Chapter 110
Tales of Dragon's Hoards
The Blight was eating the newly identified energy, or Qi, as I am trying to remember it is now called. This explains so much, and yet also doesn’t get me any closer to a complete understanding of what is happening. This explains so much in that the Blight used to expand even after draining people’s meridians and core completely dry. A few tenacious people were noted as having lived for days after their core was filled with the Blight, making the connection between mana cores and the Blight harder to detect until now, but now this… it well, I don’t quite know what it does.
As I finish my thought no less than two dozen dragon heads turn my way, as does Mallory’s head who had taken a defensive posture in front of me. Seeing their looks, I realize “did I say that all out loud?”
“Yes.” Mallory stated with a note of confusion in her voice. She also nods her head gently and speaks slowly, like she doesn’t want to startle a wild horse.
Nodding, I realize this is likely good, as it means I hopefully won’t have to repeat myself. But it is bad in that, it means I am one step closer to being the crazy reclusive sage that Mallory envisioned for me. Honestly, I hope I don’t come across as completely crazy. Though talking to yourself out loud is never a good sign.
Silence.
There is a tense moment as every dragon that had been sleeping or getting into defensive postures ready to strike at Mallory all pause and stare at me. Mallory, seeing this, decides to speak and once again gets everyone’s attention back on her. “So, you can still heal him?”
“Her, and yes I can easily heal her, but I now understand another aspect of this disease that I never knew before.” I state, somewhat excited to learn something new, but also ashamed that I somehow missed it earlier.
A pause.
As the moment stretches, I begin to think of ways I can use this new knowledge to help combat the disease. Would circulating Qi make it harder for the Blight to build up? Does that mean that everyone who gets the disease will need to become partial cultivators of QiFF users. Okay, that time I heard it, and I now know why Mallory revoked my ability to shorten class names. That one was terrible.
“So shouldn’t you do that?” Mallory asks, a note of incredulity to her voice.
I pause, trying to think if she wants me to be a QiFF, but then shake my head as I realize what she means by the pointing of her hand. Her hand is clearly pointing to the still unconscious female dragon that is clearly suffering from the Blight.
“Right, the Blight.” I say, as I begin coursing energy through the body of the dragon.
This time with my third eye open, I see the beauty of it all. I see the way my mana causes the energy of the body to get to a brighter color, “almost as if it is reaching a certain temperature, no not quite a temperature, a certain power threshold.”
I pause, as those words leave my lips. Okay, that time I was aware enough to know when I was at least speaking my thoughts out loud, so progress. Now if I could just be the enigmatic healer who doesn’t get eaten by dragons for being flighty, that would be great. Realizing that a few of the dragons that are still able to move around, have begun moving closer and are inspecting me, I choose to tune them out, knowing that Mallory is right there to protect me. With that concern taken care of, I begin healing dragons. This is so much fun, I think to myself, making sure to keep my thoughts quiet this time. Still, I don’t think I can keep my emotions from showing as a smile is cresting my lips. Not only am I learning so much, almost too much to fully process with this third eye, but now I get to play with dragons.
Yes, I have Zero, but he isn’t like these dragons. I couldn’t quite feel it until now, but with these dragons, there is no forced mental bond of the dragon to me. I think there was one with Zero, or at least some odd bonds of power and or fate that bound us. In my mind, I might have thought of that as a slave leash to Zero, forever forcing him to be bound to me, and part of why I abandoned him. Though looking back, part of that might just be my own insecurities catching up as well. I remember the last time I saw Zero, he was more than happy to see me, but that was weeks ago. These thoughts flow through my head, as I go through the now almost routine cleansing process of removing the Blight from this dragon.
Then, just like other times, I let the final portion jump out. First this helps to improve my Legendary Trick Shot skill that can once again improve from its current 125 towards its new maximum of 175, but also to show visually to the other dragons that I am able to heal the Blight. Also, grabbing the semi-sentient disease out of the air and burning it to a crisp is oddly satisfying.
Blight-jump.
Snap!
The final portion of my spell clamps shut on the Blight ensuring that nothing remains of the Blight within the subject. This time I also saw it, I saw the way I could use a cooler, or less potent version of Qi to lure the Blight out of the body. Honestly, looking back at my process, the spell did little more than increasing the potency of energy within the target body to a frequency that was deadly to the Blight, while being beneficial to the subject.
Za-zap!
Only after the last of the Blight sizzles to death do I allow myself to take a second to relax.
Breathe.
I let out a breath that I didn’t even realize I had been holding. Then, raising my head to look at the other dragons that had watched the free show, I ask, “so, who’s next?”
Rumble, rumble.
The dragons begin talking to each other in their deep growling tones, but since I don’t feel any danger from them, I assume that is just their natural way of communicating with each other.
