This was absurd—completely nonsensical.
Which meant… it had to be a dream.
Wake up. Hurry and wake up.
Mikhail squeezed his eyes shut, trying to escape this bizarre dream and return to the bed where Adrian was sleeping beside him. He waited in silence, willing himself to wake up.
But no matter how hard he tried, nothing changed.
He slowly cracked open an eye… and there it was again—an endless, empty white void. And in the middle of it, a lion sat, waiting for him.
“Why’d you go all quiet all of a sudden?”
“…”
The golden-maned lion, grooming its mane with nonchalance, opened its mouth once more.
“If I have to repeat myself, it’s not a dream. So trying to wake up won’t do you any good.”
“…”
A talking lion. No matter how many times he ran it through his head, it still felt wrong. Mikhail stared at the creature in silence before finally speaking. In this place, there was nothing to do but talk to the lion.
“If it’s not a dream… then what is this place?”
“Nowhere.”
The lion licked its forepaw with an oddly clear, articulate tone.
“What do you mean, ‘nowhere’?”
“…”
“You don’t know either, do you?”
The lion stared straight at Mikhail, unimpressed by his barrage of unanswered questions.
The word “I don’t know” was one the lion loathed more than anything.
It slowly lowered the paw it had been licking and lifted its chin toward Mikhail.
“Well, if I had to put it in your terms, you humans would probably call it ‘the subconscious space’ or something like that.”
“The subconscious…”
Mikhail echoed the word, gaze fixed on the lion as if trying to digest its meaning.
Wasn’t the subconscious just another way of saying a dream?
All around him stretched an unbroken white expanse. No shadows formed beneath his feet. There was no way to tell what was up or down, left or right. Orientation meant nothing here.
“Then this must be your subconscious.”
Mikhail’s clear voice echoed through the vast void, the only thing filling the endless emptiness.
“……And what makes you think that?”
As he turned his head, perhaps hoping to spot something—anything—Mikhail halted mid-motion and met the lion’s gaze.
It wasn’t human, but the fact that it could speak made the interaction feel oddly intimate—like they were connecting on some deeper level.
“Well, if it were my subconscious, I think… it’d be filled with a lot more things.”
Swords, a royal palace, and Adrian.
There was also something else gnawing at his mind.
A subconscious, by its very nature, wasn’t something one could shape or edit at will. It should’ve been a raw and chaotic storm of unfiltered thoughts and emotions.
For such a space to be this… empty, this clean—
Mikhail hesitated for a moment after speaking, unsure if he should say more. But in the end, he continued.
Whoever—or whatever—possessed a subconscious like this… probably wasn’t human.
“You… what are you?”
“What?”
The lion licked its forepaw a few more times before answering in that unmistakably clear voice.
“What, never seen a lion before?”
“…”
It definitely didn’t look like a normal lion. Not by any stretch.
“Anyway, you’re the one who interrupted my nap. So those ‘poor me’ eyes of yours won’t get you anywhere.”
“I want to go back to where I came from. What do I have to do?”
The lion’s indifferent gaze shifted to Mikhail.
“Just do the exact opposite of whatever you did to get here.”
“I didn’t do anything to get here, that’s the problem!”
Mikhail snapped, irritation leaking into his voice. He already had a headache from trying to make sense of this madness.
The lion watched him with a disinterested expression, grooming its whiskers before casually chiming in.
“What were you doing right before you got here?”
“……It was late. I was trying to fall asleep.”
“Where were you?”
“On the road to the capital of the Kingdom of Delbaran…”
Wait—why was he answering all these questions so obediently?
Mikhail abruptly clamped his mouth shut mid-sentence. The lion, perhaps catching on to that line of thought, gave its whiskers a final tidy stroke with its paw before flippantly waving it.
“Whatever. If you don’t want to talk, then don’t. Even if you spent your whole life here, not a speck of it would show.”
Mikhail’s crimson eyes twitched ever so slightly at those words.
He glanced around again, but there wasn’t so much as a door or hallway—just infinite emptiness. For now, it seemed his best bet was to play along with the lion.
“It was an inn, in some small village. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Really? I don’t think so. There had to be something unusual.”
“Unusual?”
“Yeah. Something different. Something… special. Something ordinary humans wouldn’t recognize.”
Their eyes met in midair—Mikhail’s crimson gaze and the lion’s golden one locking together. If there was anything special about that moment… it had to be that one thing.
“The person traveling with me is a bit… unusual.”
That much was safe to say. Mikhail had to return to where he came from—whatever it took. Back to Adrian’s side.
