I Got Cheated On and Ended Up in A Beast World

The mountains are still shaking from your shout. So, of course, I came running to see what was wrong. Tell me, did that female of yours finally abandon you?"

"It’s you that was abandoned! Your whole family was abandoned!" Long Zhan roared instantly, his sorrow vanishing as his fierce temper flared up. He scrambled to sit up, his violet eyes glaring heavily at the older man.

If he were a hedgehog right now, every single one of his sharp spikes would be standing completely straight up in anger.

Mikal didn’t blink at the outburst. He simply adjusted the sleeve of his fine robe. "The Young Lord knows very well that I do not have a female to abandon me. And in my eyes, since I raised you from a starving scrap, the Young Lord is the closest thing to a son I will ever have. So..."

He left his words unfinished, but the meaning was incredibly clear and easy for Long Zhan to understand. Mikal was saying that if Long Zhan was abandoned, then his family, meaning Mikal himself, was the one affected.

Long Zhan just looked at the tall, slender man, his mouth opening and closing slightly, completely not knowing what to say next.

The anger drained out of him, replaced by that heavy, awkward warmth he always felt around this old caretaker.

Unable to handle the emotional weight, he simply laid back down on the ground and rolled over onto his side, completely giving Mikal his back to hide his face.

Mikal released a long, deep sigh that seemed to carry the weight of many years. He didn’t say anything to scold the boy.

Instead, he gathered the skirts of his expensive, fine cloth robes and sat down directly on the dusty ground right beside Long Zhan. He didn’t care at all about dirtying his clean, aristocratic clothes with the mountain mud.

He sat there quietly for a long while, not saying a single word. He just gazed out at the wide sky, letting the silence comfort the brooding dragon beside him.

Suddenly, the soft sound of scales shuffling against the dirt was heard. Out of an old, childhood habit that he could never truly break, Long Zhan shifted his weight.

A moment later, a massive, heavy head laid itself directly onto Mikal’s thighs.

It was Long Zhan, but he had not partially shifted into his true dragon form. It was a truly magnificent, terrifying sight to behold.

In this state, he was a massive dragon that stretched over forty feet long from head to tail. If Lin Wan had been standing on the hill to see this, she would have shouted in absolute wonder and shock, because his body was a completely perfect, chaotic mix of a Western dragon and a traditional Chinese Eastern dragon.

The upper part of his body was built with the heavy, muscular structure of a Western dragon. He possessed thick, powerful shoulders, a broad chest, and two massive, blood-red leather wings that folded tightly against his sides like giant capes.

But the lower part of his body was entirely different; it transformed into a very long, serpentine tail-like leg, completely covered from top to bottom in brilliant, gleaming golden scales that caught the sunlight.

When he moved, the light hit the scales at different angles, making his whole body look quite rainbowish and dazzling.

Mikal looked down at the massive head resting on his lap. Without a single trace of fear, he raised his slender hand and gave a light, sharp tap right on the base of Long Zhan’s dark horn.

"Your size," Mikal commanded calmly. "Tone it down immediately, the smaller the better, quickly ."

Long Zhan grumbled, a low vibration rumbling through Mikal’s legs, but he obeyed.

His massive forty foot body instantly began to shrink, the bones popping and shifting until he was a much more manageable eight feet long, his heavy head suddenly feeling much lighter on the older man’s thighs.

"Do you want to completely break your old man’s legs?" Mikal asked, though his voice remained flat. "You are not a hatchling anymore."

"Your bones are very tough," Long Zhan’s deep voice rumbled from his dragon muzzle. "It wouldn’t have broken anything even if I stayed full size."

"Oh? Is that so?" Mikal murmured, his eyes narrowing slightly as his hand moved toward his whisk. "Do you want to see exactly what these tough old bones can do to your...."

Mikal’s threat was cut completely short. Before he could even finish the sentence, Long Zhan had already vanished from his lap.

The dragon’s survival instincts were so sharp that he blurred across the hilltop, moving so fast he appeared a whole field away from Mikal in less than a second.

Even from that great distance, he had immediately dropped into a low, coiled position, his red wings flared and his tail tucked, completely positioned for defense.

"Hahaha," Mikal let out a rare, dry chuckle, lowering his hand. "Don’t worry, boy. I have long lost the strength and the desire to chase you down and teach you how to be a proper person today."

Long Zhan’s body trembled slightly from the leftover adrenaline. The memory of his childhood under Mikal’s care was anything but easy. Back then, after his biological family had thrown him out into the cold wastes, the estate servants had simply ignored him.

They were all waiting for the mutated brat to die of hunger or sickness so they could be reassigned to serving any of his normal, high born brothers who actually had a future in the clan. His father wouldn’t raise a freak, so Mikal had been the one to step into the darkness.

Mikal had picked him up from the dirt when Long Zhan had fainted from hunger as a scrawny child.

Since that day, as long as no one from the main clan was looking, Long Zhan always spent every single moment of his time hiding away with Mikal. And well, the truth was that no one was ever looking for him anyway.

Mikal had been the one to teach him how to use his mixed wings to fly, how to hunt wild beasts in the forests, and how to survive when the winter frost came.

But Long Zhan had been a wild, angry brat back then, always wanting to smash walls and destroy things to vent his frustration.

Whenever he threw those tantrums, his backside had been completely destroyed by Mikal’s heavy, relentless slaps. And when he grew too big to be hit like a toddler, Mikal took it upon himself to thrash him to a literal pulp during training to break his wild nature.

Because of those years of brutal love, it was a pure reflexive action for Long Zhan to want to escape whenever he sensed even the slightest intent to beat from the older man.

"You should stop running away like a scared rabbit and come over here to tell me what is bothering you," Mikal said, his voice rising slightly across the field. "Don’t make me come over there myself to drag you back!"

Long Zhan swallowed hard, his dragon tail twitching. He took his time flying back across the grass, moving so slowly and heavily as if he were carrying an object thrice his own size on his back.

After what felt like a complete eternity later, he finally landed next to Mikal once more.

But the moment his feet touched the dirt, he didn’t stay in his dragon form. He let the scales recede and took on his human appearance.

But instead of the massive, overly bulky and rugged warrior form that Long Zhan usually used to intimidate people in the lower world, what was now seen on the hill was a completely different side of him.

His body was slender, built with a perfectly balanced and toned grace.

His facial appearance was still exactly that of Long Zhan, the sharp jaw, the fierce violet eyes, and the wild eyebrow, but his physical frame was that of an elite noble young master.

He had firm, defined abs and perfect muscular firmness in all the right places, looking elegant rather than brutish.

Mikal looked up at him, a rare hint of softness appearing in his flat eyes. "Ah... I missed seeing this face. You spent too much time acting like a wild caveman in that lower realm."

Long Zhan didn’t reply to the compliment. He just sat back down on the rock, looking completely deflated, like a man who had absolutely nothing left to live for in this world. He stared at his hands, his broad shoulders drooping.

Mikal watched him for a few seconds before leaning back on his whisk. "Whatever foolish excuse you have cooked up in that thick skull of yours to justify this crying, you better feed it right back into your mouth. Now, speak."

"So you better start talking right now," Mikal threatened plainly, his voice smooth but cutting like a sharp blade through the wind.