Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 190: Mushy

"Yes. Test that old recipe of bone-corroding potion on him. I heard it’s illegal now. I’m sure it’ll become a lost art one day if we don’t practice it."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

The voice was calm. It floated through the fog, disembodied, impossible to locate. Somewhere to his left. No—behind him. No—everywhere.

Arzhen had been awake for a while now.

Consciousness had returned to him in fragments. First the cold damp of the earth seeping through his clothes, then the distant ache in his limbs from his undignified collapse, then the slow, horrifying realization that he was not alone.

He could hear them. Voices, multiple, low and reverent. His body remained frozen, his eyes sealed shut behind lids that felt nailed in place.

He couldn’t move. He couldn’t muster the bravery to wake up and confront whatever tribunal had gathered around his prone form. So he lay there, playing dead, as four voices he couldn’t locate debated his fate.

"But, Your Majesty..." A different voice now, feminine, elegant. "Can you tell us, what is this boy’s crime that you’d want his bone corroded from the inside, leaving his mushy organs, flesh, and skin frameless?"

...why the specific description...?

Arzhen’s stomach turned. The image the words painted was vivid, horrifying. He could almost feel the degradation already creeping through his skeleton, the slow, chemical dissolution of everything that held him upright.

"His crime?" The first voice, the cold, grey-eyed voice from his nightmares, answered. "His crime is approaching my resting place when I am already so tired keeping this world intact. I was laying there, resting my eyes. I thought he was going to finish me and harvest my bones..."

"..."

"..."

"..."

As if someone could? When you’re this healthy?!

"Who dares harvest the Dragon Lord’s bones?!" The feminine voice had shifted from elegant courtesy to something far more dangerous.

"Calm down, Serayu." Another voice, male, calmer.

"Yes! Your Majesty couldn’t have been defeated so easily!" A fourth voice, also male, younger, indignant on behalf of his liege.

The first voice remained unfazed, almost amused. "Anyway, do as I say. Make him drink the potion. He won’t die from it anyway. Everything would just... turn mushy." 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

"Yes!"

Arzhen’s heart, already hammering at traitorous speeds, seized. Turn mushy. Yes, of course. Just mushy. Not dead. How generous.

Was the Dragon Lord truly still alive? Ruby’s prophecy, his entire mission, his validation, his revenge, had been wrong?

First Arkai Dawnoro, supposedly dead, had resurfaced as living, breathing proof of her fallibility. And now Oathran Alicei, the Dragon Lord whose corpse was supposed to be his greatest trophy, was very much not a corpse.

Again. The prophecy was inaccurate again.

"Wait, no." The Dragon Lord’s voice cut through his spiraling panic, thoughtful. "Put the mouth of the potion bottle through his asshole. The effect will begin faster."

"As you order!"

Arzhen’s eyes flew open.

His body, which had refused all previous commands to flee, fight, or even breathe, suddenly remembered how to move. He launched upright, his limbs scrambling for purchase on the damp earth.

He saw them. Four figures, three kneeling in deference, one standing tall and terrible before them. White hair, long and flowing. Horns, black and curved. Eyes, grey and cold, fixed on him with mild, patient interest.

Arzhen didn’t think. His body simply folded. He dropped to his knees, then flattened himself further, his palms and forehead pressing into the cold, wet ground in the deepest, most abject prostration his spine could manage.

"PLEASE WAIT! PLEASE! OH DRAGON LORD, PLEASE HAVE MERCY—"

His voice cracked, pitched high with terror. He was begging. He, Arzhen Vasiliev, Tiger Prince, was face-down in the dirt, weeping pleas at a being who had, moments ago, been discussing the logistics of turning his skeleton into organic soup.

A sound answered him. Low at first, then rising. A rumble. A chuckle.

Laughter.

"Why should I give you mercy," the Dragon Lord asked, his voice carrying that same patient, curious amusement, "when you are clearly here to harvest my corpse, child?"

Arzhen’s mind stuttered. Harvest. Corpse. The words were accurate, devastatingly so. But how did he—how could he possibly—

Sssrk.