Finally, after a long moment, one of the least injured dragons nods their head. Then taking two painful steps forward, they nod their head and state with authority, “I am next.”
“Okay, let’s begin.” I state, moving forward towards the dragon, I am now close enough that I can feel how the other dragons are encroaching on my newly provided Aura, thanks to my class.
Rumble, rumble.
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At that, the dragons begin once again talking to each other, using their odd form of communication.
***
“I must admit, I was a little surprised.” The dragon that I had just healed rumbled with a sense of awe to its fellow clutch mates.
Over my time, I had slowly begun to unweave the intricacies of the dragon tongue. At first, I thought that such a thing was impossible for me, particularly with the way I had long ago maxed out my Polyglot skill, meaning that there were languages that I would forever be denied. Yet, once again the benefits of my recent bloodline evolution showed themselves, as I could feel my Polyglot skill once again increasing steadily as I made my way through this den of dragons.
“Yeah, the odd blue elf has managed to heal everyone.”
“I’ve never seen a blue elf?”
“Are they powerful?”
“Clearly they are, this one has already manifested their healer’s aura and has yet to meet the first Aura threshold.”
On the dragons rumbled and spoke to themselves, as I made my way through their little den. I was fairly certain that if I let them know I could finally understand them, they would likely change. Also, I felt it was pretty cool to actually know the language of the dragons thanks to this interaction. I wonder if Zero, my own familiar would know this language as an instinctual thing, or whether he would only know after I began speaking it to him, sort of my own awakening his personal bloodline from a secret voodoo quest thing. I could see that this might be a hidden quest that the game would offer if I was paying attention, logically if I had Zero here I could have likely been ingratiated far more quickly than what happened. Still, I can’t complain as we are here now and moving our way towards healing the royal dragons. While the royal dragons are the most afflicted by the Blight, their timer for when true death would take them is actually longer given the amount of ambient Qi flowing within their bodies. Again, fascinating. If this entire scenario wasn’t so dire, or at least filled with the sensation of me going through a leper colony, trying to fix everyone that had been suffering for a while, I might want to take more time and map the changes that happened, and the ways the Blight interacted with my magic.
As it was, I found a few shortcuts that seemed to work particularly well. First and foremost, I found that just throwing mana at a particular area was not enough, the magic had to at least have a piece of Spirit magic within it. From there I could then add Life magic which seemed to double the effective rate of the spells being used and got the targeted area to a magical saturation point twice as quickly. Conversely Holy magic, which while seemingly less than the miracle granting nature of Divine magic, was far more versatile. With my new knowledge and access to Holy magic, I found that Holy with Spirit could as much as quadruple the speed at which a targeted area got to the proper magical saturation to burn away the Blight. From there adding Life magic to that mix still doubled the effectiveness of the spell, reducing the overall time by half.
Basically, this showed that constructing magical spells seemed to follow the communicative properties of math. Meaning I could add the components in any method and end up with the same one eight-time factor as assembling the spell any other way. This discovery alone, helped me speed through a dozen or so dragons, while using very little overall mana for the spells, for while the quantity of energy I used was slightly increased, it was nothing compared to how much time I saved by effectively burning away the Blight faster.
Also, the Spirit magic was like a light to moths for the semi-sentient Blight. They were clearly drawn to the glowing light of Spirit magic, and so long as I burned it brightly enough, it would eventually burn away the Blight, just at a very slow pace.
So many discoveries, sadly only now did I feel like I had truly deserved some of my previous degrees. But the knowledge was clearly there, and I almost had more than enough to fill up minor primers on magical knowledge and theories. Theories that I know for a fact are not available in the Mage’s guild. A fact that my Simulacrum has proven with her continuing to read through different spell tomes as quickly as possible, when her exchanging trash gold for experience, and her time healing members of the town of Crossroads didn’t take up her days.
Just thinking about it, I feel sorry for the life of my Simulacrum. Though, I guess the alternative of non-existence is also a bad way to just disappear. That was the other reason why I wanted Zero to be with her, so she didn’t feel that everyone would forget her when she was gone. Gods this is depressing train of thought, why am I having these thoughts. Oh, right surrounded by sick and dying dragons, many of which are covered in puss filled bed sores.
Speaking of which, the further we go, the more I need to heal scabbed wounds that have appeared due to lack of movement. Or weakened immune systems that couldn’t fight off infections from minor scrapes and bruises.
From a scale point of view, some of these wounds are minor in comparison to the overall length of the massive dragons. But still, even a boil that needs to be lanced properly is three feet in diameter. After the first one popped, and covered Mallory in a massive spray of blood-filled puss that stank, she declined to help.
“Oh, come on, can you help?” I plead, trying to clean out a festering scab that I could easily fall into if I wasn’t careful.
