Adam’s core retained all the memories of Johnathan Bennard within an Animae Core that contained 17 animae that had come together to form a heptadecagon. 12 of the animae were his family and friends, the 13th was himself and the last 4 were animae that had tagged along and helped build the shape that now surrounded a core that contained the essence of Adam.
Most Animae were singular. They could not hold memories or ideas though strong emotional general impressions from the life of the soul that had been attached to could leave a resonance or imprint on the Animae. The Animae was just the foundation upon which a soul initiated and grew after all. It was the only part of the soul that was truly eternal. Every other part was just a pattern that had used the Animae as a foundation. When the foundation was released, the pattern that was the soul would evaporate like mist in a strong wind, the energy seeking new patterns to hold. Adam considered why a soul would choose to release itself completely and realized that if one considered infinity, life could go on and on and on. Eventually, those with a weak will, or no desire to continue, would welcome true oblivion and forgetfulness, except part of them would go on in certain instances. A Soul could leave an imprint on its Animae that would last forever.
He'd seen a similar dichotomy within the fractured digital universe, and it didn’t really surprise him to see the pattern repeated here. Though it was kind of sad to know that some souls would eventually release themselves forever and the last part of them, their Animae would not remember them, even though it would continue on as the foundation for another soul.
Which brought him to his next thought, Adaline. Try as he might he could not reach her. He knew her animae was part of the structure that was carrying him, but she was both not there and there. He could feel the touch of her soul and the impression of a love that would transcend time, but he could not talk to her. He could remember her; he could play those memories over and over, but the memories did not change and they were not Adaline.
The same was true for his mother and father. He could feel the impression of love and acceptance for him, it was always present now, but he could not communicate with the origin of those feelings. They were merely impressions. Their Animae had recognized his and bonded with him, forever and always.
Desirae and Clarence were there as well as the five members of Pandora’s party. Adam didn’t have the same kind of connection with them so didn’t receive any impressions from them other than a feeling that this was their purpose. None of the Animae had thoughts, safe his, which wasn’t really accurate, was it? His core identity was held within a matrix that the 17 Animae created. They had come together to create it and he was now more and less than he had been. If he could have cried, he would have but he didn’t have a body with which to create the tears that were needed to cry. Instead, he flew through the darkness, loved, but alone.
Adam tried to open a Personal Interface or his prompts and failed. There was no screen to look at, no messages to read. Next, he tried to open his perception and look out to see what was around him. Again, there was nothing. He could feel impressions of speed and movement and a feeling of various resonances he could make his way toward, but he could not see them.
So, if his core wasn’t within this animae structure the animae would have floated around wherever they were and felt for these resonances and moved toward them? How did they choose? The simple answer was, they didn’t. He’d already determined there were no thoughts within his family’s Animae so it must be random. In his case though, he could choose, as could any other beings that were able to do what he was doing now. He couldn’t be the first, but it must be a rare event.
So, if he couldn’t see or visually compare the resonances he felt he was going to have to move toward the resonance that felt the strongest to him. As he thought that, he realized that he was coming closer to a resonance, but he knew there were at least three resonances that were stronger even though they were a little farther away. Adam willed himself to change course and move toward the resonance that felt the strongest to him.
He immediately felt his course change as he veered off and moved toward the strongest resonance that called to him. First, it called to his hardness and determination as well as, as well as his name. Next, it resonated with his soul in a way that he had never felt before. He couldn’t explain it, but it seemed that it just felt right for him. Finally, the resonance seemed to resonate with at least one of the other Animae that was now part of his core. As he tried to figure out which one it resonated with a feeling of warmth came from the impressions of Adaline’s Animae. A feeling of coming home to a familiar friend.
As he drew closer he realized that if the resonance was with both himself and Adaline then obviously whatever that resonance represented must be something that he wanted or needed. A moment later Adam felt that his Animae had crossed a boundary and the resonance he was seeking was before him. Adam could feel that there were other Animae nearby and that they were looking for the same thing he had found. Without hesitation, Adam felt for the center of the resonance and willed his Animae to move towards it.
