MCDB CH 04

Chapter 2. I Can’t Stand Noise Between Floors

A dragon born from an egg had to enter hibernation and absorb the essence of a dragon in order to mature into an adult.

And ten years ago, a black dragon was preparing to hibernate.

His name was Axel. Five hundred years old by dragon standards, which was equivalent to nineteen in human years. He was in the sacred forest, inside an underground cave filled with dragon essence, and had just closed his eyes, preparing to enter hibernation.

But then—

Bang, bang, bang—

“What the hell?”

Every time he was about to fall asleep, the sound of hammering echoed throughout the entire cave.

“Those humans are being annoying.”

As usual, those insignificant creatures who couldn’t even live for a hundred years were full of greed. Axel endured it once.

But then—

Clang, clang, clang—

“Ah, seriously!”

The noise turned into vibrations that made his eardrums throb. Covering his ears was useless.

While hibernating, he couldn’t use magic either, so Axel had no choice but to endure the noise through sheer patience.

After months of repeatedly falling into a light sleep only to wake up again, Axel became sensitive to even the slightest sound.

Even the tiniest noise made his heart pound with anger, and a dull headache began to throb in his head.

Screeech, screech, screeeeech—

Eventually, one day, the sound of metal scraping against metal finally snapped the last thread of Axel’s patience.

‘I’ll kill them all. I’ll tear them limb from limb.’

Driven mad with rage, Axel burst out of the cave.

The humans, terrified at the sight of a dragon, fell over themselves in panic, and Axel cursed them.

He would have liked to return to hibernation and become a full-grown adult, but life wasn’t so easy for dragons either.

“You broke the rule forbidding you from interfering in the mortal world, so you must bear the consequences.”

Gallian, Axel’s master, came to deal with the aftermath of his rampage and sighed.

“For now, go and lift the curse you placed on them.”

“……”

Axel couldn’t do that.

Was it because he was still angry?

No.

It was because he could no longer lift the curse.

“I used the Dragon’s Oath.”

“What did you use?”

“The Dragon’s Oath.”

“On a curse?”

“Yes.”

At Axel’s answer, Gallian was rendered speechless.

He stared at Axel with his mouth hanging open, then grabbed the back of his neck and collapsed backward while making a strangled sound.

“Master!”

“Damn it! Go die somewhere, you idiot!”

A groan escaped Gallian’s mouth.

The Dragon’s Oath was a binding pact that ensnared a dragon’s heart.

Unless the oath was fulfilled or the heart of the dragon who had sworn it was destroyed, no one—not even the dragon who had made the Dragon’s Oath—could break it.

“What kind of idiot uses the Dragon’s Oath to cast a curse?! Did humans kill your parents, or did they kill your master?”

“But what was I supposed to do? They made me angry!”

“You clearly still haven’t come to your senses.”

As if he no longer even had the energy to get angry, Gallian shook his head and went to attend the council of elders.

After a meeting that lasted for two nights, Axel’s punishment was decided.

Axel had no choice but to accept the punishment without even knowing what it was.

Of course, he resisted, but there was no way a dragon who had not even reached adulthood could defeat the elder dragons.

After someone struck him on the back of the head and knocked him unconscious, Axel opened his eyes in a human body.

As the six-year-old son of Baron Vanderhalt.

“Damn it! This is bullshit!”

The moment he woke up, Axel realized that all of his powers had been sealed, and he fell into despair.

“Axel Vanderhalt, where did you learn such bad words?”

“Mind your own business.”

“Oh my goodness! How dare you speak to your mother like that? Come here, right now!”

Enduring the humiliation of being spanked by the human who called herself his mother, Axel stubbornly devoted his time to regaining his powers.

It took a full ten years, yet Axel still hadn’t recovered even a third of the magical power he had originally possessed.

“The sprouts have appeared, dear.”

“The mystery of life is truly magnificent.”

That was undoubtedly because of those damned humans making such a fuss over the sprouts that had grown from a tulip bulb.

The baron and his wife, the gardener, and even the butler had all gathered around, going on and on about the miracle of life and how spring had returned.

Humans without ambition or ability.

Axel couldn’t understand why they even bothered planting flowers.

From a distance, all of them looked as though they had flowers growing inside their heads.

If it weren’t for the fits of rage that erupted several times a day from having to live among them, he would have recovered even more of his magical power by now.

Anyway, after spending ten years regaining his magic and restraining himself, a rumor crossed the walls of the royal palace.

The rumor was that the princess, who had become a beast, could speak.

Axel, who had been keeping a close eye on the princess because of that rumor, gained an unexpected piece of information.

He witnessed the secretary of his master coming to visit the princess.

Of course, he also saw the faces of those people calling themselves the duke and the prince, but they were irrelevant.

They were nothing more than humans, after all.

What mattered was his master.

‘My master has such a soft heart that he simply couldn’t bring himself to abandon the princess.’

It was possible that his master simply couldn’t ignore his disciple’s mistake either, but that wasn’t the point.

What mattered was that he now had a chance to use the princess to change his master’s mind.

He might have used the Dragon’s Oath when placing the curse, but there was no way his master or those old dragons on the council had used the Dragon’s Oath when punishing Axel.

Who in their right mind would use such a binding pact to impose a punishment?

That meant that if he showed enough remorse, he could persuade the council of elders and escape from this punishment disguised as a curse.

“All right. You can ask me anything you’re curious about now.”

