While two beasts died due to their misfortune, the dragon considered today an unbelievable boon. Two upgrades to his body for just a week of waiting!
Out of interest, he ate the lynx’s strange new teeth first. To his amazement, not even a glacial crush broke the strange, speckled teeth. They appeared white like refined sugar, but the little coloured points all over stood out far too much… The Nexus’ information cleared that up though.
[Killed level 16 Jawbreaker teeth Lightning lynx! Received 2% EXP
Killed level 17 Mixed Ice-cream Vibrant life boar! Received 3% EXP]
Jawbreakers was an interesting term, namely as no book on food ever mentioned such a sweet! The ice-cream wasn’t too surprising, although he wondered what mixture this boar was exactly. First asking the Nexus, “What are Jawbreakers?”
To no surprise, the Nexus remained quiet. Well, he could take some guesses as he sucked on the teeth as well. With a strong sweetness, he knew the mutation went swimmingly and produced this strange candy he’d never heard of before. His only concern had to be that the small size of all these teeth was too little to obtain this trait.
Teeth which could actually bite had been a desire since his earliest days along with proper scales. And while the wafers fulfilled one side, he longed for the day when he tore a chunk of flesh apart without the need for tools.
In just a few minutes, he tore out all the jawbreaker teeth and swallowed them, and even scraped out any part of its gums which also transformed into the hard candy.
For a few seconds, disappointment set in, but then a bit of ice-cream fell into his mouth… He spat it out and saw the tooth-shaped bit.
A second and third dropped right after, and he was toothless again!
It had been enough!
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy. A numb pain covered his gums, his whole mouth ached as a row of teeth slowly grew from the empty holes left by the weak ice-cream teeth. Every single one felt as tough as bone, and their edges razor sharp, so much so that he feared testing as they pushed out bit by bit.
There was no time to check colour or such, but his mana sight showed that they matched the jawbreaker teeth in mana density near-identically.
He grinded the developing teeth together, and felt relief at the sensation of his own mouth. As he scraped and ground the two sets together, he closed his eyes and simply let the pain continue. Not that it would last long like the development of his wafer scales quite a while ago. Just a minute later and all that pain left, a young dragon simply took pleasure in finally gaining real teeth.
And one corpse remained!
While waiting, he put them to a test. The teeth awkwardly grabbed at the boar’s skin, tearing through it with ease! He ripped it to shreds and quickly got to its innards, all its muscle and fat turned to ice-cream!
In particular, he found a mixture of strawberry, chocolate, and some green type he didn’t recognise. While he didn’t actually know the taste of chocolate or strawberries before this, he knew of their distinct colours and linked it to the two food evolutions he received every time thus far. It did not take long before he consumed well over half the boar’s innards, eating a large mix of all the composite ice-cream. And a mellow flush warmed him up, before he felt the sensation pass without a problem.
His mana sight revealed no changes internally, but he knew that the flavours within him differed. So much so that he felt obligated to cut himself open and take a look… Until he thought that through a bit more and knocked some sense into himself.
Although, the Nexus finally had something to say about this improvement.
[Acquired innate ability ‘Ice-cream generation’]
On second thought, maybe he didn’t want this one…
[Ice-cream generation: Mana may be consumed to produce varying quantities of any ice-cream which you are composed of. This cannot create accompanying sweets like cookies, brownies, or so on which some types of ice-cream contain]
“This is a joke right? Right!?” He began shouting to the Nexus, but received no answer… He was actually a food source now.
That little joke he made became reality. It actually became real.
“What am I even doing… It doesn’t matter. Maybe something will eat this stuff and give me more evolutions.” Looking at the two bodies, one almost completely intact, but the other half-empty as he cleared out its ice-cream innards, he decided to make a return to the elephant corpse.
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For the rest of the day, he just ate and drank bits of the elephant. On occasion he vanished from the tree to check that nightmare stalk’s progress, but even still it wasn’t even a quarter way to the required growth. He was still allowed to go collect blood from the wyvern as well, so surely if he left the post for 10 minutes at most…
Small bits of concern about everything suddenly going wrong began to plague his thoughts, but a few moments of clear consideration wiped those out. As he ran to his leader, he said under his breath, “Damned fungus.”
He easily slept after having not only the dose of wyvern blood, but more of the elephant.
What followed was a set of boring days. His completion of the floor to the new part of his Mind palace actually excited him most, and then he also created a rudimentary book!
This was it! The memory he longed for all this time!
