The next three days were spent working on freeing the dragon. I did wonder if it was possible to use general shaping to make chains ‘solid’ and use that to cut them in half, thus using alteration essence and not manifestation essence. However, since the entire point of giving Anise most of the credit for freeing the dragon was to hopefully upgrade her manifestation essence affinity, so it was ultimately irrelevant.

The biggest reason I ended up thinking about it anyway was our dwindling food supply. When we had first set off on the expedition, I had originally hoped to find a bunch of plants by foraging, thus alleviating some of our food needs, and that had helped. However, with the increasing strength of the black sun and the death of much of the surface life of this world, as well as the fact that we were spending a significantly larger portion of our time than expected breaking the red dragon’s chains without exploring further, our food crisis was becoming more and more noticeable and problematic with each day. After all, it seemed like it was getting harder and harder to forage for food, especially in the area directly around the palace since it was filled with magical mines and traps.

Thus, the second day of working on freeing the red dragon, we started to come to the uncomfortable realization that we really didn’t have enough food to make our plans successful. We either needed to start cutting back on food supply, which would leave us hungry and weakened in the future, or find a way to compensate for the food supply. We spent almost an hour trying to figure out what to do, even bringing Sekundyrr into the conversation by combining my abilities and Anise’s lights to see if it had any suggestions. We held the conversation right next to the dragon as well, in hopes that it might have an idea what fleshy, non-metallic creatures like us might be able to use for food in the area.

The dragon didn’t have any good ideas, having been imprisoned in a small cell for the past couple centuries. Sekundyrr, however, recommended that we eat some of the creatures that we had killed in the Dimensional Habitat Facility. Even if they were effectively carnivorous plants, they still had flesh - and there a good chance that they weren’t influenced by the dimension of the black sun. They also had a slight tendency to implode upon contact with the laws of our dimension, but we could always have someone try eating a bit and see what happened first. Just because it wasn’t able to maintain its structure in our dimension didn’t necessarily mean that it was poisonous, and we had Sallia and my healing abilities to keep a test subject fairly safe during some quick experimentation.

So on day two, after Anise ran out of mana and broke four more chains, we went back to the Dimensional Habitat Facility to check if Sekundyrr’s suggestion was feasible.

Luckily, it didn’t seem like the creatures we had killed in room 3 had been particularly tainted by the black sun, and also hadn’t been influenced by the weird dimensional laws of room six. Which was a relief - if the destroyed remains of the monsters we had fought had come back to life as some sort of carnivorous plant zombie, we would have had to fight and kill the creatures again, and there was no telling whether we would win or what state the corpses would have been in afterwards.

Sallia volunteered to be the guinea pig for our first attempt at eating a creature from Sekundyrr’s home dimension. Ultimately, we found that, while the plant monsters decomposed into strange mush after being exposed to our dimension’s atmosphere for about half an hour, it was still edible. Sallia was fine a day after eating it, and so we ended up using what corpses we could find as food. The plant mush tasted rather… odd, but at the very least, it kept our food supplies much healthier. I estimated that there was about a week’s worth of food available from the corpses of the plant monsters, which gave us enough time to free the dragon and still have a little extra wriggle room.

Day by day passed as we worked on destroying the chains on the dragon’s body. Sallia started joining in once Anise destroyed the twelfth chain, and confirmed that she could indeed shatter a chain on her own if she unloaded about five third-circle spells at it first. It was nowhere near as efficient as Anise’s 2-spells per chain, but it was good enough to hopefully get Sallia a new manifestation essence keyword ability, brining the dragon down to nine remaining chains.

The next day, we broke through seven chains. Anise broke four, Sallia broke one, and Felix and I copied Sallia’s actions to break one chain each on our own. With two chains left, the creature smiled at us, and began squirming around. Its body had previously been tethered to the table so securely that the creature couldn’t move at all, but after most of its chains were destroyed, the dragon could finally move quite freely on its own.

The creature wiggled around a little bit, glancing at the two remaining chains on its body, and its grin widened further.

