After the dragons slew the humans, they flew back to the chaparral lands that Audax waited patiently in. There were a few of them injured by desperate, last-minute attacks from the humans, but there were no deaths.

I flew there with them, although in Voidwalk, and eventually deactivated the spell to return to the corporeal plane. I appeared directly in front of Aurora, who already had seals placed on her. A huge commotion erupted, and Audax actually came to my defence. Usually, I’d make some snarky joke about it, but I truly didn’t even know how to feel after witnessing that. It reminded me that life carries weight, but my position to seek balance distorted that view. My thoughts were barrelling into each other and I almost forgot that dangerous dragons were surrounding me. Those thoughts were so loud that I couldn’t hear what remarks the dragons were making about me until I actually paid attention to them.

“What would an outsider like you understand?!” one of them said, and it quieted the entire place. All I could hear at this point was the wind.

Audax stood still, glaring wordlessly at the dragon who uttered those words. Aurora walked in front of Audax and rubbed her hornless head on his neck, in an attempt to calm him down. It worked, thankfully, because he finally breathed again.

“Do the rest of you think the same?” Audax asked. None of them said a thing; it was hard to watch.

“Come, Audax. Let us leave here,” Aurora encouraged. So, Audax flew off, and Aurora followed close behind.

I began having my doubts about it all. Were the dragons any different from the humans? Ugh, whatever, man. I can’t make the correct decisions every time. “Dragons of Et Draco!” I garnered their attention, which they didn’t like. “I have the impregnated dragons that the humans of Et Draco captured. What will you do with them?”

Again, some silence crept forth. “They, are tainted!”

Are you fucking kidding me?! I ran some light magic in myself to remain calm. “So?”

“We will not harbour your wretched young, human!” another dragon, female by the looks of it, declared.

“You don’t need to. I’ll come get them when the eggs come out. Is that okay?” I said, trying to make it so they welcome their own kin back.

One walked up on me, slowly, “It seems you do not understand us, human! We will not have the desecrated back here!”

Something finally snapped in me, and I slammed him down so hard that Gravity Field broke a few bones, “You disgusting filth!” My mana flared, “You are no different that the humans you hate!” Gravity Field began fading and I switched to pure void manipulation, a much stronger and more versatile alternative.

I suddenly felt a warm presence behind me, “Stop! You’ll kill him!” Dawn said. “Please!” I hadn’t even noticed when she manifested. She also passed light magic through me to calm me down once again.

I used Mana Perception to identify the dragons that had seals in them, those that tried to hide the fact that they were already inseminated by humans for their own safety.

“It’s probably a bad idea to leave them there,” Donna advised, which I agreed with. It wouldn’t take long for the other dragons to realise some females have seals in them, and from there, it would probably end in a cleansing.

I used Scour on one of them to find where the dragon land in Et Draco was, and Voidported all the ‘purists’ right back where they came from. Only the once captured females were remaining. “Every dragon here has seals in them, and probably laid eggs which held half-breeds. I am offering refuge to the dragons currently carrying eggs in them. I am also doing the same for half-breeds. I welcome all of you to my world. Of course, if you wish, I can remove your seals and you can go back to your homelands. The choice is yours.”

So, for the next hour or so, I freed about one hundred and twenty-five dragons from seals. They chose to return home. Fifty or so opted to go to Methelia with me. They were really brave to trust a human like that, because I’m sure they were scared of me, but their love for their young won out.

So, I returned to Methelia with Dawn, and about fifty dragons in tow. I landed them safely with void manipulation. Once I removed the seals, I visited Moken who went to Ingen. He allowed me to use his old homelands. With Earth God, I redid a lot of the landscape to make it appropriate for housing.

With the intervention of an entire team of civil engineers, roads, needed facilities, and houses were built in about a month that would accommodate about half a million people. Thanks to the variety of engineers from different worlds, not all infrastructure looked the same. Twenty Erics with mastered transmutation and Division was pretty handy for building a city. During that month of endless work, Volt contacted me using Dawn as a messenger.

