Gathering Wives with a System Chapter 720 Dragon Heart, Missed Farewell

Isaac Hargraves had been the first person the dragon had trusted in decades, and now he had become the person it wanted to destroy the most. The dragon remained hidden for several more seconds, its eyes slowly narrowing as the rage finally began to rise again. It had spent so long believing that it could no longer care about anyone, only to discover that it had been wrong.

The dragon finally revealed its presence without warning. Isaac immediately sensed the change in the surroundings, and his expression changed when he realized where the hostility was coming from. Before he could fully react, the dragon lunged toward him with enough force to shatter the ground beneath its claws.

"Hey, listen, it's not what you think. I can explain—"

The dragon did not listen. Its claws came down with enough force to destroy the area around Isaac, forcing him to move away while Kaela hurriedly retreated behind him. Isaac tried to speak several times, but every attempt was interrupted by another attack, and it quickly became obvious that the dragon had no intention of giving him an opportunity to explain himself.

The dragon was considerably weaker than it had once been, and the corruption had taken away a large portion of its strength, but it was still the Dragon Lord. Even in its weakened state, it possessed enough power to force Isaac onto the defensive, and every attack carried the clear intent to kill.

Isaac could defend himself, but Kaela could not. That was what finally forced him to stop trying to reason with the dragon, because every moment he spent talking gave it another opportunity to attack. Isaac grabbed Kaela and retreated while narrowly avoiding another attack, and after realizing that staying any longer would only put her in greater danger, he finally escaped with her.

The dragon could have chased them.

It knew that.

Yet for some reason, it did not.

After watching them disappear into the distance, the dragon simply returned to the place where it had been hiding earlier. It lowered itself onto the ground and remained there without moving, as though nothing had happened.

When night arrived, the cold slowly settled over the ruined Sector. The anger inside the dragon gradually began to disappear, leaving behind the same emptiness it had known for so many years. It remained there in silence until the first tears began falling from its eyes.

There was no rage left in those tears, and there was no one around to hear the quiet sounds that escaped it. The dragon simply remained alone in the darkness, unable to understand why betraying it had hurt so much when it had already decided that Isaac was someone it hated. It wanted to believe that the pain was nothing more than anger, but some part of it already knew that was not true.

Days passed like a blur after that. The dragon had no sense of direction anymore, nor did it have any desire to move, so it spent most of its time sleeping wherever it happened to be. Whenever it woke, it would remain in the same place until exhaustion forced it back into unconsciousness.

Sometimes it could not control its tears. It hated those moments, but it no longer had the strength to fight them, and the more it tried to understand what was happening inside its heart, the more tangled its emotions became. It had survived hatred, loneliness, grief, and countless years of emptiness, yet somehow this was the first time it had felt completely lost.

Days turned into weeks.

Then, one day, Kaela appeared.

The dragon immediately sensed her presence, and the sorrow that had filled its heart was replaced by anger. Its eyes opened slowly as the temperature around it began rising, and the ground beneath it started trembling from the pressure it unconsciously released.

[Why have you come here? Do you think I won't kill you simply because I let you leave alive once?]

Kaela had always been easily frightened by the Dragon Lord's presence, yet this time she did not cower. She simply stood there and looked at the dragon, her eyes puffy and red as though she had spent the past several days crying.

Then, with trembling lips, she finally spoke. "Isaac doesn't have much time left."

[Good riddance.]

The dragon sneered as it spoke, but its heart twisted painfully the moment the words left its mouth. It did not understand why hearing that Isaac was close to death affected it so strongly, because it was supposed to hate him. It had every reason to hate him, yet the thought of him dying made something inside its chest feel unbearably heavy.

"I know how you feel, but he only did what he did because he wanted to help the Sector. He always thought of you as a friend, Alice, and that's why he never tried to force anything on—"

[Enough!]

