he could overwhelm anyone—and the immense power that proved it wasn’t mere arrogance.
Only a dragon could possess both.
“You have a talent others don’t. So bring that talent to its full potential.”
As the mysterious man turned to leave, warning Minos not to disappoint him,
Minos had been captivated by the idea of dragons.
If only I were a dragon...
The man’s praise about his talent barely registered.
Minos could think of nothing but dragons.
If I’d been born a dragon instead of a weak human...
He would never have had to suffer such humiliation at the hands of his brothers and officials.
If he’d been born a perfect being from the start, he would never have had to endure such shameful, painful memories—experiences he wanted to erase.
From then on, Minos began to harbor a secret dream he couldn’t share with anyone: he wanted to become a dragon.
Overpowering his brothers, who had looked down on him for his lack of martial skill, and ascending the throne...
Turning his small border kingdom into a vast, unified empire after becoming king...
Those were merely achievements he’d gained along the way to his goal. To him, they meant nothing.
There was only one true dream he had cherished until the day he died:
To become a dragon, a perfect being.
To have the same powerful body as a dragon, to be talented in every field, and to live for thousands of years—perhaps even close to ten thousand—just as they did.
That was his dream.
After years of training, at the young age of thirty, he achieved a remarkable feat: he managed to manifest Dragon Tongue in a human body.
“But I couldn’t say I’d manifested it perfectly.”
Everyone else thought he’d mastered Dragon Tongue, but he knew the truth.
What he had manifested was incomplete—so incomplete that even calling it half-baked might have been generous.
That truth had been captured vividly in the recording magic Minjun had seen.
I want to use Dragon Tongue perfectly. Not a half-baked version, but a perfect Dragon Tongue, exactly like the dragons use!
No one had been there to kindly advise him, as Minjun had been advised, but Minos had understood instinctively.
In his mind, the most important prerequisite for becoming a dragon was to master Dragon Tongue perfectly.
And so, he hadn’t been satisfied with what he’d achieved. He kept pushing himself, training relentlessly—
Until mana backlash began to destroy his body.
Damn it...!
At some point, he began coughing up blood from mana backlash not only when he used incomplete Dragon Tongue, but even when he drew on a tiny amount of the dragon’s power in his sword.
At first, it only happened when he used his power. But as time went on, it grew worse, until he suffered mana backlash even when he wasn’t doing anything.
From then on, Minos’s body weakened beyond recovery.
His dream of becoming a dragon seemed like a futile one he would never achieve in this life.
And yet—
Minos never gave up on the dream he’d first conceived as a thirteen-year-old boy.
Wasn’t this imperial tomb, designed so that no one but a Dragon Bone Sword wielder could reach its lowest level, proof of that?
Still—
The more Minjun listened to his story, the more Minos reminded him of Icarus from Greek mythology.
Icarus hadn’t been content to fly. He’d tried to soar higher and get closer to the sun, until the wax holding his wings together melted and he fell.
And Minjun felt a growing fear that he might end up like Icarus—or like the Minos standing before him.
“You look troubled.”
“...I have reason to be.”
Minos seemed to sense, at least vaguely, what Minjun was feeling.
“Which brings me to the point.”
Minos slowly began to speak.
“I’ve waited here for a long time for someone who could fulfill my dream in my place.”
Minos had died long ago.
But his powerful desire had left behind a lingering spirit, and that was why he could appear before Minjun now.
Some might think his obsession with becoming a dragon was excessive.
After all, using Dragon Tongue was already almost impossible for a human—and he had managed to use it, albeit imperfectly.
But Minos’s blind admiration of dragons had become a pathological obsession. That obsession had led him to form a twisted dream.
Though he himself had failed, he wanted to see with his own eyes someone else break through the limits of their birth and become a dragon, even as a human.
So he had remained here as a spirit, waiting for someone who could fulfill his dream in his place.
Someone who owned an artifact containing a dragon’s power, like the Dragon Bone Sword—or someone with the same potential as he had, even without one.
After an eternity of waiting—an unimaginable span of time for a human—
Minjun had finally arrived.
“So, I want you to show me how you use Dragon Tongue.”
“...I’m sorry, but it hasn’t even been a month since I started seriously learning to use this sword. I’d like to show you how I use Dragon Tongue, but I don’t think I can do that just yet...”
Minos had carried this unfulfilled longing in his heart for a very long time.
Now that Minjun knew his story, he wished he could help him find peace.
But he was truly sorry that he couldn’t.
“So you can’t use Dragon Tongue?”
“That’s right. I’m really sorry. Still, if I see a chance someday, I’ll be sure to come back and show you.”
“No. There’s no need.”
Minos smiled ominously and closed the distance between them.
“I’ll make it so you can use Dragon Tongue.”
Minjun stared at him, confused.
Minos himself had failed to use Dragon Tongue perfectly.
So how could he make someone else able to use it?
But then Minos said something that left Minjun stunned.
“From now on, you cannot leave this place until you can use complete Dragon Tongue. There is only one way for you to get out.”
Whether by using your sword or drawing on the power of another artifact, it doesn’t matter how you do it.
Use complete Dragon Tongue to shatter this illusory world Minos had created.
“Until then, you won’t be able to leave whenever you want. You won’t even be able to die when you want to.”
As soon as Minos finished speaking, he conjured a blood-red sword out of thin air and drove it into the ground.
Another notification appeared before Minjun’s eyes.
[Rank: EX
Clearance condition: Reach the lowest level of Minos’s tomb and use Dragon Tongue (0/1)]