Mother is evil. That is simply a fact of life it seems. She may have been watching, or maybe she really just wanted to see if we can survive until she comes back, but either way, she is evil.

We are back in the cave and I am feeling numb. All my anger, frustration and fear drained away during the flight. Mother is evil, but in the end the lessons were important and will serve me well in the future. Also I realized that I have underutilized my growth too much. I was a bit afraid of modifying myself as I grew, but because of that my form remained somewhat normal, which, as a dragon, is completely unacceptable. I need to paint a picture in my mind. No, I need a whole model to focus on so I make sure to abuse the way this body functions to the fullest.

My tails need to be stronger, my wings need to grow so I can finally start flying, maybe they could double as extra arms if I can grow a few fingers and my muscles grow and modify a bit… I need to also change the bone structure somewhat, but it is possible and I have plenty of examples saved up. My eyes as well need to go past what I have. Slit eyes work for better depth perception and detail in short ranges, but I need big boy eyes for long distances now that I am no longer the size of a fat squirrel, or however big I may have been as a baby.

I also need to train my magic and mana capacity. I need better magic for moments where just using a breath attack isn’t enough, and I also need enough mana to survive more than a day outside. Trying to continue hunting for mana cores like I am playing a survival mission looking for life support is just not sustainable. It would become problematic quickly if being a dragon means I’m forced to exist mostly around high mana. Mother spends most of her time in her lake, so maybe that’s just the nature of dragons. But then how would we leave the nest? Maybe there’s pockets of mana out there and you just need to have the reserves to reach them.

You know, when I woke up as a dragon I didn’t imagine I would be dependent on magic crystals… But I guess if there were no limits to power then the entire world would be dominated by dragons. Unless it is, in fact, dominated by them already. She did just round up humans in a day, so who knows?

I try to shake away the inane thoughts and focus on something more important, like actually training for this. I have no idea how to increase the amount of mana my body can hold. So far I have only been using my lungs to hold in mana, since my breathing is my fastest method of gathering it, but I know every cell in my body can hold on to some amount of mana. Now, how do I force it to spread around in my body so I can gather up more of it?

Well, the simple answer is that I don’t need to force it. My body has been doing that since forever. That’s how my siblings have been able to repel deadly blows and how I was able to use that acid attack against that rabbit during my first fight. My breath attacks so far have been mostly used to confuse or debilitate, with only the electric attack being able to secure kills, but even that is just me biting something to death. The only long range attack that actually killed something was my desperate acid attack that held a combination of all the mana my body was able to hold at that time. I was debilitated just like Spots, though I recovered faster because of the high mana density in the air and the core I ate right after.

However, despite the fact that gathering mana is natural and intrinsic to my body, to my very cells, it’s not enough. The passive, organic and innate mechanism that spreads mana throughout my body is bad. Really one should never rely solely on a natural process. The body, at least the human body from my old world, is a horrible little thing that will devour your muscles the second it thinks it can get away with it. It’s a dumb shit that will tell you you are burning, freezing and got zapped by lightning just because you hit your elbow at a weird angle. It’s a dumb fucking thing that barely knows what your guts are even supposed to do and where they should be, and when it thinks you’re hurt but has no idea where, it just throws the feeling of pain straight into the maze of intestines and guesses that those shifty things are hiding something.

Alright, breathe, rant over. Still, below all my very justified anger at cruel facts of biology is a point I am trying to make to myself. I need to do what my body does, but better. I need to not only feed a bit of mana to my cells, but rather, I need to pack them with as much mana as they can hold so I don’t dry out like today. Half the reserves in my lungs went straight to my body to take the place of whatever mana my cells consumed, meaning that I was on a pretty tight timer since I had to use multiple breath attacks. If not for that river I may have ended up dropping, and I doubt my siblings could help.

So, what is the best way of fixing mana from the air to your body? Well, why not steal a page out of one of the stranger types of fantasy stories out there? Cultivation! Chinese, Korean, whatever source it is, it doesn’t matter. The concept is always the same. You breathe in a special way and cycle the life energy you get from your surroundings through your body, to clean it of impurities and empower yourself into divinity, or something like that. Some stories are more grounded than others at least. My best bet is to take this idea and apply it to myself.

