Brass Dragons in the Dragon World

Angers also raised his glass, revealing a sinister smile.

"Cough cough, Pepsi is definitely the best taste."

Chapter 88 A Father

At night, in the clock tower of Kassel College, this small room has been cleaned up, and the once-exciting posters that used to be pasted on the wall have been covered up.

A round table, a copper pot, and Ander and his friends sat around the hot pot, enjoying the tender mutton.

Professor Manstein sat in a Chinese-style armchair, chopsticks in his hand, shifting uncomfortably.

His bald head was covered in beads of sweat, which looked particularly striking under the indoor lights.

Lu Li was enjoying being fed by Ander, her eating habits were wild and unrestrained, which was inconsistent with her petite body, like a young dragon tearing things apart.

Fingel sat to the side, also becoming a freeloader, unceremoniously throwing whole plates of chopped mutton into the pot, and after about ten seconds, scooping out the still bloody mutton and slurping it into his mouth like noodles.

Opposite Manstein sat his father, the vice-principal of Kassel College, and the alchemy mentor nicknamed the Night Watchman:

Nicolas Flamel.

This afternoon, Manstein had just finished disciplining two students who had violated school rules when his irresponsible father came to his door, saying there was a family dinner party and he absolutely had to be invited.

Manstein's birth was an accident, most likely the product of his womanizing father's drunkenness. It's not easy for high-blooded mixed-race people to have children, and the Night's Watchman at the time never imagined he would have another child.

Later, Manstein's mother, a first-generation German immigrant, gave birth to a child. As he grew up, a peculiar loneliness followed him, and he felt out of place among the other children.

What bothered him even more was the omnipresent sound; every day, a rock concert was playing in his head, like Superman's awakened super hearing in a comic book.

This is his Word Spirit Snake crawling around, uncontrollably gathering information for his master.

Tragically, Manstein did not awaken superhuman powers. Instead, he was driven mad by the chaotic and complex sounds, and his golden pupils were too eye-catching. So, in the autumn of that year, St. Elizabeth Hospital in the United States gained a schizophrenic patient.

St. Elizabeth's Hospital was a notorious slaughterhouse; almost no patient who entered it ever came out unscathed.

After witnessing the immense power of mixed-race individuals during World War II, the US military also conceived the idea of ​​conducting research, and the location was precisely this mental hospital.

During that era, which coincided with the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, and with the lingering effects of World War I and World War II still fresh in people's minds, some psychiatrists were conducting experiments on patients without any restraint, including pontine separation and anterior lobe resection.

"Increase the current!"

That painful feeling, and the doctor's indifferent voice, still haunted Manstein's nightmares.

Fortunately, Manstein was still young at the time, and perhaps in order to allow the test subject to live a little longer, those guys didn't do anything too outrageous to him.

During those dark and hopeless days, his only companions were his longing for his mother, the children in the next room, and his close friend Guderian.

Later, Angers found them, and after a series of twists and turns, the two came to study at the College of Kassel and stayed on to teach after graduation.

That day, Manstein had just celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday. After the birthday party, he changed into a clean bathrobe and prepared to go to sleep for the day.

But the doorbell rang, and a man holding a bottle of liquor stood at the door. He looked to be in his forties, younger than Manstein.

He roughly shoved a teddy bear into his hand, let out a burp reeking of alcohol, and stammered:

"Happy birthday"

"My son!"

A child born into a single-parent family suddenly gained a father on his fifty-fifth birthday.

Manstein didn't know how to get along with this sudden father, and Nicholas was equally unaccustomed to the child, but he hoped to make up for the years he had neglected him.

So Nicholas sought out Ander, the most sociable of the people he knew. Angers was a vengeful madman, and Nicholas himself was a dissolute rogue; it was Ander, this dragon from another world, who seemed most human.

"Then let's invite him to have dinner together!"

Ander said that in China, there is nothing that a hot pot meal can't solve, and if that doesn't work, then add barbecue.

So Nicholas invited Manstein and his apprentice Finger, while Ander brought a hot pot and brought Luli. The two families then had a hot pot feast together in the clock tower of Kassel College.

Fingel had just swallowed the meat when he saw the vice-principal staring at him with a murderous look. Looking around, he realized that he was sandwiched between the vice-principal and Professor Manstein, and he quickly got up.

"Excuse me, just a moment."

Fingel picked up his bowl and slipped out of the clock tower with an agility disproportionate to his size, while Nicholas moved to sit next to Manstein.

The steam rising from the copper pot blurred Ander and Luli across from them, making it impossible to see them clearly; all that could be seen was them consuming the meat on the cart beside them at an alarming rate.

"Son, I'm so sorry."

A deep voice sounded in Manstein's ear, so low that only he could hear it.

Nicholas picked up the sesame paste from the side, scooped a spoonful into Manstein's condiment bowl, and added a little red fermented bean curd and green chive blossom sauce. His expression was serious, as if he were performing some kind of special alchemical ritual.

Nicholas poured some broth from the hot pot over the sesame paste in the dipping sauce bowl to dissolve it, then placed the bowl in front of Manstein. He snatched a few perfectly cut pieces of mutton from Ander's chopsticks and put them in the bowl.

