My Girlfriend Returned as a Dragon - Chapter 2

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Chen

◈ My Girlfriend Returned as a Dragon ◈

Chapter 2: Oppa, We’ll Never Have to Break Up Again.

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My beloved girlfriend, Sia, died a year ago.

And yet.

A strange woman, not even a monster, suddenly appeared from a Gate and claimed without warning that she was my dead girlfriend.

How many people in the world could take her words at face value?

At the very least, I could not.

If anything, I was furious at the thought that someone was deceiving me on Sia’s death anniversary.

It was an insult to Sia, who had passed away, and to me.

I stepped back from the woman who claimed to be Sia and tried to throw her arms around me.

I wanted to curse at this woman impersonating the dead Sia and tell her to disappear from my sight immediately.

But since she had come out of a Gate, I decided it would be best not to provoke her carelessly.

First, I needed to try speaking to her calmly.

“Who are you, exactly? How do you know me, and the woman I love?”

I asked while suppressing my personal feelings as much as possible.

But when she heard my flat words, the woman... started sniffling the moment she heard my question.

‘She’s crying?’

I had not expected this at all.

It was fortunate that she had not taken a hostile stance toward me so far, but something about this situation was strange.

An unidentified being that had emerged from a Gate.

And no combat personnel here besides me.

‘Stay calm. I have to stay calm.’

First, I needed to find out why she knew my name and Sia’s, and why she was pretending to be the dead Sia.

Just as I was calmly organizing what to say next in my head.

“Well, I look so different now that of course Oppa would think that. But I was worried you might’ve forgotten me. I’m relieved. I’m sorry. I was stupid to doubt you. You even brought tteokbokki and gimbap because you were thinking of me. Right? There’s no way you could’ve forgotten me. Of course Oppa wouldn’t have met another woman and left me behind. Right. I was wrong. I was stupid to doubt someone like you.”

After muttering to herself like that, the woman took a moment to compose herself and looked around.

Then she raised her hand high toward the sky and began murmuring in a language I did not understand.

[Silence.]

The instant her murmuring ended, an enormous amount of mana began to envelop the area.

“There’s no one nearby, but you never know.”

‘Magic?’

And she had cast magic through an incantation alone, without calculating a spell formula?

At that moment, I instinctively realized something.

No matter how desperately I charged at her, this woman was an incredible monster who could subdue me without lifting a finger.

My legs trembled as if I might collapse at any moment, and my heart pounded so wildly that it felt ready to burst.

“Oppa, what’s wrong all of a sudden? Are you sick? You’re not sick, right? Right? Get a hold of yourself, Oppa!”

“W-who are you...?”

The overwhelming difference in power made it hard to breathe.

But she looked far more flustered by the sight of me struggling for breath.

“Where does it hurt, Oppa? Or are you scared of me? Oppa, calm down. Take a deep breath in, then let it out. I’m your girlfriend. Why would I hurt you? Calm down. No, I’ll make you feel better.”

Then the woman murmured something again and cast magic on me.

I could not hear exactly what she said, but once again, she invoked magic at once without calculating a spell formula.

“How is it? Do you feel better now?”

“...I do.”

“Thank goodness.”

Only seconds ago, my heart had been pounding as if it would burst, but my heartbeat had returned to normal as if by magic.

Yet that only made me more afraid.

Magic that could calm someone’s mind? I had never even heard of such magic.

“I understand that Oppa can’t believe I’m Sia, and I admit that you can’t help feeling that way. Fine, then I just need to prove that I’m your girlfriend, right?”

After catching her breath, she began speaking calmly.

How Sia and I first met, the words she had said when she confessed to me, where we shared our first kiss, the first birthday gift she had given me, the songs I always sang whenever we went to karaoke together...

They were all things no one but Sia herself could know.

Then was that woman really Sia...?

It was an unbelievable situation, but I decided to ask one more question, just in case.

“Then what’s my favorite drink?”

“It’s kind of debatable whether it counts as a drink, but you like coffee milk. I always told you that you were addicted to coffee milk.”

That answer convinced me.

I did not know why she had appeared from a Gate, nor why she looked completely different from the Sia I knew.

But the woman before me was undoubtedly Sia, my beloved girlfriend.

“And you said that while you were addicted to coffee milk, what you were even more addicted to was Sia... Then I told you not to say things like that anymore because they gave me goosebumps. When was that? I was twenty-one then, so...”

“Sia.”

Before Sia could finish speaking, I pulled her into my arms.

“Sia. Sia. Sia.”

Words like this can’t be a dream, I missed you so much, and I love you came to mind, but I did not have the chance to say anything else. I could only keep calling Sia’s name.