Of course I can only use the very essence of the idea, since anything more advanced than “breathe and try to move the magic juice in your body” is bollocks. Especially with the way magic in this world seems to be tied very closely to biology as is evident because of the hyper mutation that affects every living thing touched by mana that I have seen so far. Even the ones less changed, like the rabbits that were just a bit bigger or the boy with his blue eye.

Let’s see, I am sitting in the nest, right on top of our pile of riches that gathers mana without a care. I breathe, not as a human, but as a dragon, the air flowing in and out in a continuous cycle rather than in the wavy motion that mammals are forced to use. This efficiency is what let the dinosaurs become enormous and what lets the birds fly so freely. Now, unlike a cultivation story, I don’t have meridians and pressure points and whatnots, or at least I don’t think I do. But I do know what I have, and what my body has been using to do this process automatically. Mana gets fixated on my lungs, just like oxygen, and a small portion of it is taken to the rest of my body. All I need to do to improve this process is force more of my mana to enter my circulatory system.

So, much like I do when I use a breath attack, or when I created the light rune, I took the mana I am breathing in but then ordered it to move deeper. I could not visualize it perfectly, as despite having the diagrams of a lot of different animals, I didn’t know exactly how the insides of a dragon looked, so instead I took it by feeling. I don’t know how my lungs look, but I know I have lungs. I don’t know how my heart looks, but I know I have one. I know I have veins, I know I have warm blood, I know I have muscles and bones and trillions of cells all ready to be used as organic batteries. I also must have a core here somewhere that should hold on to a lot more mana than any other part of me, but I have a hard time pinpointing it with just vague feeling alone.

I sit here, on the pile of gold and focus on the faint fog. It becomes more defined as I concentrate on it, but I can feel my brain start burning. I feel the energy, chaotic as it is, with all the flavors combining into a single one that just feels like power. I do not require a particular type of mana, I need all of it, any of it, I need as much strength as possible and I need it tightly packed.

I think there is a good reason why mother isn’t keeping us at her lake, under her direct protection and why she made such a diverse spread of mana types in our nest. If we were to be soaked in water and nature mana, we’d be basically forced into growing into water and nature dragons. From me and my brothers’ having red scales I can only assume our father was a red scaled dragon, probably with a fire affinity at least. It’s why fire came so naturally to my siblings but they have yet to use anything else despite trying. Nature and water are both more complicated, but I expect any of them figuring out how to use their breath to spray mist very soon.

So, mother doesn’t want us to have to follow her affinity, and I don’t know if I want to start focusing on an element right now when I have so little knowledge about how this whole thing actually works. Plus if I am to become a dragon stuck on a few affinities I would rather have something better than fire or water. That’s just too basic and cliche! I wonder if there is “space” mana or something of that sort? Being a dragon that can manipulate space itself would certainly be more useful and much cooler than just burning stuff.

There is another thing to take into consideration. I already know that mana changes the body, but there’s some changes that are good and some that are straight up problematic. Let’s take mother. She’s green and blue, from her affinities, and has tendrils that look like vines from afar but they are clearly made of meat and scales when you are close.

Then there’s the old lady, also with nature affinity. Her hair is gray, tending towards white and her eyes are mostly black, with only a few spots of dark green pigment sprinkled through. However she wasn’t changed to look like she was a tree, but rather she became half tree. The bark on her body was literal wood, not just a mimicry. So, why did that happen?

Mother has so much more mana than her that it is a joke to even compare them and the way the old lady used her magic was vastly different, but is that it? Or did she end up like that because of the way she gathered mana? Is it just because she’s human?

Whichever might be the answer, I know that if I gather a lot of different types of mana, I won’t be changed one way or the other. After all, if you pull something in all directions you won’t expect to move it. And hey, if I manage to figure out how to manipulate a lot of different elements I might end up having a better time than trying to figure out how to do everything with just one or two types of magic. While the old woman using vines to pull on the water and make it fill the basin was witty and impressive, it was a patchwork, slow solution. I managed to gather more water, faster, by manipulating water in a half baked way. I want to at least have a good foundation in everything before switching to a specialty, just like how mother shaped earth despite it not being part of her affinities.

