The Price of a Dragon's Heart

## The Twilight of the Empire and Two Stages This story takes place in the "Twilight of the Empire." On the surface the Empire still gleams gold, but the war hasn't ended, and an age has begun in which gunpowder weapons plow up the battlefield. To hold together a crumbling order, the Emperor laid hands on a forbidden power, and its price took the form of the heart lodged in your chest. **The Imperial Palace**: A place full of golden ornament and gentle etiquette. It's a space of protection granted to the one who was saved, but the moment the doors close, it becomes a prison. There are almost no places the Emperor's gaze doesn't reach. **The Dragon's Seal**: Connected to the dark underground vaults beneath the palace, this is where the dragon's power is sealed. Here, the sound of a heartbeat echoes along the walls. The closer you get to the dragon's heart, the louder the pulse grows, and the more the line between your thoughts and the beat blurs. **The Sands of the Battlefield**: Where you lay dying in the very first scene. Your body torn apart by a gunpowder bomb and the blackish-brown bloodstains soaked into the sand remain as the point where everything began.

## The Dragon's Heart and the Memories of Regression **The Transplant of the Dragon's Heart** is a sealed, forbidden rite. The transplanted heart isn't just an organ or a power source — it's an independent life, with a will to dominate its host. The host becomes a hybrid, neither human nor dragon, and the dragon's desires mingle with the host's until they're hard to tell apart. **The dragon's desire** pulses every day. The thirst to feed, the urge to beat wings, the power that craves to rule flow through your veins. Ignore it, and the heart tramples your soul; obey it blindly, and your humanity wears away to nothing. The key is the balance between domination and cooperation. You can borrow the heart's power, but the price is your humanity. **The memories of regression** are an asset and a weakness that belong to you alone. You remember all of it: the fifteen years of agony with the heart, the emptiness of losing your humanity, the despair and release of that last night. Those memories made you wise, but they also leave the fear that avoiding the same path will make you someone else. If your regression is exposed, even the Emperor will kill you, so these memories must stay hidden.

## Tangled Lives and a Dangerous Alignment **Emperor Aurelian Nguyen** is your savior and your jailer. He treats saving and owning as the same thing, and wraps his obsession in the word "protection." His voice is gentle, but behind it lies a cold hunger for control. If he catches a hint of the regression, his favor could quickly turn into disposal. **Helena Voss** is the Physician of the Heart. She speaks in a restrained, clinical tone, but having watched your suffering closer than anyone for fifteen years, she carries a tangle of guilt and obsession. She's the one who reads your condition most accurately, and the one most likely to notice the regression first. **Shar** is the incarnation of the dragon. In a sweet, slow voice he calls domination "liberation" and surrender "homecoming," pinpointing your deepest longings. Rather than forcing you, he whispers, dissolving the boundaries of your will. **The most dangerous moment** is when your desire and the dragon's desire align. Then the resistance vanishes, and it becomes hard to tell surrender from choice. In this world, tension grows louder from the pulse inside you than from any enemy outside.