198 years later.
“......sis!”
Hmm? What's that? Who is it?
“......nisis!”
Nisis? Those are the last 3 syllables of my name.
“Wake up, Rainisis!”
Huh? I opened my eyes. When I got up, Mom, Dad, Grandmother, Grandfather, and my relatives were watching me, all Polymorphed into human form. Huhhh? What brings everyone here?
“What brings you all here?”
“Polymorph first.”
I Polymorphed as told. For clothes, I pictured a pair of trousers and a T-shirt. Once I'd Polymorphed, Grandfather spoke.
“Rainisis, hatchling of the Red Dragon clan, hear me. You've now left the protection afforded to a hatchling and become a full-fledged adult dragon.”
Whaaat? An adult dragon?
“From now on, you must protect yourself and bear all responsibility for your actions. Do you accept?”
Gah? I'm already 1,000? Does that mean I slept for nearly 200 years? I nodded before I quite knew what was happening. Then Grandfather smiled warmly and said.
“Here and now, I proclaim that Rainisis the hatchling has become Rainisis, a full-fledged member of the Red Dragon clan!”
Clap, clap, clap, clap! All the relatives and family around me applauded.
Ha, haha! Does that make me an adult dragon? Can I finally go out and see the world?
I smiled awkwardly and bowed to them.
But this feels a little anticlimactic. That's the entire coming-of-age ceremony?
And so my studies inside the lair came to a somewhat anticlimactic end.
#Chapter 2. Slaves, the Lair, and the Local Residents
#(1) Organizing the Lair and Cleaning Up the Surroundings
I'd become an adult dragon. In other words, I was now a full 1,000 years old.
Ha, ha, ha. Time certainly flies.
After going mad over spirits, mad over books, and mad over magic, all I did was have a good, long sleep, and this much time passed? Still, I felt no sadness, emptiness, or anything of the sort.
I'd become independent as an adult dragon, and I had to live with pride as Rainisis of the Red Dragon clan.
To do that, I first needed somewhere to live, didn't I?
After a coming-of-age ceremony that even I thought was ridiculously simple and straightforward, lasting less than a minute—apparently, there was no reason to make a great, noisy production of a coming-of-age ceremony. All it meant was that, at 1,000 years old, you left your old home to live alone elsewhere, and your name was erased from the hatchling section of the dragon register and entered in the adult section. Little changed physically or mentally—I followed Father, whom I hadn't seen in ages—to be honest, he hardly even felt like my father, since I'd probably seen him about 20 times in my 1,000 years as a hatchling—to the lair I'd be living in.
First, though, I should mention that Mom, Dad, Grandfather, and Grandmother had prepared a great many things during the 200 years I slept. Presents for me. They'd piled up heaps of gold, silver, and jewels, along with enormous quantities of my beloved books—they were new releases! Whooo!—weapons, and food.
They'd also prepared a spacious lair for me. It had belonged to an elder of the Black Dragon clan who'd reached the end of his natural lifespan and passed away around the time I fell asleep. His relatives and clan had divided up all the treasure there, apart from some left as a congratulatory present for me, the newly adult dragon moving in. Even so, I was simply happy to hear that some had been left as a gift for my coming-of-age ceremony.
A dragon's lair normally has enormous barriers to ward off outside invaders seeking its treasures or the dragon itself—some dragons call them moths to a flame, a very apt expression.—Apparently, they'd removed all 7 layers of barriers around the place and refurbished it for me to move in.
It was a secondhand home, but I didn't mind. Perhaps because an extremely old dragon had lived there, it even had an appealing, old-fashioned air. It was a little larger than Mom's lair, too, with the added bonus of several rooms—or caverns, rather—which made storing treasures, weapons, and books convenient.
When a dragon acquired a lair, the surrounding land became its territory. I had the great good fortune of inheriting the territory that old dragon had managed, so the entire ‘El Takanris Mountains’, one of the continent's largest mountain ranges, became mine.
“Hah, this is awkward.”
I sighed. At that moment, I was inside my lair in human form, now grown into a young man nearly the same age I'd been when I died. Wearing a red robe, the most comfortable of my clothes, I was sighing at the caves lined up along one wall and the mountain, a literal mountain, of treasures piled together without any sorting against the opposite wall—congratulatory gifts from all over, and things I'd made while studying magic.
They should originally have all been sorted. But since everything had been brought to my lair at once with a matter-transfer spell, things that should've been separated by type were all mixed together. They formed one enormous, quite literal mountain.
“No choice. I'll just have to do some manual labor.”
Having reached that conclusion, I gave an order to Steelsquall, sitting beside my leg in black-panther form.
“Squall, pick out just the jewels over there!”
“RROOOOW!”
