Half an hour after all the beasts left, the hatchling too returned home. Upon exiting the barrier, it collapsed on its own and he slowly adapted to wearing a belt around his belly. It wasn’t the worst sensation, although its design in no way complimented his light brown scales.
Within its dimensional storage, the girl, Raccelline, kindly placed his two items for safekeeping. The lantern wasn’t completely uncharged as he initially imagined, although from testing the contained souls weren’t even enough to release a single beam.
In other words, less than 10% full for now.
Once home, he failed to find a single animal in the outdoors, likely frightened after the constant auras appeared. As for humans… they probably just wanted to run off, now feeling the heightened mana. For him, it meant nothing special as he cooked some wolf meat before getting some rest, not even bothering with a portion of blood as the pot neared empty.
Tonight would be a moment of huge growth, and he looked forward to seeing just how far he’d go. He also removed the belt as it interrupted him whilst lying down and the repercussions of wearing it during rapid growth occurred to him.
Surprisingly energetic, it took hours before he fell asleep, and to speed up the process he drained his MP a few times in hopes that the repeated usage forced a bout of tiredness on him.
How unfortunate he forgot to keep coniferous eternity ferns on him, it would’ve solved this issue with ease. But the plan worked at least, after expanding his main room to double its size, he felt sleepy enough to rest.
And the next several hours were exceptional.
Not even that long after falling asleep, his body rapidly grew to almost double its current size. Heart, lungs, stomach, brain, even the claws on his feet, they all enlarged greatly and boosted his ability to incredible levels.
Compared to his newborn state, his heart alone was now twice its original size! His head was at least thrice as large, and while his body felt normal, its power actually increased by a small amount. His scales thickened considerably, becoming somewhat more elastic in the process.
In just a single night, he achieved a month of growth!
An abnormal growth speed in fact, as no dragon could normally absorb life essence so quickly. The stratnum fruit alone takes a week to digest, but the life essence within required twice that.
So, when he woke up in the morning he wasn’t at all surprised, merely amazed by the growth. His body couldn’t even fit through the tunnels anymore, which meant an unfortunate pain of having to melt away enough snow until he could freely move about.
But he didn’t leave yet, staying inside for a while longer to see how far his growth extended.
He also looked through some books to understand divinity more, although dragons rarely talked about the topic as their god so rarely handed down such runes. Only some of the most devout dragon priests were eligible for such power, and even then it wasn’t unbelievably powerful as the role might suggest.
As for demigods, the dragon race actually had none due to lacking a pious dedication to their god in general. Exactly how this religion even worked left him a bit stumped, and yet he still didn’t understand how divinity worked. So, he changed methods.
“Nexus, how does the divinity within me work?” There was no response to this, a fair reasoning as the question had no intentional relation to bloodlines nor the Nexus itself. This led to the immediate refinement, “Why didn’t absorbing the divinity cause me to die like assimilating a bloodline?”
[Divinity is dormant, it cannot be utilised prior to reaching Master tier. Furthermore, divinity is not a bloodline and thus cannot cause a structural breakdown]
“I have to reach that level just to utilise divinity?”
[Yes, under normal cases]
He almost felt tempted enough to curse, finding out he gained an incredible power but it wasn’t all that useful for years to come! Thankfully, he acquired some items from that Sage, and now truly liked that Raccelline spoke up for him.
One thing bugged him though, that being how it stated ‘normal cases’ so nonchalantly. Since when did this thing casually add detail without reason!
He gave it an obligatory questioning in response, “How does the Nexus know that divinity would behave like that with my situation?
[We do not. Nothing leads us to anticipate that divinity will impact the assimilation process differently, but currently seven reasonable assumptions exist as to what may happen]
“What are the top three?” More so out of curiosity, he thought it best to prepare against such a situation.
[1. Kandir divinity selectively enhances its own bloodline, providing further benefits for its race’s path during evolutions
2. Divinity enhances all assimilation processes, easing the burden but possibly consuming its power
3. Divinity provides bonuses to any selected bloodline upon evolution, regardless of relation to Kandir giants]
None of those ideas sounded insane, but on the other hand… Did any of that actually make sense?
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From what he saw the second of those appeared most beneficial to him, aiding him in completing that unlikely dream of assimilating all the powerful creatures here. He doubted such a convenience could exist though.
“I don’t understand. If the divinity is dormant how can it make choices like that? My body would have to actively use it.” He didn’t doubt the Nexus accounting for this, but rather trusted his body to act with its own benefits in mind far more.
Would his innate draconic powers enhance a foreign bloodline over its own? Absolutely not.
[Unknown if this is true. This is one of many assumptions, currently the interaction of unstable genetics and divinity is entirely unknown]
So it was just his guess being wrong? Divinity and bloodlines worked in entirely different ways, making it impossible to understand just what might happen over time. Removing it was just as impossible as taking away an assimilation, simply out of his control to an extreme.
But first it became a matter of thinking up what to do, and it allowed him to remember the reason he even wanted to stay inside. A complete month of growth should’ve been substantial besides gaining mass.