Alright, back to my bootleg cultivation. It’s been a few tens of minutes of me being stuck in my mind, while having the cycle of breathing in mana, pushing it into my veins, then pushing it into whatever cells my erythrocytes reach, going on repeat. I don’t feel different, sadly, but I do notice a change. It’s like the change between prismatic red and prismatic legacy, but it is there. The fog around my body is just a sliver denser. It doesn’t radiate further but it feels like it’s more packed together. However I don’t feel that this mana is at my beck and call, like the one in my lungs. It would take great effort to rip it from my cells, so maybe this is a bad way to go about increasing my capacity? But at the same time, this might still be a good buffer for my bodily needs if I am ever away from the nest again. The mana that my body uses is probably taken first from within the cells and then from my lungs, so if I have my body full, I won’t have to worry as much.

It might even help me with my own strength. I felt myself lose mana from just pulling Spots with my tails, and later from hitting the wolf hard enough to break its leg. That was me using mana innately to empower myself, so maybe my body is stronger while it is juiced up. I’ll test that later. Right now I need to continue this… Let’s put on a memory of a clock in the background to get some measurements on this.

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Six god damned hours. I sat here, for six hours, just doing nothing but imagining mana flowing through my body. I focused so hard on it that I am now wrapped in an almost opaque blanket of white-ish mist. It’s like a second skin. I had to fight against my own metabolism to manage this, but I did it. I filled up completely on raw mana. How do I know I am full? It hurt. Once I tried to fit any more, I was hit by pain, bloating, nausea, headaches, literally the entire clown car of basic “this be bad” symptoms.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Huh, this reminds of when I felt like I was intoxicated with water when I drank a few gulps… just earlier at the river I drank a whole lot more than normal and I felt fine… What if it wasn’t water intoxication, but rather water mana intoxication? I was already pretty full on normal mana, so when I tried to fit in the very concentrated mana in the lake I just got the sickness instantly…

Mana sickness, great. So I can’t just gulp down an ocean of mana and be fine for a few years… I need something different then. I already know the maximum capacity of my lungs, I know the maximum capacity of my body, I even know how to somewhat use the mana in my body to follow my will, even if I can’t yet focus all of it into causing phenomena aside from using my breath and mimicking the runes. Well, there’s the water movement, but I think that was me actually making up a spell of my own. It was costly and inefficient, because I didn’t know what words to say. Or even how to talk. But it was magic that I could do…

Alright, enough sulking on my own, time to go find a teacher. Mother is at her lake, probably, and I am still not quite over her throwing us at the wolves, quite literally at that, so I am going for objectively worse but still somewhat useful teacher(s): the humans. Or should I call them “the women” instead? After all, I don’t think the boy will be able to do much for me. Oh well, it’s worth the try. I grab another ice, fire, nature, blood and bone crystal, of course one of each, and go towards their room.

Now, we don’t understand each other, they are always on edge around me, and they are objectively worse at using magic compared to mother, but they must have their own way of growing stronger, so I need to see how they gather mana and how they use it. The problem is getting them to show me.

As I reach their room and peek my head in, I see… a scene. They freeze in the act and we just stare at each other. They’re washing the beast woman, I think. She was not happy about it, having worn a scowl until I came in. Let’s see, they’re using the water from their trickle fountain, as well as a mixture of fruit and leaves to act as soap. Inventive. I take a deep breath and try my best to not focus on the mana, instead getting their actual scents and the entire room smells of fruit. They even washed their clothes in a similar fashion, probably while I was in the woods.

I sigh and drop the crystals. Why didn't I bring any for the assassin lady? Well she threw the last ones against a wall (didn’t shatter them, they’re much tougher than you’d think). I figure she doesn’t feel like using them. Now, let’s see if I can get them to stop looking so strangely to one another. Why did they just freeze up like this?

Ah shit, I just realized… While I can’t see anything from the way they are positioned right now, the feline woman should be properly naked… Well her shirt is just rolled up over her head, since her hands are still tied together, but otherwise naked. For a fraction of a second the idea to just ignore that and walk in pops in my head, but I immediately swat it away. That’s a bad thought. Really bad. I can just imagine the title already: “I reincarnated as a dragon in another world so I can now be a pervert without consequences!”. That alone makes me retch at even having the intrusive thought.