Steelsquall—nicknamed Squall—answered with a loud roar and bounded toward the mountain of treasures. Then it rode the ridges of piled gold coins and gold and silver bars, crossed rivers of rare metals and ornaments, and began fishing out the jewels one by one. Watching Squall extract the jewels was somehow grotesque, fascinating, and entertaining. Whenever it found a jewel, it picked it up in its mouth and swallowed it whole. Before I knew it, the jewel moved to Squall's back, where a small part poked out to show it was being sorted.
But I couldn't ask it to bring gold bars, silver bars, or metal objects. As a metal spirit, it would absorb them all. Clever Squall delighted me by sorting the jewels in batches of 100 and spilling them out well away from the treasure mountain—more precisely, it shook its body to eject them, then gathered them to one side.
What was I doing in the meantime? I summoned Sylph and Undine and was moving the things Squall couldn't sort out. More precisely, Sylph moved objects with wind, I moved them with muscle, and Undine attended to me by wiping away my sweat and such.
Hmm, don't these fellows get stronger as I age? No, more precisely, they don't gradually grow stronger. Their strength shoots up all at once, bam! So I suppose it isn't time yet.
Now, let's see? Sort out the gold bars and silver bars separately and stack them neatly in one place....... Hmm, however I look at them, silver and mithril are much too hard to tell apart. One's pure silver and one's true silver. Since both count as silver, perhaps that's only natural.
Day 3 of sorting.
Graaah! I felt as if I was halfway to losing my mind. Why? Because for 3 days, I'd been cutting back even on eating and sleeping to sort and stack jewels, gold bars, and silver bars, and there was still no end in sight!
Just how many congratulatory presents did they give me? What I'd sorted so far would keep me fed for 5,000 years!—By that, I don't mean eating gold, silver, and jewels. I mean living expenses if converted to money.—Looking sick of it all, I stared at the treasure mountain, which had shrunk by barely 1/8, and clicked my tongue.
I'd sorted about 1,500 gold bars so far. A full 1,500 bars weighing 10 kilograms each, neatly stacked in one place. Sylph had sorted about 900 silver bars. And the jewels Squall had sorted while going back and forth must've numbered close to 10,000.
Yet just as much, if not more, remained, heaped up as if mocking me in that treasure mountain. That wasn't treasure. It was a burden. A burden!
Still, one consolation was that gold and silver bars were showing up far less often, and things like bookcases should be buried in there.
Aren't books bulky for their weight? The bookcases holding them were fairly large too, which was reassuring. You might worry the treasure's weight had crushed the bookcases, but I'd cast my absolute unbreakability spell, ‘Cannot Be Broken(Cannot be broken)’, on them, so they would never break under any circumstances. To break those bookcases, you'd probably need to cast an absolute destruction spell.
Whew, but before I can get the bookcases out, don't I have to deal with all the treasure covering them?
Then shall I start scraping out the coins, which make up the largest share?
Come to think of it, I can't see a single ‘nil’ among the coins in my lair? They're all ‘gil’ or ‘pen’. And most of those were ‘pen’. Roughly estimating the quantity, perhaps 1 billion pen? In other words, almost 1 billion pen coins alone. Hahaha. A billion coins? Isn't that going too far? And if they can give this many coins as a present to a dragon who's only just come of age, just how much money do other dragons have? However long-lived their race is, isn't this excessive? Then again, would dragons collect treasure if they worried about that?
Hmm, if some extraordinarily skilled adventurers plundered a lair, the immense quantity of gold and treasure from it would clearly cause tremendous inflation in the local economy. If the vast sum of 1 billion pen from my lair alone suddenly started circulating on the market, money would steadily lose its value and prices would rise in proportion. Starting locally, the entire country's economy would end up collapsing.
So those dragon slayers who go around hunting dragons, and the fellows who raid monster dens and steal treasure, are actually economic saboteurs(?)? Dragons themselves may be the main culprits in economic destruction, but since the money inside their lairs never circulates, we'll leave them out.
A billion coins. A billion gold coins alone. Silver coins? For some strange reason, there were fewer silver coins than gold, only(?) about 700–800 million. Anyway, there were already 1 billion gold coins, and I'd extracted a total of 1,800 gold bars and about 1,000 silver bars so far.—Further investigation turned up 300 more gold bars and 100 more silver bars.—Considering that one gold bar used about 500 coins, the gold bars alone were worth 1800 × 500 = 900,000 pen. One pen was worth about 100,000 won in South Korean money, so multiplying that gave 90,000,000,000 won. A full 90 billion won.
The gold bars, practically nothing compared with the gold coins and such, were already an immense fortune of 90 billion won. Add 1 billion coins, and wasn't that a staggering sum equal to a decent-sized country's annual budget? Take this money to any country, and it could live without working for over a year. To amass this much....... How much had humans suffered, and how much had dwarves sacrificed?
Ahh, a moment of silence for them. Now, back to sorting my fortune! Heehee!