By the day’s end, Akevorax truly couldn’t comprehend what exactly maintained the stability of golden elements in their higher dimensions. He considered that the dimensions or elements themselves contained intelligence and balanced them manually, but this went against all logic as the process ought to be natural and self-sustaining.
Like how sunlight evaporates water, which then falls elsewhere as rain. This natural cycle of nature sustained itself so long as the source of heat remained, and for that reason he gave up.
He understood the life element well enough, but not the dimensions behind it.
So, as he claimed, the next step came in the form of soul training. Unlike many other dragons, Akevorax made the entire process into a piece of cake by the nature of his Soul Capturing bloodline, and this next step was no different. The array took some time to set up on account of its size enveloping almost 50 metres across and requiring about 15 layers for a complete mess of effects and enhancements. To save on the whole explanation, it was best to summarise what the majority did.
Firstly, four of the arrays acted purely as Base components. Even at their size, they purely existed to endlessly filter elements into a refined form close to condensed mana in nature, and then store them as necessary. A required component as the next step in Galactic Soul Armoury required doses of highly compressed elements to be provided all at once.
One Trigger array monitored his Soul at all times in case the influx of elements caused any problems. This resulted in an Effect array pulling out all these loose elements as fast as possible to reduce damages, this safety mechanism a necessity as many combinations of elements resulted in devastating expulsions of energy when allowed to float freely.
A literal bomb exploding right beside you is bad enough, but to have it beside your soul?
Lastly, the other nine Effect arrays. Whilst one of them purely created that same grey substance he used to create the elemental veins not too long ago, the other eight allowed him to set elements in place once placed in ideal locations.
As for the actions he took himself…
The arrays lit up once again and pulses of rich colourful lights charged into his body, forced inside against his better judgement and fired directly towards the Elemental Heart all at once. At the same time, a mist of grey filled his body and somehow slowed the pulses of energy, coating them in the substance at the same time. This in no way reduced the pain and irritation he felt throughout.
However, his Mind now sensed the location of every single element with ease, and he could move them about with sufficient concentration. That sounded so much easier than it truly was, but after hours of attempts he finally figured out a way to split his attention such that the pulses all retained stability.
And now he actually began the process.
Taking the pulses of elements, he slowly dragged them towards the connecting vessels of the heart and gently compressed all the vibrating balls to a small circle. From there he extruded each one into a thinning strand and twisted them to form a spiral of multi-coloured rods.
Once the thickness of this spiral matched the connecting artery, he manually triggered the eight Effect arrays and held on for dear life.
He failed at this step 15 times so far, but hadn’t given up once as his progress slowly built up. From failing to control the elements at all, to an explosion almost occurring as they gathered to a small area, and eventually messing up the creation of those spiral fibres…
Copious mana forced its way into his body, towards his soul and completely surrounding the heart and little branch of twisted elements that would soon attach itself to this structure. The pain from this action was unreal, equal to the full mana of a master tier rampaging within his body, but Akevorax recovered from all that damage just as fast. However, the pain hardly ended there, as a searing pain erupted from his soul.
It felt different from when he melted. Different from any cut, bruise, wound, corrosion, or anything really.
The pain caused his whole body to shake. His Mind palace as a whole cracked under the intense force placed upon him.
But his soul simply sat within the Elemental Heart, unaffected by the momentous powers converged within his body. The two crystalline compression of elements which formed the heart began to melt somewhat, and so the malleable spiral now melted together with the original before the entire thing hardened once more.
A process lasting 10 seconds at most, and for all that effort he created a tiny extension from the Elemental Heart… The first of thousands.
These spiralled strands of elements would go on to become the circulatory system required for the next step which generally required one to be at tier 6 in the book’s words. In more local terms, a master tier.
The fact his Mind palace lost several bricks and cracked in various places told him enough about the intensity of this process.
The third step of this technique was called Soul Warrior, however, that state was years away at his current pace. Instead, he focused on the major goals within this step, these split up into:
Inner Creation, Outer Creation, and Combination.
Inner referred to a complete set of blood vessels related to the being using the technique, Akevorax therefore took notes on his own body and tried to figure out where his blood vessels ought to be for a regular dragon. Oddly difficult when you don’t have any blood. The benefit of this step was a massive boost to soul power regeneration, allowing the user to utilise far more soul spells in battle.
Outer Creation was simply the skin and appearance, however, while you could be as vain as desired in this step, what made it difficult was the high degree of concentration required for adequate defences. So much so that Akevorax literally could not complete it unless his soul power increased drastically, or he enhanced his soul in other ways, like evolution. Meanwhile, this portion did precisely as expected, granting a defence which blocked pretty much anything below master tier.
Even the lower end great language spells couldn’t damage it!
Akevorax didn’t even bother going through the process for Combination though, it required the two former parts to become linked through a series of mystical organs with abstract uses. In the past he questioned its vagueness, but ever since learning a basic higher concept he realised that the organs themselves interacted with some sort of dimension in a strange way.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
If it told him how or what to create, the resultant product might not contain his original thoughts.
And while it isn’t outright harmful to help others grasp these concepts, there are times where conflicting discoveries or interpretations come up… And those always resulted in a depressing death.
With a single completion of the technique as proof for its plausibility, Akevorax now spent just 20 minutes every day to complete another small section of this artery. The rest of the day went to other forms of education and recovery, after all, just this singular extension damaged his Mind palace a bit, multiple uses might directly destroy buildings.
A few days of this passed staggering quickly, the group ate and talked at times, but for the most part they took advantage of the safety offered and immense repertoire of knowledge which everyone could make use of.
Akevorax did eventually remember to ask the four about their tails, not making a huge fuss of it during a rather casual conversation.
