Sometime later, the youngling dragon let out a groan, which alerted the others in the house instantly. He quickly saw that everyone was already inside, and on further appearance, it was late into the night with Raccelline the only one asleep. For once, after a while unconscious, nothing hurt. It said quite a bit for that to be his general response to fainting.
“How long was I out for?” Stuck lying still, he avoided waking the child beside him and spoke in a gentle voice.
Korridan replied, “Just over a day, it’s almost midnight. What was it like?”
Interestingly, Mala didn’t ask that question first. It somewhat made sense as the warriors of the group likely stood to gain the most from ever undergoing an awakening like this. However, it was tough to say what about that event was his representation of it or the real situation of his soul. Besides, the additional things mixed into his soul changed things immensely, with many parts likely having a nice taste.
He did his best to recount the now hazy journey towards his own depths.
However, it was when he described an empty space with only that wall of elemental bricks, that the group’s interest turned to concern. Meanwhile, likely just a visualisation of what the Proto-formed soul looked like, neither he nor Mala believed that such a clean wall grew naturally. For the rest, once they heard about it, the question of why Formed souls no longer awakened such armaments turned clear.
Fortunately, his half-finished wall allowed him to slip by the black space with ease.
Both already compared it to their notes on such awakenings, and it differed somewhat from a regular case.
An outer layer like quicksand, a sea of blue with the stars deep within, were all the same. But instead of vivid colours, most encountered a landscape unique to themselves. Some claimed it similar to a mental space eligible for Mind palaces, being large plains or extensive desert. Such vividness remained true, but the sights and senses differed so wildly that it was tough to draw comparisons.
“What did you get then? Some sort of armour for dragons?” They all knew that Icy sought some real protection, but he never bothered with metal due to its weight and difficulty of finding a smith with expertise in crafting sets for beasts.
In fact, he didn’t know how exactly to find and pull out the item himself. But if it was given due to the bloodline, perhaps the Nexus could answer?
Speaking Draconic, he asked, “How do I retrieve whatever I obtained?”
[Your desires drive the ability to see deeper within. We may only forcibly initiate the process]
Desires once more…
It only made sense. Those who awakened soul armaments are known to die for their beliefs, they were individuals with a deep-rooted will that could not be shaken. After all, if it were so easy to fracture such a thing, they’d have never obtained those armaments.
His mind focused on the white grain of sand within his body, the little soul appeared identical as when he entered it. But this time, the glowing surface of imperfections rippled as his senses drew near. Now so close, the drumbeats deep within appeared and in moments of testing, he discovered the method he needed. Not to enter, but to pull out this item.
With a rope formed by his desires, he felt something attach itself to the other end. A simple thought pulled that thing a distance which previously took days to cross mentally.
The object escaped, and his mind now returned to his body, no longer focused on his soul. Eyes open, he realised that a suit of armour fit for dragons did not cover him from tail to snout, a slight disappointment, but he also clearly did not possess any weapons.
Instead, he found his ‘soul armament’ in front of him, lying on the stone floor of the cottage. An unwound pocket watch with no chain, the lid open to reveal the face within.
Made of a pink crystal for an outer shell, it was a clear and lustrous crystal as though perfectly formed in this curved shape. The clock face was minimal, in fact revealing the watch’s inner workings, which made no sense. Hundreds of miniature gears made of blue crystal, all of them similarly perfect but far more opaque, yet these gears did nothing but look pretty. Nothing was rotated by them, let alone the slim pair of hands which appeared as a white crystal instead. With the markings around the watch face and relevant markings also in that white crystal, he could not help but look at the top of the watch.
A small indented dial to wind up the watch jutted out, and while a small hole indicated the existence of a chain, this armament clearly came without it… Unwilling to mess it up with his thick claws, an Apprentice telekinetic spell lifted it up and gripped the dial gently.
Twisting slightly, he felt some resistance within the tool and turned with greater force. Curiously, the crystal minute hand moved from its position at the 12 o’clock mark and began moving clockwise as he turned. More and more, he turned and turned.
At around a quarter way round the clock face, he realised that the hour hand moved a fraction of the way to the first hour mark. Everyone watched him do this and shared a similar question.
Was this thing a timer?
However, he continued turning. Completing one full rotation of the minute hand and starting a second. However, as it ticked past the 6 o’clock mark, he felt a sickness overwhelm his body. It only took a moment of thought for his mind to once more detach from his body and look inwards at his soul, it began to ripple once more, but he could tell this rippling was nothing to do with an awakening. He stopped trying to turn the watch’s dial and let go.
And so, his question was answered immediately.
The minute hand began moving counter-clockwise, and he saw everyone around him freeze in place… No… Not freeze.
He, too, couldn’t move his body or the telekinetic spell, everything seemed to freeze in place as his senses saw the room in clear detail, but he couldn’t do anything.
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But as the minute hand completed half a cycle, he realised that his statement was wrong.
The world didn’t stop. Rebecca behind him clearly blinked, but at the speed he watched, it was like she slowly opened and closed her eyes, making it obvious that someone moved. So, the watch actually held an extreme time slow ability?
Certainly useful, in fact impeccably so. Time spells are all top-tier, but he found it a bit too impossible that his soul granted such a powerful effect. 60 seconds of slowed time was a single rotation around the clock for the ‘minute’ hand, so he cleared up that mistake too. And after the total of 90 seconds, everyone realised that Icy released the watch, but to them, it was as though it ticked down in less than half a second!
