I don’t think Merlin and I are talking.

Normally, this wouldn’t bother me. I can hold a passive-aggressive silence with the best of them, so if he thinks I’m going to crack first, he has another thing coming.

What’s that? You don’t think I have the patience to stare down a legendary cultivator in a bottom-lip pouting contest?

You know me so little.

I have a ‘friend’ from Nursery I haven’t spoken to in about twenty-five years: bitch took the last block of yellow Lego from the tub and, well, you don’t do me like that.

She made somewhat of a power move a few years back by inviting me to her wedding. If you’d seen me ostentatiously blank a two-hundred-pound woman, in a puffy white dress, on the happiest day of her life, you need to believe I can cold-shoulder a wizard whose only presence on Earth is as a disembodied voice.

But, as I left my internal artist’s studio and returned to the real world - one in which I found myself lying in the slimy, congealed blood of a recently decapitated dragon - it’s hardly surprising I felt up for a chat.

“Big M, you there?”

Silence.

“Okay. I get you’re pissed at me for not taking your advice. But you need to remember I have no idea how any of this works. You dropped me into a mortal combat death match with a dragon, and I admit I was feeling a bit raw about it. However, I get that I shouldn’t have gulped all that stuff down in one go, especially after you told me not to. But let’s be fair, it doesn’t seem to have worked out too bad, does it?”

Silence.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is that we both could have been our better selves over all this a little more, and we should probably put it behind us and get back to, you know, saving my sister. And the world.”

That was a terrible apology.

“Excuse me, mate? Did you hear the word ‘sorry’ anywhere there? I’m not apologising to you; I’m saying things were done, and we can agree we both might have done them better. No harm, no foul. Look, think of it like I’m the loveable, impetuous one that the audience loves to hate, and you’re the sanctimonious know-it-all who gets a spin-off series that is cancelled after three shows when the producers realise who had the real star power. We’ve got different skill sets. I’m telling you, we should totally team up and fight crime.”

That’s an extraordinary way of saying you made a colossal error, despite my advice, and that you are so grateful I swooped in to help. And that you are very, very sorry for being such a silly, silly girl.

“Dude, if you’re hoping to out-petty me here, I can show you an official wedding photo with me giving such exquisite stink-eye to the bride that they had to stick one of those yellow smiley faces over me in post-production.”

More silence.

I shifted around a little on the ground, feeling extremely high levels of ick at the resulting squelching noises. My back was thoroughly coated with the dragon’s blood, making staying much longer in my current position feel very unattractive.

I’d only just gotten over the experience of being covered in wolf guts, and I feared the tunic I’d been gifted in the village was probably at the end of its serviceable life.

I pressed down with my forearms and elbows to start the process of standing up and, somewhat surprisingly, found myself catapulted several feet in the air.

Fortunately, to make sure this was even more ungainly, the back of my tunic was stuck to the ground by all blood and was ripped clean away as I shot upwards.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

The result of this, as I fell back to Earth with quite the thump, was that my arse was once again fully exposed to the elements.

“What. The. FUCK! Merlin, what was that!”

Fine. I am going to need to explain what has happened so you don’t injure yourself while getting used to the changes. However, I don’t want you to take me engaging with you over this as any sign that I either accept your apology -

“I didn’t apologise!”

Or that I believe I have done anything at all for which you are due an apology of your own. My position is that you are entirely to blame for everything -

“Mate, tell me what’s going on with my body!”

You will recall that I have mentioned several times that the body you have possessed has gone through a significant process of physical tempering.

“So?”

Do you remotely understand what that means?

“You know what? I think it was unfair of me to describe you as a sanctimonious know-it-all. What on Earth made me think that was a fair thing to say?”

I am saying that the customs and practices under which your body was trained by its previous owner are nothing particularly advanced or unusual for the culture from which the boy was from. However, they are extremely impressive by modern standards. During our little day of training, we’ve further tightened up on what he had achieved there. You are thus what I believe is known in the trade as … buff.

“Okay . . .”

However, whilst I was heroically keeping you alive after your latest foolhardy escapade, I seem to have pushed the physical potential envelope of your body a little.

I looked down at the divot my elbows had left in the dirt as they had propelled me into the sky. “In what way ‘pushed the envelope’, Big M?”

This seems like an apt moment for me to outline some further details around cultivation.

“It’s not that long ago since your last infodump. Am I going to find this remotely interesting?”

I could put this another way, do you want to know what’s happening with your body? Or should we just let you flounder about in what I am coming to recognise as being your signature style?

“Are there any other choices?”

You really are a child.

*

I will spare you the lecture Merlin gave me that seemed to last most of my adult life.

At one stage, I had to check time was still passing and he wasn’t looping things again as I was sure there was no way there could be that much monologuing in just one short day.

We’re talking Grade A Bond Villain oversharing here.

There were a whole heap of words I didn’t understand and an awful lot of stuff I kind of did, but those sections sounded largely like Merlin was making it up as he went along.

But, to try to summarise with the highlights, it is apparently essential to have as a starting point that there’s an awful lot of Qi in the British Isles.

Like, a lot.

Have you ever wondered why so many myths, legends and general wackiness have been generated on such a small island?

Well, now you know. It’s not hallucinations caused by the toxic build-up of ingesting too much tea. It’s Qi—lots of it.

The thing is, though, when he was alive, Merlin simply hoovered most of this energy up. The way he tells it, he needed to pull so much of it out of the land to keep up with his advancement that it left the rest of the island somewhat bone-dry.

The reasons there are no dinosaurs any more? Merlin sucked up all the Qi they needed to survive.

Atlantis? Merlin on a Qi bender.

Hang on. I never said anything like that...

So, the lesser folk - that’s absolutely what he called the rest of us, by the way. Don’t worry, I’m keeping score of all the many and various ways I’m not wholly sure the Big M is the good guy of this tale - by necessity, would focus on physical cultivation and body tempering in order to survive.

Essentially, in the absence of any Qi because of Merlin-the-magic-hog, a whole culture built around maximising physicality grew up. Thus, a fine young dark-age warrior like Wulfnoð would have spent most of his life pushing his body past its limitations in such a Qi-deprived environment.

Hence the henchness of our ancestors.

And, incidentally, nothing to do with all that paleo-diet bollocks your mate’s dad would swear by as he paraded in front of you with his shirt off and in his ancient budgie-smugglers.

So, take one Qi-deprived but very well-drilled body and enter me and my fantastic idea to flood it with some high-quality dragon Qi. When that all became a touch intense, and Merlin needed to pull some epic cultivation shit to keep it from exploding under all of the stress, that’s where the magic happened.

To cut a long story short, the outcome of all that coming together was that I’m now the proud owner of a superhero bod capable of jumping small buildings in a single bound.

That is so far from what I have just explained to you that I assume you simply weren’t listening to a word I said.

“That was the gist, no?”

No. Not even slightly.

“Come on. You as good as said it yourself. Dragon Qi equals gamma radiation, and my body is now permanently Hulked up, right? Next, we need to focus on flinging some force lightning around and sharpening up the old lightsaber action. After that, I’ll be good to go to meet Arthur and save the world.

I think I preferred it when we weren’t talking.