God-Tier Enhancement: My Upgrades Never Fail-Chapter 170: Episode 34_You’re the Mother (1)

1.

It was just paper.

It was not a devil’s contract, nor was it any kind of magically binding document.

She remained silent.

Kardian glared at Han Simin with open suspicion.

’What is he playing at?’

There was no way a man like him would trust her enough to casually shove a contract at her without some ulterior motive.

If he were that foolish, she would have signed without a second thought.

Because if she didn’t keep it, that would be the end of it.

Contracts were only meaningful when both parties trusted each other, or when at least one side had the power to punish the other for breaking it. Signing a piece of paper with no enforcement behind it was something you could do a hundred, even a thousand times over.

“Go on, read it.”

Of course, his expression was far too relaxed for her to just dismiss it and sign.

It was the look of someone who clearly believed that even if she ran off afterward, he would not be the one taking the loss.

Which, in fact, was true.

He was literally holding the Dragon Heart in his hand, and Kardian currently had no power to take it from him.

Forget taking it—she would be lucky not to be killed by him on the spot.

That was obviously what he was counting on.

She frowned and skimmed the contract.

“Party B shall obey Party A?”

“You’re Party B, obviously.”

“When the contract period expires or the conditions are fulfilled, Party A shall transfer the contracted item to Party B.”

“Of course. If you were to just eat it and run, I’d have no way to stop you, would I?”

“The contract period is twenty years. The condition for fulfillment shall be defined as paying, in cash, the current value of the Dragon Heart as of this moment.”

“Twenty years isn’t long for a dragon, right? It’s not like the heart is going to go bad. And I generously set the Dragon Heart’s value at a mere twenty million gold—a bargain, really. That’s after tallying up its inherent worth, plus every bit of additional value and synergy you’d gain from the moment you take it to the day you die.”

She fell silent.

There were a few more pages, but she tossed them aside.

The way he kindly added explanations to each clause was grating.

No, not just grating—it truly made her feel like she had been shoved into the role of Party B.

Back when the demons invaded the continent centuries ago, the contracts they forced on humans had been brutal, merciless things. This was harsher, more vicious, and even colder than those.

“Are you sure you’re not a demon?”

“Me? I wish. I’d be making way more money. If you get a chance later, you should introduce me to them.”

She didn’t respond.

’So there really is a human worse than a demon.’

After a brief hesitation, Kardian cut her fingertip.

A drop of dragon blood fell from the end of her long, slender finger.

She opened to the last page of the contract and let the blood fall.

Seeing this, Han Simin flinched and hurriedly brought over an empty glass bottle he had somehow produced.

“Why are you wasting perfectly good blood?”

She said nothing.

Even a single drop was an incredibly valuable material for humans—especially mages.

Something you couldn’t get your hands on no matter how hard you tried had almost been left to splatter on the ground and vanish.

At his miserly fussing, Kardian shook her head.

Then she gave up and simply held her finger there until the bleeding stopped.

A few drops of blood.

It was a waste to give even that much to a human like this, but what could she do?

Her Dragon Heart was being held as collateral.

“You might as well cut open my belly and take the blood from there.”

“Come on. I’m not the kind of guy who makes moves based on short-term profit.”

Pretending to help her stop the bleeding, Han Simin was actually massaging her finger to keep the blood flowing.

Kardian felt deeply worried about the future.

And she made a vow.

’Once I gather my mana, the first thing I’ll do is get rid of this human.’

A blood pact?

That was just a trick to make him believe in it.

Unless it was a Mana Vow, no contract in this world could truly bind a dragon.

Not even a devil’s contract.

“Ah!”

She was grinding her teeth in silence when Simin, who had been gathering up the contract with a pleased look, suddenly held out his hand as if something had just occurred to him.

She looked at him in confusion.

’What is this trick now?’

At this point, Kardian was suspicious of his every move. Han Simin spoke.

“Make a vow.”

He said it naturally.

And brazenly.

She stared at him blankly.

“You dragons have that thing you do, right? Where if you break it, your mana gets erased or your Dragon Heart stops working.”

“How do you know about that?!”

“Please. You think this is my first time dealing with your kind? You’re already planning how to run off with it.”

He had only been probing, but Kardian couldn’t help but flinch.

’How does he know that?’

When something you thought was your secret trump card gets casually laid out by the other side, you can’t help but feel stripped bare.

Thrown off balance, Kardian was drawn into his pace.

“So? Are you going to do it or not? Should I just eat the Heart right now? No, wait. There are plenty of people who’d love a Dragon Heart besides you. I might not get as good a price as I would from you, but selling it cheap is still better than getting nothing because some bastard—no, some bitch—decided to stab me in the back, don’t you think...?”

“I’ll do it!”

In that moment, Kardian’s fate was sealed.

Shouting in a panic, she drew up her mana.

There was barely a thread of it left.

But that didn’t matter.

A Mana Vow was, by its nature, formed by burning all the mana one currently possessed.

This meant that right after the contract was made, the dragon would be completely defenseless.

Her tough scales would still protect her body, but she was burning the mana that could be called the dragon’s very essence to forge this vow.

It was a declaration that she was putting everything on the line.

Fwoom—

Light flared.

[You have obtained the Black Dragon’s Vow.]

[Confirming the conditions of the Vow.]

[Do you wish to enter into this Vow?]

She didn’t suspect fraud or illusion.

The hologram kindly informed her that this was the real thing.

’The beauty of a game!’

The moment he hit Confirm, a pitch-black light seeped into Han Simin’s body.

When the light faded, the first thing he saw was Kardian, her eyes brimming with tears.

