Dragon Raja 3; Chapter 4: The Imperial Commissioner (3)

Dragon Raja 3

“You’re the designer of Black Swan Bay? So, you’ve always been in charge here?”

“Yes, I’m fortunate to have had that responsibility.” The doctor waved and greeted each child by name.

“You seem like their father,” Bondarev said.

“When I mentioned the orphanage, you probably imagined a stern head nurse leading a group of sickly, pale children. Perhaps you thought we drew blood from them every day for experiments?” The doctor laughed heartily. “That wouldn’t be an orphanage—that would be a Nazi concentration camp.”

“Speaking of the Nazis, forgive me for being direct, but your name is Herzog, which is a German surname,” Bondarev said.

“Yes, I once served Hitler’s Third Reich. Back then, I was the youngest doctor at the Imperial Institute of Biology. I graduated from the University of Munich at sixteen, and people called me a genius.” The doctor spoke with a touch of nostalgia. “In 1945, I was captured by the Soviet Red Army and sent to Moscow. After a year of interrogation, I was sent here by dogsled to take charge of the δ Project, and I’ve never left since.” The doctor paused, “I have a question: what will happen to the children when the project ends?”

“I suppose they’ll be sent to orphanages across the country,” Bondarev said. “You’re quite compassionate.”

“When there are so few people here, we cherish each other,” the doctor said with a sigh. “I’m already an old man. Aside from my research, nothing is more important to me than talking to the children every day. At the edge of this cold, desolate world, we pass warmth to one another. I hope they will be happy in the future, even though I may not be able to see it.”

He walked forward, lifting a little girl who had fallen in the snow and brushing off the snow from her clothes. Bondarev had noticed the girl earlier. Some people are naturally drawn to the outliers in a crowd, especially if they are outliers themselves. The little girl stood out, not playing with the others or chasing after the nurses for cotton candy. She clutched a cloth bear, walking alone along the walls, searching through the corners like a lost puppy. She wasn’t particularly pretty, with a few small freckles, a body as frail as a paper doll, and a pale face devoid of color. But she had a striking head of platinum blonde hair, her skin was as white as snow, and her eyes were deep and quiet.

“My little Renata, you look so beautiful today. Tell me, what are you looking for?” the doctor gently stroked the girl’s cheek.

“I wanted to see if there are still any flowers blooming,” Renata whispered softly, sounding very obedient.

Her platinum blonde hair was braided into a single plait, with a yellow plastic butterfly tied to the end. In this frozen world, where everything was either white or black, or the gray of military uniforms and the red of five-pointed stars, the bright color of the plastic butterfly was heartwarming.

The doctor gently patted her head, sighed, and turned to Bondarev, saying, “It’s too cold here. Only Arctic poppies can bloom. Their blooming season is like a holiday for the girls. But it only lasts for two months, and now the season is long over. Major, I hope you can send these girls to a warmer place, where they can see colorful flowers.”

“I’ll do my best,” Bondarev replied.

Renata watched the backs of Dr. Herzog and Bondarev in silence. Only after they were far away did she turn back to continue searching in the corner. She stepped over every inch of the grass, carefully checking each suspicious mark along the base of the wall.

She wasn’t actually looking for Arctic poppies. She had just lied without batting an eye. Contrary to her appearance, Renata was a habitual liar. Here, everyone had to learn to lie because the consequences of telling the truth were dire. Renata was more talented at lying than anyone else. When she lied, her face remained expressionless, and there wasn’t the slightest flicker in her eyes. The nurses called her a “paper doll,” believing that Renata, like a paper doll, had no expressions, no heart, and didn’t even cry when beaten. The nurses had stopped bothering to punish her physically because, to them, if a child didn’t cry during punishment, it meant the punishment had no effect. No one was interested in whipping a paper doll—inflicting pain on it was pointless.

Renata actually did feel pain, but she knew to hold back her tears when being hit because the more she cried, the more they’d hit her. She was looking for traces left by the black serpent. She couldn’t remember when it started, but on every full moon night, she dreamt of a black giant serpent. It rampaged through Black Swan Bay like a wild dragon, shaking the port to its foundations, and finally coiled atop the church, gazing out over the Arctic Ocean.