"Try it? It's a secret recipe I got back in China."

Manstein hesitated for a long time. Even though Kassel College had started teaching Chinese five or six years ago, Manstein still didn't know much about Chinese cuisine.

He hesitated for a moment, then picked up a slice of lamb and put it in his mouth. The lamb, mixed with sesame sauce and with a milky aroma, made even this German-American, who had eaten sausages and pork knuckles since childhood, exclaim in admiration.

"It's delicious, Father."

Nicholas smiled, picked up a tissue and wiped Manstein's mouth, then pointed to the hot pot and said:

"Then eat more."

Manstein turned his head and saw Ander wiping Luli's mouth with a tissue. The little girl had been eating too wildly and her face was covered in yellow sesame paste.

But why does this movement look so familiar?

Manstein glanced furtively at his father, who was staring at Ander across from him, a small notebook in his hand, jotting something down.

"Prepare the seasonings for him,"

"Give him more food,"

"Wipe his mouth,"

A line of text was written on the notebook cover:

How to be a father.

Chapter 89 Pure Humanity

After a hot pot meal, the relationship between the vice principal and his mature-looking son seemed to have improved considerably.

After everyone had eaten and drunk their fill, Lu Li was quite stuffed. Combined with the comfortable indoor environment, she was already feeling sleepy, her little head nodding as she drifted off to sleep.

Nicholas and Manstein sat together and agreed to have another family dinner next time, but instead of hot pot, they would have grilled sausages and pork knuckles, served with sauerkraut made by Manstein's wife.

"I'm entrusting the little one to you."

Fingel returned sometime earlier, holding a bowl, and ate until his belly was round next to Ander. Ander handed Luli to him and asked him to take Luli to bed.

He stayed in the clock tower, helping Nicholas clean up the remaining dishes.

Manstein wanted to stay and help, but his father stopped him.

"Good boy, it's time to go home and sleep."

Manstein was both amused and exasperated by the way his father coaxed his child. Nicholas looked even younger than him, but in his eyes, he was just a twelve or thirteen-year-old boy.

Seeing Manstein leave, Ander snapped his fingers, and the oil stains on the ground disappeared. One by one, the plates flew into the dishwasher, and the round table was magically folded up and stored aside.

"No matter how many times you watch it, you'll always find magic truly amazing."

Sitting on the sofa, Nicholas sighed.

"It's a pity you're unwilling to undergo the transformation ritual."

Ander was also sprawled on a sofa, holding a can of Pepsi in his hand.

"I don't really want to become a lizard man."

"You are already a lizardman."

Nicholas chuckled self-deprecatingly. He was probably the hybrid with the highest bloodline. Here, "high" did not refer to concentration, but to quality. His dragon blood was comparable to that of a second-generation hybrid.

Calling himself a lizardman is perfectly fine; more accurately, he is a humanoid dragon.

However, there was a real dragon right in front of him, the kind that loved to talk, so Nicholas decided to cut to the chase and get straight to the point.

"Over the years, we have been studying those fleshy spheres that separate from the dragon's body."

Nicholas rummaged through the miscellaneous items covered by a canvas for a long time before finally pulling out a glass pillar.

A fleshy ball floated in a yellowish-green liquid, its surface covered with pale skin, through which the blood vessels and muscles beneath the skin could be vaguely seen.

"We call this thing the brain nucleus because most of it consists of human nerve cells."

"As you know, Kassel College is somewhat biased towards biology."

The biology program at Kassel College primarily studies the physical composition of dragons, with only one purpose: to facilitate the killing of dragons.

In this atmosphere, Kassel College actually conducts very little biological research on humans, since everyone comes here to slay dragons.

"Initially, we simply analyzed the composition of the brain nucleus, focusing more on its role in the dragon."

"But in 1985, a teaching assistant from the Department of Biology attended a meeting of the U.S. Department of Energy."

Nicholas pulled a few crumpled pages from the gap in the sofa, flattened them on the armrest, and handed them to Ander.

The Human Genome Project aims to determine the complete base pair arrangement of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes.

"This provides a new direction for our research."

After learning about the Human Genome Project, that teaching assistant decided to sequence the cells that make up the brain nucleus. This was initially just a way to fill space in a paper, but it led to a major breakthrough.

This teaching assistant spent a year working with the interns and discovered a startling fact: the genes in the brain nucleus are extremely subtle differences from those in modern humans.

This discovery led the biology department to sequence the genes of the mixed-race individuals. By comparing the three sets of genes side by side, they discovered a fact.

"The chromosomes of mixed-race individuals and ordinary people have two more pairs of genes than the chromosomes in the brain nucleus."

Nicholas said with a pained expression, "After that, the Secret Service began tracing the origins of hybrids, and finally came to a conclusion:"

"All humans in the world have dragon blood, only the amount varies."

"And the cells in the brain nucleus are the purest form of human beings."

Ander was not at all surprised by the conclusion reached by the secret service. There is an old Chinese saying: "Poverty does not last three generations." After three generations, the poor will die out.