Getting to the right place took about a day, and that was with him running at the highest speed he could keep up without outright damaging his body or leaving himself vulnerable for an ambush, something close to 175 km/h.

While he ebbed and flowed in how fast he was due to a myriad of reasons like the terrain, population centers and having to cross a couple of mountains too big and stormy to fly over, the reason it took so long was mostly the sheer size of the super continent he currently resides in.

Aki had pretty much gone from one edge of the empire to the other, about perhaps the same as the length of America, and the empire certainly didn't lose to either one in width despite occupying only half of it's side of the continent.

Which was somehow a hollow triangle with a few dots in the middle. A shape he did not bother to figure information about.

While the beast kin occupied the largest stretch of land, the only parts you could really live in were near the extremities and middle. Despite occupying more land, with even more available to expand into, both humans and demon-kin had other problems instead, in the form of beast lords and their posses.

Similarly, the dwarves and gnomes could expand however much they wanted, so long as they didn't collapse the great inner sea into their tunnels and caves or got too close to the territories of the great monster clusters underneath.

Comparatively, the elves lived in a set of isles not too far from the triangle point of the demon-kin and beast-kin territory, apparently not interested in expansion at all, and seemingly undisputed.

What he was about to do was the equivalent of attempting to conquer a small nation by himself so as to add the banner of his faction to it, though admittedly, this was mainly a personal choice as there were easier targets all around.

…………………

Adding a fourth gravity well to his trap and further infused his mana into the hardening dragonoid, it's screams somehow became even more pitiful, scales digging into it's not so soft flesh as they were forcefully moved, the contorted creature bleeding several small waterfalls of blood as it was hoisted on the air.

And Aki stood there, right below it, utterly concentrated on milking the pitiful soul for blood and suffering. Truth be told, he was enjoying this a bit too much despite how hard his head pounded in pain and his mana channels burned.

If he could be said to hold his more orderly cousins and their societies to a negative light, then he most certainly knew himself to be a bigot against dragons and their kin.

The normal reasons were there, of course, he feared them and wished for their corpses to serve as materials for his success, but mostly his loathing came from envy.

For after all, dragons were creatures of purpose. Born People and regularly elevated to whatever position was needed for the good of reality, they always had a reason to be, a duty and place to be.

*CRACRUNCRUNCH*

Yet what stood before him was nothing more than a filthy and sick cat with delusions of grandeur, one who had never accepted it's place, which at best, it was too pitiful a creature to understand.

He thought about sundering it's soul, but he had better things to spend the next hours upon, his strength not enough to liberate the Possibility in that Spark without a complete remodeling of his current ritual.

*Roar*

*Roooaar*

*ROOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRR*

The nest of a dragon was, after all, several times the size of the area it's occupant actually used, working as a Gu pot where the animals and beings mutated by its essence fought and established a chain of command and authority drawn by the concentration of essence reinforcing their bodies, with the dragon in question and his chosen descendents at the top, growing stronger through the ritualistic Significance and Faith generated by the desperate cannibalism of ecosystems changed to strengthen and please them.

Because that was just how fucking broken dragon essence was, no matter the actual power level of the individual.

Which is how his now blood soaked ass intended to train, with a ritual made to siphon and condense dragonic essence. Not only could the result be condensed into a treasure capable of strengthening him so long as he kept feeding the process his own significance, but the thing was also the equivalent of a magical offensive billboard that kept blaring about free food with a megaphone in an area filled with hungry people.

Meaning he'd get to kill pretty much everything in the area that wasn't a complete coward or water bound. So long as the dragon nesting around wasn't awake and intended to crash his party, which was unlikely.

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So it was to his not so great surprise that the first thing to answer his challenge was a bigger, uglier version of the armadillo drake he had just torn apart instead of some hulking beast spitting hellfire everywhere.

Not that the thing wasn’t bigger than a van, perhaps the size of a trailer cart, but with it’s eyeballs being so big, he had an easy simply sending a few pulses of radiance into it and then all he needed to do was use a small gust of wind and a jump to avoid the collapsing carcass of the being that had just been charging at him.

Perhaps a ritualist of this world would have had their entire scheme blow to kingdom come right there, the ritual lines on the ground destroyed by the corpse.

For a xianxia aficionado like him however, it was child’s play to integrate complete and partial ritual components into a single system with multiple redundancies, where the excess mana and vitality in the air would be slowly integrated into the components that had long since been activated and melded into the surroundings, serving as both a strengthening of the original ritual and a force of surplus energy to regenerate the already firmed ritual.

