The fourth lesson I learned after reincarnating as a dragon prince was this:
The universe doesn't care where you land.
The portal Sapphire forced me through didn't lead anywhere gentle. I fell. For what felt like hours.
Wind screamed past my ears as the sky twisted into colors I didn't have names for. Dimensional travel, apparently, was not meant to be experienced when you were thrown through it like a rock.
Then gravity returned. Hard. I crashed into water.
Freezing seawater swallowed me whole as I sank beneath the waves. For a brief, miserable moment I wondered if I had somehow managed to escape a frozen planet only to drown in an ocean.
Fortunately, dragon instincts kicked in.
Magic surged through my chest before my mind caught up. Heat burst outward and the water around me exploded into steam as the ocean recoiled from the sudden temperature change.
I shot back to the surface, coughing violently.
"…Fantastic," I rasped.
For a moment I floated there, staring at the grey sky. No blizzards. No endless glaciers. Just clouds and ocean. I had made it off Dyamond. The problem was…
I had no idea where I was. And judging by the fact that I had just fallen out of a dimensional portal into the ocean at seven years old, that was a serious problem.
It took three days to find land. A jagged volcanic island eventually rose from the ocean like a broken tooth. I dragged myself onto the black rock and collapsed. The air felt strange.
Warm.
Humid.
Salty.
Compared to Dyamond, it felt almost tropical. I took a slow breath. Then doubled over.
"—kgh!" Something hard rose in my throat. I spat into my palm. A small pearl rolled across my hand, glowing faintly with storm‑blue light. "…Great."
Dragon pearls. Ever since leaving Dyamond, they appeared whenever my body struggled to stabilize the immense power sealed inside me.
None of them came close to the true Dragon Pearl bound to my soul, but they were still powerful. Fragments. Overflow. Excess power my body couldn't contain. I slipped the pearl into a pouch and looked around. Endless ocean stretched in every direction.
Strange spirals of mist twisted above the waves. Storm clouds formed and vanished without warning. Ships avoided the area. Planes too. Even the magical creatures beneath the waves seemed reluctant to approach.
Weeks later I finally heard the name of the place.
A fishing boat passed nearby during a storm I had accidentally created. The sailors were shouting nervously to each other. "The Dragon's Triangle!" At first the words meant nothing.
They weren't speaking English. Then something stirred in my blood. Dragon instincts were strange things. Not quite memories, not quite guesses—more like ancient knowledge buried deep inside my bloodline.
And along with that instinct came something else. Understanding. The sailors were speaking Mandarin. In my previous life I had only known English, so I definitely hadn't studied Mandarin. Yet their words were suddenly perfectly clear.
It took me a moment to understand why. My dragon bloodline translated language instinctively. For most dragons that meant ancient draconic speech or magical dialects. But my bloodline traced back to the First Dragon. The being that created magic itself. Which meant the magic in my veins treated language like something to decode.
Human languages.
Magical languages.
Ancient dialects.
Modern speech.
It didn't matter. I understood them all. And once I understood what the sailors were saying, the pieces fell into place. The Dragon's Triangle. A mysterious region where ships and aircraft vanished. Located on the planet humans called—
Earth.
I stared across the endless ocean.
"…Huh." Apparently, I hadn't just crossed space. I had crossed worlds.
The first year was… difficult. I survived the same way I had on Dyamond.
Fishing.
Shelters carved into cliffs.
Training.
Experimenting with dragon pearls.
Sometimes my emotions slipped and storms formed around the islands. More than once I accidentally created whirlpools large enough to swallow ships despite not being able to actively control water or storms. After the third incident I moved farther away from shipping routes.
Humans noticed things too easily. But during those early years I noticed something else. The cold inside me. Not physical cold. Something deeper. A strange distance between myself and the world.
At first I assumed it was exhaustion from forcing my body to contain power far beyond what it was meant to wield. The Dragon Pearl bound to my soul held power far older than I was. Naturally there would be side effects.