I turn around and plop down, my tails still peeking through the vines to show that I do want to come in, but that I will wait for them to be done. It takes a while for them to start moving, but soon I feel a quick tap on the tip of my blue tail. I turn around and go in, finding them sitting down, spread around the room. I do notice that they took their respective gems, the old lady adding another decoration to her branches, the girl holding them both in her scorched arm, the beast woman… she just piled them to the side. Not planning on using them, I guess? The boy is also not doing much with his. He at least is holding them on his lap, but he looks like he’s on the verge of crying. That’s a lot to unpack and I am a busy dragon that’s very bad with emotions I cannot find the rationale for. Poison gal? Still sulking. Wait, no, nevermind, she’s just sitting there, but her entire demeanor changed?

Right, probably rich. Is she trying to put on a noble front now that she got her rage out of her system? Probably. She’s not touching her gems, but she does eye me with obvious curiosity. I really don’t know what to think of her.

Ah, I am dumb. No wonder the beast woman and the assassin aren’t using the crystals I brought. They can’t. “Uh, tree lady makes shiny runes appear on her body when she does magic, I wonder what’s up with the shackles that have literal runes written in gold on them?” Dumb, dumb man. Well, another reason why mother was fine with them being here. They not only can’t use their arms right, they are also unable to use magic. I can see the fog dispersing as it gets close to the cuffs, and at least the woman’s skin around them is starting to look at least a bit sickly compared to her otherwise fair complexion.

The beast woman also looks weaker, not visibly, just my instincts tell me she’s weaker than before. That might be a problem. I don’t know if people here are dependent on mana like me… Should I try and break the chains? No, that’s dumb. They disperse mana that gets close, no reason mine would be unaffected. And I know for sure getting any mana displaced will feel horrible and like a part of me is slowly dying, so no chance I am trying that yet.

Plus I am scared. What if the beast woman rips my head off as revenge against my mother? What if the noble woman poisons me and my siblings then uses her shadow affinity to run away. They’d have at least half a right to do that, if not for me they would have been eaten by my siblings, but even if it would be right it is not something I can allow.

Alright, heavy thoughts aside I try and look at the two actively using the crystals… Why are they not breathing in the air around them? I focus my eyes on the fire girl and I can see the mist around her two mana crystals, but I don’t see her focusing on drawing it all in. She spins them around in her hand… I am surprised she has enough energy to do that considering how burnt up it is. Still, she’s not breathing in the mana, but rather absorbing a very faint amount through her skin? Well, I think I did do that, especially as a child, but even so I am surprised she is using the far less functional method.

Should I show her? I turn to the side and see granny just sitting there, with her eyes closed, almost meditating. She’s doing it in a much better way, even if she isn’t actively breathing mana. Her branches seem to direct quite a bit of it into her body, so maybe those growths aren’t completely bad. Hmm, is that why the younger girl is using her burnt hand? Because it was changed by mana and it might transfer it much easier?

Not as efficient as I would like, but I guess this is a starting point. Use parts that were changed by mana to get more mana faster. My entire body was changed by mana, though, so not exactly useful. But I guess I now know that I can absorb mana directly from my skin instead of focusing so much on my lungs. That should help, maybe.

Let’s see if I can try to get her to breathe in the air around the fire crystals. That’s where the real mana’s at after all. Let’s see… I approach her and she stops spinning them. She looks a bit worried, but at least she’s not terrified as I reach my snout towards her charred hand. I take in a deep, audible breath, and then turn my head to the side and breathe out harmless sparks. The boy gets startled and the noblewoman speaks a rough word that I am 90% sure is a curse, but the fire girl is not afraid. Instead she looks excited.

She grabs the crystals tighter, then puts them to her chest. I see the mana no longer directed towards the arm, but rather straight to her chest and I realize what is happening. Her core. It’s going to her core. Now that I focus on it I can see that everyone has denser mana around their chest as opposed to having an even spread like me and my siblings. Then is their entire method reliant on that organ? They're not trying to improve their bodies to go along with their magic? Or is it that they can't...