Doing something so ‘innovative’ had downsides, of course.

The reason people didn’t normally do this kind of ritual work in the wild without some sort of outside artifact capable of masking them was simple. Any ritual capable of creating a lasting impression on reality in way that would allow it to regenerate needed time to be effective, and with it, energy.

Energy that would need outside resources in drawing arrays, which would be rather obvious without an accompanying formation to allow for stealth, sans leading every simple minded nasty around you to come and take a look. It is always an option to use trained mages to more efficiently feed such constructions, but their presence would in turn need concealing, and by the end of the charging they would be unlikely to still have an iota of mental strength even if their mana regeneration could keep up with the drain. So it was suicide to try and use anything of the sorts alone, right?

Most certainly.

Unless you knew how to convert mana into mental acuity, vitality into stamina, take both from your fallen enemies and had a soul well developed enough to deal with taking in so much from foreign sources at once, which would be needed in great number to supply for a maniac attempting such a daring do.

Aki could, of course, do all of that.

So by the time the next beast came around, the young man intent on honing his animancy was more than ready to once again do the most damage with the least amount of mana.

Just like that. There was little delay between the appearance of the stampeding animal and it’s death. For a battle maniac, this was an absolute waste, but for a man that was about to take on the longest fight of his short life, it was absolutely an overuse of mana as the bull had been dead by the third pulse and yet he had even released another one.

When fighting a horde, that was a good way to get killed. The murderous monsters certainly wouldn't care to allow him the respite to slowly correct it either.

This time there came three by air, one oversized dragonfly and two red birds. While the birds died instantly, the insect somehow dodged the near instantaneous spell with no travel time before impact. That meant that not only could it see the trajectory of his spell, the thing had fast response musculature good enough to allow it to fly like it had short range teleportation powers.

‘Bothersome, and likely to be an archetype rather than a unique specimen so long as it has good enough attack capabilities.’ All dragon types had fast reproductive capabilities after all.

Both as a test and as a form to conserve himself, Aki allowed the thing to come closer, and as it was about to reach him he cast a small wind blade from behind it, which sent the thing rolling away in the air due to it’s type of flight.

He had honestly been expecting it to dodge the point blank spell coming from behind, preparing to punch the thing’s face in, but that was also good enough. This cost him even less than expected, and it wasn’t like something else wouldn’t end up killing the injured bug.

And with those thoughts, he turned to the newest arrival, a slow ass turtle that seemed to be carrying an entire hill on it's back and a pack of what could be either wolves or hyaenas. It was hard to tell, but they had mottled, red fur and seemed to be foaming at the mouth.

Him analyzing whether he was dealing with cats or dogs was distraction enough that an unseen beast managed to get the first hit on him, a small pressure suddenly hitting his back.

He did not think for even a moment before manipulating his vitality to forcefully eject blood from the wound he could not feel, a release he recognised as a piercing object leaving his flesh coming right after.

He didn't doubt there was some kind of noxious agent still in his system, but before dealing with that he still sent quick bursts of radiance at the new arrivals, turning around to find… nothing? No, that's a giant spiked chameleon, it's just brown, fast and hiding in the trees with some kind of weird light refraction quality.

A small brain fart over how to dispatch it later, Aki summoned tentacles of darkness to hold the thing before throwing magma into it's face. The species seemed to still have some arm strength however, as it almost broke out before it's demise reached the intended destination, forcing him to spend more mental energy on it and making him almost get tackled by a rather spiteful dragonfly.

Still, he could have commented on the ease of it all if the next sneak attack didn't send him skipping backwards, the earth splitting open as the mouth of a generic but very ugly lizard came from below, his reaction perhaps a tad exaggerated as the thing was sent flying backwards by a boulder it had liberated shoving itself down it's far too small gullet.

With that surprise, he started siphoning more the increasing ambient mana into himself, Aki topped his reserves and kept going, saturating his Spirit, Body and eventually Mind with energy, forcing the recovery of related resources while taxing the physical and metaphysical components of his Being.

It was probably too early to start doing so with this intensity, but there WAS a flurry of monkeys coming from the trees who were rather agitated, and what seemed to be a blur of black and green stalking for carion.

Yeah, this was going to take a while.

'Plenty of time to get good.' He decided, allowing a small smile to pass through his fear.