At least, that was the explanation I settled on. Emotions still existed. They simply came slower now.
Sharper.
More controlled.
Where I once reacted first and thought later, now I analysed situations quietly. Like watching a storm instead of standing inside it.
The headaches started around my tenth year on Earth. At first I thought it was stress from overusing magic. Then one morning I woke up with a pounding ache behind my temples. "…Ow."
I rubbed the side of my head. Something felt… wrong. I walked over to the small mirror I kept in my cave and stared. Two small bumps had formed just above my hairline. I blinked. "…You've got to be kidding me." Dragon horns.
Apparently, puberty for dragon blooded princes involved growing weapons out of your skull. Over the next few months, the headaches came and went as the horns slowly developed, curving back slightly along my head like jagged but still pretty cool daggers.
It wasn't exactly comfortable. On the bright side, they looked cool. On the downside, hats were going to be a problem. Not unless I learn how to hide them,
Years passed. My body slowly adapted to the Dragon Pearl's power. The number of pearls I produced decreased, though they still appeared occasionally. Sometimes I woke up coughing one into my hand.
Other times I could feel pressure building inside my chest until I forced one out intentionally. Each pearl was different. Storm pearls. Frost pearls. Occasionally even faint embers of fire. None of them matched the true Dragon Pearl sealed in my core. But they were still powerful artifacts.
Eventually I began exploring farther from the islands. Flying came naturally once my body matured. Dragon instincts helped. Wind manipulation helped even more. And during one of those flights, I saw it. A massive stone structure stretching across the mountains like a sleeping dragon.
The Great Wall of China.
Something about the place resonated with me. Dragon ley lines flowed through the land there.
Ancient.
Deep.
So, I stayed. The mountains became my territory. Hidden caves. Abandoned watchtowers. Snow‑covered valleys. And undiscovered mineral mines. Perfect places for a dragon prince to disappear.
Modern society if remembered my previous life correctly ran on two things. Money and information. Criminal organizations unfortunately possessed both. Fortunately for me, criminals became extremely cooperative when confronted by a glowing‑eyed dragon teenager capable of freezing the air around them.
Within a few years I had more money than I knew what to do with. Which meant I could finally explore something I had been curious about. The technology of this similar yet different earth.
One laptop later, I discovered the internet. At first it seemed similar to the one from my previous life. Search engines, videos, forums. Then I opened a discussion thread about the Dragon's Triangle.
The first comment read:
"Obviously aliens."
The second:
"No, it's Atlantis."
The third:
"It's dragons."
I leaned back slowly.
"…Well."
At least one of them was technically correct. Scrolling further only made things worse.
Someone had uploaded a blurry picture of a storm over the ocean.
The caption read:
"REAL FOOTAGE OF SEA DEMON???"
I stared at the screen.
"…That was me."
Apparently, I had accidentally become a cryptid. Human conspiracy theories were far less logical than I remembered.
Years passed. I grew taller, stronger, more controlled. By the time I turned nineteen, my life on Earth had become strangely stable. Until one night while browsing online.
A profile appeared. A girl living in Gardenia. Red hair, Birthday: December 10th. Name: Bloom. My little sister. I leaned back slowly in my chair.For years I had focused on survival.
Training.
Control.
Stability.
I had convinced myself I didn't care anymore. Survival leaves little room for nostalgia. But seeing her name… reminded me that somewhere in this world, my little sister was living a life that was supposed to have been mine too. It reminded me that they were still out there.
Daphne.
Bloom.
Damian
My family.
The scattered royal children of Domino.
Bloom's sixteenth birthday was approaching. Which meant something important. If the timeline I remembered was correct…
That was when everything started. I closed the laptop and stepped outside. Snow drifted across the mountains of northern China. For a moment the cold wind reminded me of Dyamond. And of a white fox disappearing into a storm.
"…Hang on a little longer, Sapphire," I murmured quietly.
Then I stood. Bloom's birthday was coming. And I intended to be there when the chaos started.
Even if she didn't know it yet—
her brother was coming.