The book itself was bound with a thin leather and somehow stuck to the binding even though he never glued it together. Even the leather was a musty brown, and thin akin to a badly crafted top layer, unlike a clean and well-tanned genuine hide. The pages were all uniform, with a slight yellow tint at most but still more than usable. It also lacked a quill, not that he needed it.
For this, one directly uses their mind.
This was a process he recognised on impulse, but never actually managed to replicate. Not that he tried more than a handful of times.
His Auric spirit ‘spoke’ to him by literally imprinting its thoughts onto his mind, which he then understood nearly instantly. Such a communication is preferred at higher levels, and he previously assumed it to be an issue of his lacking Mind palace. Now, having grown far more than when he first gained the spirit, there could be no problems with this process! He thought up a simple Incantation, Ice bolt, and stared harshly at the page. He did not imagine himself writing, but simply wrote those words. The appearance of every character clearly appeared in his head, and his eyes closed with the book open on its first page. He barely felt it, the little zap which connected the two of them.
When he opened his eyes, a few words already appeared on the first page. In simple black ink, the four words for Ice bolt.
From today onwards, he no longer had to care about memorisation!
To a limit… But he could worry about that later.
He looked over some Apprentice true spells chosen beforehand, and prepared to write them out into the book just like Ice bolt. He cleared his mind, and focused entirely on the words in his inherited memories, and…
His mental space suddenly shook. Broken from his concentration, he feared an attack from outside and rushed out. But not a single beast stood nearby, although the sky lit up with an eerie pink glow, and he didn’t hesitate to rush out. He only focused on a single place.
The nightmare stalk.
Once he arrived, the stalk was still that two-metre long rod from before. It wasn’t anywhere near large enough to initiate a portal, in fact, its mana hadn’t changed in the slightest from his last visit.
Then why was the sky pink? Why had something shaken his mental space?
His questions did not go unanswered.
A powerful burst of mana came from the south of him, in fact near that lynx’s tree… In fact, wasn’t the tree right next to it previously owned by that goat? That goat… who became a follower of a terror realm lord.
That goat who was obviously intelligent enough to keep a nightmare stalk hidden.
His gaze flitted between the source of mana in front of him and contacting his own lord, but unsure who held the advantage in a battle of mental spaces. The sheer number of steel tiers who’d follow alongside that lord had not been prepared for either. He had to destroy the stalk before that lord came through, it was the only way to ensure his own life in this battle. They had another stalk under watch, and with it they could ensure whatever occurred went their way. But a strong personal motivator also led him to desire its destruction.
That maniac, whatever the hell their lord was, made him feel unbelievable danger in the few seconds they met. Not to mention that demented attitude they displayed moments after realising he was a dragon.
If it knew its fate was sealed, who’s to say it might not target him? He did technically kill a loyal minion after all, he knew rulers killed for a lot less.
He thought about it enough, and used everything he could muster in leaping towards the source. On the way, he jumped several times in the air if his landing appeared unfavourable. It took just 10 seconds for him to cross that large distance to the mana gatherer tree. From here, his mana sense fizzled out as chaotic flows made nothing visible.
Above the verdant oak, he saw a pink mist fire out of the branches. It dissolved into the air to not only colour the sky, but further transform and stain everything nearby. Already, hundreds of weaker beasts fell victim to the influence of this other dimension.
The oak itself appeared in even worse shape. No longer did veins merely grow up its trunk, but he knew that the entire thing had been overrun. From the deepest roots to highest branches, all of them contained some semblance of that purple sludge flowing through veins around them, or barely kept from seeping out its soft internals.
“Where’s the stalk? It can’t be beneath. I checked there… Surely, they didn’t? Of course they did!” He instantly realised how he missed a stalk growing in this place and took a single leap to reach the tree trunk, at the same time casting Sword wind.
He had to stop this. It was now or never!
The wind parted and a deep mark appeared in the tree trunk, but it was still too little. He cast it again, creating splinters of wood which flew all over. But he didn’t care. He repeated the spell time and time again, chipping away at the vein-ridden tree to reach its core. He could hear it.
Hear the violent throbbing. The immense power of mana exciting the very fabric of reality and pulling another realm into his own… He had to stop it.
He was close, just another one and. There! He saw it!
The thick purple rod lodged in the tree’s centre, using its potent mana to mask its own! The outward vacuoles of liquid shimmered as it pulsed, so close to opening that portal now. There was no time to hesitate.
He cast a lava spear, to end this once and for all.
Four seconds passed, perhaps the longest he ever felt… the spell completed as it absorbed the mana he released. The spear formed and flew straight for the nightmare stalk, the link would be broken.
“Oh, littleeee dragon. It’s so good to seeeeee you.” A voice came from right beside him.