"Groooar!" Just as expected, the Spirit Dragon glared at Luo Qi with teary eyes and let out a cry.
To others, it was merely a crisp chirp. But to Luo Qi, who understood Draconic, the sound translated clearly: "Save me, Demon King-sama!"
Genuine dragon speech.
"So it really is a baby dragon?" Luo Qi frowned. Worse yet, the creature had instantly recognized his identity.
This was a catastrophically bad development.
Currently, the only person in this world who knew his identity as the Demon King was his stepsister, Luo Lin. Though Luo Qi was the Demon King, Luo Lin herself was just an ordinary hybrid with succubus blood.
He wasn't their biological child. His parents had found him abandoned on their doorstep as an infant. As he grew, his extraordinary abilities became apparent.
Shockingly, his adoptive parents had been thrilled to raise a boy with the Demon King's bloodline.
The reason he said "currently only one person knew" was because three years ago, his "parents" had vanished without a trace during an expedition to a magical creature-infested forest.
Though Luo Qi wielded the Demon King's powers, even his exhaustive search through the Cursed Woods—where his parents vanished three years prior—yielded nothing. That summer, he'd flipped that forest upside down like a pancake, combing every ravine where they'd supposedly hunted spectral moths.
Result? Zilch. No bloodstained cloaks, no shattered mana crystals, not even a stray boot. But then again, those two "magizoologists" packed more firepower than a dragon's hoard. Officially, they studied slime migration patterns. Unofficially? They could've bench-pressed archmages while reciting eldritch bestiary entries.
The best hope was that they'd been trapped in some underground dungeon by a teleportation trap. Maybe they'd pop back into existence in a couple of years.
But now, a freaking dragon had instantly sniffed out his true identity.
Absolute disaster.
According to the Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures, all dragonkin—even hatchlings—could shapeshift into human form and speak human languages.
If this dragon suddenly transformed and shouted "Demon King!" in front of the class, he'd be buried in headaches. At minimum, he'd have to brainwash the entire class with high-level memory magic—messy, risky, and unreliable. After all, even modern science and magic couldn't fully explain 1% of the brain's workings.
"Time Stop!"
Without hesitation, Luo Qi activated time-freezing magic. He yanked the Spirit Dragon out of its cage and tucked it under his arm.
Honestly, this juvenile Spirit Dragon wasn't large—light as a big pet dog!
"Advanced Mirror Puppetry Spell." Luo Qi cast a mid-tier illusion, creating lifelike duplicates of himself and the dragon. These mirror puppets had no actual abilities and stood as motionless as mannequins, but they'd suffice for cover.
The teachers had likely mistaken this Spirit Dragon for a common "Spirit Lizard." Though dragonkin were often crudely called "overgrown winged lizards," even baby Spirit Dragons were distinct. Adult Spirit Dragons could reach over 5 meters long, whereas Spirit Lizards maxed out at 2 meters.
Guess dragons had been extinct too long for people to tell the difference.
Of course, the Sea Dragon clan, which used to live in the sea and rule the oceans and the skies above the oceans, must be excluded from the similarity comparison. Because the body of the Sea Dragon clan is as long and narrow as a snake, covered with scales, and has sharp claws on its limbs, and without wings, their bodies are quite recognizable.
And generally speaking, Sea Dragons are scarier than ordinary dragons. In terms of size, the Sea Dragon clan is generally much larger than the dragons on land. Moreover, if the wingless Sea Dragons need to fly, they rely entirely on their innate magic. Their water-based magic is powerful enough to cause terrifying floods, and the degree of destruction is even more dreadful.
Of course, the Sea Dragon clan has now disappeared. After the Demon King was defeated, it seems that there hasn't been an officially recorded appearance of a real dragon on the continent for hundreds of years. All that people can see are the dragon skeletons from the war period preserved in museums.As the pinnacle of demonic and magical beings, dragons answered only to the Demon King. So-called "dragon knights" among humans only tamed inferior drakes and wyverns—pale imitations of true dragons.
As the supreme overlords straddling both demonic hierarchies and magical beast rankings, the dragonkin's supremacy remains unchallenged. Only the Demon King could ever hope to command such primordial might. Humanity's so-called "Dragon Knights"? Please—their greatest conquests are glorified subspecies: land drakes that dig tunnels and wyverns that couldn't torch a barn. While these lesser creatures may bear draconic features, comparing them to true dragonkin is like mistaking a child's plaything lightsaber for a Death Star superlaser. The power differential isn't merely quantitative—it's a cosmic gulf forged in the crucible of evolution itself.
With his cover-up ops complete, Luo Qi pulled a teleportation triple-axel worthy of Olympic gold, materializing in his totally normcore bachelor pad—a three-bedroom "sprawling" 100-square-meter crib that screamed "average citizen" louder than tax forms.
Just as his chrono-jujitsu hit its expiration date, time rebooted like a Windows update—complete with that awkward lag before reality buffers. Even for the freaking Demon King, freezing time came with hardcore limitations: a strict daily cooldown and the magical equivalent of a "You've used 1/1 Time Hacks Today" notification. Turns out getting your powers nerfed sucks worse than losing Wi-Fi mid-boss fight.
But here's the kicker: While ordinary mages needed incantations for high-tier spells, Luo Qi could cast them instantly. This alone made the Demon King's power terrifying—no wonder he could solo the world.
But here's the kicker—while lesser mages needed to chant verses like bad karaoke to cast high-tier spells, Luo Qi's magic operated on "sudo" privileges. His spellcasting speed made machine-gun toucans look slow.
Even Luo Qi himself shuddered at this reality. No wonder the Demon King's resume listed "solo apocalypse" under special skills. This level of OPness could make game developers rage-quit.
With his mirror puppets holding the fort, Luo Qi finally exhaled—that breath held since third period math class. Time to deal with the scaly stowaway under his arm.
*Fwoosh!*
The Spirit Dragon chose that moment to pull a magical glow-up. Magical particles swarmed like paparazzi at a celebrity wedding, engulfing the creature in a chrysalis of raw mana. In three heartbeats flat, the dragon morphed into something that'd crash any loli-con convention—a completely bare loli-form glowing brighter than a neon sign in Akihabara.
In the blink of an eye, the Spirit Dragon cradled under Luo Qi's arm morphed into a bare-as-the-day-she-was-born loli. The scene radiated an energy so sketchy, it could power Tokyo's red-light district for a week.
There stood Luo Qi—Demon King extraordinaire, master of forbidden arts, and now unwitting poster boy for loli-nappers. With a glowing naked moeblob clinging to him, he looked less like a dark overlord and more like a walking felony with bonus sparkles.