Just north of the Dragonlands’ central mountain sat the peak dedicated to the First Elder, who usually went about his day in peace, but currently took on an arguably worrying situation. For the third time this past week, supreme tier dragons came to the peak seeking some sort of arbitration as a minute crystal dart tried to attack them. Obviously, they all knew the source, but it was hard to react, as the dart shouldn’t have even been able to access their caves. Then came the issue of these dragons usually locking away all outside senses to purely focus on internal development and growth.
Especially at their levels, growing beyond an Exalted Soul and Master mind palace were important goals.
“It’s one thing for him to go after those weaklings, but surely he should be taught a lesson by now for going after those with Manifested Wills?” Even though the two dragons were technically in the same tier, becoming an elder amongst dragons already implied great strength as a supreme tier. And since it was quite well known that the elders doted on this outlier amongst the younger generation, a direct pushback was unwise by all standards.
And just as expected, when the First Elder finally answered, it was a sarcastic response which admonished this top tier dragon. He said, “Aren’t you to blame for that?”
“But why can he do it? How is he using aura to break these arrays?” The distress in this dragon’s voice could clearly be heard, having researched the fact himself and lost by the possibility of all this.
“No one bothered much with aura studies because isolating the power is too troublesome. One moment,” the elder gave a frank response but took a moment to raise his head towards another mountain peak. It only took a moment for information to transfer back and forth as even he frowned at the data returned by Casstilandri. “Interesting, it appears he’s overloading arrays with… Does that work? Surely aura doesn’t ruin arrays like this,” from the quickly decaying tone, the watching supreme tier dragon’s face only grew longer by the second.
“What exactly has he been doing?”
“Array blocking followed by overloading and self-repair destruction. But the method is quite novel, Casstilandri seems to be unable to reproduce it with just aura as well… And he’s been using Domination Force, somehow.” As the degrees of surprise and confusion only bloated up and up, unnerved reactions grew larger from the supreme tier who simply came here to vent and ask the elders to stop the troublesome kid from bothering him.
Instead it appeared like the already scary kid somehow grew frightening powers like fruit from a tree.
They could not help but ask, “What sort of monster will he be after using the dragonstone?”
No response came though, and instead the First Elder pointed for them to leave without any further discussion. The silence did not last long though, as the older dragon failed to hide his smirk any longer, and even laughed gently in the silent but well-lit cave. The weakling dragons who Akevorax stole blood from still hated the kid’s guts, but their utter shamelessness, going so far to pretend it wasn’t his soul armament, really earned a laugh from the stronger dragons. Certainly, all four elders waited to see if Akevorax ever grew so emboldened to try and extract something from their bodies.
The unnamed First Elder did eventually find an answer to that supreme tier’s question though. Saying aloud to the few voices across the Dragonlands who could hear him, “He might actually live up to his name.”
It wasn’t hard to agree given what they knew.
…
On Akevorax’s side, the problems weren’t any less. Even if they came from the fact that his soul armament actually had a physical limit to the number of extractions it could perform each day, that number was a surprising 1500 times… There should be no question of how he found out this limitation. But with this in mind, he now defaulted to scouring countless books for special plant bloodlines.
Plants with abilities that would appear undoubtedly incredulous on anything non-plant… very few of these existed for obvious reasons.
It might seem obvious that a strong plant could just inherit similar rebirth tools like the eternity fern, however, the few species with such abilities never even stepped beyond bronze tier. A long and troublesome bit of research occurred when he sought out an answer for this, and it came back round to an incredibly simple matter.
Energy requirements. Funnily enough, the same reason this ability was generally impossible to see outside of plants.
However, that isn’t to say he found nothing for all his searches.
Three bloodlines specifically drew his interest. One which belonged to a subset of plants, these all capable of ‘rooting’ themselves to elemental realms to draw out copious quantities of a corresponding element. Many of them tend to latch onto sub-realms completely composed of a specific element, but the strongest version of these plants directly broke into source realms and sucked out whatever possible from there.
Just a way to endlessly acquire mana from the pure source completely changed all his work on arrays. Anyway, the weakest of these plants were grade 1 resources so he reluctantly held off.
Not to mention he’d have to consume dozens of them for a single assimilation.
As for the other… It technically counted as a parasite, but this plant possessed some strange method to brainwash entire forests or plains to turn the giant swathes of biomass into their personal food factories. Like this, the parasite focuses on growing itself and will spread a child once it reaches mithril tier. The problem came down to the vehemence such a plant received, in that most species only stored a tiny volume for experiments, hardly the fifty or so pieces for an assimilation.
He also found a range of weird or strange abilities, but so many of them only helped stationary individuals. Giving them to a tanky individual like Korridan changed a lot, but how did they help a dragon with minimal defences?
Those things didn’t really synergise with divinity as well, so nothing much changed if he wasted evolutions on those bloodlines.
But that third bloodline… Akevorax already researched where the plants grew but held off on leaving as the place contained an abundance of master tier beasts. Furthermore, a rather scary race of insects dominated that land, a large stretch of desert located on the south western edge of the human continent. In that place existed a special sort of cactus which routinely survived by hiding its mana in a method completely unique to itself and a few rare species.
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As the only one of the plants below mithril tier, he obviously preferred to search for it. At the same time, this desert of master tiers revealed a possible source of further Elder bloodlines for his final Nexus mission.
Besides all that, he already recovered the lost Dominator Force by drinking masses of dragon's blood every single day after an easy assimilation of the Conquering Juggernaut.
It very much turned out that hundreds of Legendary rank bloodlines very quickly resulted in serial evolutions. And with the ridiculous threat that were the eternals, he didn’t really care if the dragons noticed his rate of evolution. With most elders on his side, it became a question of how fast he could grow… Akevorax didn’t let anyone down in that regard though.