“I can feel my control over my spellcasting essence returning to me,” said the creature, grinning broadly. “It is such a relief to have access to my spells again.”

Then, the dragon began manipulating an absolutely massive amount of manifestation essence.

Far more than I had seen used in the recent past. Far more than I could ever hope to use in this life.

If the amount of alteration essence I had in my body could be compared to a small stream, the dragon’s mana was equivalent to a small lake. It glanced at the final chains holding it down, and I felt the manifestation essence quickly form itself into a spell I had never seen or heard of before. I did, however, have a rough idea how much manifestation essence was contained in the spell.

It was a seventh circle spell. It had to be. I had seen the overseer of our hometown use a seventh circle spell before, and the dragon was manipulating about the same amount of essence. But it didn’t feel like this was the dragon’s limit, though, unlike our former overseer.

Our overseer had barely managed to squeak out a single seventh-circle spell before dying during the battle against the Orukthyri. The red dragon was manipulating the same amount of mana because it seemed to think that was sufficient for the task - I knew with certainty that it could do much more than this. It hadn’t even used up a tenth of its total mana reserves.

In that moment, I realized that there was a reason dragons were considered gods on this world. And I also realized just how powerful the former Orthans of this world had been. They had managed to subdue and capture this creature, which seemed utterly impossible to fight in my eyes.

A small spurt of ice clawed its way out of the dragon’s mouth, before landing on the two final prismium chains. They froze over, then collapsed utterly and completely. Moments later, most of the prismium chains in the room, as well as the table the dragon had been strapped to, followed suit.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Not a single change in temperature was felt by me. If it weren’t for the fact that I could feel manifestation essence being manipulated, I might have thought that the table and the half-destroyed chains had simply decided to implode all at once for no reason at all.

“Ahhh… freedom at last. That feels wonderful,” said the dragon, its massive teeth widening into a massive grin.

After a moment of stunned awe, I activated my soul-sight. I didn’t think the dragon would turn on us, and if it did, using my bubbles of sleep would be far more likely to do something than trying to extinguish the dragon’s ridiculously oversized soul.

No, I was hoping to see something else, even though I had no idea if it would be visible to me at all.

As we freed the dragon, I saw a System notification pop up.

Influence: Play a minor role in helping one Dragon escape its imprisonment

Achievement +1,000

My Achievement increased from 17,328 to 18,328. However, I completely ignored the Achievement and the muted feeling of joy it created as it settled into my soul.

Instead, I focused entirely on Anise’s soul, hoping to see something. A sign that maybe, just maybe, Anise might be coming with us. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to her once we left this world. Not now, not ever.

And I saw something change in Anise’s soul. It was very, very faint, and if I hadn’t been paying as much attention to her, I might have missed it entirely.

But even though it was hard to notice, I was pretty sure that her soul had become ever so slightly brighter. It wasn’t by much - if previously, Anise’s soul was as bright as a little lantern, now, it was like someone had added a firefly’s worth of light to it. It was so faint that I wasn’t even completely convinced that it existed. It didn’t look like a skill settling into her body. Instead, it looked almost like Anise had flicked a switch inside of her soul, and it had just become ever-so-slightly brighter.

But something had changed, even if I could barely see it.

I smiled, and reached over to give Anise a quick hug. It wasn’t a declaration that she would definitely be coming with us, when we went to the Market again.

But if I wasn’t mistaken about what I had just witnessed and what it meant, it was proof that people could upgrade their attunements at least a little bit from one life to the next. I couldn’t remember any of my lives before my life on ‘Earth,’ and the details of my life on ‘Earth’ were incredibly patchy. But I finally had a good idea why I apparently had an incredible talent for manipulating alteration essence.

Apparently, in one or more of my previous lives, I had been very good at messing with alteration essence. I had no idea if the one, single action from Anise had brought up her talent in manipulating manifestation essence to the point where it was considered an ‘extreme’ affinity. I didn’t know if the Market would sense her and bring her along with us. But I was now pretty sure that affinity for an essence could grow. And that meant there was a real chance to bring Anise with us.