“Is it an effect we can’t see? How do you feel?” Darak immediately looked towards Icy, who stared at the crystal watch with confusion and intrigue at the same time. Two similar emotions, but they could not be mistaken.
“I think time just slowed. That took 90 seconds to tick down for me.” He tested it again right after, but this time only reaching a quarter cycle before that same sickness came over him again, granting 15 seconds of slowed time.
He wasn’t sure what powered this armament, but perhaps the Nexus had an answer?
The prompts available clarified things immediately.
[Obtained Innate ability ‘Bodily Acceleration’]
[Bodily Acceleration: The Soul tool’s acceleration effect may be channelled into specific parts of your body with sufficient mana. This effect is not automatic and care must be taken in what specific parts of the body are accelerated as the effects are precise]
“Acceleration? Not slowing… Does this thing speed me up, not slow everything else down?” He realised his misconstrued error, and with some help from Mala, the two later tested that this guess was correct.
His soul indeed ran almost 50 times faster than his body while the watch was active, giving him a great amount of time to think and act in the middle of a devastating move. However, he could tell that the innate ability that came with it held far more uses in his desire for power than the tool itself… But that would require immense testing and work to use safely. For now, he returned to completing his heart transformation.
* * *
Six months passed since awakening that pocket watch. In the first couple of them, he finished the transformation, and besides getting a title as expected, something about his breath finally changed. It’d been so long since something meaningful happened, not that he counted the recent mutation, and now he could infuse a variety of elements into the breath attack. It wasn’t a very flashy or overwhelming improvement, but he knew the potential uses.
Some tests showed that elements either affected the breath directly or instead released that elemental effect over time whilst stuck to something. How it differentiated between the two seemed quite random.
Fire and ice were both released over time, burning or freezing the foe’s body, respectively. Wind made the spray far more viscous, and it randomly slid around when trying to peel it off with mana, making its removal somewhat tougher. Earth hardened it as soon as it sprayed onto something, forming a solid coating around the opponent, not that this actually helped in many cases as they removed it faster.
Water actually diluted the spray, turning it from a syrup into a usable form of vanilla extract with caramel. In his eyes, this held literally no combat potential.
Lightning just shocked the covered thing, and he could’ve gone on, but most of the effects he could currently test weren’t that amazing. Most did what their elemental effect implied, and since they scaled with the quantity of elements used, this ability held some merits.
Though, from there, it took a downturn…
He knew it was a bad idea, but not going on to make Formed Soul meant that their escape might take even longer. However, with what Icy told them, it became clear that none of them wanted him to cut off the possibility of awakening more than just two tools in his lifetime… That’s also right. In those six months, he underwent a second awakening for his soul armaments.
This time, he actually did acquire a set of armour! Sort of?
It was a mass of flowing silver liquid, mistakable as mercury if not for its far more resplendent shine, and when laid on top of his scales, it formed into layers of armour plates which overlapped but only covered a small portion of his body. It easily switched between solid and liquid forms at will, but he had to constantly manoeuvre it to avoid damage. But it was actually decent armour, compared to his wimpy scales, that is.
It easily blocked the physical strike of a weaker gold tier and actually stopped single-target spells well into Intermediate true spells. Unfortunately, it did nothing against wide range attacks and usually shattered into pieces after a few attacks, slowly receding into his soul from which he waited a day for it to reform.
Like all soul armaments, he imagined that it grew stronger with his soul but also became a larger set of armour.
However, progress on soul-based casting went poorly as he stopped trying to improve himself structurally. There was another way to empower himself, except it relied on a painfully slow method of first creating a rudimentary soul furnace within his Mind palace. This thing was also somewhat different from the ordinarily array-covered furnaces that one saw.
Little more than a brick box with one section for fuel and another for the substance to-be smelted, most people used soul furnaces to achieve very special forms of crafting within one’s mental space.
However, he’d simply be forcing the souls into the fuel section and burning them until their protective shells gave out and they utterly collapsed, at which point the clean fumes of soul power could be absorbed by his own shell. This method was wasteful and monstrous, requiring hundreds of equal level souls just to improve his own to the same point of a Formed Soul…
But, something had to be done. And not like they didn’t routinely kill gold tiers for food.
It might be questioned how come he hadn’t evolved after so many months, especially as he often averaged an evolution every three months or so. The reality is that he did evolve, just once, around a month after awakening the pocket watch. As the group often hunted the same beasts at this point, it was tough to constantly acquire new things for him to gather bloodline energy from, but eventually, it did, in fact, happen.
However, unlike his initial plans, he didn’t assimilate the World-shaker elephant yet, mostly out of concern that it was still far above the wyvern and elder guard, potentially killing him instantly.
He focused on enhancing the evolutions he already had, choosing one which developed his Mind palace to become a store of mana. This one was actually rather basic amongst the evolution options, as shown by insane concepts like Equivalence Principium from the previous evolution… But he really just needed crazy stores of mana.
And the one he selected, Palace Experimentalist, was one which allowed the creation of vessels to store mana and various elements within his mental space. In theory, he could maintain a basement filled with massive tanks of various pure elements, substituting them for spells or even use them to empower the arrays on his Mind palace.
Was it a wasted evolution? Not really…
After all, it was the next one which would be a lot more interesting.
[Assimilated World-shaker elephant! 7 new bloodline pathways potentially available]
[The comparative difference between this bloodline and others has exceeded all expectations of the Nexus, and it is unknown if a separate rank should exist between this one and ‘Extreme’. For now, it is denoted as ‘Legendary+’ rank]
Deadly was becoming a bit of an understatement with these things.