The dragon's voice shook the surroundings, and Kaela immediately fell silent. The dragon stared at her with cold eyes before speaking again, its anger making the temperature around them rise even further.

[Leave.]

Kaela remained silent for a long time. She stared at the dragon with an expression that seemed almost pleading, but when she realized that she would not be able to change its mind, she lowered her head and slowly turned around. Without saying anything else, she began walking away.

The dragon watched her leave before turning its head away with a snort. Yet the moment Kaela disappeared from its senses, its mind became even more chaotic, and the anger that had briefly distracted it began fading again. All that remained was the same question that had been haunting it since the day it discovered Isaac's plan.

Why did it care?

The dragon had always hated being manipulated. Its entire life had been ruined because someone had manipulated the people it loved, and it had spent decades suffering because of it, so it should have hated Isaac for doing something similar. Isaac had gained its trust before revealing that he had only been trying to use its Corruption Resistance, and yet every time the dragon thought about his impending death, its heart twisted painfully.

It hated that feeling.

The dragon became increasingly restless as the days passed. Eventually, it decided to continue its journey, believing that moving forward would at least give it something else to think about, because remaining in the same place only gave its thoughts more time to return to Isaac.

It should have continued toward its hometown long ago because of its family. Instead, Isaac's betrayal had shattered its heart so completely that it could barely move, and somehow, as though fate wanted to prove that it had a cruel sense of irony, it was now continuing that journey because of him.

The dragon eventually reached its city. It landed among the ruins and remained there for a long time, silently paying its respects to the people who had once lived there, remembering their faces, their voices, and the life that had once existed in this place.

Yet even here, it continued thinking about Isaac.

Was he okay?

Was he in pain?

Was he still alive?

The dragon suddenly raised its head and released a roar that shook the ruined city. Golden flames erupted into the sky as it unleashed everything it had been holding inside, yet even after the roar faded, the feeling in its chest remained.

It hated this feeling. It hated Isaac for trying to manipulate it, hated him for making it trust him, and hated him even more for making it care about whether he lived or died. The dragon wanted to tear those feelings out of itself, but no matter how hard it tried, they refused to disappear.

Still, the dragon would not go to him. The only thing it believed it had left after losing everyone was its pride, and it refused to throw that away by returning to the man who had betrayed it. If it met Isaac again, it would kill him, because that was easier to accept than admitting that it still cared about him.

But the dragon could not quell its emotions. It wanted to rage and release all the feelings that had been bottled inside it for so long, and eventually, it remembered Nova Etra. Those people had tried to kill it because they wanted its heart, and the dragon had already vowed that it would eventually take revenge against them.

It was time.

The dragon knew that it might die if it attacked Nova Etra. Its strength had declined considerably since the Thousand-Year Stampede, and the corruption had left its body far weaker than it had once been, so attacking an entire city filled with powerful survivors was not a decision it could make without risking its life.

It had promised itself that it would survive for as long as possible for the sake of the family that had died because of it. So why was it going there when it knew that it might never return?

If it thought about the matter logically, there was no reason to take such a risk. Perhaps some part of it still hoped that the people who wanted its heart would survive if they obtained it, or perhaps it simply wanted to die so that it could finally escape the sorrow that had long consumed it.

Maybe it would destroy its own heart after it lost so that no one could ever obtain it. Maybe it wanted to prove that it could still win despite everything that had happened, or perhaps the corruption had finally begun affecting its mind after all these years.

The dragon stopped thinking about it.

The dragon spread its wings and rose into the sky before accelerating toward Nova Etra at breakneck speed. It knew something was wrong because Nova Etra had been unusually quiet for several months, and considering everything that had happened before, that silence could only mean that they were planning something. There was a possibility that it was flying directly into a trap, but the dragon no longer cared enough to stop.

It flew forward until Nova Etra finally came into view, and what it found left it completely stunned. The city was in shambles, with only a few buildings still standing while most of the streets and structures had been reduced to ruins. The destruction was far greater than anything the dragon had expected to see.

