Reincarnated as an Orphaned Dragon!

Chapter 1 - "Am I alone?"

My name is Lena.
Rather, it used to be.

I was already chosen to have a short life due to health complications, and I didn't even have a problem with that.
At just 19 years old, I'd accepted my impending doom.

It really didn't bother me to accept death as long as I kept reminding myself that living forever is a curse, one that I had no chance of suffering through.

Living forever may be a curse, but I would have preferred to live a little bit longer.

I was certainly ecstatic when I realized I still had self-awareness after death, though that dwindled slightly when I first realized I became a dragon.

At first I was terrified of my own mother.
Who wouldn't be shocked to suddenly see a scaly red giant?

I was given no choice but to eat the disgusting raw meat she brought every day, lest I starve.

Even my new name, Laviella Dex Tiama, was unbelievable.
It sounded like some kind of powerful noble's name.

But hey, at least magic was something to look forward to.
Dragons in this new world had a form of genetic memory.

Thankfully, it didn't get completely 'unlocked', since if that happened it would be impossible for any normal dragon to ever have a personality truly their own.

But thanks to that, I already understood the basics of how magic worked as soon as I was born.

In this world, magic is focused almost entirely on chants.
Talent certainly plays a major role, but the chant clarified what would happen and how much Mana it would take.

This made me extremely happy, magic is fairly boring if it's just shouting lame template spells like 'Fireball' (Which does exist by the way!)

The more descriptive the chant, the more powerful the spell and the less Mana is used. While the smaller, more concise chants are typically weaker and take more Mana, though the more powerful you are, the more powerful you can be with less chanting.
They aren't required though, and for simple spells there is usually no point to use them.

While the chant is partly to convey the intent of the spell, it's not the main reason chants are stronger, since the chant is also used to specify external sources of magic to achieve a stronger effect, to the point of sucking out the Mana of living beings without enough will to resist.

A nasty side effect of this was that most spirits now hide in isolated and Mana rich areas.

Many humans include spirits in their chants, earth spirit, light spirit, etc, so every time they used a chant any weaker spirits around would have the juice sucked out of them.

This was absolutely terrifying for me as a dragon, since being much stronger meant I might end up wringing lesser beings dry, so I pretty much decided that if I was going to use magic I would either avoid chants or stick with vague things such as forces, gods, and the like, it didn't really matter if they existed or not. If they didn't then there wouldn't be any harm, and if they did, I doubted a god would run out of magic so easily...

There was little to do in the cave I was born, other than exercise.
Mother was almost always back by this time.

The past few days she's been bringing back things such as treasures and trying to entice me with them like they were simple toys.
Dragons that go around harassing humans never have a good ending...

Most dragons here either ignore humans or get arrogant and try to control them, and my mother must be leaning towards the latter.

Most dragons don't even bother with chants either since they assume themselves to be too powerful to need them. I definitely don't want to be dangerously stupid like that...