Dragon Dragon Dragon

“I’m very curious, just what exactly are you about to do?” Eric quizzed without hurry.

Roland leisurely stripped off his outer garments covering his body and then went downstairs again to retrieve the hidden bag of tools and dagger.  He came back up shouldering the magician they had just killed, then answered with composure, “Obviously, there are things here that interests me more.”

Roland was set apart from Easley and the others. He did not believe Eric to be just an ordinary dejected swordsman. To be this deep in the woods completely free of injuries was evidence enough to demonstrate his strength, but after luring Easley and the others away, he did not fear facing Eric by himself because his own strength also greatly surpa.s.sed the level he had shown in front of everyone.

He was not any ordinary rogue. He was the king of rogues in the profession.

He lured Easley away not because he was afraid of him, but because he did not want to cause a conflict with him. For example, if he carelessly injured this youth, it could possibly spite the Heine family. Although he was not afraid, it was still better to reduce as many inconveniences as possible.

This time while coming forward with the squad, on the surface he appeared to be hired by Easley, but in reality previous to this, he had also signed a contract. The Heine family had hired him to observe and record the performance of Easley after he entered the sea of forest, as well as to test him at random.

Everything he had currently done did not really count as violating the first contract. While creating a situation to test Easley, he could also obtain the things he coveted along the way.

However, the person Roland was facing was Eric. Eric was also confident in his strength and felt he could handle the rogue, and so let Easley and the others take the bait and give chase while he watched the rogue go up and down carrying things.

After carefully placing the corpse on the floor, Roland turned around and went downstairs again, retrieving the artifacts he had previously hidden away.

He had identified the collections in the tower, and besides the Hundred Billion Stars, there were also a few other legendary artifacts that had their information only written down in ancient records. Any one of these artifacts posed a great temptation, enough to make it worth going against the contract to seize it.

Of course, in order to avoid troubles, he did not mention the names of the other artifacts besides the Hundred Billion Stars.

However, the things that interested Roland were not limited to these.

He flipped the dead magician’s corpse over with the back facing upwards and untied the other party’s garments to inspect. Yi Longlong gave a gasp of astonishment and then subsequently quickly turned around, not looking at Roland.

Roland noticed Yi Longlong’s behavior and felt it was quite strange, but he did not pause. He tore apart the outer garments of the evil magician while casually asking Eric, “What’s up with her? Scared of the corpse?”

After several days of interaction with her, Eric had already basically figured out Yi Longlong’s thinking patterns. He could tell what she was thinking just by looking at the angle her tail was c.o.c.ked. He replied without hesitation, “She thought you were about to express your admiration for this corpse gentleman. As a demure female, she felt very embarra.s.sed and turned her head around to avoid seeing an extremely horrifying scene.”

Eric was rather euphemistic with his words. It took quite a while for Roland to automatically translate it in his head: Yi Longlong thought he was into necrophilia and enjoyed violating corpses in front of bystanders, so the dragon maiden turned around, lest she saw…

Not only did Yi Longlong turn around, she even used two tiny paws to cover her eyes. It was a typical show of looking away from indecency, demonstrating that Eric was not talking nonsense.

Roland’s face turned pale then darkened again. He slowly said with gritted teeth, “I’m undoing this fellow’s clothes because I wanted to check whether or not he was human.”

Yi Longlong was startled and turned around after hearing his words. She surprisingly discovered that the texture of the skin was very rigid, not at all like a normal person – although she was in the hospital in her previous life for that long and was the one being treated, she did have some knowledge about some things, of which included human anatomy. With the clothes removed, Yi Longlong discovered that the anatomy of this “corpse” had some slight differences from normal humans, and the wound on his back did not have much blood. Instead, a glint of metal could be seen through the wound.

Roland pointed at the back of the “evil magician”, saying, “I accidentally discovered this during our fight with him. This magician is fundamentally not an actual human. He is more akin to an extremely intricate crafted puppet. They possess a human appearance, and some of them can even think and make simple judgments, however in the end their behavior is still controlled by the master’s orders…Do you know about puppets, should I give an explanation?”

Yi Longlong shook her head. This was not hard for her to comprehend. These so-called puppets were equivalent to the androids from the stories in her previous life, and even the type that had a little bit of intelligence.

She looked at Eric again. He did not seem to be fazed at all. Yi Longlong recalled Eric’s relaxed att.i.tude back when Roland killed this puppet, suddenly realizing that Eric had already known this evil magician was actually a fake.

Roland smiled. “If I didn’t guess wrong, the master of the tower has really gone out. He left this puppet magician to guard his home, and may have also relayed the orders to attack all intruders. This can explain his attacks. I rushed an attack to his back, destroying his processing core, which counts as killing him… This type of puppetry is a rarity on these lands. Not to exaggerate, but this corpse is practically as valuable as the famed sword Hundred Billion Stars.”

After ascertaining the “evil magician” was indeed a puppet as per his guesses, Roland was satisfied and put the clothes back onto the corpse. He then looked at Yi Longlong again.

“I’m not like the young n.o.bleman.” Although Roland’s eyes were looking at Yi Longlong, he was actually speaking to Eric, “Are you actually unaware or pretending to be ignorant?  Putting the dragon aside, you even wastefully used the extremely rare and valuable silver blue gra.s.s that only grows under special conditions on weaving clothes for her. With her dolly get-up, it’s enough to buy a village.”

It was all fine when Roland was speaking, but his last utterance gave Yi Longlong a shock. “This gra.s.s, is it really that valuable?”

When she saw that it was everywhere by the lake where she was born, she had thought it was extremely common.

If the ones on her body could buy a village, then in this year alone she wasted…