In the early hours of the next morning, the small fire they used had already died out and all the adults prepared to leave. It was just Icy and Raccelline who had yet to awaken, the former a bit surprised to see her using his body as a cushion. Likely a lot firmer than she was used to. His body no longer felt heavy, and that constant headache more or less vanished, although a part of him remained exhausted and wanted to sleep for some more hours.
Whilst Mala removed the ice below them, he found that most of the water already seeped away and the snow regained some of its compact nature. It was only now that he looked up again to see snow floating in rings. Yesterday, the weight in his neck from merely sitting up made this feel like an impossible task. How funny that he actually came here on the final day…
A tree he considered occupying until this whole war started.
Thinking about it, there was something he specifically wanted to do this whole time. Melting the bark’s coating with a Great Flame Bolt, one of the many remaining gold tier weapons slashed open the bark. Just from the visible golden shine at a distance, he could tell how much thicker its life essence was, and immediately began to swallow some mouthfuls of the fluid. Once the ball of golden essence reached an inch in diameter he switched to storing the rest in one of the crystal vials from the ruins. Like this, he had another two similar sized dosages for the upcoming trip.
“Am I going to need a body shrinking spell? Would they even work?” He spoke to himself in Draconic while everyone watched him collect the sap with Pronounced Telekinesis. It took some seconds for him to realise that no one could understand him, and he simply reiterated his thoughts for them. “I’m wondering if shrinking spells would work on my body.”
Unsurprisingly, no one could answer that question. He could test it himself by quickly learning one, but then came the issue of actually making a working variant if it failed. Of course, spells which focus on ‘miniaturising’ would work as they don’t actually have to compress body matter. It was more often a form of body reconstruction, which meant it also worked on everything without physical matter to shrink.
Unfortunately, all his miniaturisation spells started as Adept true spells, and those often resulted in the reformed body being greatly weakened. Well, besides his tail there weren’t any real issues with his body size yet.
And if he really needed such a spell it could wait until the end of this growth phase.
With this matter finished, Raccelline also woke up and spent some time getting ready. Namely, Mala and Rebecca helped her change into a new set of clothes and brushed her hair after a quick wash with some water spells.
Korridan smothered the remaining embers, and they stepped down the mountain. In particular, the main path up and down is a steep but stable slope which wrapped around the side at the mountain range’s southwest corner. It was this method that every single group of humans thus far used to ascend and descend, so its usage couldn’t be a concern. However, as they eventually reached lower and lower points, it became clear that the snow thinned.
And eventually, for the first time ever, he saw a spot of earth without a mountain of snow covering it. The dark brown dirt with some grey stones and even some hints of yellow from dead grasses just barely slipping through. And of course, the vibrant shades of green for various plantlife, it was so strange seeing it so casually appear for once.
Whilst the verdant oaks were a variety of fall colours, they were slightly uncommon mana gatherer trees, and with the fungal infection they couldn’t really be called pleasant to look at.
“Aren’t you afraid of melting?” Jaren looked backwards and asked, unsure how the dragon literally made of ice-cream planned on dealing with this.
Without much thought, he cast Ice Coat to create a layer of white frost all over his scales, inadvertently covering the wafer colour but leaving that distinguishable design. The spell only lasted an hour or so per use, but with a single casting requiring next to no mana, he didn’t particularly care. With an answer received, Jaren nodded along whilst the others didn’t respond, Raccelline, however, had a bit of a different response.
She rubbed his neck several times to feel the difference in structure. Whilst the design remained beneath, she felt that everything smoothed over completely. It actually felt just like running her hand over a block of ice!
But besides staring with great interest, she didn’t really do much else, and he gave up on reprimanding her against it now.
“Do we need to stop by any cities, or do you all have resources?” He asked a simple question as the air grew even warmer and for the first time, he actually felt something from breathing. A bit dry in his opinion, but nothing painful, and while this was reinforced as they finally stepped onto ground level, he accepted that normal atmosphere wasn’t exactly made for something like him. Most creatures made of ice also agreed on such facts.
In fact, even the Kandir giants were forced to accept that their young couldn’t withstand even these mildly warm temperatures.
“We have a month of rations. For now, we’ll travel south outside of Remelo’s borders and restock a city somewhere there, knowledge of a dragon is pretty well known here. All it would take is a single wizard, like Mala,” Korridan told him the precise plan the group decided yesterday evening, it worked in his favour as the number of steel tiers still interested in hunting a youngling isn’t exactly small.
However, Mala did follow up with something, “It’s wrong to assume that. I found maybe a dozen real accounts of dragons across far too many bestiaries. Actual knowledge of them is a painful experience to come across.” While mostly targeted to the group, she hadn’t ever corrected the notion because it never truly mattered… But with a real dragon here instead she felt obligated to give a correct story.
After all, it wanted to learn more about humans as well, not once had Icy hidden that intention.
While the rest of the group navigated a well-trodden dirt path away from the mountain and towards a far more defined road, it was pretty clear what path the group would take away. While some gravel roads might have existed inside between rather significant cities in the empire, it was wholly too pricey to maintain such things in a kingdom. Or rather, no ruler wanted to hire a sizable number of wizards to cover the road in aggregate or stone slabs which would require far more attention than plain old dirt.
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They handled it well enough either way, and due to Raccelline’s size, their walking speed wasn’t too intense. Everyone kept up well enough, and with the immediate concern of a missing dragon been resolved, it became a far more leisurely journey towards the coast. They justified this for two reasons.