He should’ve hit the limit for awakening, and yet he had yet to? This really just came down to not growing enough then, and an easy solution for such a thing wasn’t out of the question. Just consume more sap and continue eating loads.
That morning, he ravenously devoured all the remaining wolf blood before eating a portion of meat quadruple his normal serving. Yet even after that a faint hunger remained, and he feared devouring his whole stockpile at this rate.
[Consumed Stormfrost lord wolf bloodline! Assimilation progress 63%]
That was a whole gallon of blood he drank in a single go as well, capable of stomaching it from start to end just to gulp more down without waiting. He hadn’t felt it earlier, but a full month of growth made him insatiable beyond normal cases.
With a spare knife in the dimensional storage, he used Telekinesis and a Third eye to eventually get the belt back on, realising that an upgraded spell was absolutely necessary. Pronounced telekinesis was one which took this next step, and changed it to a mental link with the object which granted an understanding of its position at all times.
This mental link is similar to controllable spells in general, just that he gained some feedback akin to Third eye at all times. Some compared it to gaining a new limb. It’s only cost was having to learn a 23 word spell.
Extremely tough at his level, but also worth using by most accounts. Pronounced telekinesis optimised itself greatly to be left activated at all times, only using MP to move items when needed, as such, the MP cost of just keeping it on was negligible.
The recent growth spurt should have massively raised his max MP as well, not that he really tried things out. So, where better to start than throwing out expensive spells to test the newfound improvements?
First of all, he cast Explosive bolt with ease. An uninteresting change in mana, dropping to 96% MP from a single use. Using a second one showed his mana drop to 93%.
This wasn’t a joke, his MP went from extremely high to ridiculous levels. Part of him believed that casting Apprentice true spells might be just around the corner, but that idea faded as he still needed to reach awakening first.
His next test was Explosive seal, a spell which only used a similar amount of mana. Having only used it once before it was no surprise seeing his partially refilled MP drop from 95% to 90%. Then came the more amusing tests.
Mental shock also only cost a few percent, as did the two blade storm spells he knew. Rapid camouflage dropped to just 8% of his MP, being around 25% when used in the past.
Funnily enough, making a Jump seal actually left his MP at the same value! It used so little mana that only through using it thrice in a row did it change by 1%. However, most importantly, Instant shift went from using at least 35% of his MP to just over 10%.
A month of growth improved his max MP almost three times over! While not entirely clear, this middle portion of the growth stage is where it reaches a peak and a dragon’s body increases far more than at other periods. As for why?
To prepare them for the awakening. In the meantime, he decided to test some of the Nexus’ theories on divinity and how it might interact with his assimilations. The first step being nothing more than finding something to hunt in the wild.
Then tear into its succulent body and… He felt a bit woozy from the idea, a roaring hunger still urging him to devour whatever possible. Heading out immediately, he used Water control to dig through the exit and immediately cast Rapid camouflage to better approach targets.
At first he found a small hare, but left it be since he knew it wouldn’t fill up the appetite at all. He needed larger and far more muscular animals. But such a thing didn’t take too long, although he strangely did not come across any humans.
A body would’ve been greatly appreciated…
Instead he found a large Ice-charge boar to kill, making things fast by using a powerful Mental blast to instantly crush its mind. The animal had no clue that it even died by the time his spell hit, and then it just took a Telekinesis to drag it back safely.
His improved tunnels could even fit the boar, so there was no need to cut it up!
But once inside, there wasn’t much decorum as he created a massive Lesser flame and roasted the bulky pig with a knife waiting at the side. It’s skin crackled quickly in the resplendent flames, and even though the heat nipped at his face, the desire to eat completely overwhelmed that concern. The heavy knife at his side just waiting to cut into the blood-filled body and eat till the bones were clean.
However, cooking a whole boar isn’t exactly a fast process, even with the skin charred black and peeling off the corpse at this point. To speed things up, he used the knife to cut off the partially cooked head, chucking it in a pot, and dropping its whole body in right after.
While difficult, he held up the heavy corpse and knife at the same time, then cut its body into eight large pieces while letting the guts and organs fall into the pot with all the blood. The eight cut parts then returned to his Lesser flame, occasionally cut into smaller sections to further speed up this cooking process.
Fifteen minutes later he had a whole boar-worth of cooked meat, and his method of cooling simply involved chucking snow over the meat until it stayed in his mouth without hurting.
Half an hour later, the whole boar body vanished, the pot with blood, organs, and guts now only retained about part of the blood and all its guts. The remaining bones also sat at the side as his hunger finally felt quelled for once, and his stomach utterly full of meat and blood which took time to digest.
Not once had hunger taken over him to this extent, but with it finally being over, he tipped the remaining parts of the boar outside and washed out the pot with a few Water spells before heading back inside.
Throughout it all, he only cared about food entering him. Neither the taste nor desirability mattered, merely substance. Thankfully a whole boar managed to fulfil his sudden needs.
With that in mind, he finally set off properly, searching for more bloodlines and setting a new goal for the day.
Take a look at the node tree for once. He wanted to see what sort of creature could dominate this region.