Then it noticed something hanging above the city's gate. It was the head of a dragon, pinned above the entrance like a trophy, and the sight immediately made the dragon stop in midair. The appearance of the decapitated head was almost identical to its own, from the shape of its horns to the color of its scales.

'What?'

The dragon remained motionless as several possibilities passed through its mind. Had someone used transformation magic art or a skill to create a corpse that looked like it? That seemed like the only reasonable explanation, because there was no way another dragon that looked exactly like it could have simply appeared in Nova Etra.

Then another thought struck it.

Transformation magic art.

The dragon remembered someone who had been practicing it, and the realization immediately sent a chill through its heart.

'No, that can't be.'

Without wasting another moment, it flew toward the center of the city, desperately hoping that its assumption was wrong and that there was another explanation for what it was seeing.

The castle stood in the middle of the ruined city, and the dragon destroyed what remained of its walls with a single flap of its mana. Dust and debris scattered in every direction, revealing a massive dining hall hidden beneath the ruined structure. There were dozens of Awakeners gathered around a large table, but none of them were moving normally.

They were writhing in pain as though they were desperately trying to suppress something inside their bodies. The dragon's gaze immediately fell upon the center of the table, where something enormous had been placed, and its heart sank when it realized what it was. It was a giant dragon heart, and judging by its size and appearance, it had almost certainly come from the corpse hanging above the city's gate.

The dragon slowly looked around the table. Smaller pieces of the dragon heart had been sliced apart and placed in front of the Awakeners, all of whom had already eaten them. They were now desperately trying to resist whatever was happening inside their bodies. The situation was obvious once the dragon understood what they had done.

They had eaten the heart because they believed it belonged to the Dragon Lord. They had thought that consuming it would grant them the power to resist the corruption, only to discover too late that the heart did not belong to the Dragon Lord and that it was already corrupted. Instead of saving them, it was slowly turning them into monsters.

'Why?'

The dragon's heart began shaking as the truth slowly became impossible to deny. It stared at the giant heart on the table, and for the first time since entering Nova Etra, it was no longer thinking about revenge or the people who had tried to kill it. It was thinking about the person to whom that heart belonged.

At that moment, someone caught its attention. A man who appeared to be the king of Nova Etra was standing near the table, clawing desperately at his own neck as blood flowed from his mouth, nose, and ears. The corruption was slowly spreading through his body, yet even while suffering, he continued glaring at the dragon with hatred.

"How dare you do this, evil dragon? How could you send a corrupted monster here while making it disguise itself as you? Don't you have any pride as a dragon?"

The man coughed violently before continuing, his voice becoming weaker as the corruption spread through his body.

"We only wanted to live. How could you do this to us when you are supposed to be the saviour of this Sector?"

His expression was filled with hatred, but beneath that hatred was also the desperation of someone who knew that he was dying.

The dragon slowly took a step backward. It was afraid, but not of the dying man standing before it or the corrupted Awakeners surrounding the table. It was afraid of the realization it had been desperately trying to deny, because the identity of the person whose heart was lying on that table had already become obvious.

Without saying anything else, the dragon turned around and flew. It no longer cared about Nova Etra, the people who had tried to kill it, or even the anger it had carried toward Isaac. There was only one thing it wanted to know now, and that was whether Isaac was still alive.

The dragon flew without stopping. It traveled across the ruined Sector for what felt like an eternity, barely noticing the passing landscape as it desperately searched for the familiar presence it had spent so long trying to forget. Its body was already exhausted, but it continued forcing itself forward until it finally sensed Kaela.

The dragon immediately changed direction and flew toward her. Its body could no longer maintain proper flight, however, and it eventually crashed into the ground several meters away from Kaela, creating a powerful shockwave that forced her to shield herself. The dragon struggled to stand before immediately turning toward her.

[Kaela! Where is Isaac!?]