Temple Calendar, Year 937, February 23rd.
Ed Village — just another utterly ordinary little village on the Dea Continent.
It was spring. Sunlight spilled over wide, peaceful grasslands. Sheep grazed lazily, and the shepherd girl was busy hanging herself from a tree, developing some very improper doubts about this world.
At this moment, the game had only just begun.
Reynard McIntosh never imagined his very first quest would go this poorly.
The shepherd girl’s skin wasn’t that sickly noble pallor, but rosy and healthy, carrying that wild, sun-kissed look of the mountains. She was Leifely and cute, with big, bright black eyes, full of fawn-like curiosity and fearless innocence—if she weren’t just a throwaway character in the game, Reynard might seriously have considered adding her to his future harem.
But she had actually refused him without a second’s hesitation.
“No sale.”
Not the slightest sense of being an NPC. Even worse, her sheep had jumped up and kicked him in the ass.
Reynard had noticed the girl’s strange name: “Leif”—which, in the language of this world, meant “Leifer.” Who in their right mind would use that as a name?
Just then, the wounded demon dragon fell out of the sky.
He decided to go slay the dragon first, then come back and deal with the sheep.
That demon dragon was basically a newbie welfare package—like, in a wuxia game setting, the equivalent of “you fall off a cliff and find a secret manual.”
If he killed it, he’d get a huge pile of gold coins and experience. Not to mention, the dragon race was naturally greedy, obsessed with hoarding gold and gemstones. Once he got the dragon’s treasure map and found the ancestral hoard in its lair, he’d be rich for life.
But Leif had followed him, and now she stood in his way. This was nothing like how an NPC should behave—she’d come specifically to ruin everything!
Fine. If he wanted that sheep, and he couldn’t buy it, killing the owner was also a perfectly valid solution.
Besides, Leif had already stopped him twice. She deserved to die.
Reynard hadn’t expected the girl to be so strong. He sneered.
“You really are stupid. Didn’t you see that thing that just fell out of the sky—”
What he expected even less was how insanely fast the demon dragon’s regeneration was.
“Uh, that…”
The dragon that had just been struck by heavenly fire, burned half to death into a lump of charcoal, had become, after hitting the ground, a girl with long, pale flaxen hair.
It was a self-defense trick of the dragon race when badly injured—turning into a vulnerable-looking human girl to exploit the pity of idiots.
If you let a dragon’s pretty face fool you, in the end you’d lose everything.
Wounds closed at a speed visible to the naked eye, and the dragon’s true form emerged again. It tilted its head, golden, wicked eyes wide as it stared at him, like a cat toying with a mouse cornered against a wall, as if to say:
She was going to play him to death, slowly.
The shepherd girl was burning with righteous indignation, completely unaware of what she’d just thrown herself in front of.
“You liar! You villain—how could you try to kill such a weak, innocent girl!”
Leif stopped mid-rant.
She suddenly noticed the light in front of her dimming. A huge shadow covered her from above, shaped like some strange beast.
Staring up at the supposedly “weak and innocent girl” she’d just mentioned, Reynard broke out in a waterfall of sweat.
With one sharp twist, he redirected Leif’s machete off to the side, didn’t even look at the girl who was about to topple over, and bolted. But of course, the demon dragon had no intention of letting him go so easily.
Leif watched the ground rush up toward her face. Right before her cheek could slam into the back of her own blade, something black hooked her around the waist.
“Thank—”
Leif looked up at the thing that had just saved her.
The sunlight was bright. The air was unnervingly still. A gentle breeze brushed over the grassland, but in the distant woods no bird or beast stirred, not even a leaf dared move.
Leif was dangling from a black dragon tail, hanging upside down. After a bout of dizzy spinning, she was safely deposited onto a tree.
The demon dragon was as tall as a three-story building, with wings on its back, its entire body a gleaming, crystalline black, shining in the sun with a sheen somewhere between metal and leather.
Leif simply could not connect the white-dressed, white-skirted, flaxen-haired girl from before with this monster in front of her.
The dragon tossed Reynard into the air a few times, then spat a ball of flame at the lump of flesh it had played into mush.
Boom.
In the crimson blaze of dragonfire, the young noble was burned to nothing.
There was a crisp crack as what was left of him hit the ground, like a ceramic bowl dropped off a table. He shattered in an instant into a small pile of ash, burned completely through. A gust of wind scattered it, drifting away like dust. Not a single fragment remained, as if he had never existed at all.
The dragon paused for a moment, then turned its head, moving step by heavy step in Leif’s direction.
Leif’s legs had long since gone weak. Her hands shook around the machete’s hilt. She was so scared she nearly fell out of the tree.
