"Fleeing?"
The dragon pursued the fleeing sea monster for a while, but then he decided to stop.
"I hope that it didn't dare to return."
The dragon knew that he could catch that sea monster if he continued to pursue it, but at that time he would be already too far from the tribe where the members of the Dragon Race lived, and he feared that the sea monster was just trying to lure him far from the tribe to let others attack them.
After all, it wasn't normal that a sea monster went to the mountains to attack, so it was pretty obvious that it was just following orders, and since the intentions of the person giving orders in the shadows were unknown, the divine dragon didn't dare to bet with the lives of the members of the Dragon Race.
The battle between the two had been quite quick since the sea monster decided to flee at the moment that it noticed that winning was impossible.
The sea monster hid in the coast near the place where Yale's group reached the western continent because that was one of its lairs. In fact, since there were space portals connecting all the lairs, some of its preys ended falling into them and appearing at other lairs, which was the reason for people sometimes appearing at that coast after being attacked.
"I can't do anything as long as they are in that mountain. Fortunately, I don't have any time limit."
After the sea monster confirmed that the dragon hadn't pursued it, it sighed in relief while waiting until the moment when Yale's group would leave the mountains belonging to the Dragon Race.
Without knowing anything about the battle between the divine dragon and the sea monster, Yale's group was enjoying the hospitality of the Dragon Race.
The Dragon Race hadn't been in that world for as much time as the lizardmen, but their traditions came from even before they needed to emigrate from their world, so their story as a community with their own traditions was among the longest even in the western continent.
However, all the living members of the Dragon Race were born in the western continent, so they had only learned the traditions from their predecessors and weren't sure about the origin of those traditions.
"What did you say that was this?"
Sebe had a weird face when asking a member of a Dragon Race about an item that was in front of him.
"A wine vessel, there are some of our best wine inside."
The reply was immediate, but that didn't improve Sebe's face.
"Alright, and the other thirty items were all the same… Why do you need so many different vessels for storing wine? I admit that your wine is very good, but there shouldn't be any need to store it in so many kinds of vessels…"
Sebe had been very interested in learning about the traditions of the Dragon Race, but he was starting to have a headache.
"We don't know. This is just a tradition passed from ancient times."
Yale was hearing the conversation and wanted to laugh due to Sebe's reactions. Of course, Yale had identified everything easily with his Divine Eyes, so he didn't need to ask questions to know about some meaningless traditions of the tribe. Moreover, he was sure, that those traditions were wrong and probably mixed too many unrelated things on them.
However, Yale didn't plan to say anything about that and just observed the members of the tribe execute their traditional dances around the fire.
"Demon Lord, our boss has just returned and asked us to bring you to his presence."
The chief of the tribe rushed to speak with Yale as soon as he received a message from his boss that had just returned. Of course, the divine dragon could have just asked Yale directly by Spiritual Sense, but that wouldn't have been polite.
Yale was happy of hearing that because he was already bored of so much Dragon Race's traditional welcome party.
Wyba, who was sleeping on the top of Yale's head, was the only one who went with Yale to meet with the divine dragon as the others remained on the welcome party.
"Welcome, new Demon Lord. You can now leave me alone with the Demon Lord."
After welcoming Yale, the divine dragon asked the chief to leave, and the later obeyed without any hesitation.
Yale observed well the huge dragon in front of him because it was about ten meters tall and it was probably because the divine dragon was already controlling the body size to avoid being overly huge.
The body of the dragon had two types of scales, golden and black, being the golden ones more abundant near the head and claws while the black ones were more abundant in the rest of the body, but since they were mixed all around, it gave quite a strange feeling.
"Someone told me that a new Demon Lord appeared, I am glad to meet you. My name is Ronragruk."
Ronragruk had received a Spiritual Sense message from an unknown person telling him that the new Demon Lord was in his domains, so he decided to invite him over.
Although Ronragruk didn't know who was the one who contacted him, he knew that it was someone who he couldn't offend because their difference of strengths was impossible to measure for him. Of course, the one who contacted Ronragruk was the Mysterious Expert.
"My name is Yale, and she is my sister Wyba."
Yale pointed out to the cute wolf on his head while speaking and the dragon in front of him nodded while looking to the cute wolf with his pair of deep blue eyes.
"I see that she is in her beast form, why don't you also change to your beast form?"
When Yale heard Ronragruk's idea, he rejected that immediately.
"I am sorry, but Wyba is sleeping on my head, and I don't want to disturb her."
Ronragruk felt a bit disappointed, but he understood that there wasn't any reason for Yale to transform at that moment.
"In that case, I will show you my human form. No one in the Dragon Race has seen it before, but you are someone worthy of seeing it."
Just after finishing to say those words, Ronragruk shrunk, and his shape changed to that of a human.
In his human form, Ronragruk had a mix of blond and black long hair, similar to his scales in his dragon form. Moreover, he wore black clothes with some golden decorations, which also matched to his dragon scales. The hair was like that influenced by his dragon form, but it seemed obvious that he liked that combination quite a lot because the clothes had nothing to do with his dragon body and he still wore the same colors.
Ronragruk seemed to be in his twenties, although it was clear that he was older than that due to the deepness of his blue eyes.
"I would have never thought that you looked like this in your human form, this is quite surprising."
As a dragon, Ronragruk was quite scary, and anyone who had a weak mind would probably faint from fear or flee at the moment they saw him, but his human appearance was just the opposite.
Ronragruk looked gentle and quite feminine despite being a man, which didn't match in absolute with his scary appearance as a dragon. Yale was sure that someone like him would become an idol in Trade City if Julie used him as a model for merchandising. After all, it had been already confirmed that the wealthy women in that city loved seeing pretty guys.
Even though Yale was considered a handsome, pretty guy, it is evident that he was a man, but there would be some people who would doubt about Ronragruk's gender if he were to try to hide it. Ronragruk's appearance in his human form could even let some girls ashamed.
"When I met other experts in the past, they all said the same. However, among other species like elves, this kind of appearance isn't strange at all."
Ronragruk laughed because he was conscious of how his human form was, but he truly didn't mind at all since it was a perfect cover for his real identity as no one would think that he was a dragon. Moreover, it was just as he said, for other species, his looks weren't that weird for a male.
However, he knew how deep-rooted to traditions were the members of the Dragon Race, so he kept his human form in secret to them. Thus, only when Ronragruk met with people of high status would he reveal his both forms, while others would only know about one of them.
"If you called me, I suppose that you want to speak about some important topic, right?"
Yale didn't mind about how the other party looked and wanted to go straight to the main topic.
"Indeed, but we can speak about this later. I think that you noticed about the boring traditions of the Dragon Race… I made some slight modifications to make it a bit more original and livelier. I will show those modifications to you."
Ronragruk was the last divine dragon that existed as a backer of the Dragon Race, and he was born soon after they reached the western continent, so he had a lot of time to slowly alter traditions to make them more interesting for himself.
