Chapter 39: One Last Laugh.

"It's so huge and cool." I muttered, seeing the dragon in front of me, their bloodied figure spelling a tale of tragedy and power that cannot be compared to that of any animal I could think of.

Their breath was slow, almost nonexistent, which might be because dragons needed less air, but I doubted that because of their large frame, that size would need more fuel to generate energy rather than less.

I was told that high-level cultivators didn't need food after a certain level, but utilizing profound energy in place of oxygen seemed useless outside of specific situations. I might need to look into how that worked.

"What do you mean cool?" I asked a flabbergasted Jasmine inside of my head, "You do know that if it wakes up, it can kill you in an instant?"

"Who cares? Something can be both dangerous and cool at the same time, like sharks."

"Whatever," she replied with a psychic eye roll, "it's passed out; just get the seed and let's leave; what a waste of perfectly good materials."

I ignored her words and instead took a very good look at the dragon, especially at its profound vein network.

It was incredible; there were more profoundly opened entrances than I had seen in any other being, but that's not what mattered to me since I could open them all to probably anybody.

What mattered was the layout of the network; it was completely different from that of a human, and the difference was similar to the difference between a human's circulatory system and a lizard's.

But while lizards were more limited in size because of the low oxygen concentration in the air, that didn't seem to apply to the creature in front of me at all.

Maybe dragons had evolved to rely more on profound energy than oxygen to survive, which might also explain the incredibly slow breathing.

It was honestly beautiful; it was different from humans in every possible way. Rather than being separated in a physical body with spiritual veins that didn't physically interact with the body, it was more intertwined, the spiritual veins mixing with the physical body to a level far beyond humans, more like blood than energy.

"Jasmine," I called for the girl's attention. "What's the average dragon's cultivation compared to a human's?"

"The dragon race is the strongest race in existence; every member is an incredibly powerful being; there is no comparison when talking about average; why are you still here instead of going to the seed?" She asked, seemingly baffled at my choice to remain near such a dangerous creature.

"I see," I muttered, jotting down notes on every possible idea that came to mind. "This is incredible."

Her voice rang in my mind, confused. "What is?"

"Profound energy is to this dragon what blood is for us, a physical part of its body, not separate like our profound veins; maybe this is the source of their overwhelming strength." I drew a rough sketch of its energy circulatory system.

I looked at all the blood around, proof enough that there was also a normal circulatory system, but in what way did these two systems interact with each other?

There are so many questions that I would love to have an answer to.

I circled around them, looking at every single wound on their bodies. The scales looked incredible—a deep and bright red that reminded me of hot magma—but I was forced to concentrate on what could actually teach me something.

There were many cuts, most of them smaller in size. Many had been cauterized by heat, and the opponent probably used fire in their techniques as well.

Cauterizing the opponent's wounds in a fight seemed counterproductive, but I wasn't an expert in fights, so I just shrugged off the weirdness of using fire against what seemed like a fire dragon.

But what I didn't shrug off was the biggest wound by far, a large, profusely bleeding gash right on the beast's side, where its ribcage was.

There were splinters of bone sticking out of the wound; this was a very nasty affair.

"What are you doing, you fool?" I heard Jasmine shouting in my head, which was entirely expected.

Since I had begun to apply runes to the dragon's wound, I was trying my best to close the wound.

They were ineffective, to say the least; the passive resistance of the beast's flesh and blood wasn't something I could casually interact with without a much more massive level of cultivation.

"I'm helping them; I can't just leave them to die, Jasmine." I said, while at the same time trying to come up with a way to go around the insurmountable gulf in level between me and my patient.

"You absolutely can; what if it wakes up? I can't take you away from this close; if it attacks you, I will kill it." She replied, her voice stressing that she would do exactly as she said, and I didn't doubt that in the least.

But well, if I didn't do anything here, then the dragon would die anyway, so it was a calculated risk.

"I'll just have to be fast then." I replied, scooping up a vial of the mighty beast's blood and applying rune after rune, just in the hopes of finding some kind of intent that I could produce to coagulate it fast.

It was useless; after five minutes of trying and hundreds of possibilities, I wasn't able to cause the effect I wanted fast enough to stop the flowing blood from such a gigantic wound.

So I passed on to the next possibility. I threw the vial away, as it was useless now, and tried to stimulate the dragon's body to close the wound by itself.

Energy threads to help close the major severed vessels by stitching them together were useless; the threads couldn't even make a dent in the vessels; forget about stitching them.

Runic patches to stop the blood flow were useless; the beast's flesh rejected my foreign energy passively and directly attacked anything I tried to do.

Physical stitches to close the wound in the nice old way?

The needle snapped.