As his animae came into contact with the resonance a prompt filled his vision.
Resonance match to primary Animae, 100%
Resonance match to secondary Animae, 50%
Resonance to Complex Animae 23.5%
20% Resonance Threshold met. Animae accepted.
Note! Complex Animae detected.
Automatic Soul Formation paused. Animae registers as sentient.
Query Animae.
Do you still wish to participate in Soul Establishment for Adamantium Dragon Hatchling? Yes or No?
Adam stopped. He actually froze for a moment. An Adamantium Dragon Hatching? Adamantium Dragons were a thing? Of course, they were a thing, the universe was infinite after all, and anything was possible. That explained the various resonances he’d felt. Powerful, similar names and a Dragon that called to the impressions Adaline’s soul had left behind. Those must have been the resonances he felt.
He'd have to grow up as a dragon. That could be weird, but he did have Adaline's memories to pull on if he needed to. Adam only thought about it for a split second before he chose “Yes.”
Selection noted.
Abilities already determined.
Soul Establishment will commence in 3, 2, 1
Adam felt everything go dark for a moment and then a sensation, somewhat familiar to him as he’d once been a blob and moved into and through many tunnels, conduits, and crevices. What he felt at the moment was very similar. He felt as if the core identity that was him reached out and started to fill something. This sensation took time but also felt like it happened in an instant. It was really weird. Once it was complete he could feel and hear again, though he only felt a gentle vibration, and his hearing was muffled but what he could hear sounded a lot like what it sounds like through the walls of a house when there’s a storm outside and the wind was rushing by the outer surface of the walls. Wherever he was wasn’t uncomfortable. It was very cozy even though he couldn’t move that much. He felt Like he was in a sleeping bag that was too small for him, but it was made out of plastic he couldn’t break.
Wherever he was, he was warm and it felt inviting. He tried to open his Status Screen and was pleasantly surprised when he immediately entered his Mindspace, and his information populated a holographic screen that appeared.
Name: Adamantadine “Adam”
Identity: Amantadine “Adam”
Race: Adamantium Dragon
Age: Hatching
Weight: 260
Birthday: ???
Animae
Complex Animae Core (Complexity 1,700%) - Your Animae has combined with 16 other Animae to form a nucleus that cannot be destroyed upon Soul death. While most physical aspects of your existence will be destroyed the Core of your being is sheltered by your Animae. Your Animae has reentered the cycle of reincarnation fully aware of everything that transpired before. Additionally, two Abilities have been designated as permanent abilities and will remain a part of you during all future reincarnation cycles: Perfect Memory and Chaos Incarnate
Normally memories and accomplishments will fade with time unless an Ability is retained that alters this.
Primary Abilities:
Perfect Memory - Like Photographic Memory except for all five senses with automatic recall of desired information.
Chaos Incarnate – A Spark of Primal Chaos has melded with your Animae. It is forever tied to you. As it has grown your ability to absorb and harness Chaos has grown with it. This is represented by a new attribute: Chaos. The Chaos Attribute may only be grown through specific Class choices and Incarnation-specific actions. Unlike other attributes, during reincarnation, the Chaos Attribute does not reset.
NOTE: Chaos is ever-changing and always growing after all. The Karma one Sows stays with them always, through all reincarnations. -K
Secondary Abilities, A byproduct of the Chaos Incarnate Ability.
Molded Chaos - Your body is Chaos Incarnate. While the sundering of your Animae from the rest of your previous physical body destroyed your previous body and arguably your soul, the Chaos that had attached to you could not be destroyed. Your Chaos has done what it can and spreads into every nook and cranny of your new body and adapted to your new incarnation. Chaos may be utilized in many ways; it is up to you to discover and hone the use of this attribute.
