Yijun finds it hard to blink. So does trying to speak. Surely the benevolent dragons, in their most profound and eternal wisdom, didn’t send  the ultimate disaster to solve a series of disasters? He was told often enough that dragons can remake the world at will, but the stories he heard never speaks of them as being evil.

“What?” he finally croaks out.

The dragon sighs and shakes his hand off his arm to continue weaving his spell. “I am the herald of Death, the complement of Life, the two forces driving the World’s cycle. I am the Reaper that appears when life is fully grown and gleans the world anew to prepare for the next cycle.”

Yijun knows the dragon is speaking words but somehow it’s not connecting in his brain. His words are too deep for him to understand. All he gets from it is that the dragon is bad and he ignores the rest to focus on the more important part. “Why are you ending the life of the villagers?”  he asks.

 “It is the Will of the World.”

Will of the World. Heaven’s Will. Which is to mean the will of the dragons for dragons rule the heavens. Before his trip to the holy mountaintop, no one has ever met dragons face to face before, nor even talk with them so of course Heaven’s will is not clearly explained. During that trip, he only expects to pay respects at the peak and give offerings. While he noticed then that the path to the top was abnormally long, he never expected to encounter dragons at all.

Heaven’s Will is invoked whenever any unexplained phenomena happens. It is not for any mortal to question. But now there is a dragon around, he may have a chance to know what it is.

“What is the Will of the World and why does that village have to die for it?”

The dragon clicks his tongue in irritation. “It is a matter beyond your mortal comprehension, something I will not humor you about.  Now get out of my sight.”

Reading the dragon’s unmerciful expression, Yijun knows there is no chance to change his mind. His shoulders sag at the knowledge of the village’s impending doom. “Will they all really die?”

“If they have no ability to save themselves, then yes,” the dragon snaps at him.

Yijun cocks his head at his reply. “If I were to tell them about what will happen-”

“I care not a whit about what you do,” the dragon snarls. “If you do not move , I will kick you.”  

Yijun looks up with hope in his eyes and moves a little out of the way. “How long before your spell finishes?”

“An hour,” the dragon answers through gritted teeth.

Yijun gives him a nod then dashes down the hill. His lungs burn and his legs scream from the cuts of the grasses as he runs but he does not stop. He has only one thought in his mind and that is a wish not to see again the destruction of his village.

The village is an insignificant one, made of mud houses and thatched roofs with fields of rice paddies all round, golden with dry stalks of rice. The villagers are not much to talk about either, only being humble farmers with no hope of rising above their class. They dress modestly with homespun wool and their children crawl on mud floors while pigs and chickens roam the yard. Their lives are a dull cycle of planting rice and harvesting them. They faithfully give offerings to the gods, though the gods never made their presence known. With such unremarkable characteristics and inoffensive habits, it is a wonder why they are targeted for destruction.

At the moment, they are not pre-occupied with their dull lives, but rather on their animals who seem to have gone berserk.

“What is the matter with you?” a peasant woman asks in exasperation as she stands in front of her pig pen, hands on her hips, watching her pigs squeal to high heavens like they are being butchered. The chickens and geese are long gone, flying to who knows where. Buffaloes on the fields bellow; she jumps, her hair pin falling out of the greasy bun of her hair. She shivers at the unnerving sound and rubs at her arms to warm them from the sudden cold. Their place rarely gets a cold front, and she looks up nervously at the snake venom sky.

“Run! Run Away!”

She turns her head and sees an unfamiliar man running by, shouting his head off. His hair flies in the wind, its tie long gone. He arrives at the center of the huts. His face looks wild, his clothes torn as he kneels and pleads at the village center.

“A disaster is coming! Run Away, please run away quickly!” the man pleads as he bashes his head to the ground.

“What’s the matter with you? Who are you and what do you mean?” a middle aged man asks as he approaches the stranger. By then a crowd was forming around them, the people gawking at the strange shouting man. Heads are peeping outside their windows, looking for the source of the commotion.

The strange man grabs at his robes and shook his head. “ There is no time, you have to run away! Now!”

“Calm down and explain. Who knows, you may be a robber who's waiting when we leave,” a bystander insinuates. Some of the crowd nods and looks suspiciously at the stranger.

