A part of me was impressed with how true to my imagination the dungeon of Londimin was. The rough stone walls were almost damp, the only furnishings visible were the rusty bars a few feet away and a cot shoved against a wall underground. In certain parts of the old London, actual prisons with oubliettes and whatnot could be found and while none of the Tower of London had come along in the Shift, the people of Londimin had done well regardless.

I didn’t feel very threatened by the situation, though it definitely wasn’t ideal. There were guards situated at opposite ends of the hallway containing my cell, and they weren’t the slacking kind apparently. The weight of their attention pressed onto the cell like a physical force. It was not Dao which I could sense, though. It was fear.

They were terrified of me.

Looking down at my hands in the dark, could I even blame them? For a moment, I had been willing to tear that entire room apart just because they didn’t give me what I wanted. I could forgive myself a little because it wasn’t that simple - Seth made the decision that we would fight, seemingly before I even entered the room. Uncomfortable tension was locking up my back, so I released the deep breath I had been holding. My hands shook lightly.

Was I dangerous? For a moment, in the meeting room, I had been so willing to unleash carnage, probably crippling any chance Londimin had to survive a trial wave or whatever the System forced on them next. It would have been so easy to say that the Dao within me had triggered the reaction but it wasn’t so simple. The Dao was larger than me, yes, but it was still my energy, my understanding of the world.

Had I always been this way? In a bird’s eye view of my life, it was possible. I had never been one to accept “no” as a final answer. If anything, that simple truth was the main reason I had never been able to truly connect with my father, or my mother. By extension, that became the rest of my siblings, who preferred to toe the line for an easier life. Maybe they were happier than I was, but blind acceptance of how the world was presented to me was not one of my traits. No matter how much I wished it had been.

I couldn’t look at my nature as a bad thing, and I wouldn’t spiral into a pit of angst and depression because of something I might have done. As powerful as the instinct to destroy had been, I had resisted it, immediately horrified. Just as my knee jerk reaction had been to attack, my heart had known where I stood. It wasn’t the end of the world to know that I wasn’t perfect. Still, as I was apparently going to be here a little while, it seemed like a sensible moment to stop in on my inner world.

It took longer than usual for my mind to slip into the lucid state required to inspect the inner workings of my magic. Instead of feeling frustrated, I started from the beginning, simply grasping a portion of my mana and spinning it in an increasingly fast rotation. There was a sense of nostalgia as I returned to the most basic manipulation of mana possible. Even then, the vast amount of that renewable energy as my disposal was magnitudes more potent and plentiful.

Recently, I hadn’t placed effort into feeling my magic, so the forced break was almost nice. I took special care not to let any of my energies leave the cell. Stopping the mana from exiting my body was nearly impossible as more and more of the massive reservoir became caught up in the circular flow around my core. I remained linked to any mana that escaped my body, keeping it tightly wrapped around my body. I began to feel a little lightheaded as energy which normally stayed where it had settled was kicked up like sediment. It was surprising to see that some of my mana had become stagnant, embarrassing even.

I was forced to use the Dao of Tempests to keep the cloud of mana around me from billowing out into the hallway. The guards probably weren’t magically sensitive enough for it to matter, but it was good practice. The problems with the leadership of Londimin could be laid at the feet of my higher level of power. I still had yet to sense a single flicker of true Dao, nor see anyone over level thirty in the city, after all. It was all so unknown to them that it caused instinctive fear and aggression.

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Dao was still somewhat of an unknown to me, but at least a few of its rules were fairly clear. At this point in my journey, I viewed Aspects as something less important, and Guidance Stones less so. They were the fuel and blueprints for Dao and skills, but I wasn’t even sure they were strictly necessary. From how Steel had described them, they were almost more like a shortcut to the true power, which was Dao. If I needed any “proof”, I need look no further than the System prompt which was once my Aspect information.

