Episode 22
Bella was a talented cook who had been working at the Harrison mansion for seven years.
This morning, she headed to the kitchen early as usual.
But since today was the first day she had to prepare breakfast for the three dragon siblings who had come to the mansion, she had to be especially early.
“Oh my, it’s so dark.”
Bella, who was wandering down the dark hallway, snatched a candle from the wall and lit it.
And when she arrived at the kitchen with frequent steps, relying on the light barely illuminating the floor near her feet.
‘Crunch, squelch, snap.’
From somewhere, a squelching sound of bones crumbling could be heard.
For a moment, goosebumps ran through Bella’s body.
She slowly moved the candle she was holding in her hand toward the sound.
And.
“Whoaaah!!”
Bella screamed loudly and stepped back at the terrifying sight before her eyes.
Something’s head snapped up when it heard her scream.
“……!!”
Bella barely managed to stop stepping back with her trembling legs and carefully looked around to see what was going on.
It was only with great difficulty that she found the courage to go near it because it was smaller than she thought.
As she focused on the kitchen counter, the silhouette of something began to come into view.
It was only then that Bella realized that the thing occupying the counter was a reptile with blue scales.
The reptile was munching on raw meat on the counter, bone included.
Its whole body, including its face, was covered in blood, as if it had eaten more than one or two pieces.
The reptile, whose eyes met hers for a moment, narrowed its pupils vertically and examined Bella.
But soon it seemed to lose interest, opened its mouth wide, and went back to eating the raw meat.
“Ah, ahh…?!”
Only after Bella let out a dumbfounded exclamation did she realize that the reptile was one of the three siblings who had come here yesterday.
Because she discovered small wings fluttering in its back.
“Hey! What’s going on?”
Several guards heard Bella’s screams and rushed toward the kitchen.
“Oh!”
“Oh my…?”
“What, what is this…!”
And everyone gasped at the sight of blood spilling out before their eyes.
Even though he knew their eyes were on him, the blue reptile, Resen, did not stop eating meat.
He even let out a satisfied purring sound from his mouth.
Finally, after Resen had put all the meat chunks in the storage tank into his stomach, he jumped down from the cooking area.
The servants split into two to make way for Resen to walk in.
“Gya!”
Resen, who was looking up at them, flashed his yellow eyes.
The servants whose eyes met those pupils of him held their breath.
Since they had never seen the true form of an adult dragon before, the reptilian pupils felt quite alien.
Blood dripped down the path Resen walked.
“…”
All the servants’ faces turned pale as they just stared blankly at each other.
In the end, not a single piece of meat was served for breakfast that day, which caused much resentment among the other servants.
At the same time, in the garden of the Harrison mansion.
The veteran gardener Hillman hurried to work in the morning to plant the seedlings he had brought in yesterday.
Although he had never heard a single word of praise from the new head of the household, he was proud that the garden he tended was the best in the Sylvian Empire.
That’s understandable, the garden of Harrison Mansion was famous in many ways, enough to be a constant topic in people’s tea time.
As such, Hillman had to regularly maintain the garden, and today was one of those days.
Hillman’s steps stopped as he headed toward the seedlings he had gathered in advance the previous evening.
The seedlings that had clearly been neatly arranged by type were now piled up in a disorderly manner, like firewood thrown into a fireplace.
“Huh?!”
He rubbed his eyes, wondering if he had seen something wrong, and looked again.
But no matter how many times he blinked, the fact that his precious seedlings were piled up like a mountain did not change.
“What, what is this!?”
Hillman ran to where the seedlings were piled.
But before he reached them, a baby dragon with red scales took its place on the pile of seedlings.
“Byaa!”
In addition, the dragon was playing with all kinds of insects, spider webs, and larvae by rolling them on top of the seedlings.
The tender, tasty leaves of the seedlings had already been tattered by insects.
“Huh, huh, huh?! Noooo!!”
Hillman screamed as he looked at the miserable state of the seedlings.
As his loud shouts spread through the garden, the other gardeners who had been tidying up nearby began to gather one by one.
“Mr. Hillman? What’s going on?”
“Huh?”
At first, the gardeners just stared blankly at Hillman’s face, not knowing what was going on, but soon they started screaming likewise.
“Oh my god! I-isn’t th-that a Hebrew tree!?”
“Isn’t that a golden olive tree!?”
“What the heck is this?!”
Despite the gardeners’ nagging, Hillman couldn’t say anything.
It was because he also couldn’t understand what was happening right now.
The real culprit of all this was the red baby dragon, Lia, who was observing the insects, narrowing the pupils of her emerald eyes.