“Don’t worry. You trust me, right?”

She was speechless.

A thoroughly untrustworthy hand of darkness wrapped around Kardian.

* * *

People are always like this.

When they’re being conned, they never understand how they ended up in that situation, and even after it’s over, they’re left dazed.

Why would a dragon be any different?

While she was fixated on the one weakness he had seized, she had ended up putting her liver, her gallbladder, and her very soul up as collateral.

“Come here.”

She hesitated.

“Claw.”

She remained motionless.

“From now on, you call me Master. From what I can see, you’re not ready to get your Dragon Heart back yet. It’s only a temporary contract, and it’ll expire once you help me out a bit, but if you act uncooperative in the meantime, even I don’t know what I might do with this Heart. For both our sakes, let’s not find out. Got it?”

“Yes, Master.”

Obedience wasn’t hard.

She had been repeating it to herself all day long.

’This is an amusement. This is just a game.’

Conveniently, she was in human form and had no mana.

Normally, she preferred amusements where she became a human hero and ruled the continent, but circumstances were not in her favor.

So she decided that, for this round of amusement, the concept would be “becoming a human’s slave,” and tried to make her peace with it.

“First, let’s stream. Ah! And when we get back to the palace, I’ll introduce you to my son.”

“Your... son...?”

“Yeah, your son.”

She looked at him quizzically.

“Starting today, you’re going to be his mom.”

Of course, it didn’t look like it was going to be easy.

Not at all.

2.

While Kardian was dragged off to the Empire and collared, the guilds in the Mountains of the Crash were gradually settling in.

It wasn’t all that difficult.

Their self-imposed Maginot Line was only a short way past the entrance, and they focused on hunting the monsters that appeared around that area.

Most guilds did the same, and no one overreached.

Life was precious.

Seeing adventurers get swept up in their emotions and charge at a dragon did shake them, but that didn’t mean they could throw their own lives away with them.

They wouldn’t come back to life.

They forced themselves to tuck away the boldness and freedom they might have once dreamed of and to ground themselves in reality.

It was the same for the player guilds, who were aiming to at least post a respectable result in the Guild Selection Tournament.

“If we go there for nothing and die, that’s it.”

“It’s a two-day penalty... In that time, it’s better to kill even one more monster.”

If you tried to raid the dragon, the Guild Selection Tournament was over for you.

And the sight of a dragon, once seen, was not something that left your mind easily.

From the players’ perspective—and even though he looked weaker than the dragons the NPCs knew of—no one could be sure they could actually hunt him down.

Above all, dragons used their heads.

After being annoyed a few times, he had stopped showing himself in the human world altogether.

They had worried he might come into the mountains and cause trouble, but it had already been over two weeks since they had even heard a dragon’s roar.

Which meant he was looking for another way.

That was a penalty just as terrifying as a powerful boss monster’s high HP and attack power.

So everyone quietly focused on hunting.

If you didn’t have the ability to take down the final boss, all that was left was a score race.

Kill as many monsters as possible, and kill the strongest ones you can.

Any unfortunate incidents that occurred in the process were all part of the competition.

Naturally, the bigger the guild and the stronger its combat power, the more advantageous its position.

Kenji felt that in his bones.

’We’re lacking.’

He prided himself on running a large guild with over a hundred players on the payroll, but compared to the countless guilds that existed on the continent, they were nothing more than a mid-sized guild that had just started to find its footing.

There were guilds that truly moved like armies, in units of several thousand!

Even though they were few, their sheer presence made it impossible for him to stand before them with any confidence.

On top of that, attacks against each other were now fully justified.

If it looked like they would lose, they had to give up the hunt and hide.

At the same time, they had to move to areas where they wouldn’t clash with those guilds, which meant they were wasting time as well.

That was why, even though actual battles between guilds in the Selection Tournament were rarer than expected, the gap between them kept widening.

Kenji scowled.

’Forget first place.’

He had only ever dreamed of it; he had never truly expected it.

Now he abandoned even that dream.

Fantastic World.

He had always known it, but he was feeling once again just how stingy this world was toward players.

The entry barrier was absurdly high. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

He had spent over half a year practically giving up on real life to live on the continent, and he had thought he had finally climbed over the wall that new players had to face.

But now there was an even higher wall.

No, it wasn’t that it had appeared; it was that he hadn’t been able to see it before he climbed the first one.

Who knew how many such walls there were?

The higher his level rose, the worse it would get.

If he thought of it like reality, then the walls erected by the vested interests would be lined with countless obstacles.

He let out a short laugh.

Thinking of it that way made it funny.

“Interesting.”

Kenji was a man with more than enough talent and ability.

Lately, he had only been seen getting wrecked by Han Simin, but if that overpowered freak hadn’t existed, the Kenji Guild might have been soaring even higher by now.

He had the money and the guts for it.

“This is doable.”

He set himself a goal.

Top 50.

Get into the top 50 and expand his power.

Player or NPC, it didn’t matter.

He would climb over every fence the continent’s residents had put up and join the ranks of the vested interests.

He had acknowledged Fantastic World not as a mere game, but as a world.

The beginning of complete game addiction!

And the acceptance of reality.

’You can’t become the best with players alone.’

His path from here on would change.

He was certain that anyone who saw the fences the NPCs had put up would change as well.

Fortunately, he was the fastest.

He would sprint ahead before anyone else could catch up.

Simply by adding NPCs into his blueprint, his vision expanded, wide and lush.

And at the very end of that picture was, of course, Han Simin’s downfall.

’Let’s see how long that bastard can hold out on his own.’

Kenji began to run hard for his dream.