It was a wonderful dream. In the dream, her locked door would open, and Renata could go wherever she wanted. The dream felt incredibly real. She would walk through the empty corridors, moonlight streaming through small windows, every turn, every detail was as vivid as real life. She could even enter the forbidden zones where the children were never allowed. She would go to the library, sit down, take a large book from the shelf, and read in peace for as long as she liked, without anyone disturbing her. She could go to the kitchen, where bread was always baking on the stove. No matter when she went, the bread was always perfectly baked. Gradually, Renata began to look forward to full moon nights, eagerly awaiting a whole night of freedom.

Then one day, she started to wonder if it wasn’t a dream but reality. That day, the nurses took the children to visit the library, a place they were never allowed to enter. Renata was shocked to find that the library’s layout was exactly as she had seen in her dream. The book she had read on a full moon night was still in the same spot on the shelf. Renata remembered clearly placing it back next to the thick almanac after she had finished reading. 

Renata tried staying awake on a full moon night, and sure enough, at midnight, she heard the sound of castanets in the darkness. She climbed up to the small window and saw that the window was filled with black scales. Just when she thought she had discovered the greatest secret of this port, the next morning, she woke up in her small bed, and everything seemed like just a dream. The strange dream and reality had blended together. Renata clearly remembered pinching her finger in the middle of the night to make sure she wasn’t asleep, and then suddenly hearing the sound of iron castanets. It seemed that once the sound of the castanets began, reality turned into a dream.

None of the other children knew about the black serpent. Even though they were present in the dream, they only stood silently behind their doors, their eyes vacant, like lifelike puppets. Their doors never opened. The black serpent only opened Renata’s door because she would loudly call out to it.

Renata suspected that the black serpent was real and not just part of a dream, but she carefully kept this secret to herself. She didn’t tell anyone. If she mentioned the black serpent to the other children, they would secretly tell the nurses, and the nurses would think she was hysterical and lock her up in solitary confinement. Renata hated being confined. The solitary room had only a single lonely chair and smooth walls. She would sit on the chair and imagine herself slowly dying, like a little mushroom drying up.

The small window in the confinement room was only 20 centimeters wide—too small for even a child to crawl through. It wasn’t designed for heat preservation but for imprisoning the person inside.

This port was a cage, a lonely fortress at the end of the world. No one who came here could leave. The only exception was the black serpent, which was unparalleled and unstoppable. One day, it would grow angry and whip its long tail, smashing everything to pieces—Black Swan Bay, the snowy ice fields, Siberia… even the entire world.

“When the thousand years are up, Satan will be let loose from his cell, and will launch again his old work of deceiving the nations, searching out victims in every nook and cranny of earth, even Gog and Magog! He’ll talk them into going to war and will gather a huge army, millions strong. They are as numerous as the grains of sand in the sea.”

 Renata still remembered the chanting that echoed around Black Swan Bay on full moon nights. She had never seen the frenzied chanter, but she felt that he regarded the frozen sea as a stage, upon which he was performing his unparalleled masterpiece.

The nurses took out black wooden clappers and began to strike them. The children, who had been running and playing, stopped in their tracks, standing in the snow like puppets. The ball they had been chasing kept rolling forward, but their eyes gradually turned white, losing all expression.

The black iron door in the corner swung open. The nurse with the clapper led the way, and the children followed behind her. Their movements were stiff, hands resting on the shoulders of the child in front, forming a long line. Another nurse stood by the door, tallying the numbers on their sleeves, checking them off on a list to ensure that none of these precious “samples” were missing.

As Renata passed the door, the nurse yanked the yellow butterfly from her braid and said coldly, her eyes peering over her glasses, “If you wet the bed again, you’ll have to wear this!”

The yellow butterfly wasn’t a symbol of spring’s warmth. It signified that a child had made a mistake and would be locked in solitary confinement. Renata had been confined again last night because she wet the bed.