The sound was soft, distinct. Paper unfolding. Arzhen’s blood chilled.

The tall white figure glanced at the sheet now held in his elegant fingers. His grey eyes scanned the lines, his expression unreadable. Then, he recited it.

"Follow the old logging road until it ends. Then walk east, toward the sound of running water. You will find a clearing with a single, lightning-struck oak. Beyond it, in the ditch, is where his body lies."

The Dragon Lord lowered the paper slightly, his gaze shifting from the handwriting to the trembling prince at his feet.

"Where my body lies?" he repeated, the question soft, almost conversational. "Such neat, beautiful handwriting. A woman’s handwriting?"

Arzhen’s face drained of all colours. The note. Ruby’s detailed instructions, the precise coordinates she had given him, her divine sight guiding her pen across the parchment. He had stored it in his inner chest pocket, pressed against his heart.

The Dragon Lord had searched him while he was unconscious. Of course he had.

"No one knew where I rested," the voice continued, each word falling like a stone into still water. "No one knew where I was. For seventeen years." A pause, deliberate, weighted. "But someone knew I ’died’ here. Someone knew where to find my ’body’."

"Not even the dragons knew where I am." His gaze swept briefly over the three kneeling figures, Serayu, Lazuardi, Jenggala, all of whom remained motionless, their heads bowed. "So... whose handwriting is this?"

Silence. The forest itself seemed to hold its breath. Even the mist paused its slow drift.

"Someone who can see the unseen," the Dragon Lord mused, his tone that of a scholar working through a particularly elegant theorem. "Someone who can foretell the future, perhaps? The Saintess?"

Dread descended upon the clearing. It was not Arzhen’s alone. He could feel it radiating from the three dragons. A collective, visceral fear that thickened the air. Serayu’s shoulders were rigid. Lazuardi’s hands had curled into fists against his thighs. Even Jenggala, the youngest, had gone perfectly, dangerously still.

"Does the Saintess," Oathran Alicei asked, his voice dropping to something quieter, more intimate, and infinitely more terrifying, "Ruby Vaiva, want you to find my corpse and turn it into a weapon?"

Arzhen’s throat closed.

How did he know?

He had told no one. Not his mother, not his retainers. Knowing his precise intention to come and find his body from the paper was one thing. But knowing what he planned to do to his corpse?

The Dragon Lord waited. His patience was absolute. After all, he was centuries old. No one excelled at waiting better than him.

"Why are you silent now?" he asked. "Coming here alone, with a sack in your bag?"

Another pause.

"If you wanted to honor me, to find my body and announce it with dignity, wouldn’t you be coming with men? And carriages? And priests?"

The questions were just precise statements of fact, laid out with the cold clarity of a mind that had seen every permutation of human greed and ambition and found them all predictable.

"You came to act like you found me by accident. Guided by divine eyes, saying a legacy of the Dragon Lord was laid here. You would turn me into artifacts before anyone could protest. Then stir the narrative under the Saintess’ name."

That was exactly his plan.

Every step, every calculation, every carefully constructed justification, laid bare, dissected, and displayed before him by a being who had not even been present for its conception.

After all, if he and Ruby announced it first before making sure his corpse had fallen into their hands, bringing men and prie—"You’re afraid I’ll be stolen?"

The Dragon Lord asked.

...

...

...

"BWAHAHAHAWHAHWAHAHAH!"

The laugh erupted from him like a storm breaking, vast and unrestrained. It echoed off the skeletal trees, rolled across the dead grass, sent a flock of hidden birds exploding from the canopy in a panic of beating wings.

Small creatures, squirrels, voles, a startled fox, burst from their hiding places and fled in every direction, their instincts screaming of apex predators and imminent doom.

The three dragons remained kneeling, pale, trembling in fear.

The laughter subsided slowly, leaving a warmth in its wake that was somehow more disconcerting than the cold.

"Go home, child."

The Dragon Lord turned, his silhouette already beginning to dissolve back into the patient mist.

"Tell your divine eyes... she’s not the only divine in this world."

The fog thickened, curling around his receding form.

"I, Oathran Alicei, am also the divine dragon of Isaiah’s line."