Only when I called her name did Sia seem reassured. She smiled brightly and called mine.

“Minjun-oppa.”

“Yeah, Sia.”

Instead of asking each other how we had been, we held each other silently for a long while.

Her face, voice, and height were all different, but the moment I held her, I knew she was Sia.

No one else loved being in my arms this much.

After holding each other for a long time, I wiped away my tears and asked Sia,

“Sia, what happened to you all this time?”

* * *

Even as her whole body burned in the irresistible flames that erupted inside the Gate, Jeong Sia did not lose hope of survival.

‘I won’t die. I absolutely won’t die. For myself, and for Minjun-oppa, whom I love, I’ll survive somehow. I’ll make it to the end.’

But unfortunately, her resolve came true only halfway.

She came back to life.

But in a dimension completely different from Earth.

As a dragon, the strongest living creature on land.

At first, she could not believe what had happened to her. But as she gradually adapted to life as a dragon, she was able to enjoy her dragon life.

However, that happiness did not last long.

‘Something is missing.’

After being reincarnated as a dragon, she could have anything she wanted and do anything she wished.

Her kind new parents showered her with affection as well.

Even so, she could not be satisfied.

‘I can’t see Minjun-oppa.’

She had everything, but the boyfriend she loved was not by her side.

Minjun, whom she had loved enough to consider him the other half of her soul.

Sia missed that other half of her soul terribly.

Then one day, as she suffered from the emptiness that could not be filled because of how much she missed Minjun.

She finally decided to go meet him herself.

There was only one way. She had to develop and use a dimensional travel spell formula that transcended time and space.

From then on, she began making plans to achieve it.

Until she became an adult dragon, she trained relentlessly and gained strength far beyond that of hatchlings her age.

Whenever she had free time, she took magic books from her father’s study and read them, building a foundation of magical knowledge.

And after becoming an adult dragon, she devoted herself madly to researching dimensional travel magic.

The other dragons tempted her, saying, “In theory, dimensional travel magic is magic that cannot exist in this world, so come have fun with us instead.” But she was not swayed by them and focused only on developing dimensional travel magic.

Creating new magic alone, with no guarantee of success, was never easy.

At first, she had begun thinking that she did not care if it took thousands of years, as long as she could meet Minjun.

But as time passed, she increasingly felt as if she would go mad. The thought of letting go of everything kept circling through her mind.

Whenever that happened, though, she carved Minjun’s face into a stone and steadied herself.

‘Get a hold of yourself, you bitch. Are you going to give up here? Minjun-oppa is waiting for you. You pathetic bitch.’

As much as I miss Oppa, he must miss me too.

Oppa cannot do anything right now, so I have to work hard to meet him.

Minjun-oppa. Minjun-oppa. Minjun-oppa. Minjun-oppa.

‘Wait for me. I’ll definitely come to see you.’

And so, a hundred years passed. Then two hundred years...

A thousand years passed.

And a little over two thousand years later.

Her efforts finally bore fruit.

Unlike existing dimensional travel magic, which could not set coordinates for the dimension and time one wished to travel to and required one to stake their life.

It was a groundbreaking dimensional travel spell that could take its caster to any desired time in any desired dimension.

There was a chance of a slight error when setting the time coordinates.

And because it consumed an enormous amount of mana, its side effects when cast were unknown.

But Sia was ready to bear all of it.

Meeting Minjun was more than worth taking those risks.

“The day has finally come.”

The moment she finished checking her calculations, she cast the dimensional travel spell without hesitation.

“Just wait a little longer, Oppa.”

* * *

“I had planned to travel to the very next day after I died, but after casting the spell, I remembered that I had made a small mistake in the final calculation.”

Sia confessed that she had realized too late that she had set the time to one year instead of one day.

“The moment I noticed the mistake, I tried to fix the formula, but the spell had already activated, so I couldn’t change it. If I hadn’t made that mistake, Oppa could have met me sooner.”

That was the end of Sia’s long story.

Honestly, taken on its own, it was a story that could not help sounding unbelievable.

Since Gates had appeared a few decades ago, all kinds of monsters had been discovered, but dragons had never once been observed.

Above all, I had thought reincarnation was a concept that only existed in novels.

But Sia had miraculously returned alive. There was no reason not to believe her.

Whether she was a dragon or anything else, all that mattered was that she had returned to me.

“Our Sia must’ve gone through so much. Two thousand years... I can’t imagine how long that must have...”

Before I could finish, Sia suddenly pulled me into her arms.

Just as I had done earlier.

“Oppa.”

Then Sia pressed her cherry-like lips deeply against mine in a sudden kiss.

“I was so late. I’m sorry. I wanted to come sooner, but I couldn’t.”