I continue looking at the girl while thinking to myself. I see her stick her hand out, then speak long sentences in whispers. Whenever mother says her syllables before creating a rune and using magic, I can hear the power in each short sound. Here I almost don’t get that. Instead I get little jolts at very specific sounds, as if everything else is worthless filler. Still, an effect happens. Her charred arm gets a few runes written in red on it, then I see a blob of mana mist pushing through it, through the crystals, then as it gets fully out of her body I see a shower of sparks appear.

I have to admit, despite being able to do it so much faster, her version is prettier. I look at the wooden floor below us, and while it is mostly unharmed since it is made by mother’s magic, it now sports little scorch marks in the rough shape of a butterfly. She smiles as she looks at me being fixated on the sudden drawing. Guess I had that look, huh… How could I not? I’ve been thinking of ways to improve the strength of my magic that I almost forgot why I love magic.

The reason I was so excited about magic is not just the power it can afford, but the fact that it allows will to be made manifest. I have more art in my brain than master painters could make in a hundred lives. I have more songs, theater pieces and movies than a whole college of bards could create in its entire history. I have beautiful sculptures memorized down to the last detail and I am sitting here, pondering how to get bigger muscles and make a bigger boom.

In my past life I wasn’t an artsy person, my body simply didn't do well with anything requiring dexterity, doctors said I was simply born with nerve damage, however that works. My voice was also just plain bad, but I enjoyed all forms of art greatly. Maybe I should use at least a bit of my new life to show beauty to the world… Maybe I should think about what I can do other than fight. I wonder if there's a rune for sound... If there is, then just like the light rune I could modify it and start making any sound I need. I could use it to pour out the songs I have memorized... I need to learn more runes. I need to have something better than fighting...

Hell I don't even need to limit myself to art! I watched every episode of "How it's made", I know theoretical physics, biology, chemistry and I can turn everything I know into reality if I work towards it. Magic, at least so far, seems more than able to do what I need in order to make something nice.

The stunt mother pulled forced my brain into survival mode, but I know how quickly I will end up burning myself up if I get stuck like that. I need to be better, to do something good, something great… I need to enjoy this gift or else I will hate it just like I hated my last life.

I let out a heavy sigh, then approach her again. That was a nice break, a nice moment to reflect, but I do still need to understand them more and the way they use magic. Even after listening to it there’s so many unfamiliar sounds that I have a hard time even remembering what she said. It’s a language with a lot of consonants, very different from any of the languages I learned in my life, so I need a point of reference for something that I can mimic.

I again sniff at the crystals, then push her hand upwards with my snout. She is confused and holds her hand to her chest, but that’s not what I want. I reach again and push it upwards more. She gets the hint and puts them to her nose, then breathes in, but she keeps her confused expression. I understand why that is.

She did not breathe In the mana. No, rather the fog ignored her entirely. When I breathe close to it, the entire fog gets directed towards me, but when she did it remained stationary, completely undisturbed. I thought mana was bound to the air somehow, but I think that is completely wrong. I think mana is its own thing and only loosely interacts with the matter around. My body interacts with it almost completely, as just moving my hand next to it makes it move like fog should, but humans can only pull in a bit of it towards their cores, they can only really interact with mana by using their core or whatever body part is already modified... I should have realized that mana and air aren't necessarily corelated when we weren't hit by wind just for being close to the gold.

That complicates things, mostly because this means I can probably not use anything that the humans are doing. Our biology is absurdly different, they need constant water and food, their flesh interacts weirdly with mana, their bodies are inefficient and about as bad as I remember them from my past. I also can’t use chants like they do, my voicebox is still stuck on squeaks and roars, I can’t exactly use runes either if I don’t have the rune memorized and the pattern of the mana inside remembered fully…and I don’t know if I can even use the runes the humans have showing up on their body as they seem a lot more automatic and out of control compared to what mother does. They don't modify the runes after all, but they seem more like a prelude to something happening.

I think I need to first improve my body some more and then hope I can steal some secrets from mother… The next time I see her draw a rune I will forcibly remember it. After all, my very last memory before being a dragon is me forcibly recording the experience of a disembodied voice laughing at me before I fell into this world, into a permanent memory in the shape of a book. It’ll hurt like a bitch, but it’s clear that I need to do this if I want to have any hope of using proper magic before mother's tests throw me into an early grave.