novelraw Chapter 200
Chapter 200
Chapter 200: The Evil Dragon Wants to Eat Humans
In the congested evening rush hour, as the sun set, the city’s veins were gently outlined by the glimmering neon lights.
In the spiderweb woven by countless cars, headlights intertwined, and the slow-moving steel was like a torrent under the night sky.
Xia Li gripped the steering wheel.
He didn’t drive towards home, but instead turned onto a road he had never been on before.
Looking at the constantly receding streetscape outside the window, Lucia’s face was filled with bewilderment at this unfamiliar scenery.
Although she had been on Earth for almost half a year, she was still somewhat awestruck when faced with the vastness of human cities.
The towering buildings on both sides were like strict guardian knights, making her, sitting in the car, seem quite insignificant in this concrete jungle.
“Wh-Where… are we going?”
Lucia turned around, a few strands of hair escaping from her bun, her butterfly hair clip slightly askew, her neck shrinking into her collar, looking a bit intimidated. Tucking the hair at her temples behind her ears, Lucia looked at Xia Li and asked softly.
Just because she didn’t change the ‘Xia’ character to ‘Gong’, is the Brave Hero going to take the dragon to the market and sell her off?
“I’m taking you out to dinner, to celebrate your first week at work.”
Xia Li glanced at his phone mounted on the air vent. The map on it showed that they were still a kilometer away from their destination.
“One week, you persevered. That’s a good start,” Xia Li added.
The so-called celebration was just an excuse. The real purpose was to add a little surprise to life.
Look at how scared this dragon is.
Xia Li knew this kind of surprise would be effective.
However, there was one thing Xia Li wasn’t wrong about.
Before sending Lucia to the pet hospital, he had already decided that if Lucia couldn’t adapt to the outside world or had difficulties communicating with people, he would bring her back home. Working or not wouldn’t matter.
—Given Lucia’s level of social anxiety at the time, Xia Li had a strong feeling that the possibility of bringing her back home midway was quite high.
But Lucia persevered. She overcame many difficulties.
Lucia wouldn’t tell Xia Li about all her struggles. When interacting with people, it often takes a period of adjustment, and it’s normal to have arguments and conflicts during this period.
With so many employees at the pet hospital, just getting along with colleagues was already a headache, let alone dealing with various clients and small animals.
Lucia had never complained in front of Xia Li, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have any.
So Xia Li assumed that this dragon had already put in a lot of effort.
“Just a week…”
Lucia muttered, counting on her fingers.
“I still need to find a new lair, and continue… for many, many days!”
“A week is already pretty good. I used to feel physically and mentally exhausted after just one day of working as a waiter… If you ever feel tired, just tell me. We don’t have to insist on this.”
Xia Li turned the steering wheel, taking a glance at Lucia in the rearview mirror.
“This isn’t really about insisting. It’s a very reassuring feeling to wake up every day and see an extra forty yuan in my pocket,” Lucia said, tugging at the seatbelt across her chest, her gaze returning to the window.
This was one of the few things she could do to contribute.
The dragon brain didn’t have many grand ambitions. The value she wanted now was literal value. It referred to little money.
Money was the magic of this world. You could get anything you wanted with it.
Three yuan for a fried rice cake, two hundred yuan a day for Xia Li, eighteen thousand yuan per square meter for a new apartment in Qingcheng City…
Watching these dreams accumulate little by little and then come true was also a kind of happiness.
Xia Li looked at Lucia’s engrossed and serious expression, moved his lips, and didn’t say anything more.
From the moment they got out of the car to the walk to the restaurant, Lucia’s little mouth, like a well-oiled engine, started chattering non-stop.
Things like new patients at the hospital, a puppy who miraculously survived being run over by a car, a cat who was found to be pregnant during a sterilization surgery, a rabbit that couldn’t poop, confrontations between clients and doctors, and even office romances.
When listening to the first half, Xia Li simply took these things as learning clinical experience.
But the last part left him dumbfounded.
“Office romance?”
Xia Li said blankly.
“Is this something a little dragon like you should be exposed to???”
In his impression, the level Lucia could reach was only at the level of ‘kindergarten kids holding hands’.
How come she was already exposed to office romances? Even Xia Li had never seen one.
“Yes, after the New Year, the hospital hired a lot of interns. Besides me, there’s also a fresh graduate, who is the director’s nephew… That nephew and a nurse named Liu in our hospital were former lovers, boyfriend and girlfriend? Yes, they were exes…”
Lucia, like a little loudspeaker on an electric bike, blabbered on and on.