Adaptable - Chaos Adapts to All Environments. As an Adamantium Dragon, you were already immune to most environments. As a being of Chaos, you are immune to ALL physical environments.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Astral Link – Chaos is in everything everywhere. A permanent link to the Astral Plane is always active. Mana and Hit Points may be regenerated at Chaos Attribute Rates. Note: Channeling Chaos at greater than Endurance per second can harm
Chaotic Core – You have 100% Affinity with all spheres of Magic.
Magical Resistances:
Fire: 100%
Ice: 50%
Electricity: 50%
Titles:
Dungeon Founder
Labyrinth Founder
Character Level 1
Attributes
Strength 11
Agility 11
Dexterity 6
Endurance 6
Constitution 11
Perception 6
Intelligence 6
Wisdom 6
Willpower 6
Charisma 11
Luck 11
Chaos 8.95E+47
Primary Stats
Carrying Capacity: 143 lbs. (64.9 kgs)
Hit Points: 6
HP Regeneration: 1 per second
Stamina: 60
Stamina Regeneration: 18 per minute
Mana: 60
Mana Regeneration: 1 per second
Movement
Normal Running Speed: 8 MPH (12 FPS)
Standing high Jump: 16 inches
Note. Falling Damage is not mitigated by maximum jumping Distance.
Flying Speed: 89 MPH (130 FPS)
Base Attack
Unarmed Attack: 1-4 - 4
Critical Damage Maximum Damage x2
Skills
Total Skills: 0
Total Unused Skill XP: 0
Hatching?
He wasn’t born yet?
He was in an egg?
Seriously?
Adam quickly looked down but the image he had of himself still appeared human. He willed a mirror into existence and checked anyway. Yep, still human. Don checking his mental image of himself Adam reviewed the information and decided that his next question was; Where was his egg? It sure didn’t sound like his new Mom was sitting on top of him. In fact, now that he was starting to get used to the new body, he could feel the heat being leeched out of the egg. It didn’t affect him; he’d felt the chaos in his system flood into the hatching dragon and begin the conversion his Animae and soul had begun. He could even wiggle his fingers and toes, no they were claws now, weren’t they?
Adam put that out of his mind and reviewed this Status Screen again. The Note concerning his Chaos Attribute was interesting. It looked like K…Karma?... didn’t like what the Gods had done to him and had found a way to give them the shaft, which meant that the Chaos Attribute had to be useful. Also, he still had the Mold Chaos ability and while the ability said that he had to find out how to use it himself, he had his memories and already knew of a couple of ways. He willed Chaos to spread out from him and find out what was around him.
The first thing he noticed was that while that attribute was insanely high, once he started letting the chaos leak out and surround him, if he went too fast it hurt. It hurt a lot. The chaos was healing the damage as it was done but he needed to figure this out. He increased and slowed the rate and eventually found that as long as the rate at which he released the Chaos was less than or equal to his Endurance attribute he felt fine.
Hmmm
Could he use his Chaos Attribute to boost his other attributes? It’s not like that attribute was higher than any attributes he’d had before. Then he paused. His body was currently in an egg. If there was no room outside for his body to expand into, he might find it impossible to grow. While this wasn’t the same as a polymorphed dragon stepping into a small room with an Anti-magic shell and killing itself as it expanded. Adam would prefer if his newly discovered Adamantium Dragon Body wasn’t squished as it tried to grow and change as Adam used Chaos to increase his attributes. No, slow and steady it was.
Adam released chaos from his body which permeated the egg he was in and then started expanding outward around the egg. Adam visualized the Chaos as nanites, it’s what he knew, and utilized them to look, listen, smell, and hear everything outside of his shell.
The first thing he noticed was that he was not in a nest, at least not a nest as he understood it. The rushing wind he’d heard was actually magma flowing by the egg at a high velocity. The egg Adam was in was wedged within a tunnel that wasn’t much bigger in diameter than the egg. The magma was under high pressure and pushing against and around the egg but the high pressure was also leeching heat from the egg.
