More and more of the egg started to break, and it wasn’t long before the top half fell off into the rest of Azoth’s hands, revealing a tiny, azure dragon the size of a baby lizard. I held my breath as I used [Appraisal], and having pushed it to Level 10, the skill was finally bearing fruit.
[Draco Sapiens Lv. 1 – N/A]
HP: 25/25 (1000)
SP: 10/10 (300)
MP: 5/5 (150)
Vitality: 10 (60)
Strength: 1 (50)
Dexterity: 1 (60)
Intelligence: 1 (40)
Wisdom: 1 (40)
Racial Traits:
[Sapient Creature]
[Claw Strike]
[Night Vision]
[Regeneration]
[Draconic Sorcery]
Class Skills:
N/A
Skills:
N/A
Titles:
N/A
Status Effects:
[Newborn]
Mom’s eyes were wide open, her eyes tearing up as the little dragon was sitting in its egg, looking around and taking in the sights with its relatively large eyes.
The baby dragon was barely two inches tall, with its head making up nearly a third of its size. Its little paws and feet did not have claws, and its mouth didn’t have teeth. For some reason, though, it was already covered in its scales, as if it grew them in the egg.
The baby looked towards mom and stared for a moment, before pushing part of the egg away as it tried to crawl towards mom.
“Squeee!”
Mom gently raised the baby to her face, overwhelmed with emotions as the baby started touching her face with its tiny paws and squealing.
With a tear dropping down her cheek, mom kissed the baby on its snout and started laughing as the baby carried on squealing and hugging her face.
“Take a look, Kiara. This is your sibling.” She said, any trace of exhaustion or stress simply gone.
She gently held the baby towards me, who slowly looked towards me.
I took the baby from her hands and held it as it turned to face me. It stared at me for a moment before bursting into tears, an infernal racket bombarding my ears and making me flinch.
“What the hell?! What’s wrong, kid?!”
The screaming was upsetting me on a deeper level before mom took the baby back from my hands and started to rock it gently, humming a lullaby in an attempt to soothe it. The baby went from bawling its eyes out to sleeping within a period of nearly 15 seconds.
“…Is my face that ugly?” I said, starting to feel myself falling back into a depression.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Mom just started laughing softly before answering me.
“No, dear. Baby dragons like this one get strongly attached to their mothers, and their attachment remains strong until they lose their [Newborn] status. Still, I didn’t expect just handing them to you would result in such a response… It seems like your sibling is a timid one.”
“Huh. Well, did you come up with a name for them?”
Mom stared at the sleeping baby in her hand tenderly as she responded.
“Madeil; Their name is Madeil.”
She then stood up slowly, careful not to wake up Madeil.
“I am going to lay Madeil in their crib in my room. Do you think you can stay in bed alone for a few hours while I prepare a few things for your sibling?”
I shook my head and pushed my blanket off me, before sitting up and putting my feet on the ground.
“I am fine, mom. Like I said, I am going to be working on getting comfortable with the system again. Feel free to do what you have to in the meantime. By the way, where did you put the domain field?”
***
I was in the snowy field of mom’s domain field, standing over two destroyed war golems.
“It seems that I can interact with the system just fine. I can fight, and I can take hits whether or not [Pain Immunity] is active.” I thought out loud.
“Still… While it’s good to confirm I haven’t lost my edge, this isn’t what I am here to overcome.”
I sat down in the snow and stared at the class advancement prompt, that prize that was so close, yet so far away.
“Maybe the time away from it all might make it easier for me?” I wondered.
But why was my class advancement giving me trouble in the first place? It was my evolution that was painful, I know why it hurt so much and why it can’t hurt like that again, and I have an immunity to pain. It doesn’t make sense tha-
I slapped myself with both hands and closed my eyes.
“Enough stalling. It’s time to get to it.”
With fiery determination, I tried to will the words out.
“Y-Ye… Ye… I accep-”
I felt my heart thundering in my chest, my breath short and my sweat cold.
Instead of trying to say it, I tried to will it internally this time. Surely that would be easier than saying the words out loud?
And yet, I faced the same wall of fear. Every time I would go near the edge, I back out in an instant, withdrawing consent to advance involuntarily.
My hands were shaking, and I was starting to hyperventilate.
“That’s enough, Kiara.” Mom’s voice echoed from the sky.
I laid on my back in the snow, opening my eyes with frustration and disappointment.
“You’re going to make things worse by trying to force it. Like we’ve said before, just get comfortable with the system prompt at your own pace. Don’t rush.”
Outside of the tiny marble-sized domain field, mom was taking care of Madeil as she observed me from afar.
“Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to see if I could advance after some time had passed.”
My breathing was slowing down, and the snow felt strangely warm to the touch.
Strange.
Now that I think about it, domain fields were really something. I couldn’t wait to get my own, but that wasn’t going to happen before I was a rank S creature.
I sighed.
“It all comes back to this stupid trauma, doesn’t it?”
If advancing my class is this hard, what am I going to do when it’s time to evolve again?
I shook my head before getting up, shaking the snow of my body, and exiting the domain field. In an instant, I was warped out of it, standing in front of the dresser where it lay.
Mom was sitting next to the crib, watching over a sleeping Madeil.
“How much sleep is one baby going to get? It’s nearly nighttime already.” I asked incredulously.
“Newborn Dragons grow up really quickly, sweety, so they only wake up for food or to have their diapers changed.”
“How’s that the case? Even human babies don’t sleep that much!”
Mom rolled her eyes good naturedly as she answered.
“Well, dragons are very different from humans. Human babies take nearly four years from birth to become children, then take around 14 more to reach adulthood. From there, they can live up to roughly a hundred years, give or take a few decades, if they remain at F rank. Dragons are different.” She said, wagging a finger at me.
“Dragons spend nearly a month as babies from their hatching, rapidly growing by absorbing mana and nutrition to become children. They then take twenty years to reach adulthood. Their life expectancy after that varies wildly, depending on the evolutions they took, their health, and so on and so forth. And before you ask, the reason you are an exception is that you evolved from the child form of an abyssal drakeling into a dragon, so you skipped infancy entirely.”
Hmm…
“So you’re saying I can skip twenty years of childhood by evolving into another evolutionary line with a short childhood, then hop right back into being an adult dragon?” I asked with a cheeky grin.
Mom scoffed, exasperated.
“Leave it to you to come up with such a ridiculous idea. Listen, Kiara, when you evolve out of an evolutionary line, the system stops offering you options belonging to it, with some minor exceptions – mostly relating to forbidden evolutions. Even if that wasn’t the case, evolving into a dragon from another line is already incredibly difficult to do, particularly since no other sapient, reptilian species exist.”
“Alright, I ge-”
“And even then,” she carried on with gusto, “good luck finding a sapient race with a short childhood period, let alone managing to evolve into its line. There is a reason it takes so long for sapients to reach adulthood. And even then,”
“Oh gods, I get it, it was just a joke!” I implored, begging her to stop.
Seeing an entertained glint in her eye, I knew my words fell on deaf ears.
“You’d still be a child in an adult’s body. You’re not going to see me treating you differently just because you grew a little taller. Besides, messing with your biological age would be a waste of a little surprise I have prepared for you tomorrow…” she said with a teasing voice.
“Huh? What kind of surprise? Can’t you just tell me now?” I sighed.
“That’s for me to know and for you to find out tomorrow.”
Madeil stirred comfortably in the crib as we argued, insulated from any noise we made by mom’s custom-made enchantments.