Watching people gathering around the beauty, laughing and singing in their admiration of her, he was driven to fear that unless something was done, another power completely alien to himself might arise, competing with, or even undermining him.

It was not, of course, that the dragon feared individual human beings.  He rather despised them, their weaknesses, feeble desires, mediocre wishes, vanity, deceit, treacherousness, to name a few of their characteristics.

But he was observing a change occurring before his own eyes: People uniting in a common objective of admiring the beauty, and in so doing beginning to have dreams, to elevate themselves above the true reality, to feel themselves reaching above their own existence.  They might soon start having exorbitant ideas that they were the masters, the center of the whole earth.

The dragon feared this transformation within and among the people.  It had to be stopped.  Not that he thought the people could achieve much of anything.  But he knew that dreams, in and of themselves, could be dangerous, apart from being distasteful to him.

Unless such a situation were brought to an early end, he might not be able to deal simply with individuals who were weak, sycophantic, and easily dominated, who were eager to propitiate him and were always soliciting petty favors through unworthy means.

The chance presented itself when the beauty, accompanied by her usual entourage, was passing by the seaside where the dragon was lurking.  With all the grandeur and splendor of the crude natural forces, the dragon emerged from the sea and pounced upon the beauty.  It was a deliberate act of cold calculation.

But it was also an act, or rather a phenomenon, of nature, as when water flows from high to low, a tiger falls upon a deer, schools of fish swarm to their spawning sites, or the fierce wind from the Mongolian deserts thrashes at the budding flowers in the early spring in Korea—a sheer urge to destroy coupled with envy and love.