Chapter 1121 — Gradual Recovery

A surprise?

Metz looked at the radiant smile on her friend's face. Though her heart was brimming with everything she had seen and heard on the Loren Continent and she was eager to tell it all, she could not help but feel a flicker of curiosity and anticipation at the "surprise" Noretta had mentioned. With that anticipation, she returned with Noretta to their dwelling in the coastal camp.

The temporary house, built from salvaged materials and boulders from the shore, was still crude—no match for the once-glorious palaces of Upper Talrond, nor even for the houses in the human nations of Loren today—yet these shelters, raised brick by brick through the dogged efforts of their kin, still brought Metz a sense of reassurance. Passing through the camp, which had grown considerably larger, she came to the door of the "home" she had left for half a month. The moment she pushed the door open, that feeling of "coming home" welled up from the bottom of her heart, drawing an unconscious smile of relief from her and calming her troubled thoughts.

And then she saw it: the dragon egg standing in the largest open space of the room, and the magical runes arrayed around it—clearly designed to maintain a constant temperature and store energy. The warm breath and arcane circulation they emitted were being slowly released to nourish the egg, with its pale yellow shell and faint purple speckles.

In the corner of the room she could also see an ovoid incubation pod, already open. Plainly the egg had been kept in this container before, but it had since lost its function; with the lid open, it had been repurposed as a storage bin for odds and ends, stuffed full of Noretta's personal belongings.

Metz: "..."

"I adopted a dragon egg!" Noretta's voice came suddenly from behind her just then, jolting Metz out of her daze. "A beautiful blue dragon, just like you—actually, I wanted to adopt a white dragon at first, but then I thought it over, and I'd rather watch a little miniature Metz grow up bit by bit..."

A dragon egg. A dragon egg... Metz's heart gave a sudden thump, and for some reason she was reminded of that moment in Dragon's Rest Keep not long ago, when Cecil's message had arrived out of the blue, and two sentences began echoing endlessly in her mind: "About that dragon egg sent over from Talrond..." and "It spoke..."

For the first time in her life, she discovered that she was actually allergic to "dragon egg"—not to dragon eggs themselves, but to the word itself.

"Metz?" Noretta noticed her friend's sudden silence and could not help looking worried. "What's wrong? Are you exhausted from the long flight? I'm sorry—I only thought of giving you a surprise, and forgot you needed rest..."

"Ah, no, it's not exhaustion, I just..." Metz opened her mouth, utterly at a loss for where to begin, and could only point at the dragon egg in the room, the corner of her mouth twitching twice. "So this is the surprise you prepared for me?"

"Yes," Noretta nodded, a little at a loss—clearly her friend's reaction was far from what she had expected. "Didn't we agree a while back to adopt a dragon egg? But before the application was even submitted, you suddenly got orders to go to Loren—and during this time the camp's situation has been improving, food supply and everyone's survival skills have developed, and Agondor opened up more adoption quotas, so I went and applied for one? I never expected it to be approved so quickly..."

At this point? the white dragon lady looked at Metz's expression with some concern. "Don't tell me you don't want to adopt anymore? But adopting a dragon egg is a very serious matter—once the application is made, you can't..."

"Ah? No? Of course not," Metz finally broke free of those two sentences looping in her head? She knew her reaction had caused Noretta to misunderstand, and hurriedly waved her hands. "I'm delighted! We did indeed talk about adopting a dragon egg before—hatching one more wyrmling is a contribution to the revival of Talrond too. It's a good thing—I'm just a little... surprised, and a tiny bit oversensitive."

"Oversensitive?" Noretta looked Metz up and down several times with suspicion. "What's there to be oversensitive about?"

Because the egg I sent to Cecil a while ago has already started talking! Because the Dragon God has now become an egg that spends all day drinking tea and reading the newspaper and can actually talk!!

Metz's expression shifted twice? In the end, all her words were swallowed back down her throat—these matters could not be spread around before they were reported up the chain, even if Noretta was her friend.

"Nothing—probably just that I've been through a lot on the Loren Continent, and I haven't adjusted yet," the blue dragon lady tugged at the corner of her mouth? with a somewhat awkward smile, and then her attention settled on the egg in the center of the room? Now that her mind had calmed, she finally had some sense of reality about what was happening before her? and as she looked at the dragon egg, her gaze could not help but soften. "A dragon egg... Not long ago? I never imagined that one day I would choose to hatch a dragon egg... I always felt that such things were far away from me? that for at least twenty thousand years they would have nothing to do with me."

Noretta watched Metz's expression? She seemed to sense that her friend was hiding something, but years of understanding between them kept her from pressing the matter. Instead she nodded gently. "Of course I understand. After all, I'm like you—a high-tier employee custom-made by a biotech corporation. No parents, no siblings, no innate social ties, our familial tendencies dulled by genetic adjustment. Normally, upper-tier dragons like us, custom-made by corporations, would very likely never hatch 'children' of our own in their entire lives... But now everything has changed."

Metz smiled, and suddenly looked at the dragon egg with some curiosity. "By the way, have you thought of a name yet?"

"Not yet. I plan to wait until the little one hatches," Noretta shook her head. "There are two other families in the camp who have claimed their own dragon eggs too—everyone is waiting until the wyrmlings hatch before naming them."

"Family... truly a distant concept for custom-made employees," Metz could not help sighing softly, then suddenly grew a little curious. "But then again—does that mean the wyrmlings we hatch will effectively have two 'mothers'?"

"Is there a problem with that?" Noretta blinked. "The wyrmling next door to us will have three fathers in the future! After all, we all adopted our eggs—there aren't many conditions for forming a normal family on this wasteland these days..."

Metz thought it over, and suddenly felt there was nothing wrong with that...

Then another question occurred to her. "By the way, how much longer until our dragon egg hatches?"

"This egg had already reached the third stage of incubation at the hatching factory, and afterward its protective pod kept the egg viable, so it looks like it will complete hatching successfully before long—perhaps in less than a month," Noretta said at once. "I've set up a constant-temperature environment for it now, and every day I use my own magic to replenish what the runes consume—if you come help out later too, we can take turns staying by the egg, and the hatching efficiency might be even higher."

Metz pictured herself trying to hatch the egg in the near future, and her expression could not help turning strange. She could not say whether it was anticipation or nervousness, but when she saw the smile on Noretta's face and heard the sounds of their kin building the camp outside the door, those turbulent thoughts gradually subsided, and her strange expression finally gathered itself into a smile.

"Of course, I'll come help as soon as I can—but before that I still have to make a trip to Agondor. Speaker Anqian and Leader Heragor are still waiting for my report."

...