The temperature on a mid-October night was somewhat low, and the vast hall was terrifyingly silent.
The darkness magnified every sound and every pain. The tyrant’s face was deathly pale. The scales all over his body rose and shifted, accompanied by faintly visible black-red lines. Withered yellow scales fell off, mixed with pus and blood, landing on the jade bed with faint yet grating sounds.
His core was shattered, and his spiritual power had dried up. Just suppressing the pain and the curse consumed almost all his mental strength. Each day, he could only undo a tiny bit of the curse. At this rate, it would take him three years just to wake up.
His body, temporarily paralysed by corrosion, could not move. The tiny insects that he once could have crushed casually with a bit of spiritual power were now madly sucking at his flesh and blood.
Cold sweat slid from his temples, down past his eyelids, and into his pitch-black hair.
His consciousness gradually blurred. Just as he was about to sink into the dark depths, the hurried sound of footsteps suddenly rang out. Her voice was a little breathless, as if it were right beside his ear.
A warm hand gently covered his forehead.
Before he completely fell unconscious, he heard her say—
“Your complexion is so bad. Does it hurt a lot…”
Mu Wanwan had absolutely no idea that Mr. Dragon had woken up once midway. She wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, then added some lamp oil to the lamps in the room. The room instantly brightened quite a bit.
She looked at Mr. Dragon’s half-rotten tail and the pus and blood constantly dripping from it, and truly felt her scalp go numb.
Mu Wanwan held a knife that had been briefly sterilised in boiling water. Facing Mr. Dragon’s long tail, she suddenly had the illusion that she was preparing dragon cuisine. Thinking of it that way seemed to make things a little easier. With a pale face, Mu Wanwan slowly brought the knife closer.
Mr. Dragon’s tail had begun rotting from a spot a little above the tail tip. Mu Wanwan gently cut open the few withered yellow scales attached to the pus-covered surface, and an indescribable rotten stench instantly spilled out. She felt as if she was about to suffocate.
But when she thought of the tyrant’s almost deathly pale face from pain just now, Mu Wanwan still forced herself to endure the discomfort. She applied a little force and cut through the scales, then slowly carved away the flesh that had already festered.
During the process, she inevitably encountered the little insects she least wanted to touch. The tiny black insects had hard shells and would crawl everywhere. The feeling that something was constantly crawling over the back of her hands, arms, and legs was truly awful.
By the time she had roughly dealt with Mr. Dragon’s tail, Mu Wanwan felt as if her entire body stank. Her outer robe had also been completely dirtied by filthy blood. She glanced at the pad beneath Mr. Dragon. Many corpses of tiny insects she had violently pinched to death were lying on it, making Mu Wanwan feel a wave of revulsion.
She quickly took off her outer robe, wrapped it around her hands, dragged Mr. Dragon’s tail, and moved him to another spot. Only then did she throw out the pad, the basin filled with things she had removed from Mr. Dragon’s tail, and her outer robe.
After carefully washing her hands clean, Mu Wanwan took the medicinal ointment and gauze back into the room.
Perhaps because she had briefly dealt with the rotten tail, the smell in the room was not as strong anymore. Or maybe it was only her imagination, but she felt that Mr. Dragon’s complexion also seemed less terrible.
She carefully applied ointment to the long tail, then wrapped half of the tail with gauze. After that, Mu Wanwan fetched several more basins of water. Using the clothes she had changed out of yesterday and had not yet had time to wash, she wiped Mr. Dragon’s somewhat dirty tail once over. After thinking for a moment, she still blushed and gave his upper body a simple wipe-down as well.
While wiping his tail, Mu Wanwan accidentally touched a scale near his waist. That area was somewhat different from the others. There was a thick layer of membrane there, and it felt a little hard on top. But she did not think too much about it. She simply wiped that area as well, along with Mr. Dragon’s bare upper body. Only then did she force her exhausted body to wash up.
After finishing the cleaning, Mu Wanwan thought for a moment, took a low-grade spirit stone from her pocket, and placed it beside Mr. Dragon’s pillow. According to her memories, some powerful people could unconsciously absorb spiritual energy from spirit stones even in their sleep. Although she did not know whether Mr. Dragon could absorb spiritual power in his current state, she decided to try.
Mu Wanwan took another Hundred Treasures Fruit from the box. Using a small knife, she cut a small opening in the peel and dripped the juice onto Mr. Dragon’s bruised purple lips.
