Chapter 563 — A Tentative Trust
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Once both sides chose to speak frankly, the conversation naturally became much easier.
At Gao Song's own request, Meiheng stopped addressing him with the polite, formal manner of a "Mithril Treasury agent," and no longer used "you" in the deferential sense—under these circumstances, that was clearly a gesture meant to build trust.
Conversing with a dragon was a novel and fascinating experience, but the real dragon race was plainly rather different from all those muddled myths and legends—the ones Gao Yu told, the ones passed among bards, recorded on ancient steles, and set down in the obscure, tangled notebooks of mystics. Humans, it seemed, loved to describe this powerful species in exaggerated language steeped in mystery: the dragons of legend were mighty and proud, rulers of the sky; they were said to harbor a startling mania for glittering treasure, and in ancient times to have taken particular delight in plundering human kingdoms. There was even a legend that the ancestors of the Gondor Empire were dragon slayers—that they had driven back the great dragons, and only thus won mankind's dominion over the continent...
Meiheng Pernia seemed rather helpless before such legends.
"We are a highly civilized race, yet the stories you mention describe us as something closer to powerful but utterly unrestrained beasts. And it is true that dragons love treasure—but when have we ever gone plundering? Isn't trade a faster way to wealth than robbery?"
Gao Yang... greatly admired the dragons' candid attitude on this point.
"The races of this continent do so love to invent such stories. The last dozen centuries or so have been better, but there was a time when your human dragon-slaying novels flourished remarkably—as though a young man from some village could not even qualify to appear in a bard's tale unless he had killed a dragon or two," Meiheng went on. "That craze even drew the attention of the Council. We dispatched special observers to the Loren Continent to investigate, to see whether any dragons out on assignment had come into conflict with human kingdoms—and in the end, the observers brought back three bards who had spent their whole lives feasting and freeloading in our realm."
"The unknown makes people uneasy. A powerful and mysterious race will naturally have a heap of sensational tales arranged around it," Gao Yang remarked with a helpless air, then shifted tack. "But the stories of dragons destroying kingdoms are sometimes not entirely fabricated either, are they?"
"Why do you say that?" Meiheng's eyes went wide at once. "We have never done such a thing—"
Gao Yang spread his hands. "Old Cecil was destroyed by dragonfire."
Meiheng's remaining words were choked off at once, and she coughed repeatedly. "Cough, cough, cough..."
"That wasn't you, was it?" Watching Meiheng's reaction and recalling the morphological features of the dragon he had once witnessed, Gao Yang ventured tentatively.
"You were there at the time?" Meiheng recovered from her coughing and looked at Gao Yang in astonishment. "How did I not notice..."
"So it really was you," Gao Yang said, sizing Meiheng up and down. Though the fact was now confirmed, he still found it hard to connect this petite lady before him with that sky-blotting shadow of a dragon. "Then it seems we shall have to add one more to the number of times we have met."
"I had no choice then," Meiheng said, a note of embarrassment seeming to enter her voice. "That land had already been tainted by magical energy; the number of aberrations had exceeded the proliferation threshold. Only burning all the corruption to ash could stop the situation from worsening."
"I understand. I have dealt with aberrations," Gao Yang said with a wave of his hand. "I did not bring this up to assign blame—let us call it satisfying my own curiosity. And there is something else I am curious about as well: how does your dragon race view me, a man who has risen from the dead?"