Dragon Raja 2; Chapter 12: A Birthday Cake is the Grave of Youth

Dragon Raja 2

In fact, birthdays don’t matter to Lu Mingfei. Who would remember? Uncle and aunt? Don’t be ridiculous. Parents? That’s not true. Is there anyone in this world who really cares about him? Lu Mingfei has taken another step towards the future of a wretched uncle?

A birthday without anyone to celebrate with was just another day, and he had experienced many such days before.

Upon waking up, he could hear the cicadas screaming their lives out. The sunlight was brilliantly harsh, and the inside of the house felt stuffy, like the steamer used by a monster to steam the fat monk in Journey to the West.

Lu Mingfei was fanning himself with a paper fan that said, “I came with the moonlight”—a phrase that made him feel like a perverted rogue—as he typed on his laptop: “www.i-cassell-you.com.”

Username “Ricardo_M_Lu,” a password that changed with the date, plus a security token. He pressed enter, and the page refreshed.

The Cassell College Holiday Daily Report Form appeared. The interface was dark green with clean lines and too many buttons to take in at once. Lu Mingfei pulled out a crumpled little notebook from the pocket of his oversized shorts and started going through each item as noted.

“Any unknown dragon detected?”

Lu Mingfei checked “No.” In broad daylight, where would a dragon suddenly appear? Returning home for summer vacation meant returning to the real world, completely cut off from any contact with reptilian beings.

“Have you used Yanling?”

Another “No.” After that battle at the Three Gorges Dam, all his Yanling abilities had vanished again. He had risked a quarter of his life for that, and it turned out he could only use it once, without any after-sales service. Lu Mingze was such a con artist.

“Any unusual physical conditions?”

“Any suspected alchemical equipment found?”

No, no, no, no, no. This was Lu Mingfei’s daily routine during his freshman summer vacation.

“Daily reports” were part of Cassell College’s rules. During winter and summer vacations, students had to report online every day. Professors graded the daily reports—good reports would raise the GPA, while false reports were considered equivalent to cheating on an exam. In a way, this was their holiday homework, something teachers assigned just to mess with your happy holiday life and assert their presence. It was like someone adding a few drops of mustard oil to your dessert after you’d finally gotten through dinner. But for Cassell College, where Lu Mingfei was studying, “daily reports” were absolutely necessary, because they had a group of absolutely unique students.

Cassell College, located in the Great Lakes region of Illinois, USA, was a private, elite college for nobles. These descriptors didn’t fully capture the nature of the college—it was a haven for monsters and madmen.

A school for human/dragon hybrids.

The professors firmly believed that “dragons” once ruled the world as an intelligent species. In this way, evolution theory was rewritten—humans were no longer the only peak of the evolutionary tree. Before mammals evolved into humans, the reptiles had already produced a top-level intelligent species: the “Dragon Raja.” This part of history was buried after humanity rose, with only fragments appearing in ancient myths. But the decline of the dragons did not mean extinction—the Dragon Kings, representing the most sacred bloodline, were merely in slumber, destined to awaken again. Needless to say, they wouldn’t attempt to join the United Nations to build a harmonious future with humanity. Instead, they intended to revive the era of reptilian theocracy.

They had this capability because they were by no means the clumsy, fire-breathing monsters seen in knight novels. They possessed a mysterious technology called “Alchemy” and a holy speech power called “Yanling: Word Spirit”—abilities that could even alter the laws of physics.

Most humans believed that “dragons” were just mythical legends, mainly because a certain group had always been erasing evidence of the dragons’ true existence—this group was the “hybrids.”

Hybrids of humans and dragons, with human hearts and draconic powers, they guarded the secret of the dragons and took on the responsibility of being protectors.

Cassell College trained the most exceptional hybrids, who were then dispatched worldwide to prevent the awakening of the Dragon Kings, and if necessary, to draft a plan to slay the dragons and put those incorrigible Dragon Kings back into slumber.

Student Lu Mingfei was originally born under the red flag and raised in the sunshine, receiving a materialist education with a perfectly orthodox worldview. Although he occasionally had wild thoughts, he never imagined that “dragons,” these supernatural beings, could have anything to do with him.

However, Cassell College went out of its way to admit him, praising his bloodline to no end.

The college’s courses were incredibly ridiculous, and the textbooks even more so. In black and white, they clearly stated that humanity did not gradually learn to use tools and fire over millions of years of struggle with nature. Instead, it was the dragons who taught their servants these skills. The Hunnic King Attila was a dragon, which was why he was so powerful, advancing all the way to Rome without anyone able to stop him. Chinese emperors calling themselves “descendants of dragons” wasn’t just boasting, either—tracing back to the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, the enlightened leaders of those times were indeed hybrids of the Dragons.

After attending classes at the college, Lu Mingfei thought that perhaps all historical events were somehow related to dragons. Maybe it was really like in Stephen Chow’s Royal Tramp, where the Qing Dynasty was doomed because the Heaven and Earth Society cut off its dragon vein.

Since everyone was a human-dragon hybrid, the college was full of geniuses, and elites were as common as dogs. Every genius had their shocking eccentricities. Without strict discipline and serious management, the consequences of them losing control could be unimaginable. Compared to these hybrids, even Ultraman, Pikachu, or Transformers weren’t necessarily such incredible beings. During the summer vacation, these people were living among regular humans, so if any one of them accidentally unleashed their “Yanling, Word Spirit” power…

There were certainly painful lessons learned in this regard.

Fortunately, the college’s upper management wasn’t composed of elegant but useless scholars. Before the college was established, the organization of dragon slayers was known as the “Secret Party”

Anyone daring to call themselves a “party” had to be ruthless and cunning—no ordinary people. Without some iron-handed measures, how could they command respect? Principal Anjou wielded the killer weapon of “daily reports.”

Although the students complained incessantly, it proved effective, reducing the number of incidents requiring the college’s intervention by over eighty percent.