Gathering Wives with a System Chapter 715 The Dragon

Alice saw herself crying in the memories.

The sight felt strange because the person inside those memories looked nothing like the Alice she knew now. Alice had always considered herself someone who could endure almost anything without breaking, yet the girl in those memories had fallen to her knees and cried until she could barely breathe.

That Alice hated her family, especially after everything they had done to her and the way they had discarded her once her Talent awakening failed. Yet despite that hatred, she still loved them, and that contradiction made the memories even more painful to watch.

It was a strange, hateful feeling that the dream Alice could not properly understand. She hated them for what they had done, but she could not erase the years she had spent with them, nor could she simply stop caring about them because they had hurt her.

The Alice inside the memories had lost everything at once, and there had been nothing left for her to hold onto. Her home was gone, her family was gone, and the place she had once considered her entire world no longer existed.

The Alice who watched those memories felt her heart tremble.

She was shocked to realize that the memories Jasmine was showing her were not simply scenes created by some skill. They belonged to her Conqueror Trial, and the more she watched, the more intensely the emotions began to rise from somewhere deep inside her.

Pain. Sorrow. Longing.

They were not distant emotions that belonged to someone else, because they felt real, almost as if Alice herself had lived through every single moment in another reality, not just a Trial.

Alice focused completely on the memories. She watched herself searching for a reason to continue living, only to find nothing that could give her life any meaning. After losing everything, revenge became the only thing that remained, so she began searching for the monster responsible for destroying her home.

Eventually, she found the Catastrophe. The battle was long, but the result was certain, and the Alice within the memories eventually killed it. Yet the moment she accomplished the only thing she had been pursuing, she realized that nothing had changed.

There was no happiness waiting for her, or relief. There was only emptiness.

The memories went black for a moment before continuing, and when they returned, Alice was already looking at a completely different existence.

A Dragon.

The dragon lived each day as though it wanted to die, barely caring whether it survived from one day to the next.

The dragon no longer even realized that it was usually living in its transformed human form, because the distinction between the two had gradually disappeared from its mind. Even if it did realize, it wouldn't care, because the dragon form was its real appearance and it had been living as a transformed human.

The dragon's scales had once been pure gold, but they slowly became darker as the years passed. The dragon noticed the change at times, yet it never cared enough to do anything about it, because its appearance meant very little compared to the emptiness inside.

People came to the dragon. Some came carrying rewards, hoping to persuade the dragon to join them, while others arrived with hidden plots and schemes. Some even came intending to kill the dragon, believing that defeating such a powerful creature would bring them fame or wealth.

The dragon ignored them all. It continued living alone, moving from one place to another without any real purpose. The dragon ate when it needed to, slept when it became tired, and fought whenever someone forced it into a battle, but none of those things meant anything anymore.

Then, many years later, the dragon discovered the truth.

The dragon's home had not been destroyed by a Catastrophe. Someone else had caused it, and the destruction that had shaped the dragon's entire existence had been deliberately arranged as part of another person's plan.

The dragon searched for those responsible. It searched for years, following every possible clue and destroying anyone connected to the mystery, but the dragon never found the people behind it. Still, the purpose of revenge had given the dragon something that resembled life again, even if it was nothing more than hatred keeping an empty body moving forward.

The dragon became increasingly violent as the years passed. Eventually, it went berserk and began destroying everything around it. It killed without hesitation and destroyed without thought, continuing forward because revenge was the only purpose it still remembered.

The dragon's scales darkened even more, and now only half of them remained gold. Time seemed to blur together after that.

The sorrow and rage inside the dragon slowly hollowed out everything that had once existed there. It no longer remembered what happiness felt like, and even the hatred that had once kept it alive gradually became nothing more than an instinct that pushed the dragon forward.

Then the Thousand Year Stampede happened.

Everyone and everything was destroyed.

The dragon survived, although surviving hardly felt like a blessing. The Red Rain covered the entire sector, and the dragon was exposed to it for days, weeks, and eventually months, suffering as the corruption slowly spread through its body.

The pain was unbearable at first. The dragon endured it for days and weeks, then months, until eventually its body adapted to the corruption. When the dragon finally recovered, almost two-thirds of its scales had become black, with only a small portion retaining their beautiful golden color.

A portion of the dragon's body had also become red.

However, the Red Rain could no longer corrupt it. The corruption could not be erased, but it could no longer progress, leaving the dragon permanently scarred without allowing the Red Rain to consume the rest of its existence.

That was when the dragon realized something.

The dragon was special.

It was the antithesis of the Red Rain, an entity born with the potential to fight against the very power that had corrupted the world. The realization should have filled the dragon with hope, but instead, it finally understood something far more painful.

The dragon cried that day.

For the first time in many years, the dragon wailed and cursed the System. This power, this strange existence that had given the dragon abilities beyond ordinary beings, was also what had brought destruction to its home.

Because of the System's 'blessing', that hidden mastermind had destroyed everything.

The dragon's family, the dragon's home, and the dragon's city had all been taken away. Everything that had once given the dragon a reason to live had disappeared because of a power that had supposedly been given to help it become stronger.

The dragon roared and cried for a long time, but there was no longer any rage behind its voice. There was only sorrow.

The Red Rain had weakened the dragon considerably, and for some reason, the dragon that should have been a perfect antithesis to the Red Rain had already been corrupted, even if only slightly, long before discovering its true nature. The dragon no longer had the strength to go on another rampage, and even if it did, there was probably no one left for it to take revenge against.