When she saw an insect she liked, she would gently touch it with her front paw and open her mouth wide to laugh.
Then as if she still had some strength left, she dug a ditch by cutting the grass all the way into the mansion.
The minds of gardeners who had been tending to their lawns for months without a single millimeter of error were naturally turned upside down.
But, of course, they could not express their dissatisfaction to the baby dragon.
***
A small commotion swept through Harrison mansion early in the morning.
The commotion quickly spread among the servants. And as the rumor spread, the servants’ feelings toward the baby dragons gradually changed from anticipation to worry and concern.
Then another incident of that further set the fire occurred.
“Young master? May I come in?”
One of the servants who had stopped by Poi’s room for lunch knocked cautiously on the door.
As in the morning, there was no sound in the room.
The servant knocked on the door again with a worried expression.
“Young master? It’s lunchtime now. Are you still sleeping? I’m worried because you haven’t eaten breakfast. I’ll go in now.”
The servant spoke loud enough to be heard from inside, then opened the door and walked slowly through the softly opened door.
“Young master, I have come in. Where are you?”
As soon as she opened the door, there was no one on the bed.
The servant, who had naturally thought he would be sleeping because he was tired, tilted her head to the side and looked around.
She approached the bathroom, wondering if he was washing up, but, as expected, there was no sign of anyone inside.
Then she turned around, thinking that she had to tell her colleagues about this quickly.
“Hic mama…”
But before she could do that, from somewhere, a sobbing sound mixed with another unidentified sound was heard.
“What, what is it…?”
A chill grew on her back as an ominous aura rose slowly. The servant gradually approached the bed from which the sound was coming.
“Oh my.”
The servant, whose shoulders hunched over by the creepy sobs that mixed with the sound of his own footsteps, lowered her gaze to the bottom of the bed, where the sound was coming from.
Immediately after, she made eye contact with a sparkling eye in the dark space under the bed.
“…?!!”
The servant fell on her buttocks in surprise. It was clearly the eyes of a beast.
The beast that had been in the corner under the bed, Poi, was still crying, looking for ‘Mama’.
The child’s black eyes were glistening with tears, and red snot was dripping from his nose.
The servant, after patting down her surprised heart, stretched out her arms while trembling.
“Oh, my lord? You should come out here and eat.”
Poi, who was watching the servant’s arm approaching stealthily, let out a short scream of ‘Myaa!!’ and hid himself further into the corner.
“Oh, my. What should I do with this?!”
The servant, who had failed to pull out the child on her own, finally called in her colleagues.
After they decided to combine their strength to lift the bed, Poi was nowhere to be seen.
“Uh?!”
“Oh my! Where did he go?!”
The servants looked at each other with puzzled faces.
But that didn’t mean the master who disappeared would reappear.
A game of hide-and-seek started out of nowhere in the mansion.
The servants started searching for the youngest master.
“Is he there?”
“No! He’s not here! How about you?”
“He is not here either!”
Everyone was stamping their feet because they couldn’t find him even after looking around every nook and cranny.
The servants, unable to find even a trace of Poi by lunchtime or even dinner, wandered around the mansion with tired steps.
The complaints and worries that had been building up little by little since the day the children came to the mansion naturally reached Dylan’s ears soon after.
Of course, it wasn’t that he was so interested in his niblings that he wanted to hear their every move.
He just had no choice but to hear it since he was in the office all day.
Even though he wanted to throw everything away and run away to his nest, the piled up work was just too much.
As he looked at the documents covering a vast territory with hundreds of employees as his responsibility, time flew by.
“So, what do you want me to do?”
One of Dylan’s eyebrows rose as he signed the documents.
The butler broke out in a cold sweat as he spoke in a tone that clearly showed his discomfort.
“We’re not asking the master to do anything. It’s just that I worry… What if the young masters and miss can’t adjust to this? I’m speaking up only out of concern,”
The butler finally managed to plead with some courage.
But Dylan just scoffed.
“It’s fine. Even if they can’t stand it, they’ll quiet down on their own.”
“Well, still…”
“Okay. It’s annoying. Go out.”
As Dylan waved his hands indifferently, a deep sigh escaped the butler’s mouth as he eventually came out of the office.
“It’s hard.”
The garden was still unkempt, the meat was being devoured every day, and the youngest master was still nowhere to be seen.
If they could communicate, they would have asked what was wrong, but the triplets had no intention of turning into humans for the time being.
The faces of the servants who failed to communicate with the dragons turned darker and darker over time.
