I Got Cheated On and Ended Up in A Beast World

Chapter 132

"She doesn’t need to know," Weiwei said simply, her voice completely flat and calm, no excess emotion spared, as if she couldn’t bring herself to spare him more attention than was needed.

Before Long Zhan could even open his mouth to argue or ask another question, the small black cat’s body flickered once like a dying flame, and then she completely vanished into thin air.

She left behind absolutely nothing but the cold, whistling mountain wind that swept across the rocky peak.

Long Zhan sat there entirely alone on the hard dirt. His massive, calloused hands were trembling slightly as he held the items Weiwei had dropped.

In his left hand was a small, glowing porcelain bottle containing a pill that felt alive with energy, and in his right hand was an ancient leather map.

He sat perfectly still, his eyes wide as he kept on replaying what Weiwei had just said over and over again in his head. The words felt like heavy stones dropping into a quiet pool, disturbing everything inside him.

’How can there be another dragon like me? And how can it be the very first dragon, the Dragon ancestor was like me? How wan it be that he’s still alive?’

The thoughts crowded his mind, making his chest feel tight. All his life, he believed he was a freak, a broken mistake of nature that should never have been born. But now, this cat, Wanwan’s supposed guardian was telling him that his bloodline connected directly to a supreme being from the ancient past.

"I really want to find out my true identity," Long Zhan muttered to the empty air, his voice thick with emotion. "I want to know what I am. But leaving Wanwan’s side... leaving her right now is going to be so hard. I can’t bear to do it."

He sat there on the lonely hilltop, brainstorming and trying to find a loophole, any kind of excuse that would let him stay.

But the more he thought about the terrifying pressure Weiwei had shown Qin Mo, and the hidden dangers waiting in the higher realms, the more he just felt utterly confused and helpless.

He was a proud warrior, a beastman who usually solved every problem with his fists, but right now, his strength felt completely useless.

Right from the time he was a tiny child, Long Zhan had been completely ostracized by his own tribe.

The other dragon beastmen never looked at him with pride or love. Instead, they shunned him, turning their backs whenever he walked past, and whispered cruel words in the dark.

They treated him like a mutated monster, an anomaly that brought shame to the clan.

But it was never his fault. He had not chosen his own flesh and blood. His biological parents came from two entirely different worlds: his father was a pure Eastern dragon, long, elegant, and serpentine, while his mother was a massive Western dragon, wide-bodied with heavy scales and giant, leather wings.

In the beast world, it was not completely rare for different dragon tribes to marry for political reasons or alliances. But in almost every single one of those cases, the children they gave birth to always took clearly from either the mother’s side or the father’s side.

A child would be born either a pure Eastern dragon or a pure Western dragon. The blood never mixed like paint.

But Long Zhan was different. When he was born, his tiny body took features from both sides at the exact same time, making him a complete anomaly. He was a creature that should not exist according to the laws of their world.

Because of this hybrid form, even his own biological mother had turned her back on him completely. She could not bear to look at his mixed scales.

She spent all her days and nights attending to his normal brothers instead, showering them with affection, soft beds, and the best pieces of meat.

For Long Zhan, there was no love. She was always hitting him whenever he came too close, pushing him away into the dirt, or leaving him entirely alone to fend for himself in the freezing nights, his father didn’t even see him as a being.

He grew up starving, his small ribs pressing hard against his skin as he watched his brothers grow fat and strong. Yet, as he sat on the hill looking at the map, a strange, bitter sense of gratitude filled his throat.

What he was truly grateful for, even with everything his mother did to him, was that she didn’t kill him. She was disgusted by him, yes, but she didn’t smother him in his sleep when he was a baby. She didn’t hold his head underwater to drown him in the river.

He was forever grateful for that small mercy. For if she had done it, if she had ended his miserable life back then, he would never have survived long enough to grow up.

He would never have entered the portal, and he would never have met Lin Wan. She was the only light in his dark, violent existence, the only person who had ever looked at him and seen a man instead of a monster.

The more he remembered his painful childhood here in the Middle Realm, and the more he compared it to the beautiful, warm times he had shared with Lin Wan back in the lower world, the heavier his heart became.

The conflicting emotions inside his chest began to tear him apart. He felt a deep, dark foreboding of what was going to happen in the future, a certainty that their peaceful days were coming to an end.

Unable to contain the agony in his soul anymore, Long Zhan threw his head back. He let out a soulful, earth shaking roar that ripped through his throat, a sound so full of pain and raw grief that the birds in the valley below instantly took flight in terror.

The roar lasted for a long time, echoing off the distant mountains, before he completely collapsed backward onto the hard floor of the hill.

He lay flat on his back, his broad chest heaving as he stared blankly up at the vast, unchanging heavens.

"Why me?" he asked the empty sky, his voice cracking with a deep sense of betrayal. "What crime did I commit in my past life for me to deserve such a miserable life? I thought... I truly thought that finally, after meeting Wanwan, everything bad had been left behind forever. I thought I was allowed to be happy. So why am I still being punished? Why do I have to leave her just to become strong enough to stand by her side? Am I even not worthy to be near my own woman? Did I steal.your wife in my past life or something"

But the sky remained completely silent. No divine voice came down to comfort him, and no answers appeared in the clouds.

Long Zhan was still lying there, his mind numb with grief, when the distant, heavy sound of large wings flapping violently through the air reached his ears. The vibrations rumbled through the ground beneath his back.

But he didn’t even open his eyes to look up. He kept his eyelids shut tight, his face expressionless, as if this arrival was something he had completely expected to happen.

He remained lying down, the bright afternoon sun shining directly onto his face, warming his skin, when a sudden, large shadow befell him, blocking out the heat.

Slowly, reluctantly, Long Zhan opened his eyes.

"Young Lord, what happened to make you cry out like a wounded beast?"

Standing over him was a tall man with a remarkably slender, graceful build. He looked like an ancient scholar who had stepped out of a painting.

He had long, silk-black hair that was tied neatly into a low ponytail behind his neck. In his right hand, he held a traditional white horsehair whisk, the long strands drifting slightly in the mountain breeze.

His eyes were completely flat and dark, showing absolutely no signs of emotion whatsoever.

It was a cold, unreadable face, but that exact coldness was what made Long Zhan appreciate him more than anyone else in this world. This man never faked his feelings, at times he was a little bit too blunt with his words, that, long Zhan didn’t appreciate, as his words could stab someone to death.

Long Zhan let out a low grunt, shifting his shoulders against the dirt. "Mikal... how did you find me all the way up here?"

"The Young Lord will always run to this specific hill whenever you have something heavy on your mind," Mikal said as a matter of fact, his voice smooth and completely level.

He lowered his whisk slightly, his gaze dropping to the dirt next to Long Zhan’s head. "Moreover, I am entirely sure that everyone in this sector of the Middle Realm with even slightly sensitive hearing must have heard you wailing just now.