I sit in a chair, books floating by me. I think I enjoy this place, no hormones pulling on my emotions, no instincts making a sweater out of my thought pattern… Just me. Or rather just the collection of what I once was, layed out as a neat, cozy place. Even I am as I was. I look at my hand and I see it all at once. Small, big, soft, coarse, I see gashes and wounds and I see scars and I see pristine skin and I see bright red flesh. I see the bone below, how it grew, how it was shaped, how it broke that one time and left my finger crooked for a few years until I managed to scrounge up enough money from odd jobs to have it fixed.

I like being able to admire this without my heart pumping in my ear, without the imminent threat of an innocent child turning into a corpse in the quiet of the night. I like being able to exist without having to watch an abominable animal, twisted and malformed by esoteric energies, as it barrels straight into my siblings, ready to devour them. I like being able to sit still without the urge to consume the first thing that moves in my line of sight.

I am stalling.

I understand I am stalling, but I need to come to terms with how little control I have over myself and this is the one place where nothing else can influence me.

I was resigned to the fact that the boy would die. I had come to terms with it, did my own silent mourning, and I was ready to have to dig a hole to bury him before my siblings could ravage his corpse. Instead a few teary eyes were enough to make me go mad with thoughts and options. I used whatever random assortment of mana was in my body, coupled with a heavy dose of poison and just hoped it would work.

His death could very well be on my hands at this very moment. I don’t even know if it was the human me or the dragon me that caused the 180 turn. And not only that, but I also put myself in danger by using up every last drop of mana in my body! What happens if the next time someone is in danger like this we are out in the wild, away from any good mana sources and I get hit with this urge to play hero? Sometimes I can just keep cruising and sometimes I am reminded that I am a ticking bomb of indecision and weird instincts and thought processes.

The table in front of me cracks and I blink, after which it fixes itself. Frustration. My image of this place can change… Good to keep in mind. And I will keep it in mind for later, because right now I need to leave. I need to see what happened.

…

I feel heavy and tired. Since waking up in this world this is the first time I felt so spent. Even when I was going in and out of consciousness, I was at least fine physically. Now I am exhausted, weak and can barely open my eyes. I try and get up, but so much weight is pulling me down that it is wasted effort.

After I manage to open my eyes and turn my head to figure out why I am so weak, I realize the problem, or at least half of it. I am currently being used as a hug buddy/ living pillow by both the boy and Ayrah. Now, the boy weighs close to nothing and Ayrah, despite being a mountain of muscle, shouldn’t be this heavy. I can easily drag around a whole deer, I should be able to lift half her body weight without issues.

The real reason I am so weak is that I have barely any mana in me currently. It seems the humans at least did a good thing and piled their gems close to my snout, but that alone is simply not enough. I sit on an actual pile of riches and gems, these few things are a drop in the bucket. My scales are almost a lifeless gray with just a bit of hue denoting what their real color should be, meaning I am running on the least amount of power possible, which can very well lead to me collapsing randomly.

The mana density difference between the nest and here is so big that I doubt I can ever fully recover, so I need to gather energy. I do so by manipulating any nearby mana, ordering it to move closer so I can absorb it. Strange thing to note, I think I am absorbing mana from the humans too… Not from their core, but rather the bit of mana that radiates off of them. It’s less than what my own body lets out, but it is still an amount that they simply lose.

I notice movement and see the old woman as she walks into my view, bringing one of the fruits and a piece of cooked meat. Realizing that those are probably for me, I open my mouth, which she answers with a raspy laugh before putting the meal in. Consuming it is a quick affair, but I am miffed. Cooked meat tastes slightly worse than raw. That just feels wrong… but it isn’t. Then again, I should have realized this when I realized that my stomach is actually an incinerator. There’s no waste, no need for particular bacteria to break down particular proteins and compounds… whatever acid my stomach has, it lacks normal chemistry, since a piece of meat and a pebble are equally digestible.

Either way, the meal, coupled with some active absorption of mana, results in me being able to shake off the sleeping people, or rather the no longer asleep people. The kid almost looks healthier than he was before coming here… Fuck, I’m glad he’s alive… I’m glad I didn’t kill him… He seems equally happy as he laughs after rubbing his eyes, then throws himself at me, giving me a one-armed hug. I haven’t seen him this happy before. It is nice.

I still receive some uncertain stares, especially after the kid’s outburst, but I don’t think the humans are scared of me anymore. Guess I’m now just like a big, very smart dog in their eyes. Can do a lot of good but still not fully sure how I’d react to certain actions. Understandable and something I can work with. I press my snout against the boy’s face, then puff out a bit of air and he releases me as he laughs and says something.

Yeah, they still have full conversations I can’t understand. Ayrah specifically tried to teach me her language, and that’s the only reason I understand a few words. But if I don't have someone to teach me, I have no way to understand the language even with my brain working overtime to absorb their words. Ah, my brain, my newfound youthful brain that acts like a sponge… Man will I miss this when I age. I think. Dragons might actually be able to regenerate their brains and with the size they would reach… Actually with how mother mutated and was able to heal any problems we had, it would be strange to not think that dragons can recover their brains.. Good to keep in mind..

