Amber dragons are one of the few Crystal dragons that do not prefer to stay underground in caves and mountains for the crystalline minerals that can be found there but prefer ancient forests where they can eat amber directly from the sap of the trees with some help of their magics. They are skilled in plant based magic and psionics revolving around plants and animals.
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Adrian
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I purposely take sharp turns and needless loops to make my friend both enjoy the ride and be nauseous from motion sickness before landing on the street of the house we are currently occupying. He stumbles and falls off my back before throwing up with a grin as I return to human form.
“Worth it” I hear him say before I help him up.
“Don’t tell Talia, I still owe her a ride.”
He nods and we enter the house. Abagail is sitting watching the door as it opens. I assume the others are in the sparring room as I can hear the clang of metal hitting metal.
“I’ll be back later” I say before turning to get back to experimenting.
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There are alarms going off around the secured section of the town as I pass over it for a second time tonight. This time invisible as I go search for a small cluster of people. I find what I am looking for near the warehouse the vampire lead me to. A pair of individuals, perfect.
I shift to human just before landing and enter the building to see a couple huddled in the corner as if they were hiding from something that just past through here. I drop my invisibility to check for undead and find one behind me.
We attack each other simultaneously and I find this vampire lacking compared to the others I met tonight. On a whim I stake his heart with a pencil and watch the corpse fall to the ground. Not destroyed but disabled. Interesting, staking a vampire is not death but immobility.
Make a mental note to test other things like running water later I turn to my actual goal for this trip. They are untrained and sickly normal people and I easily paralyze them with a claw to the spine before binding them in top and healing them of all ailments.
“This is going to hurt and I’m sorry but I have to do this for those I care about. If you cooperate I’ll let you go when I finish and you should become strong enough to at least fight back against monsters like the ones who originally kidnapped you.”
The young couple nod, they are terrified of me but that was technically consent and I feel what little guilt I have over these actions fade away.
I start as I did before on the male. If a fail early it is better that I do it on him. After the slight tears to allow me to alter his essence in the fabric of reality, I push to strengthen what he is.
Nothing happens and I think for a minute. “Think of what you are and what you want to be” I say and listen to his dull answer.
Taller, stronger and faster. At least he added few sweet words for the girl next to us. With this I push and his raw essence changes slightly as it expands pulling some of the fragment of raw something I accidently took during my last attempt.
He screams in pain, and I shift to watch his physical form begin to change cannibalizing itself to fit the image on the fabric for reality. Something it will never accomplish alone, not without a lot of raw food and stored nutrients.
I pull out dried meat and water commanding him to eat as I start guiding and forcing changes to his physical form. I ignore the flames of his life dimming, his life span shortening as he stabilizes.
I did it, sort of. There are deformities in his bones and his musculature is off but it worked. I’ll confirm my findings with the woman and see if I can get around the shortened lifespan.
“What did you do?” the youth asks.
“I made you more than what you were before. Now just stay there and be quiet. I’m going to do the same for your girlfriend before double checking to fix any problems.”
They will be good practice for making sure no errors happen with my girls. I turn to the girl ignoring the boys words and her growing blush and ask her the question I gave the boy. Their desire might have helped in this or it might have been I had a direction to go in.
Rather than her voiced preference to be pretty and healthy I try to degrade her looks and give her more intelligence only to abandon that line when I start feeling a growing backlash. It wasn’t harder to make the change but she or the boy didn’t accept it as what should be happening. . .
I turn back to her physical traits and slowly alter them. I alternate between feeding bits of the fragment to her essence and shaping the physical to match. I quickly run out of whatever the fragment is but her lifeforce did not dim. I still made mistakes, her proportions are not quite right and there are some irregularities in bone shapes but I fix those before turning back to the boy. His life force is still fading and I don’t think he’ll last too long without more adjustments.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
I make some minor changes to his internal organs to lower the cost they consume from him. It will make him susceptible to injury but I won’t have him keeling over for no reason and getting me hit with a backlash.
I untie the boy who has been glaring at me for a while. He doesn’t move immediately and I take a step back.
“Thanks for cooperating. You can untie your girlfriend, I’ll be leaving.”
I notice a scent of unrestrained lust from the boy as I leave. I doubt he has the control over his new strength for what he wants to do. A problem caused by increased hormones in him and her emitting more pheromones? Probably, but not really my problem.
I need more of that fragment. Can I get it without killing? Maybe, it might be possible to extract it from basic physical matter instead of living beings. It might be possible to not have to use it too, Dragon’s Blessing didn’t seem to use anything but . . .