His Holistic Eternal bloodline was lost, unfortunately, the next few evolutions proved that pretty conclusively. And while he felt some temptation in scouring the hundreds of dragon evolutions for anything useful… He really couldn’t care for it.
“I select Spatial Deconstruction Ice-cream,” he selected one week after recovering his Origin Conquering bloodline. However, this decision didn’t even last a week.
[Spatial Deconstruction Ice-cream: All space can be deconstructed into geometric planes, and all movements within it simplified to simple calculations in these two directions. By reducing the complex, realistic control over space for a purely mathematical solution, all movements across planes are trivialised. All to a limit, of course]
His first choice came as a complete upgrade to Fabric Warper as he desperately sought an improvement which allowed him complete utilisation even outside the main universe. Furthermore, he could do the extremely simple vector calculations involved for this bloodline, whereas Fabric Warper required him to understand some ridiculous sixth dimensional spatial geometry as well as learning time dependency. The ability to intuitively teleport was a luxury he never took for granted.
But as stated, he never even paid attention to the temporary bonuses of this bloodline as he already said just a week later, “I select Land of Dragons Ice-cream… Is it really necessary to have Ice-cream on the end of every bloodline?” He asked a question to the Nexus, but it ignored him as the evolution occurred.
[Land of Dragons Ice-cream: With the Manifested Will awakened, its effect on the Draconic Mind Palace is increased immensely. Manifested Wills behave differently within the realm of the Mind and Soul though. Through modification and enhancement, the Soul and Mind may already become one, leading to an obvious question. Is your mental space not already a home for the Manifested Will?]
A needless rhetoric from the Nexus, but he understood the gist of this bloodline as he still fondly recalled that first time he came across the True Will’s appearance in his Mind palace. The primary effect of his illusory descension was that nullifying wave which previously only worked on the absolute weakest spells. Even Beginner true spells retained a tiny portion of their power through it! The enhancement absolutely changed it though, the wave capably resisted and easily nullified Adept true spells!
Interestingly, while the wave of energy was golden, he could not properly figure out what dimensions it laid on the intersection of.
But part of him believed this to be some sort of anti-magic effect, not that it made sense.
As for Land of Dragons, it appeared that his True Will was not as limited in his mental space. Rather than taking form as a single spiritual dragon, it could even split into hundreds of forms with far weaker power. However, within his new mental space the True Will gained an ability to grow stronger. Not literally to note.
Rather, the individual parts all slowly absorbed some sort of soul power and recovered to their original states… That really perked his interest quickly. What would happen if 100 miniature True Wills all returned to their original power and merged together?
This failed catastrophically by the time of his next evolution. As it turned out, the recovery speed of such an ability was so slow that it made his soul training look speedy. To make up for this failure, he instead split the True Will into just 3 parts for now. By his calculations, it required about 2 years for just these thirds to fully recover. On the other hand, he already picked his next evolution by this point.
“...Dimension Force Ice-cream,” he gave the next choice without much hesitation. He was too lazy to search through the endless list of bloodlines, and any upgrade to Domination Force couldn’t be that bad. Akevorax picked this bloodline because he precisely knew what this upgrade to Domination Force achieved.
[Dimension Force Ice-cream: Through direct submission of a dimension, you suppress a whole element at will, completely stripping a foe of a specified power so long as you can afford the cost. But it is such a waste to diffuse something like Origin Force through a dimension only to weakly focus its effects, rather, just suppress the whole dimension!]
This really didn’t need an explanation. It only made his already powerful ability useful against Sages and the like. He earned so much more by completely cutting off an entire colour of spells as opposed to a single element, and this made excellent precaution against Sages in his future.
Not to mention, this gave him a jokingly easy way to bully weaker wizards who focused heavily into a single type of structure and its relevant colour.
And so it continued… Just four more times. He really put a lot of time and effort into going for broke. Because seven evolutions in a couple months was the most normal thing in the world. The sheer amount of sarcasm some dragons held back when they saw this might have been enough to beat out even Jaren’s humour.
As for the other four evolutions, they were:
Eye of Truth, Palace of Arrays, Starving Regrowth, and Conjunctured Ice-cream. Against his wishes, the Nexus preferred to keep the unnecessary postfix.
A simplistic summary of all four: Eye of Truth enhanced his greatly Elder eyes; Palace of Arrays enhanced all Mind palace buildings with arrays on them as well as the speed to produce such arrays; Starving Regrowth pushed his Undying Body up to new heights of insane regeneration speeds and insatiable mana consumption; lastly, Conjunctured acted as a transitory bloodline which worked to merge his physical draconic components with his spiritual components.
Of the names, the last two definitely took a lead for the vaguest of his evolutions.
Starving Regrowth referred to his body’s endless desire to devour power to recover itself to a peak state. In a way he almost likened it to a cancer’s attempt to draw energy from a host and grow without end.
Conjunctured didn’t offer many direct bonuses, but merged together his draconic bloodline with the already draconic nature of his palace. This combination led to not just another degree of improvement for the palace’s magic negation, but also created a protective force around him so long as the Mind palace descended nearby. Furthermore, it actually improved all draconic portions of his body, including his breath attack, which not only drastically reacted with elemental effects but also stuck to pretty much anything besides crystal bodies.
It goes without saying, that while none of these bloodlines explosively raised his direct power or talent, the combined effect of so many evolutions finally resulted in a similar rise as the single Eternal Holistic option. Combining three final bloodlines into a single evolution truly gave some ridiculous options, and in fact he’d even seen an option which combined four of them together. However, this wasted so much talent in his eyes, and Akevorax wasn’t even done with the evolutions yet!
It was just that his body told him otherwise…