Dao

Fortitude - None

Speed - None

Mental - Dragon (2/4)

Will - Tempest (1/2)

Now bearing the name Dao, but with no other changes, it was just a case of being in the cool club. Now that I knew the secret handshake which was the Dao, the System had hidden a few less secrets. In the worlds beyond, which now looked to Earth hungrily from the other side of an imperceptible veil. Aspects, and the pathway to Dao which they unlocked, were the reason for the cloud of danger which hung thick over the planet. If the people of Londimin were scared of me, they were in trouble regardless.

I placed the question of whether it was my issue to one side as I refocused on the feeling of my magic. I had become a nebula of power, barely feeling my physical form. My entire existence was mystical now, and the metaphysical core in my soul felt more like my true self now than the body which housed it. I caressed the dense, powerful centre of my being with the turbulent mana rushing all around me.

I had long past the time where the microscopic crystals of draconic magic had joined fully with the flow, there was no longer any delineation between the powers within my magic. The dragon, the storm, and myself were all one, comfortably for the most part. With my mana cosy around my core and my mind calmed, I fell into the world within myself.

Choosing to appear high in the air, I knew my presence here was felt by the Dao, but I didn’t interact with the avatar or font immediately. They were, for lack of a better term, large personalities in this space, and it took all of my attention to interact with them. Right now, I was looking at the bigger picture, rather than the specific colours I used to paint it. Enjoying the metaphor, I stopped my descent through the clouds of the inner world.

I had control here, like existing within a lucid dream. As I willed it, gravity lost purchase and I hovered at a wondrous vantage point. The world below me was built upon the foundation of the Dao of the Dragon, and the sky above it was the Dao of Tempests. I hovered in the space, enjoying the swirling mixture where the two energies met as both washed over me.

Hopefully others saw their magic in the same way. I had refrained from deep discussion with any of the Fledglings or The Ascent about how they interacted with their Dao once it unlocked, and refused to give advice. Everything about Dao, and the few warnings I had received from Steel and my instincts, suggested it was a personal journey. Letting anyone else influence how the magic worked, or letting yourself make expectations, would potentially hamstring potential instead of helping.

I didn’t immediately shrink away from the thoughts of others. For a while, it had been just myself, my magic and Naea. Her existence was represented in a dozen small ways within the inner world. She was shown in the wildflowers, the streams and rivers, the dark places which creaked with the promise of danger. I truly loved my weird insectoid fairy companion, without her I would have definitely been a footnote in the existence of the dungeon which claimed my life.

Instead I had thrived enough to make it back to the outside world, where magic was no longer the focus of my life. For now, it was people. Populous, ravenous, scared and dangerous. The humans of Earth were reacting to the changes pretty much as expected. In Ascentown, I had shown that it was possible to cooperate in this new world and the benefits which would come from that. I was well aware it was a supremely privileged position to work from.

Londimin, by contrast, had become a place of competition. It wasn’t necessarily worse, but it led to this situation. I grabbed some of the nearby cloud and made myself a seat to lounge in as the sun of this world, once the Hurricane Heart of the Storm Dragon, dipped below the horizon. To enjoy the sunset again, I rotated the planet back fifteen minutes, falling onto my long chair in the sky.

The issue was their own strength. They saw someone powerful appear and assumed that meant some value was going to be taken from them because of it. “I suppose,” I said aloud, a strange thing indeed when inside my own soul, “I did ask to take a whole plane. Maybe I should have started smaller.” I shook my head at that idea.

The issue wasn’t with what I requested, it was that I had asked at all. In a place like Londimin where the strong seemed to do what they liked, the very fact that I had been polite had felt like a lie to them. I sighed, both in the spirit world and the real. A blast of cold wind shot through the small prison they kept me in, but it was sourceless as far as the guards were concerned. It made them shiver, despite their raised attributes.

It seemed a little problematic that my answer here was to be more aggressive. I glared downward to the draconic world below, but there was no rumble from my sleeping Dao. The thought process seemed logical, but that was the issue. It made sense to me, but was that only because of the magic which now influenced my thoughts and actions? “Ugh,” I groaned, letting the chair of clouds fall away and my plummet to recommence.

What I really needed to do was have a chat with the dragon in my soul.