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Where was I? Ah right, people are talking and I feel like I don’t belong. I also feel like I should go back to napping. My mana’s burning just from me moving around, so I need to keep things brief. The boy reaches a hand to pat me and I lean in, letting him do so for a bit, then pull away. It feels a bit awkward to leave without saying anything but I don’t know how to say goodbye, so I just walk away. Can’t even run without fearing that I will spend a bit too much and collapse. I don’t understand how shutting off completely is part of dragon DNA, but it is and I need to work around it.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the less dragons seem to make sense. Can casually control supernatural energies just by looking at it being done, and that’s before even seeing the sun. All it took to go from wiggling worms to fire-breathing killers was some binge eating. Hell, we learned magic before learning to run!

We have powerful bodies, with capabilities that surpass physics to the point where a tail swipe is enough to absolutely shatter another animal’s bones without even injuring us, yet we can eat absolutely anything and leave behind no waste as if we're scavengers. Apex predators that can hunt in basically any environment, we can mutate our bodies to absurd capabilities, we’re entirely sapient, we must live a long time since mother has a whole overgrown tunnel dedicated to herself… a tunnel I completely forgot to actually explore in the other direction… huh…

Not the point! The point is that we have literally every survival plan and strategy crammed into our very nature and it’s starting to show problems.

So many unknowns, so many dangers, so many thoughts!

I didn’t make it to the nest. I fell. I am not sleeping yet, but I can hardly move and I just feel so overwhelmed… I saved a kid. I should be happy, but instead I sit here almost tearing up because I didn’t succeed through hard work, I succeeded through luck and unreliable instinct. I remember being dumb enough to think that luck was a skill, but it isn’t. Luck is hardly something to base my life on, something to rely on, it is simply something that may be useful sometimes.

And now it was useful. And next time, instead of a medicinal poison, I might end up creating a mini-nuke.

I need more. I need to know more, to be better, to no longer collapse every time I try something new. I failed to exceed my limit last I tried to forcibly increase my mana capacity, and since then I grew and so did it. But it didn’t grow from my usage of magic, it grew from my body being bigger, so I did not get better at packing it in, I just have more space.

I need to actually train harder. I need to strain my muscles until they break, train my magic until I can control giant boulders and needles of stone with the same precision. I need to guzzle down so much mana that I force my capacity to expand. I need to better understand the inner workings of mana. I need to be better so I don't have to rely on luck again and fear a bad roll.

I need a better long term plan and I won’t find it on the floor. I’ll find it in my mind.

As I nudge mana towards me, trying to recover, I make a checklist. It is simple, so far, but it is better than nothing. I need to really understand the benefits of this body, so I need to start using it more. It can be fighting my siblings, hunting, or just hitting trees, I just need to do something so I understand my limits and how to better use what I have naturally. I have some knowledge of biomechanics and general physics that can give me some ideas based on how my body performs, at least better idea than “bite if you can, slap with tail to back away”.

Next I need to do a lot more with magic. speech, runes, mana control, mana capacity. These are the four concepts I gathered are important. Speech and runes are self evident and their training is mostly about the mind. Mana control and capacity is where it’s at. For control I need to force myself into manipulating more. It could be bigger, heavier, more in number, different elements at once, it doesn’t matter, it just needs to be more. After that I can work on making it fine control instead of just aimless manipulation. As for capacity… I have no idea. I can fill up every cell in my body just fine, but after that mana just refuses.

I’ll need to force it some way. I will need an idea for that…

In the meantime, I get up, having gotten a bit of energy back, then pushed myself forward.

It took a couple more minutes to be greeted by my siblings. I get sniffed, a lot, probably because I fully slept somewhere foreign for the first time, and then they leave. They’re thankfully just a bit curious, showing complete disregard for the humans. Honestly? It is better this way. Much easier to focus without having to fear how their interactions shape my siblings’ perception of things.

I shake my head and go straight for the pile. It is quicker than before. Despite having a bit more capacity thanks to my size, I can fill up to the brim in only… roughly 4 hours. Which is a great improvement all things considered. Once full the rules are still the same. can’t really take the power out unless I use a weird spell, or if my body uses it on its own.

I can also pack up my lungs with as much mana as I physically can. Doesn’t change anything. I tilt my head and push further. More mana through my nose, more mana through my skin, eventually, somewhere, mana should compress enough that I get a natural, better way to pack it up, to at least use as reference. Hopefully. Or I might be sitting here doing all of nothing for an hour…

…

I did all of nothing for an hour.

Great.

I realize my mistake. Technically, yes, you should be able to compress mana to a degree. The difference in density between the human room and our nest makes that plenty clear. However after you achieve saturation you need a lot more strength than my mind has, so I need to think bigger. What way, other than trying to do it by hand, is there to compress mana?

Well the only logical thing that pops in my mind is using an even higher density of mana than my body has. After all, the more mana I gather, the more it radiates to fill the emptiness around. And if it does that in this situation, it should also do it if I just expose my body to absurd densities. Mother probably has more than enough for what I want, but there might be a reason why she doesn’t just use that more often for training. It might kill me.

Alright, if she’s a bust… Well there’s her lake. Her lake filled with gems at the bottom, with mana rising up, filled with mana. Guess I know what I will do once mother gets here to take us outside.

This will be either the worst thing I ever plan for, or the best.