Bleh. “No!” Mallory states, apparently just looking over at me now is enough to set off her sympathetic vomiting.
Sigh.
Sadly, despite how much I might try to push my way through this process, I am now finding that it is even tough for me to power through this, as the stench is just too overpowering. Not only was the smell bad, but the more powerful the dragon being healed, the more corrosive their blood was, meaning that unless the item I wore was soul bound, and thus able to be healed up over time with my mana, I would quickly be out of clothes. Worse, the blood did sting a little, which made my concentration even harder to keep.
Realizing, I still had a few more dragons to heal, and more corrosive puss filled lesions to remove, I decide to do something I swore I never would in polite society. For the first time ever, I put on my Vice Master Thieves’ Guild Mask. Yes, the silver one denoting that I had at one point risen to the second highest ranking of a Thieves’ Guild and denoted that I was not only on good terms with the guild, but also still in good standing.
This was likely a dumb mistake, but the mask had a 75% filter in it that protected me from poisonous gasses and could help seal out major scents.
As I put it on, I was quick to cover it with puss, and dragon’s blood, but apparently that wasn’t enough to hide it from the dragons that I was in the process of healing.
“She is a thief?”
“Not just any thief, that is the sign of a Master Thief.”
“Technically a Vice Master of the Thieves Guild. Do you think this is part of a ruse to gain access to our hoard of magical books?” One of the more refined dragons that I had just finished healing the puss filled lesions from their behind asked.
Yeah, now that he can sit down without pain, now is when he decides to start talking trash about the healer. Still, I basically asked for it. Also, I couldn’t help but have my pointy ears perk up at the sound of a hoard of magical books. Then, to almost accentuate this fact, the other dragons kept talking in their odd growling language that I honestly tried to pretend that I didn’t fully understand.
“Hush, you should not talk about such things.” The dragon that looked to be the head of security spoke.
“Oh come now, you aren’t so frightened as to say that this puny elf can understand our language, and that even if she could, she would try to steal our secret hoard of knowledge?”
At that, my ears started to feel like they were burning, as I knew this was one of those quests the system was putting here directly towards me. Making it so I could either gain possibly forbidden knowledge, or I could be a good girl and make friends with the dragons. Pausing mentally to make sure I was not speaking my thoughts out loud, I mentally nodded to myself, as I prepared to try to find out more about this dragon hoard of books. Did they melt down gold into books that would last longer from their turning of pages? If so, that was probably the most brilliant use of gold and way to hoard a treasure that even I would be willing to go to war over.
Just as I was having this, internal, thought, a system message came and let me know that I was not imagining things.
Hidden Quest Discovered: The Dragons’ Secret hoard: You have unearthed rumors of a hidden treasure of books guarded by the dragons that you are healing. Find out more about this mysterious stash of books, while not giving away your knowledge of having discovered that such a place exists. Rewards: Experience, Rare Skills, Gold, Variable. Note: That there is a chance for possible hidden classes to be discovered by taking this quest.
Then just like that, the magic words were read, and I knew what my next task here in the tower was.
Jitters.
I felt like my skin was beginning to pulse at the knowledge of this treasure-trove that was hidden somewhere in this tower were books. Big beautiful, possibly made of gold, books that held knowledge on new classes, new skills, and new potentials for this world. I couldn’t wait.
Then the dragons said something, that made me realize this was all likely a trap.
“Besides, we all know she wouldn’t be able to enter the Imperial Treasury Room without Princess Luminestria’s pendant.” The royal dragon said, with an air of superiority. While I had my head turned away from him, I could tell he was watching me like a hawk, seeing if I made the slightest twitch at that comment.
Then just when I thought I was free and clear, I nearly jumped out of my skin when I received the notification of yet another hidden quest.
Hidden Thieves’ Guild Quest: Princess Luminestria’s Pendant: You have found out that Princess Luminestria’s pendant is needed to access the sacred treasury room of the dragons. Obtain the pendant to gain access to the treasury room. Rewards: Experience, Gold, Variable. Note: That there is a chance for possible hidden classes to be discovered by taking this quest.
At times like this, I realized why I stopped ever using my Thieves’ Guild Mask, and generally went for a shawl or other covering. Unfortunately, none of those would last through the corrosive nature of this toxic dragon’s blood that would eat way at even my regular clothing if it wasn’t all Soulbound items that I was wielding at this time.
Still, this was not a quest line I could ever hope to give up on. With a new goal in mind, I set out to try to learn more about this hidden library, that the dragons referred to as their hoard room. A room that I really hoped was filled with different books, otherwise I was about to tick off a lot of dragons for no real reason.
Realizing I had apparently stopped after healing the last dragon, I paused. Then allowing myself to speak out loud for the first time in a while, I said, “let’s do this.”