Mana and draconic essence. I might be able to extract it from supernatural powers. I need a name for whatever that raw essence is too. I turn to the immobilized vampire a feel a plan forming.
I could try and see if I can extract it from his vampiric powers or butcher a bunch of people for it. . . I doubt one vampire will be enough. Perhaps a vampire who constantly gorges himself on a mortal I force to regenerate as he eats too. . .
I bring the vampire with me to the next nearest cluster of people. They are a few streets away in an office building. No undead are nearby save the one I am dragging around when I check for them. I hold the corpse of the vampire against a wall with my claws around his neck as I remove the pencil from his heart.
An instant of struggle happens before he finds he is too young and weak to break my grip.
“I have some questions, answer them and perform a task for me and you’ll get to continue past this night.”
He nods, accepting his fate.
“Good, now what is the medium and source of you supernatural abilities.”
“Blood.”
“How?”
“First promise me that if I cooperate I’ll go free.”
I nod, I don’t care as long as I get what I need.
“My coven specializes in blood magic. Blood is the source of life, there is energy in it and a vampire condenses that power in his own blood when he feeds.”
“I am going to test something, afterwards if it works I have a task for you to do that won’t be of any help to you.”
I slit the vampire's wrist and drain some of it’s blood into a glass pulled from Void Cache. His is thinner than the one I fought in the sewer. A correlation or just happenstance?
I let the vampire go but he stands in front of me his injury fading and I focus on the blood. I find it’s reflection on the pattern and pull at it like I did the woman when I accidently broke a fragment of and killed her. I feel it crack and there is a something that leaks out of the bloods essence as I rip out the piece most similar to what I had before.
Then both the blood in the glass and the tiny fragment of raw essence wrapped in my will become denatured. The fragment becomes what I want and the blood putrefies and rots as it should have been coming from a corpse. I smile, not I need to harvest as much of this as I can.
“I want you to gorge yourself on some mortals as I force them to regenerate and give me the blood in the same state as the sample I took from you.”
“Why?” the vampire asks in genuine interest.
“Evolution” I say cryptically and there is a genuine grin from the undead.
“Other than the embrace?”
“No, I'm not going to be making vampires with it.”
“Really? Now I absolutely must know. Tell me and you’ll have my full cooperation.”
“I’m going to extract the power from the blood and use it to raise and awaken the potential in other creatures.”
The vampire nods, “interesting. Could I watch the second part of this process as well?”
“Sure, I can do it to someone you bring me to later tonight. I doubt the victims of the first phase will be in any condition to be a proper display.
You show an interest as if you attempt similar things. Care to explain?”
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After spending roughly half of the food I stole today regenerating the victims I have a few gallons of the jelly like vampire blood sitting in Void Cache as the vampire guides me down a tunnel in the sewers stopping before a door that should not be down here.
“My meat is your meat. My blood is your blood and you are welcome to stay within the domain of Vas'rac.”
I don’t understand why he said that but notice the people within the hall the door opened to relax.
“Thank you for your hospitality.”
“Come, I shall show you my creations. Perhaps they shall inspire your gift to be greater” Vas'rac says as he guides me to a dungeon.
The cells hold flesh crafted monsters, living creatures molded by vampiric blood magic. I find myself fascinated in the same manner as I am Damû's books on necromancy.
None of these things should ever have been created. The processes are horrible and he explains them which such detail and clarity that I have no doubt this man has long forsaken his humanity.
We stop before a cage holding a twenty foot wide amalgamation of flesh he calls his greatest creation. A monster of raw physical destructive power that he had planned on testing against the bone warriors of the mortal necromancers.
I certainly know what kind of thing I should make to please this monster who helped me by the time we reach and end of his creations and arrive at a cell with a few dozen very well fed and fit individuals.
“Please choose the base and show me your art” Vas’rac says.
I take one of the males at random having no desire to turn a woman into a machine of death and destruction.
The man walks over to me and kneels, he is apparently completely devoted to his vampiric master. I pull some of the vampiric blood from Void Cache and spend a few minutes gathering fragments of raw essence from it before touching the man's head and ignoring the screams of pain. Screams that seem to please the ears of my host.
Bones warp and I slowly turn the man into a reptilian monster covered in scales and bladed spikes. A metabolism to support regeneration and enough intelligence to use more than just physical strength. A fifth of the blood was spent but when it is done I am sure Vas'rac will be willing to help me get more if I need it.
I ignore his moderately positive critics of what I made but pay great attention to his comments on improvements to be made like inefficiencies in how the muscles are altered.
Declining an offer to rest in his domain I leave to return to the others. I’m probably going to get talked to about running off on my own but this is something that I could not have done in front of the others.