Xia Li was surprised that this dragon could not only understand social relationships but also pry into things to this extent.
“Xia Xin told me… the kind young lady who showed me around on my first day. She keeps talking about these things in my ear every day, and my ears are getting calluses from listening to her.”
Lucia had no one to complain to.
If there were any difficulties at work, getting along with colleagues was the hardest thing for her.
She didn’t like to gossip about others, but if she deliberately avoided it when everyone around her was chatting, she would become the one being isolated.
Lucia had only been working for a week and had already noticed this trend, which forced her to join the girls’ camp.
When chatting with A about B, A would badmouth B, and she would nod and agree. When chatting with B about A, B would badmouth A, and she would also nod and echo.
When A and B were both present, everyone would act as if nothing had happened.
No wonder they said human nature was sinister.
Four girls could have five WeChat groups.
Lucia had already tried her best to be sociable, but she still felt a sense of not belonging.
“Don’t learn so much from the local girls…” Xia Li interjected, “There’s no need to cater to things you don’t like. Just speak up if you don’t like it.”
Xia Li was afraid that his little dragon would suffer, and also afraid that she would learn some messy things.
Especially the unique personality of local girls.
The Sichuan Tyrannosaurus Rex that people talked about was a figure of speech, but his dragon was a real dragon, the kind that you absolutely couldn’t hold back once she went berserk.
As they talked, the two of them turned left and right at the complex intersection, finally stopping in front of a shop.
“Evil Dragon Slaughterhouse!”
Looking at the pictures of raw meat on the signboard at the entrance, Lucia suddenly felt like she had entered some extraordinary place.
Xia Li chuckled and said, “It’s a sushi restaurant. These kinds of places love to use pictures of sashimi for advertising. Sashimi means raw meat…”
Although Lucia had learned a lot about this society, she was still lacking in many aspects.
For example, this kind of shop.
Places she had never been to were places she had never been to. When chatting with colleagues and friends and these words came up, she would only choose to remain silent because she had never seen these things.
Humans cannot imagine things they have never seen, and neither can dragons.
Staring at the pictures of bright red raw meat for a couple of seconds, Lucia swallowed.
Xia Li didn’t allow her to eat raw things before…
He said that the first milestone of human civilization was cooking raw meat. Eating raw food was something only barbarians would do, so he wouldn’t let Lucia eat it.
However, the bigger reason was that he didn’t want to activate Lucia’s wild instincts.
Especially this kind of bloody food… When Lucia was a dragon, she would put live prey directly into her mouth and chew it. Just thinking about it was terrifying.
So after returning to Earth, Xia Li had been avoiding these things, even making Lucia eat well-done steak when they went out.
Today, he wanted Lucia to try something new.
This time, Xia Li wasn’t afraid of activating Lucia’s nature, but rather that Lucia was becoming too human lately, putting the cart before the horse.
Humans occasionally eat raw food too, it’s called dietary diversity.
◈◈◈
“How does it taste?”
Xia Li pulled Lucia to sit down in a corner of the shop.
It was a conveyor belt sushi restaurant, with a rotating machine resembling an assembly line, spitting out plates of sushi from an opening.
The biggest advantage of this kind of restaurant was that there was no need to wait for the food to be served, you could eat immediately after sitting down.
Lucia stared at the conveyor belt for a while and felt dizzy. She lowered her head just as a ball of white rice with a slice of meat flew by, and she happened to open her mouth and catch it.
“Ah~”
After eating the rice ball that Xia Li fed her, Lucia narrowed her eyes and chewed a couple of times.
The raw meat tasted like jelly, without any bloody smell, far different from the taste of chewing on a lamb in Azure Continent.
“Good…”
“So good!” Xia Li stole her answer.
He knew Lucia would say that.
Lucia, whose thoughts were guessed, closed her mouth embarrassedly, looked around at the people nearby, then picked up her small bamboo chopsticks and ate another piece of sushi.
Xia Li must have secretly used mind-reading magic, even imitating her tone perfectly.
Was her usual speech so childish?
She was already a hundred years old, old enough to be Xia Li’s great-grandmother.
The rice balls dipped in soy sauce tasted quite good. Lucia didn’t like chili peppers, so this kind of food was very much to her liking.
“Why doesn’t the fish here have a fishy smell?”
Picking up a piece of bright red fish, Lucia shook her chopsticks, her eyes sparkling as she stared at the patterns on it.