The dragon lowered its head and looked at the girl in the branches, then extended one claw as if to grab her.
Leif knew she was done for.
Only in that last moment did she finally realize—
This world wasn’t some “health-preservation hell.”
It was clearly the very game she’d been playing before she died.
She was always extremely competitive about gameplay—loved fighting, grinding, leveling, stacking stats—but never cared much about lore or setting. She’d simply clicked through everything, chopping and slashing her way forward, her favorite activities being “kill, kill, kill” and “level up, level up.”
She had only just now recognized that this was Knights and Princess, and that was only because, in her past life, she had dropped dead before she could even land a single hit on the final boss, the “Ghost of the Demon Dragon.”
For sixteen years, that lingering obsession had never faded, like a splinter of flesh stubbornly growing out from under her fingernail.
Last life, she’d blown her Leifer out grinding bosses. This time, before she even got the chance to “blow her Leifer,” she was about to get killed by the boss instead.
But even if she died, she at least wanted to get one hit in. Just one. Otherwise she’d never rest in peace.
To hell with it!
While the dragon had its head lowered close to her, Leif quickly judged the distance, gripped the machete, and leapt, aiming straight for one of its eyes.
The eyes were the weakest part of any animal. Demon dragon or not, that rule still held.
Not far away, the little sheep Lili had been quietly grazing. Hearing the commotion, she slowly wandered over.
The lamb’s eyes went wide, her mouth opened in shock, a smear of fresh green grass juice still on her lips.
The dragon was simply too big. The shepherd girl was about the size of one of its claws.
A sharp dragon talon hooked the back of Leif’s coarse tunic from midair and lifted her up in front of its snout. Tilting its head with a hint of puzzlement, the dragon studied her.
The shepherd girl flailed her arms and legs desperately. The rough cloth of her tunic was about to tear under her full weight. If she fell, she’d be lucky to get away with a mild fracture. Leif quickly reached back and wrapped her arms around the dragon’s finger instead.
The dragon made a startled gurgling sound in its throat, clearly not expecting this girl to be so bold.
Leif was terrified out of her mind. Back when she was just pounding keys, slicing away at the boss on a monitor, even if she died in-game there was nothing to be afraid of. But now that she was staring at the real thing, her heart was about to leap out of her throat.
Calm down.
The more scared you are, the calmer you have to be.
Because she did not want to die.
This dragon didn’t actually seem hostile toward her.
Could it be… it knew she had just saved it?
It clearly had intelligence. Maybe she could try to deceive it, then kill it.
But… this was bad.
Leif deeply regretted not having studied any of the in-game characters back then. To the old Leif, the demon dragon in front of her had been nothing but a walking heap of experience points and gold. Sure, it had a thicker health bar, but essentially “wounded demon dragon” and “charging wild boar” were the same thing.
Who would bother learning how to “communicate with experience points”?
Who could have imagined she’d end up in this situation?
Leif had just vetoed the thirty-seventh plan for killing the dragon that flashed through her mind and was cobbling together an equally terrible thirty-eighth plan when—
The demon dragon suddenly set her down, gently and securely, on the ground.
Then it let out a huge yawn, and a cloud of black mist rose from its body.
When the mist dispersed, a languid girl in white dress and white skirt appeared.
Her skin was pale, her features exquisite. Her long, faintly wavy flaxen hair fell to her ankles. The fabric of her dress looked impossibly soft at a glance—light and thin, yet without a single crease, as if it had been carefully pressed. Handmade lace edged the hem, delicate and snug. Look more closely, and you’d see the threads were silk dyed with finely ground gemstones for warp, woven with specially refined platinum threads for weft, giving it incredible flexibility and strength. Under the sun, it shimmered with prismatic fire.
Leif clutched her chest, almost unable to breathe from the sheer contrast. She raised her other hand to shield her eyes, because the dragon-turned-girl was simply… dazzling.
The dragon girl lowered her head and searched the ground in a slow circle. At last she turned toward Leif and wobbled over, each step like she was walking on clouds—clearly not very used to moving around on human feet.
Leif, sitting up in the grass, actually forgot to scoot away.
The dragon girl bent down and took her hand.
She was supposed to be a cold-blooded creature, and yet somehow, her hand was even warmer than Leif’s.
While Leif was still staring blankly, thinking,
“What is she doing?”
“Why is she so close?”
“Is she about to kill me?”
—the dragon suddenly leaned down, pulled away the hand Leif was using to cover her face, and lifted it over her head.
Then, she pressed her lips firmly against Leif’s.
Boom.
Leif’s eyes flew wide. She stared up at the sky as the back of her head thumped into the springy grass, a spray of fireworks exploding in her mind.
