(Oct 21)

After consuming my fourth spice pill, I was temporarily unable to see, hear, smell, taste or feel any emotions.

In exchange, I gained unimaginable power and my ability to sense the magic and world around me was heightened to the very extreme.

That was when I noticed that The Grinch’s magic… contained dragon essence mixed in with it. The Grinch possesses dragon essence within its body!

It was only a very small amount of dragon essence. It was nearly unnoticeable because of how minuscule it was, and it was only after taking my 4th pill, was I able to barely notice it.

At first, I thought that maybe it had absorbed my magic when I attacked it earlier… but no.

The dragon essence was mixed in with its magic and its body, almost as if it has had dragon essence for a while.

Hm…

Curious…

At that moment, I felt curious.

Why did The Grinch have dragon essence? It was something I didn’t know, and it made me curious.

This also means… I didn’t fully lose all my emotions.

Curiosity isn’t an emotion, but you wouldn’t be curious if you didn’t feel anything.

This proves I was still capable of feeling something, although very minor, it was still something. And something is not nothing.

Driven by my new motivation of curiosity to figure out why The Grinch contains dragon essence; I took a step forward.

The Grinch was on the ground, wiggling around like a worm after I had destroyed its lower body.

Before it could regenerate its legs back, I lifted it up into the air and plunged my claws into its stomach before scooping out a handful of its meat and blood.

I stared at the blood and meat in my palm, analyzing it carefully.

The Grinch’s blood doesn’t have any dragons blood, so how was it able to contain dragon essence without it escaping? This goes against what William told me before.

Wait… on closer inspection, the dragon essence was slowly dispersing from The Grinch’s body, albeit at a very slow rate that would’ve take a couple months for it to fully disperse.

Something about The Grinch’s body must be special for it to be able to trap the dragon essence within itself for so long… and not only that, how did it manage to get dragon essence? Where did it get the dragon essence from?

I saw The Grinch once before, but I was far away from it and it didn’t have a chance to somehow absorb it from me, so it must’ve gotten it from another source…

This is impossible. There is simply too many possibilities and not enough information to figure it out.

After a moment of thinking and being unable to come up with a reasonable solution to this, my curiosity faded away.

I turned to look a The Grinch, who was on the ground still bleeding out and was currently trying to crawl away while regenerating itself.

‘I should just kill it. No reason to continue. This has dragged on enough.’

I released all of my bloodlust and prepared an attack.

However, just as I was about to take a step forward towards The Grinch, my entire body tensed up and froze.

“Huh.”

I couldn’t move.

My body was stopping me from killing The Grinch.

More specifically, my dragon instincts were telling me not to kill The Grinch, and because of that, it caused my body to freeze up.

What is going on?

How did my dragon instincts become so powerful that it was able to physically stop me? And why was my dragon instinct suddenly stopping me from killing The Grinch??

It’s almost as if… it has a will of its own…

The more I learn about my dragon powers and the more powerful it becomes, the less I know about it.

I tried resisting against my dragon instincts for a bit, but it was strong, so I gave up.

Instead, I became extremely curious.

I could probably have overwhelmed my dragon instincts and killed The Grinch if I really wanted to, but I didn’t, due to my lack of motivations. Plus, I was more curious on why it was doing this.

My emotionless mind started to churn, thinking about why my dragon instincts was trying to prevent me from killing The Grinch.

What was so special about The Grinch?

Then I glanced over The Grinch, who was now staring at me.

It was at that moment that I looked deep into The Grinch’s eyes and instead of fear, its eyes… were filled with sadness. A very oddly familiar sadness…

Seeing this, I was… stunned.

Well, technically I was unable to see, but I was still able to feel the immense sadness within it.

Why… was it so sad? Why is it not afraid? Instead of feeling fear, it felt sadness? This didn’t make any sense… The Grinch was a wild beast, filled with madness and anger, why would it be sad?

It’s… pathetic… and pitiful… and yet so nostalgic…

I…

Ba-thump!

Out of nowhere, I felt my heart pump inside of me again.

Warmth slowly returned to my body as my blood slowly started to flow once more.

I… could feel again.

My senses slowly returned to me.

My mind gradually got filled with hundreds of thoughts and emotions started to slowly trickle in.

Somehow, I got so impacted by feeling The Grinch’s sadness, it knocked my senses back into me.

Ironic that The Grinch was the one that helped me return to normal…

Seriously though, what the hell happened.

Nothing is making sense?!?!

So much just happened within the span of a couple seconds.

I’m so confused, why are things always so complicated???

…

Well.

I guess I should think about this from the beginning; so first of all, I lost most of my emotions after eating the fourth pill and became very powerful.

I then realized The Grinch contained dragon essence, which I was unable to figure how or why that is so.

Next, I tried to kill The Grinch, but my dragon instincts stopped me.

Why though? Why does my dragon instincts not want me to kill it?

What exactly is my dragon instincts? At this point, its not even instincts… it’s like a separate entity.

Is it a conscious dragon mind living inside of me?

And if it is, what does it want? Is it harmful or evil?

As a kid, I’ve read many novels where the protagonist borrows strength from a sealed away monster, which will try to corrupt them… is this what is happening to me?

But my dragon instincts weren’t trying to anything bad, it was only trying to prevent me from killing The Grinch. It wasn’t harming anyone, and it even helped me several times in the past…

It’s never done this before.

This was the first time it has ever done anything of its own free will.

What about The Grinch caused it to awaken?

There’s something strange about The Grinch…

The Grinch was somehow able to restore my emotions… why was it able to impact me so heavily…?

My head hurts just thinking about this…

I haven’t felt this way since I first fell in love with my wife.

So many questions, and my emotions were swirling around. I couldn’t think straight.

All my desire to kill and fight The Grinch disappeared in an instant like an inflating balloon.

The Grinch somehow managed to regenerate itself and started to slowly run away.

I just stood there, unmoving and dazed as I watched it run away.

I didn’t what to do.

What was the right thing to do here? What am I supposed to do??

Glancing over, I saw a dozen A rankers surrounding the cemetery. It seemed like backup had arrived a few minutes ago but didn’t do anything as they saw me in combat against The Grinch.

The battle was very intense between us, so they couldn’t find a good chance of lending support without directly interfering with me. And they didn’t need to since I could The Grinch myself and I’m glad they didn’t interfere.

Plus, if there was a battle between a green monster and a half dragon, who wouldn’t wanna watch that? (Wait a second, that guy over there’s eating popcorn…)

However now that it was trying to escape, all the A rankers were now going to fight.

‘Whatever… I’ll let fate deal with this. The Grinch is injured, if it manages to escape from dozens of A rankers… then that’s how it will be.’

I watched silently as The Grinch was pummelled and torn apart by dozens of attacks from multiple highly skilled A rankers.

It seemed like The Grinch was going to be defeated…

And yet once again, it surprised me.

It gathered all its last remaining energy and charged itself back up, realizing that it would die if it were captured.

The Grinch suddenly lunged at a nearby wizard and wrapped its claws around the wizard’s neck… and held him hostage.

The Grinch… held someone hostage…

I knew that The Grinch was smart… but I didn’t expect that it was smart enough to rationalize that holding someone hostage was the best way to escape.

Not only that, but its behaviour was also totally different from before… it’s almost as if The Grinch was a completely different person. It would never have done this before. It was desperate now.

The A rankers hesitate when they saw this, and using every single ounce of its magic, The Grinch went supersonic once more, and fled the scene.

Even while injured, The Grinch was still the fastest out of everyone here besides me.

The Grinch had escaped.

And I chose to do nothing.

The plan was a failure.