After squeezing nearly half the fruit, Mu Wanwan stopped. Following the original owner’s memories, she scraped out a faint thread of wood-type spiritual power from her dantian and infused it into the half-shriveled fruit. Only when she saw the small cut in the peel carefully heal did she let out a sigh of relief.
They were very poor now. Even a fruit like the Hundred Treasures Fruit, which could be bought for only five low-grade spirit stones and which the tyrant would once have disdained to look at, was now beyond their reach.
The fruit gave off a rich fragrance. Mu Wanwan swallowed her saliva, but she still did not eat the slightly shrivelled half of the fruit. After all, Mr. Dragon needed it more than she did right now.
Before the original owner married, although her life at home had not been as respected as Bai Shuiyao’s, the Mu residence had once been considered fairly decent within the tyrant’s territory. Although Father Mu was only at the fourth rank, his combat power was close to that of a fifth-rank warrior. Every month, he would also give her a dozen or so gold coins to spend. It was just that every time, those gold coins would be taken away by Bai Shuiyao through various means.
Mu Wanwan rubbed her aching head.
This time, the original owner had married in when the Mu family had fallen into trouble. She was basically an abandoned pawn. Apart from some clothes and bedding, she had not brought any dowry. So now, she could be considered part of the legendary “bedding party.”
Mu Wanwan gave a bitter laugh, then resigned herself to walking to the cabinet in the corner of the room. She found two sets of bedding: bright red wedding quilts and mattresses embroidered with mandarin ducks.
Previously, the original owner had neither the mind nor the courage to sleep with the tyrant. She had never even thought about tidying up the bed.
Actually, if possible, Mu Wanwan did not particularly want to sleep with Mr. Dragon either. But Mr. Dragon had previously had a very bad temper. If any servant dared to appear inside or outside his sleeping palace, their end could be summed up in one word: death.
So not only was there only one bed in the side hall and main hall, there weren’t even any quilts for keeping warm in winter.
Only the small kitchen had a little bit of food left.
However, this jade bed was very large. By visual estimate, it was three metres by three metres. Even if both of them slept on it, as long as they paid a little attention to distance, it should be fine, right?
Mu Wanwan looked at the bedding in the cabinet and felt a little glad that there were two mattresses and two quilts. This way, she just so happened to not have to share a quilt with the tyrant.
Although she was now Mr. Dragon’s wife in name, and although Mr. Dragon was not exactly ugly—after looking at him for a while, one might even feel that he had a kind of bewitching, fragile beauty—but…
First of all, Mr. Dragon was not human. She had heard that dragons had two of that thing. She didn’t know if it was true…
Ahem. That question was a little too advanced for now, so she would not mention it for the time being.
Most importantly, in the original book, although Mr. Dragon had been repeatedly cuckolded face-to-face by Bai Shuiyao and Ao Qin while he was unconscious, he himself had not known about it. After waking up, for some unknown reason—perhaps because he was blind—he fell in love at first sight with Bai Shuiyao, who had suddenly appeared in his sleeping palace, and said that extremely classic line:
“Woman, you are mine!”
Thinking of this, Mu Wanwan couldn’t help glancing at a certain dragon, whose face was pale and strange, with long, curled eyelashes. Her heart uselessly skipped a beat, but she forcefully pressed it back down.
No matter how much Mr. Dragon made her feel pity for him now, it could not change the fact that after he woke up, his heart would quickly change. She should stop thinking too much.
In any case, Mr. Dragon currently had no awareness at all. Even if she slept in the same bed as him, he would not know after he woke up.
Mu Wanwan thought this as she made the bed. But once she had finished laying everything out and looked at the two bright red wedding quilts pressed close together, then at Mr. Dragon, whom she had arranged neatly so that only his somewhat handsome face was exposed, she still couldn’t help blushing.
In modern times, she had been an orphan. Since childhood, even food and clothing had been a problem. With great difficulty, she had relied on some welfare policies to attend university, studying hard while working part-time. After graduating, she had worked hard to earn money and repay her loans. Her usual pleasure was reading novels. Although it was not as if no one had ever pursued her after she grew up, she had never dated.
Unexpectedly, the first time in her life sleeping under a wedding quilt would actually be with a vegetative dragon…
Mu Wanwan’s feelings were complicated. But compared to her body, which had been exhausted for days in a row, this small bit of tangled emotion was nothing. According to the original plot, she should already be dead. Now that she was still alive and even had a bed to sleep in, it was already not bad.
**Author’s note:**
Mr. Dragon: “That’s right. I am a cold man who, in half-dragon form, has two—[censored].”
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