“I am Yijin of Blue Valley Village,” the stranger says between gasps. “A week ago, my village was suddenly destroyed by a flood. Only a few of us survived.”

Through he receives looks of pity from all around, based from the mild reaction, it seems they don’t know where his village was nor received any news of its destruction. At this, Yijun grips harder at the villager’s robe.

“On the way here, I saw a…flood dragon,” he lies. He doesn’t know how he can explain about the actual identity of the dragon within the time they have so he thinks of this method. Flood Dragons are Enlightened Beasts that causes floods. Everyone knows what flood dragons are and what they are capable of.

He hears a chuckle from the crowd. “A flood dragon?”, a man his age asks skeptically and crosses his arm. “Why would a flood dragon be here? There’s no big river nearby and hardly any rain falls here. Besides, ours is only a simple village. We have no enemies and we did no crimes against the gods lately.”

“Eh, with how hot and dry the weather has been lately, even a flood dragon is welcome here,” a farmer says, holding a hoe over his shoulder. “Perhaps it may give us some rain.”

“The boy must be delirious from starving. Come, I’ll give you something to eat,” a kindly looking portly woman says as she reaches for him.

Yijiun breaks free from her grasp. “No! You have to believe me! You have to go! Now!”

“A flood dragon, you say?”

Yijun looks up to an old man, his head bald and his back nearly bent over. Only a few white hairs cling to his temples like weeds on a cliff. He beckons Yijun to come closer. “Tell me more about it, boy,”

“Old man Wu, you seriously cannot believe him?” the same man who laughed at Yijun asks. “We don’t know him. Who knows, he may be a mountain bandit planning something.”

The villagers murmur in agreement. Some who has been looking at Yijun with pity before now glare at him instead.

“It’s true humans are smarter than animals. But,” he casts his eyes around, where the buffaloes and pigs are still crying to be free of their pens, “Animals have better instincts.”  

The man’s brow knots. The crowd stirs like bees and they look uneasily at each other. It is true the animals have been going crazy lately. A few people break away from the circle and head to their homes but their strides were uneven.

“Where did you meet the flood dragon?” Old Wu inquires at Yijun.

“At the hill over there,” Yijun points towards the hills though there is no use. It is too far away to see the dragon clearly.

They were walking up the path to the front door of a house when the wood door opens and an old woman comes out with a frown and a knot between her brows. “Husband, what’s the hubbub about?” she asks Old Wu.

Old Wu waves her away and leads Yijun inside their house. “Gather our children and grandchildren. We need to leave now.”

“Huh?”

“There’s a flood dragon about,” Old Wu says brusquely as he moves past her and started shouting his children’s names.

The lines in Mrs. Wu’s face deepens and she stands still on the doorway as she thinks. She looks up at the thick dark clouds hanging heavily above them for a moment then goes in the house, heading for the pantry.

“There’s no time for that. You need to leave as fast as possible,” Yijun tells her, intuiting what she was going for.

She pauses, looks puzzled at him, but she obeys. She soon joins her husband in calling out their children and grandchildren to them.

Yijun wrings his wrists as only the old couple listened to him. He does not wish to relieve the events of his village’s disaster, but he cannot drag people who are unwilling. He and they will just be caught in the same disaster and die, wasting his life.

After some minutes, where the last of Old Wu’s son is called from the fields and the women are finally convinced to leave their valuables or food behind, he leads the family out the village, walking in a brisk pace for the children and elderly to keep up. After some paces, he gives up and grabs a child beside him and runs. Old Wu tells his children to do the same and his sons put their parents on their backs while their wives do the same to the children and the whole family runs. Some of the Wu’s neighbor’s children and other villagers follow them, but they keep their distance, looking back to their houses where the rest of their family are.

Yijun runs, ignoring the child on his arms’ whimper as he is jolted. The dragon gave him an hour, but he took a while to come down and some time in explaining the situation to the village. He has no idea how much time they have left and whether it is enough to be safe from the disaster about to fall.

They reach the beginning of the slope to the hills when Yijun suddenly feels an eerie stillness, the same stillness he felt from the dragon. Before he can shout about it, his body is flattened to the ground and a deafening roar breaks.