That brought up the question, how hot did an Adamantium egg need to be normally if he felt chilled from fast-flowing magma? Adam put those thoughts aside and directed the chaos that was around his egg to convert the rock the egg had been held by into dust so the egg would break free. Immediately the egg was released from the grip that had held it and shot along the magma conduit until it entered a large lake of magma. The egg, compared to the liquid rock was buoyant and started floating upward to the top of the magma pool. Additionally, the increase in magma flow from the conduit Adam had unplugged started filling the chamber he was in rapidly. While volcanos and their eruptions had not been a subject Adam had researched considerably it was still one of the many disciplines he’d learned back on Earth and he understood the mechanism well enough. Magma chamber plus pressure equals BOOM. How big a boom depended on how big the chamber was.
Well, now that he knew he had enough space outside of the egg Adam started directing his Chaos attribute to increase his other attributes. He started with his Endurance so that he could push more Chaos into his body. After 5 seconds, his Endurance was up to 55 so he redirected the chaos to start increasing all of his attributes by 5 per second while he also set the chaos outside the egg to spread so that he could get a better idea of how big this magma chamber was.
As his attributes started increasing and his chaos spread out into the chamber he realized pretty quickly that increasing his attributes was starting to increase his body size. That was okay because as his Endurance hit a new multiple of 11 he would increase the amount of chaos he was boosting an attribute by. After 11 seconds he increased his attributes by 7 per second, after 33 seconds 8 per second, and so on. When he’d hit the two-minute mark he’d increased all of his attributes by 414 and felt the egg crack as his body became too big for it to contain. Instead of wasting the eggshell, Adam had the chaos surrounding his body absorb and convert it, it was Adamantium after all. He turned it into something that covered his arms like bracers and his legs like shin guards. As his body expanded he adjusted their size so they wouldn’t get too tight.
As he was doing that another thought crossed his mind. Adam still hadn’t mapped out the magma chamber completely. It was at least a mile deep and wide in all directions. This chamber was huge which was perfect. Adam floated in the magma, completely unaffected by heat. If anything, he felt a little chilly. He stretched and moved drawing on memories from Adaline as to how a dragon should feel when moving and felt fine.
With his strength already above 400, it was nothing for him to reach out and swim through the magma. He made sure to draw his wings in close to his body so that they wouldn’t create drag and swam toward the surface of the magma which was only one hundred feet above him. While he didn’t need air because of his chaotic nature, he still wanted to take a breath. He figured breathing liquid rock was probably a bad idea although he probably could if he tried.
Adam reached the surface and lazily rolled onto his back. Taking his first breath in this body, he allowed himself to relax as he opened his eyes and looked around. It took his mind a few moments to adapt to his new eyes as he realized that he now had three modes of vision. Not as many as a Predator but still more than a normal human. He had Normal human vision, which just showed heat waves and steam. He could see the ceiling of the cavern that was above him and it definitely felt like he was moving upward slowly. The second form of vision was infrared, which was useless here. Everything appeared as heat because it was all the same temperature. The final form of vision was in the ultraviolet spectrum which was just about as useless. He could see details of the area around him, but it still seemed like everything was in a photo negative.
Adam lazily floated in the magma as he continued to boost his attributes with his Chaos attribute. After 6 minutes he’d increased all of his attributes by 5,115 and stopped growing. It had been interesting to watch his body grow and morph as his muscles and skin expanded. He’d even had to roll over onto his stomach and allow his natural buoyancy to hold him near the surface of the magma lake as he lifted his head out of the magma.
Still, he was comfortable, and he kept boosting his attributes with his Chaos even though there were no visible changes to his body or growth of any kind. After 10 minutes he’d raised his attributes 15,054. After an hour he’d raised his attributes by 148,174. He’d also received a Warning when he’d hit 100,000 in all of his attributes.
WARNING! The maximum natural attribute for this creature is 100,000. Any attribute above this limit cannot be raised by natural attribute training or leveling.