Mala replied first as she recounted the situation with Casstilandri, “So, it turns out I was somewhat wrong about the development of these tails. As we empower the dragon hearts, it is likely we’ll transform further with more physical traits until gaining elemental bodies.”
“So you need full cellular control to manage the transformation… What the hell’s wrong with your hearts then?” Akevorax’s voice strained with confusion as he read some notes on the process some time ago, and confirmed that the dragon heart potion never resulted in this effect.
In fact, this marked the first occurrence of such a thing.
“About that… It seems the alchemist that created our potion is a rather famous exiled dragon from here.”
“Exiled for what?”
“Constant experimentation with dragon hearts, not that he purposely killed any dragons for them. Probably,” Mala’s tone already led his thoughts on a wild ride. Even if he hadn’t quietly hunted down his own kind for research materials, it was well known that the race disliked all research into uses of dragon hearts. If any new, valuable methods were discovered it could very easily lead to hundreds of dead dragons.
From the side, Jaren spoke up and rolled his eyes, “You’re leaving out the important part again. He was exiled because his research was to improve the dragon heart potions by forcibly growing Draconic traits onto the recipient.”
Akevorax’s eyes went wide as he replied, “More than just physical traits?”
To which all four adults nodded at once. The idea that a dragon’s innate abilities could be transferred through a potion might just embolden the dragon hunters to almost unfounded levels. However, it came with a catch.
Once a consumer of this potion completed the first transformation, their heart was no lesser than a dragon heart!
This process not only improved the general power of all races, but massively devalued the dragon heart at the same time.
Was this the legendary alchemist's goal? Or was it just a simple desire to play around with the innately special hearts of dragons?
“He’s insane… Even with a dragon heart, most warriors would struggle to hit Starlite rank and then transform to an elemental body. You’d effectively be turning a huge population of every race into pseudo-dragonkin!” Akevorax finalised his thoughts on the matter, but it all reverted to a singular concept.
This alchemical dragon was insane.
To come up with an idea like this you’d have to be… But then he actually half-succeeded in his attempts. After all, the four humans here currently developed tails, their second round of transformation might grant a layer of scales or replace the tails with claws. He adjusted to the fact very quickly, but the four must’ve struggled far more to accept such an insane reality.
Only Korridan was about to form an elemental body, and that came down to the fact his evolution required it.
Darak naturally formed one as a Blossoming priest when under the endowment of his god.
Mala… wouldn’t struggle since she was a wizard, but how she formed her body greatly impacted her future path.
Jaren was the one most likely to struggle, but at the same time his persistence meant that he would easily overcome it in due time.
“Right, did you three need an array to trigger your second transformation spell?” He asked a quick question to the three unable to cast spells. With Casstilandri’s aid, Mala easily completed an Intermediate true spell which created stable, further compressed crystals, for which the dragon elder kindly created an array for as Akevorax couldn’t easily translate the spellcasting rings to an array.
“Sure, but could I also have that passive type you use?” Korridan replied first with the other two in thought for a few moments, but also nodding not long after. It took him just twenty minutes to engrave the six arrays, none of them all that complex given their relatively simple effects.
And once he returned to the arrays which muffled outside noise, he couldn’t help but look awkwardly at his partially damaged Mind palace in annoyance.
He wished he knew an array which automatically healed palaces… Or at least had someone who could do this menial task for him while he trained in more important aspects.
An idea struck him like a bolt of lightning, and hurriedly he both considered the possibility whilst asking, “Can I? Nexus, is the effect of Dragoncored limited to myself, or could I replicate it for anything in my mental space?”
[That was not simulated during the evolution. You will have to test it yourself]
“Then can you at least humour my actual idea?”
[In theory you wouldn’t even need the effect of your bloodline to achieve it]
He excitedly looked towards the souls within one of his building’s roofs, eyeing those from wizards he killed not too long ago. However, he frowned after a few more seconds and now looked towards a few different souls, these ones took longer to distinguish as they came from the elven assassins whose bodies he still hadn’t eaten. Since he acquired nothing of use from those warriors who attacked in the Everlard range, he second-guessed the need to consume more bodies. Not out of some ridiculous ethics, but because he believed the bodies might be used better as magical components or something…
“If I use Necromancy to recreate their Minds… Then enslave them in my Mind palace as workers… I need to check the library.”
[We recommend against that. Palace slaves are a rather frowned upon concept; most of the universe does not take kindly to any form of enslavement]
“Should I feel bad about making use of things that tried to kill me?”
[Of course not, but it’s preferable to stay quiet on things like this]
That put a massive hamper on his plans, not to mention he now had to figure out a way to control the connected individuals in his palace at all times. Fortunately, he didn’t see this being all that hard since the parts created by the True Necromancy book featured quite a few flaws, namely that distorted personalities or outright mental deficiencies were common.
So long as he killed any Minds which maintained their common sense, he could just continually utilise the Body and Soul to generate new, fresh Minds over and over!
Thinking about it… He understood why this necromancy became a taboo now. But it worked far better than trying to develop a technique for something so specific and equally unliked.
Anyway, True Necromancy really wasn’t all that hard to accomplish with the book in hand.
He just needed somewhere quiet to set it up, where no one would bother him, and a rich supply of bodies and souls to supplement the consumption of the original in its process. After all, the original technique actually created one from two, as it consumed the latter for the former… But this ‘resurrection’ was effectively a loophole formed by substituting the ‘two’ for ‘others’
From there, the bulk of this necromancy came down to an incomprehensible mess of a technique which somehow scanned an entire brain to convert the neural connections into memories, habits, psychological states, and a whole breadth of biology that some necromancers and wizards excelled at.
But he was neither of those things.
So he’d just use the fruits of their labour to produce his mindless drones.