When I walk outside I am instantly blinded, the sun is shining and the glare off the snow is intense. Once my eyes adjust and I can look around I realize that Kechara doesn't seem to be having any issue with the glare. While that is totally unfair I can't help but be jealous, if an enemy attacked me while my eyes were adjusting it would have been a huge pain.
Now that we are outside I tell Kechara to grab onto a large rock and then practice flapping her wings. As she exercises her wings all the snow within twenty feet of her is blown away. Unfortunately, I am standing within that range so I get blasted by snow and feel like I am standing in a blizzard.
As I expected, it only takes about ten minutes before Kechara stops flapping her wings, new muscles don't have much stamina. So after letting her rest for a minute I summon Bones and we resume combat training. I take it easy on her at first to allow her time to adapt to the changes in her body.
Before we head inside to have lunch I have Kechara exercise her wing muscles again, but this time I stand farther away. After eating I decide to give Kechara an hour to rest and relax before we go back to training. As she is resting I resume working on figuring out the language of the city.
After a bit Kechara raises her head to look over my shoulder to see what I am doing. Seeing that she is curious I decide to teach her what I have figured out so far, then I start slowly reading the book to her. Since the book is about basic combat it is something that can help her broaden her knowledge.
Besides since this race created the guardian, as far as I know, I don't see anything wrong with Kechara learning about them. Now that I can slowly read the language, the more I read the better I get, although I still have to stop to figure out anything new. The most useful thing is now I can use the context to help figure out the meaning, especially for words with multiple meanings.
*DING*
Congratulations! Skill Linguistics has progressed to level 9!
Linguistics
Level 9
Int +18
You are adept at deciphering other languages.
After reading with Kechara for an hour we head back outside to continue her training. She has already gotten to the point that she can fight Bones and I at the same time. She might not be able to beat both of us but she can hold her own against us which is impressive.
With occasionally breaks for her to exercise her wings the rest of the day passes quickly. After eating dinner I again read with Kechara for an hour before she starts having trouble keeping her eyes open. Sending her to bed I put away the book and use my sacred power to try and work on my core.
Stolen novel; please report.
Core Upgrade Progress: 1%
It is just as I feared, trying to work on my core past rank four is so much harder. Using over a thousand sacred power just to get one percent of progress is way too slow. At this point I have no idea how to progress, I can't absorb any of the cores I have in my pouch, I already tried.
Hopefully I can still absorb demon cores, but until I run into another demon I won't be able to test it out. I should be able to absorb sacred cores but they seem to be even more rare than demons since the guardian is the first I've killed. I know that Great Mother Wolf is a sacred creature but there is no way I am going to try and kill her.
In fact, if other sacred creatures are like her I don't want to kill them either. If the guardian had been able to communicate with me I probably wouldn't have killed her. Of course if that was the case then I wouldn't be in this situation, I'd still be a demon.
For now I won't worry about it, I will ask the advice of the goddesses after I have destroyed the temple. Hopefully they will know more about sacred beasts and how I can continue to get stronger. Until then I think my best bet will be to focus on helping Kechara reach her maximum potential.
With that thought in mind I go to sleep, and as soon as I wake up in the morning I feed all my sacred power into Kechara's core. Examining her core after adding my energy I can tell her progress towards rank two is going well. If I keep feeding her core with my power she should reach rank two in a day or two.
As for the amount of power inside her core my best guess is she already has enough stored up to reach rank three. It is actually a lot easier for me to learn from studying her core than it is my own. My plan right now is to learn as much as I can while seeing if this method can progress past rank four.
If it can then I will turn my attention to duplicating it within my own core, it's my only hope of ranking up without absorbing cores. Based on my experiences with Mother Wolf, Brother Raven, and now Kechara, I do not want to hunt sacred creatures. Even if it means I can't get any stronger, this world would be much poorer without these kinds of creatures.
After all this peninsula is only a small part of this world and I already know the demons won't exterminate all life. As much as I like the goddesses I would rather see them fall than let the humans turn this into another earth. Of course I don't plan to let that happen, but if it comes down to a choice that is the way I am leaning.
What heavy thoughts for first thing in the morning, shaking my head I start cooking breakfast. As usual the smell wakes up Kechara and as she stands up and stretches I can see she has grown a bit more. She walks over and rubs against me as she buries her head under my arm.
Laughing I reach down to pet her as I tell her good morning, not that I have to reach down far anymore. In fact if she was to stand on her hind legs she would tower over me now. I am finding it really hard to compare her to the tiny ball of fur she was when I first met her.
After we finish eating I have her lay down and stretch out, I am curious about how much she has grown. When I measure her, from nose to tail, I find out that she is almost twenty feet long now. If I don't look into her eyes she isn't as adorable anymore, but she is definitely beautiful.
She still has the ability to widen her eyes in a way that makes me powerless to resist her. Luckily she only really uses that when she wants to steal my food, I barely remember what it is like to eat my fill. Seeing how much she has grown I figure today is a good day to let her make her first attempt at flying.