“Thank you very much, little Orthanoids,” said the dragon, turning its attention back towards us. “I appreciate the help. Now, as promised, let’s go and figure out the source of this taint in the air.”

“Can we wait for Anise to recover?” I asked, trying not to sound too demanding. The dragon seemed agreeable enough, and hadn’t suddenly turned on us the moment we freed it, which meant there was a good chance it intended to honor its earlier statements. However, I still didn’t want to annoy the creature. But waiting for Anise to recover her manifestation essence was also a good idea. “She’s a bit tired from helping you get free.”

The dragon paused, giving us a curious look, before it sighed. “Very well, little Orthanoids. We can wait a little bit. I will naturally protect you anyway, so it’s quite meaningless. But I suppose even if your abilities are measly, it must be comforting to be able to help yourselves as well.” the dragon glanced at the chains and table that it seemed to have obliterated for no reason at all besides pure spite, and its eyes rolled in strange directions. “I find that I can sympathize with that idea far more than before, given my recent experiences. How long will it take the pink-haired girl to recover? You usually wait about a day, yes?”

“A day should be more than enough. Thank you,” I said, before the four of us settled down to rest and eat some more weird plant porridge.

“I never did get used to the need flesh creatures have for eating such weird food,” said the dragon, shaking its head as it looked at our strange plant porridge. “So odd. Say, do any of you have any gold on you, or other metals? I could do with a snack myself.”

“Hmm…” I frowned, and then opened my backpack to check. I found several bars of gravitite. A thought occurred to me.

Could dragons eat gravitite? Also, I had gotten an Achievement reward for ‘owning’ a certain amount of Gravitite. What happened if, after gaining that Achievement, I lost ownership of that gravitite? I hadn’t ever seen the System deduct Achievement we had earned, at least not unless we paid for maintenance for our equipment or bought something.

I found myself very curious.

“Are you able to eat this?” I asked, pulling out one bar of gravitite.

The dragon looked at it, and gave it a cautious sniff. “It smells delicious,” it said. “I’m not sure what metal it is, though. I can’t say I’ve ever seen it before. What metal is this?”

“It’s called gravitite,” I said. “We found a bunch of it in one of the other facilities near here. It seems to be a type of metal found in another dimension, although we’re not quite sure how that would interact with your body if you ate it.”

The dragon thought for a moment, and then rolled its eyes around in their sockets a few times, making them look kind of like disco balls. “I can try a little nibble and see if it upsets my stomach, I suppose. So long as I wait a few hours, I should know if it will be harmful to eat or not.”

I handed over the gravitite, and the dragon delicately shredded off a piece of gravitite about the size of a coin, before swallowing it.

“Delicious! This is even tastier than gold!” said the dragon enthusiastically, before it completely ignored its earlier statement about waiting a few hours as it immediately devoured the metal whole.

“Do you have any more?” asked the dragon after a moment. It looked almost like a puppy begging for food.

I gave it two more bars of gravitite… dropping my total number of ‘owned’ Gravitite bars below 12. I had gotten 2 Achievement rewards for owning gravitite: the first reward for owning 3, and the second for owning 12 bars of gravitite. If the dragon ate these two bars of gravitite, I should, theoretically, lose my Achievement reward.

The dragon nommed the two bars of Gravitite. My achievement remained completely unaffected, even though I no longer owned twelve bars of Gravitite.

Interesting.

There was something I was missing about how wealth achievement worked: some facet of how Achievement as a whole worked, perhaps. I seemed to recall seeing a System notification somewhere mention that Achievements were connected to local dimensional laws, although I couldn’t for the life of me remember where I had seen it before. Once we got back to the Market, I would look into that.

But for now, at least, I had more important matters to deal with.

The dragon was free. It was time to plan how we were going to find the origin of our connection to the world of the black sun and cut it off. We had a dragon on our side now.

I just hoped it would be enough.