Firstly, they wanted at least a few members to hit Gold rank before reaching the coast. Right now, it seemed that Korridan was in the best spot as he had always been the most well-trained of the group.
Mala’s own progress would depend entirely on her ability to understand entire books full of single to six ring spells that the dragon provided. And Darak… he was the only one that Icy saw no easy solution to. Obviously, he could hand over a series of skills to train the priest in a melee-focused evolution, however, this sacrificed a lot of their group’s ability to heal.
That’s not to say he couldn’t also learn regular magic, it just also took months at the minimum for his enhanced mind to learn even the simplest spells. The hundreds of formulae and specific rune creations are a huge burden at first.
The best option to solve this would be… a divine intervention.
Those aren’t exactly easy to induce though, so perhaps the easier solution was to just make a sizable donation to a cathedral and obtain the relevant healing-focused divine spells that Darak needed. Technically, he had the money, and if they just donated a bit to each cathedral on the way it wouldn’t take more than a few cities to complete such a collection.
With that in mind, he shared the idea with the group.
Jaren raised a fair point in return. “That’s not exactly a small amount of spare change though, we’d need weeks of dedicated hunting to gather enough… Alright, a few days of hunting. But it takes quite a while to sell corpses for a good price.” All of them more or less shared this sentiment.
However, as the dragon revealed several hundred ancient coins, all still clearly minted by the Ancient Empire of Man, it became clear that money really, really wouldn’t be an issue.
And why exactly the dragon remained confident in helping them buy new techniques became clearer. On that note, travelling to a major city, but not a capital, became a rather immediate goal. If they strictly wished to move outside Remelo first, it would take about a week and a half to hit a new city. But inside the country, they could instead reach one in just two days…
In the end, the group suggested that the three of them who needed techniques immediately would go in and buy such things with a small pile of coins.
Their exact value would be determined by an appraiser due to their age.
Then, once done, everyone would simply meet outside the city a fair distance and head off once more. At the same time, they discussed further problems that he’d never even really thought about because it never occurred to him just how troublesome humans might be if desperate enough. For example, if a time of warfare seemed to be approaching and they absolutely needed better weapons to survive such danger.
For that reason, Korridan swapped out his usual greatsword for a far smaller one from Icy’s stash. Doing so made any who questioned the stash of ancient coins far less suspicious, as they saw Steel ranked warriors with a couple items clearly slightly above them. However, it simply wasn’t worthwhile for the very few Gold ranks to bother with a sword and dagger.
Unless they were ridiculously petty, that is.
Of course, the reverse existed as well. Wearing too many good things meant attracting too much attention, and in turn led to a high chance of someone robbing them.
Anyway, the group made it down the dirt road with ease. For the dragon, it was his first time actually walking on something which wasn’t snow or extremely cold and compressed dirt. And the dust which stuck to his ice cream feet became a constant nuisance without any easy solutions. As for the trees around him… Well, they were all pretty normal.
Unlike the mana gatherer or node trees, these ones just acted as generic vegetation. To him, they were no less impressive than the bushes and ferns which sprung up a short distance all across the sides of the road. Even if the trees often had some volume of mana due to their age, but rarely enough to equal a bronze tier beast.
They walked forward in relative silence, not exactly new for the group but certainly rather strange since they just added a sudden new member to their party but knew next to nothing about him.
Besides a rundown of his situation over the case of a few days.
At the same time, no one really knew how to approach discussion with the dragon. Until he began to cast a new spell, and all of them felt a weak attachment draw close to their minds, almost like an item hovering mere inches away from their hand. It waited for them to grasp it, but nothing forced it upon them, however, from Icy literally casting some spell in front of them it was easy to guess the spell’s non-hostile properties.
It took Korridan and Jaren the longest to figure out how grabbing that ball of energy worked, through mana obviously, but once completed it explained what the dragon had thought of.
“This is a somewhat rudimentary communication spell for our souls. It only allows you to send information to one person at a time, and only allows for written information. Hopefully, this works better until I learn to speak properly. To speak just imprint your thoughts onto a connection to someone else,” he explained to the group of five one by one. Unlike a more advanced version, it required some degree of mental training to be usable, therefore Raccelline remained out of the picture. Regardless, this stuff was far more useful when discussing matters unsuitable for a child.
Like if things went to shit…
Mala immediately asked him a question along their connection. “A psychic spell? I know a few, but how is this translating then?”
“Soul spell,” he replied with a simple response. To be exact, this was the Soul Link spell he learned months back but never really used. However, it was literally made for interspecies communication, so why not utilise it before he learnt Baranot?
Naturally, Mala understood the meaning of a soul spell. As all souls are very alike, it was very easy for information between the two of them to be pure and unfiltered in a way that both perfectly understood what was said. The specifics were a bit more complex, mostly because it seemingly made no sense that souls could instantly translate any desired information for two individuals and allow them to comprehend it with ease, but if this wasn’t the case then soul absorption abilities would just fail to work in general, for one example.
Or soul training methods would also be species-specific, which they weren’t.
While he did set up the little network of Soul Links across all of them, it was only used sparsely to talk about some more personal matters. Familial conflicts were a huge one, for some reason, everyone in the group seemed to have some sort of issue with their parents.
And then there was the dragon, who, like every other of their species, was abandoned at birth to seek strength and the will of a true dragon…
Again, whatever the hell that was. After so long he began to consider if that draconic figure in his mental space from long ago was simply an effect of the bloodline… Even if the will truly existed, how did the dragons expect children to awaken it?
Not a single book which referenced it ever spoke of such methods.