“Oh? A companion, huh? Who is it?”
The lion spoke with feigned interest, as if it couldn’t be less curious, though its expression was impossible to read with that feline face.
“A Gold Dragon.”
“…”
A shame he couldn’t see the look of pure shock on that damn lion’s face.
The beast went stiff, its gaze boring into Mikhail.
Got you.
Mikhail grinned in satisfaction and added,
“Surprised, huh?”
“…No.”
“You say that, but you’ve been completely speechless—”
That was when it happened.
Until now, the lion had been lounging with its massive body stretched out like none of this concerned it. But in an instant, it surged forward and shoved its enormous forepaw right into Mikhail’s chest—
“Ugh—!”
He stumbled backward under the force of the blow.
He fell—though there was no floor to hit in this empty void, so he didn’t even feel any pain.
“Liar.”
The lion said just one word.
Mikhail, facing the beast that was now growling directly at him, had no choice but to ask back.
“What?”
“A dragon? Traveling with someone like you?”
“…”
“There’s no way that’s true.”
“…And what makes you so sure?”
“You may not realize it, but that’s just how dragons are. They don’t travel with anyone. Maybe they’ll play at pretending, hiding what they are—but companionship? No chance.”
When Mikhail didn’t fire back right away, the lion tilted its head slightly.
Mikhail glared at it, unblinking.
The two of them stood in silence for a while, tension stretched taut between them. There wasn’t much else to do in this vast, featureless white world besides talk. Eventually, it was Mikhail who broke the silence.
“You don’t like them?”
“…What?”
The lion’s large mouth parted slightly, a breath catching in its throat.
“You sound like you hate dragons.”
“…”
“Is that a tough one to answer? Then let me ask something else. Do you know the Gold Dragon?”
Different words, same meaning.
The lion slowly withdrew the paw it had used to pin Mikhail and stepped back a few paces, allowing him room to rise.
Mikhail slowly pushed himself to his feet.
“…Let’s just say we’ve got a connection we can’t really escape.”
“A connection?”
Mikhail’s expression twisted slightly.
A bad connection with Adrian? Did this creature have some dark motive for dragging him here?
For the first time, wariness crept into Mikhail’s eyes.
“Who the hell are you really? Start explaining what’s going on. How did you even bring me here?”
“Oh?”
The lion showed no reaction to Mikhail’s sharp anger. On the contrary—it let out a soft noise of amusement, as if finding this turn of events interesting.
“So you do know how to be cautious. Too bad for you, though—it’s far too late. You’re already inside my domain.”
“But if, like you said, this isn’t reality, then you can’t actually hurt me.”
“Half right.”
The lion stretched its limbs lazily.
“I have no intention of harming you. And actually, that’s the question I should be asking you.”
Mikhail muttered under his breath, chewing at the inside of his cheek in frustration.
“What question?”
“You, Mikhail…”
The lion’s golden eyes locked on him, clear and unwavering.
“How did you get into my subconscious?”
“What?”
Mikhail.
Wait—when did I ever tell it my name?
The moment he was about to speak, the pure white space around him crumpled, folding inward like collapsing paper.
“Ugh—!”
Mikhail stumbled back but couldn’t escape the pull of the distortion.
Hah—! Huff—!
Did I fall again?
He braced himself against the floor to get back up—only for his palm to sink deep into a soft mattress. His balance faltered instinctively—he’d expected solid ground.
“Mikhail.”
Someone called his name.
“You should try sleeping a bit longer. You were tossing and turning for ages before you finally drifted off.”
It was Adrian’s voice. That calm, low tone instantly began to unravel the tension that had coiled tight in Mikhail’s body.
He exhaled a long breath and turned toward the voice, muttering, “…A nightmare, huh.”
Adrian was sitting in a chair beside the bed, reading a book.
At those words, a flash of bright yellow eyes seemed to glint in the dark—but as if it had never happened, Adrian casually turned another page of his book with a soft flip.
“Such a royal thing to say. I suppose the change in your sleeping arrangements made you restless.”
“Quit talking to me like I’m some kid. Why are you sitting there in that chair instead of sleeping?”
“…”
Flip—Adrian turned another page without answering.
Something about the motion felt… tense, almost irritated.
Then, it struck. A sudden, sharp pain sliced across Mikhail’s chest.
“Ugh—”
He winced, his brows drawing tight.
“What the hell…?”
Trying to check the source of the pain, Mikhail unfastened a few buttons on his shirt and glanced down inside.
There, right over his heart—was a strange mark. A symbol unlike anything he’d seen before, etched directly over the place where his heart beat.