Create scaffolding around the vessels to close the wound without stitching, hoping for the beast to have good regenerative abilities to close them on his own.

Partial success for the first few seconds.

The wound wasn't regenerating. I tried to use my runes as glue to keep the vessel walls from opening again, but they were once again attacked by the dragon's passive resistance.

It was the major artery in the dragon's body, right below its massive heart, bringing blood to the rest of the body. I had done everything that I could have done; now it was just a matter of hoping for the wound to close.

I had seen much weirder things in this world: people who could control the elements, swing swords that were bigger than their own bodies—the best sights I had ever seen in my life. I was able to move faster than the fastest car on earth.

Hell, a dragon hundreds of meters long was right in front of me.

It wasn't asking for a miracle if I wished to be able to prevent this magnificent and awe-inspiring creature's premature death at the hands of my own kind's greed.

I just had to hope that the energy in my body was enough to last long enough to let the beast heal on its own.

Minutes passed, and the blood had mostly stopped coming out.

The wound didn't heal.

My body was void of energy.

My treatment collapsed, and the wound reopened.

Blood splashed on me.

I failed.

"Human, you have done enough." I heard a mighty voice reverberate in the beast's chamber.

It was a voice of power, dignity, and resignation.

I reflexively turned to the origin of the sound; Jasmine had already appeared to shield me from the dragon's attack, should any such thing come.

"You're awake?" I asked rhetorically.

Its eyes reminded me of Jasmine, not in their beauty but in the innate prestige that they held and the obvious pride they contained.

They would have been like beautiful scarlet jewels any other day, but I could see something leaving them, and it was leaving them fast.

Life.

It was dying right in front of my eyes, and I couldn't do anything about it.

I had lost patients before—illnesses, injuries—and I had seen them all, but it was always hard to see those intelligent eyes, not different from a human's if not for the slitted pupil, life leaving them as they darkened.

"Since the moment you stepped into my chamber," the powerful but slightly less powerful voice replied, "I had already resigned to my fate; I couldn't be bothered by an ant at the Nascent Profound Stage."

"I see." I replied briefly; they knew they were about to die, and I could see the conflict in their eyes, or maybe his eyes, since the voice was so clearly male.

A deep and rich tone indicated many years of experience and a long life, but he didn't want to die; that much was obvious from the unwillingness evident in his voice.

"I've seen your futile efforts to save my life; it was a decent amusement in my last moments, human. For that, I will let you live, even after breaking into my home." He replied with a low chuckle that sounded more like a growl escaping his lips.

"Well, thank you for that." I chuckled in reply, an empty chuckle.

"May I ask you a question, human?" The dragon asked; he didn't demand, like I would imagine a dragon of such size, might, and age would do, but that might just be because it was too weak to really do much.

"Sure, what do you need?" I asked.

"Why did you try so hard to save me? You tired yourself to the point that you shouldn't be able to cast any technique; you should have seen the corpses outside, and they weren't the first members of your kind that I've killed, so why did you do that?" He asked, and as more and more blood left his wound, his voice became more tired and weaker than before.

I could see his head slowly lowering itself to the ground.

"They've attacked you, haven't they?" I asked back, "You have every right to defend yourself; I can't judge you for that, and even if you did kill more people, even murderers deserve a chance at life. Who knows what the future may hold if I do manage to save you? I would have liked to have a dragon friend."

"A friend?" The dragon asked, almost sounding appalled by the word.

"Yeah, I mean," I stuttered, a little flustered that my more childish dream came out, but I didn't really mind explaining, "I would have loved to fly in the sky on such a great beast; I could have learned so much from you; we could have helped each other as friends do."

The dragon chuckled slowly; he was about to breathe his last. "You're an unusual human."

"Yeah, I've been told that many times." I chuckled back, stealing a glance at Jasmine, who had been looking at me with a complex expression since the beginning.

I then looked back at the dragon, who had already closed his eyes, and asked, "How do dragons treat their dead? What kind of ritual should I perform?"

"We usually die in battle; our remains rest where we die or are taken as materials by our opponents. You can do as you wish with my corpse; if you have the ability to, count it as payment for giving me one last laugh, human." He replied.

"Thank you," I replied.

A few minutes passed; the blood stopped flowing from the wound, the heart stopped beating, and the profound energy that had been circulating naturally through his body had become stale.

The mighty beast was dead.

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Thank you for reading this story, i always appreciate all the comments.

I wanted to find a way to save the dragon, making it a friend or something, or maybe just a chance encounter, but i realized that it didn't make any sense story wise, so i tried to go with the feels and use it as a plot for character growth.

I hope i succeeded.

Leave me them stones.

Love you.