Axel’s gaze shifted from the water spirits cleaning the floor of the cage to Helens.

Helens had been listening to Axel’s story with a dubious expression. After hesitating for a moment, she finally spoke.

“So why exactly are you cleaning my cage?”

The story about why he had cursed her—yes, she understood that.

He had been sleeping, got irritated because of the noise, lost his temper, and cursed her.

And now he was being punished by being trapped in a human body.

Helens understood all of that.

The one thing she couldn’t understand was why a fairy that looked like it was made of water was cleaning the floor of her cage.

“Because I have to come here often, and I hate dirty places.”

“Why do you have to come here often?”

If he couldn’t even break the curse, why would he need to come here so often?

“I want to propose a deal to you.”

“A deal?”

“How about we try to break your curse together?”

Helens narrowed her eyes, unable to fully understand what Axel meant.

“Wait. You said the curse was placed using the Dragon’s Oath, so it couldn’t be broken.”

“I said I can’t break it for you. I didn’t say it couldn’t be broken.”

“You can break it? How? How can it be broken?”

“It’s simple. You have to receive a kiss of true love.”

Axel kept the method of destroying his heart a secret.

Even if he told her, Helens couldn’t destroy his heart herself. But there was no reason to tell her unnecessarily.

Meanwhile, Helens was dumbfounded by Axel’s confident answer.

Could the words ‘simple’ and ‘love’ really belong in the same sentence?

And it wasn’t just love.

It was true love.

Helens furrowed her brow deeply and muttered under her breath.

“A kiss of true love? What kind of curse is that? It sounds like something straight out of a fairy tale.”

As she grumbled, Helens noticed that Axel had suddenly gone quiet and stared at him.

“You, don’t tell me…”

“That’s right.”

Axel gave an awkward cough and handed her a book.

With an unimpressed expression, Helens accepted it.

“The Handsome Man and the Beast?”

It looked like a gender-swapped version of Beauty and the Beast.

As Helens flipped through the pages, she licked her dry lips uneasily.

Until now, Helens had simply thought of her curse as a curse that transformed her appearance into that of a beast.

“This is insane.”

When she reached the scene where the handsome man kissed the princess who had become a beast, breaking her curse, Helens couldn’t hold back and blurted out a harsh remark.

“So the curse placed on me is the same curse from this fairy tale?”

“Yes. How many times do I have to explain it?”

How many times?

He had only explained it once.

But now wasn’t the time to nitpick over something so trivial.

“I’m asking just in case—just in case. Did you curse me because the person cursed in this book was a princess, and I happened to be a princess too?”

“You’re pretty sharp for a beast.”

Helens’s fist trembled.

So this crazy dragon had simply copied the curse from The Handsome Man and the Beast.

It wasn’t as though the princess had caused the noise that woke him up.

She hadn’t even been there!

He had cursed six-year-old Helens, who had been peacefully sleeping in the palace, simply because the person cursed in The Handsome Man and the Beast happened to be a princess.

“Are you seriously insane? You should’ve taken your anger out on the people who actually caused the noise!”

“If I took my anger out on them and actually killed them, I’d be in trouble. If I kill someone while I’m supposed to be hibernating, I have to live as a half-baked dragon forever.”

As if that were no big deal, Axel said it so casually that Helens lost her temper and extended her claws.

“Put your neck right here.”

I’m going to bite your head off.

Under the bright moonlight, Helens’s eyes gleamed fiercely.

Even so, Axel remained relaxed.

“Even if my powers have been sealed, I’m not weak enough to be caught by a creature like you, beast.”

Axel spoke mockingly with an irritating grin.

Helens clenched her teeth.

“Who was that dragon whose head got smashed after I beat him up earlier?”

“……Th-that was because I let my guard down.”

Axel glanced down at his own shirt, which had been reduced to rags.

When he had teleported into the cage, he had even spoken kindly to Helens because he was worried she might be startled.

And what he got in return was a pair of wildly savage claws.

“I was showing you mercy, in my own way.”

“You don’t even know what ‘mercy’ means, do you?”

“Put those fangs away and listen to me, beast. This fairy tale is the most famous story in the human world.”

When Axel had been learning about the human world, his master had read The Handsome Man and the Beast to him and told him so.

He had said there wasn’t a single human who didn’t know this story.

“I thought that if I placed the same curse from this fairy tale on you, humans would realize what it was. The method for breaking it is even written in the story. Did I think it would take ten years for you to break it?”

Helens looked at Axel suspiciously.

“……You just suddenly remembered this book when you were casting the curse, didn’t you?”

“Ahem. No.”

Axel felt slightly caught off guard by Helens’s sharpness.

Because she was right.

At the time, he had been unable to sleep properly for so long that he had practically lost his reason.

In that situation, when he thought of the words ‘human’ and ‘curse,’ the first curse that came to mind was the one he used.

He knew it had been foolish, but back then, he had been half-mad with rage.

Otherwise, would he have used the Dragon’s Oath just to curse a mere human?

“All right. Let’s just let bygones be bygones.”

Despite being the one who had just pulled out her claws and charged at him because of what had happened in the past, Helens pretended that she understood everything.

She had decided that this wasn’t the time to fight.

Right now, she needed to gather as much information as possible from the dragon.

“But you want to break my curse together with me? It’s not like you suddenly feel guilty, so why?”

“I told you earlier that I was punished, didn’t I? I was punished by being placed under the same kind of curse as you.”