That meant there was a natural limit but his attributes continued to accept the boost, so he kept funneling Chaos into them. As his Endurance went higher and higher the amount he could funnel into each attribute continued to increase. At the one-hour mark, he was increasing each attribute by 164. He’d also noticed that the Magma level was continuing to rise. If it continued to do that…He checked to see if he’d figured out how big it was yet. An hour later he had his answer. The Magma chamber was approximately twice the size of the one chamber under Yellowstone. At almost 20 miles deep and 100 miles in diameter this was one of the biggest magma chambers he’d ever come across.
If the pressure was allowed to build until this chamber blew its top it would release the equivalent energy of 1.7 gigatons. He didn’t know what kind of society existed on the planet he’d been “hatched” on but if there were humans, elves and the like that much energy would be a cataclysm.
One problem Adam was currently having was that he could not control more Chaos than the attribute he had. What was one point of Chaos worth? He honestly didn’t know because he couldn’t increase or decrease the amount he could control. Every time he tried to have the chaos he controlled turn something into chaos and add it to his amount the process would start but then stop as the item he was trying to break down reverted to its original form. He could convert one thing to another, which seemed to be limited by his attributes but as he’d boosted his attributes that limit had been increased.
He was still getting used to his new dragon body as the magma came to a point where there was a very small pocket of air his head was sticking up into and he could feel the pressure increasing around him. It had been just over 88 hours since he’d entered this magma chamber. Now that his intelligence was boosted well above normal he did some quick math and realized that if he continued to increase his attributes like this, it would be a really long time before he was done. The math was kind of fuzzy. He missed Thor. But right around 100 Quintillion years sounded right, or he could increase Endurance first doubling it and doubling it again, until he reached his Chaos Attribute divided by 12. That should take about 156 seconds. Then he could spend the next 11 seconds increasing the rest of his attributes. Yeah, that sounded a lot faster.
Over the next two minutes and thirty-six seconds, Adam watched as his Endurance attribute skyrocketed. He received all kinds of prompts which he ignored as he concentrated on not moving while he brought the rest of his attributes up. When he was done, each of his attributes was sitting at 7.46E+46 including his Chaos Attribute. All of his attributes adjusted accordingly, and he felt almost normal. Which was a good thing because the pressure in the magma chamber was continuing to build at an explosive rate.
Adam made sure that he was floating in an almost perpendicular line to the ground and began rotating his body. He visualized the chaos he had as the threads of a screw that surrounded his body and then began to spin faster as he used his tail and hind legs to swim upward. The pressure from below helped and quicker than he would have thought he was shot out of a mountain atop a geyser of lava that shot at least a mile into the air above.
Adam brought his spin under control as he continued upward, and the lava that had been lifting him slowed and fell back down onto the mountain a mile below. Fresh crisp air enveloped him as he spread his wings to hover. As he looked down on the mountains below and the forest off to one side and dry plains off to another. There were a lot of reasons for him to be sad and melancholy but those feelings were secondary to the adrenaline that was coursing through his veins as he hovered and surveyed his surroundings while flapping his wings. He looked around, taking in his new body, this new world, and the eruption below him as he yelled “Hell Yay!”
Those who witnessed the dragon's emergence and many others who did not see him flying out of a geyser of lava cowered in fear as the yell of jubilance that Adam released came out as a roar they could not understand. Adam had boosted his attributes so high that any emotional declaration he made was enforced and spread with his aura that was no longer measured in feet, it was measured in miles, if he wasn’t careful, which in his excitement, he had not been. Many creatures heard the roar or felt the energy of the area shift and were frightened into immovability. After a few moments, they regained control of their bodies without knowing exactly what had caused such a reaction. That is until the tale of a dully silver-colored dragon emerging from a mile-high Lava spout reached them. They would never know that the emergence of the dragon had averted a disaster that would have killed 90% of all life on the planet.