Then, with a ‘slurp’, she ate it all.
“Because this is saltwater fish, and there are special ways to handle it…”
Xia Li couldn’t answer this question either, he wasn’t a professional. He could only beat around the bush and say: “If you choose to be a ‘chef’ instead of a pet doctor, you’ll know how to handle these ingredients.”
“I initially wanted to be a little chef,” Lucia said with a regretful tone, “But I don’t regret it either, my abilities are better suited for animals… Even the attending physician with eight years of clinical experience praised my quick reactions, saying my abilities are the most outstanding he’s seen in recent years.”
Once the topic of work came up, this dragon machine gun would start chattering endlessly.
They ate and chatted, making a ruckus for over an hour, finally filling up this stinky dragon.
The two of them ate over three hundred pieces of sushi. Xia Li took advantage of the dragon going to the bathroom to wash her claws and quickly went to pay the bill, preventing the dragon from feeling distressed about spending money.
“Xia Li, I have a brilliant idea.”
Flicking water droplets from her dragon claws, Lucia walked behind Xia Li, looking back every few steps, clearly showing her reluctance to leave the restaurant.
“What has your dragon brain come up with now?”
“This conveyor belt has an end and a starting point.”
“And then?”
“And then, I just need to squat down at the end and open my mouth… the sushi will automatically fall into my mouth!”
Xia Li: “…”
Although he roughly knew what this dragon wanted to say, she could be really childish sometimes.
Lucia was still the same Lucia. Although she had changed a lot in less than half a year, some things hadn’t changed at all.
“This is called eating a natural buffet!” the dragon concluded.
“… Do you think the sushi on this conveyor belt is automatically generated? It’s because there’s a chef making it at the back. Without a chef, even if you keep your mouth open, no food will fall into your mouth.”
Xia Li suddenly thought of a crocodile opening its mouth wide waiting for food. That was probably the feeling Lucia wanted.
“Oh, I get it. We can skip the conveyor belt and just have the chef make it and throw it into my mouth… If the chef is slow at making sushi, then we’ll eat the chef too.”
“…” Xia Li was speechless.
“I just took you to eat a little bit of meat, and your dragon brain is already thinking about eating people!?”
“Hehe, just kidding… Why can’t Xia Li take a joke?” Lucia stuck out her tongue, the expression on her face mischievous.
Xia Li couldn’t help himself and pinched her dragon face into a flat pancake.
“Spare me, brave hero~”
Lucia pretended to be cowardly and squeezed out four words from her mouth. Xia Li immediately softened.
“Say you were wrong.”
“You were wrong.”
“… It’s ‘I was wrong’.”
“I forgive you!”
“You, you, you…”
The dragon played word games with him and even managed to take advantage of Xia Li.
This was the first time Xia Li had suffered a major loss in human language, and he felt frustrated.
Walking down the street, the night was slow to fall. The sunset glow was like an orange ribbon, dividing the horizon into light and dark.
Xia Li looked up at the twinkling stars in the deep blue sky.
It gave him a sense of peace and tranquility.
Putting aside those sudden distracting thoughts, if he didn’t want to get involved in other things, if he didn’t ‘meddle’, this kind of peaceful life could probably last for a long, long time.
“Old Xia, I also discovered a pattern at the entrance of this human cub school.”
The small hand held by Xia Li moved in his palm. Those apricot-like round and cute eyes were looking at the kindergarten ahead, longingly wondering about something.
“…”
Xia Li hesitated for a moment.
He thought to himself, if this dragon dared to say something about eating a human cub, he would have to beat her up.
“Every human cub here is led out by an adult,” the dragon said with a serious face, analyzing the situation.
“So that’s what you were talking about…” Xia Li exhaled.
“Huh?”
“This is an after-school care center. Parents who get off work late will let their children have dinner at the care center before picking them up.”
Xia Li explained this phenomenon to Lucia, then he held Lucia’s hand and swung it around.
“Aren’t you a little kid being picked up by your parent now?”
Xia Li thought this sentence was quite romantic.
It fit the scene perfectly.
Any girl would be moved by it…
However, Lucia was indeed moved, and her eyes lit up.
“That’s right!”
Lucia realized and her face immediately broke into a smile.
“I’m your great-grandmother!”
Xia Li: “…”
How come even after returning to Earth, the brave hero is still being overpowered by the dragon?
Trembling with anger.
When can I start slaying dragons?
Can’t hold back anymore.