Guess what? More work! I groaned internally, because I knew that very, very soon, I’d have to start sending my twenty clones to help the other fifteen clones that were busy spearheading the coalition. But Volt’s request was just as important.

So, in the next two days, the king and queen of Methelia sat around a table. There was now a team of ten rank five councilmen that led the Order of Mages. Volt finally began throwing his pitch to the king and queen.

“Go ahead. That land is owned by the kingdom, you need not even ask,” King Maxwell said.

Volt was dumbfounded. “My king, I don’t think you understand just how much land I’m asking fo–”

“It doesn’t matter. Take as much as you want, as long as it doesn’t go into private property.”

So, it turned out, the Order was getting ridiculously overpopulated and Volt needed more land. In fact, his true intention was to literally move the entire Order of Mages from Aquan to a more centralised location, and I was his workhorse to do it. That bastard. Then again, I was the one who pitched this coalition idea in the first place, so I had no choice but to do what he asked of me. I sat down for hours wondering just how the fuck I’d move something that large, then an idea went off in my head.

If I wanted to teleport something, I had to use Riftshear, as long as I didn’t wear that something. Riftshear was a space-type spell, taught to me by the goddess of life, Zanthia. But spells had their limits. However, I knew someone who mastered manipulation for space magic – August! The only problem was, he didn’t have Division. And that line of thought led me down another place entirely.

Hey, Donna. Can I teach Augu–

“Sure.”

How about Dawn, Py–

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wanted to keep it secret but, I can’t be so selfish. You can at least teach it to people you trust, but there will probably be leaks anyway and it’ll become public knowledge after. You should run it by Volt and ensure that only those of a certain rank can learn it. Make it a forbidden spell because I’m sure someone out there is gonna hurt themselves trying to do it unsupervised.”

Hmm, yeah, that makes sense, I thought, watching her whilst she left with king Maxwell. “Okay guys, seeing that all rank fives and the leader are here, I’d like to share something with you all.”

“The dragonkin are going to join the Order?” Pyro asked excitedly.

“W-well, yes? I mean, if they want to. But that’s not what I was getting at. I want to teach all of you Division.”

“Long Division?” Pyro joked and earned a little shock from Volt.

I smiled like an idiot, trying to hold my laughter back, “It’s only long if you don’t master Clone fast. Clone takes a lot of mana to pull off. Can anyone here use it?”

They looked at each other. “We all can,” Dawn said to me.

“Oh!” I was a bit surprised. It seemed the Order wasn’t sitting around doing nothing.

“Yeah, once your mana potions became a thing, the spell wasn’t so hard to pull off,” Volt explained. “But, please, continue.”

“Right, so, mana is stored in the blood for most living beings. Using the mana in your body will tire you out. In order to avoid this, you simply need a consciousness that is not yours, to funnel your cast through. I’ll explain it in detail later, but basically, you summon a clone, and implant the clone’s consciousness into your own mind. Use the clone’s consciousness as your method to cast spells or manipulate magic, instead of your own consciousness. You can safely practise this by summoning a normal clone, and a blank clone, then transferring the normal clone’s consciousness into the blank clone. Once it works, well, you can then do it on yourself.” I summoned a clone to guide them and gave mana potions if needed.

I soon left to have a little time to myself, as Volt would need a few days to finalise certain things before the big move. In that time, I went into the spirit world to visit Hethekk the Scryer. The greyed floating mind avatar opened his eyes, “You wish to become an avatar of mind,” he said. I nodded at him, and he stood up, “To become an avatar, one must possess great control over a magic type, and one must also become that magic type. You are to merge with ‘mind’. You are to merge with awareness and ignorance both. You are to merge with reality and imagination. You are to merge with yourself.”

I shot a brow up, a little perplexed by his explanation.

He gestured me to sit down, and placed a hand on my forehead. “Experience thyself. Only through your own mind, can you see the true world and its many parallels. There is no better form of definition to all matters than the definition you yourself have acquired. The best way to see, is through your own eyes. Go, journey within yourself, and seek knowledge, for only in yourself, does true omniscience reside.”

I suddenly fell into a strange state of mind. It was a dream-like state, one that constantly shifted from lucid to erratic and uncontrollable. I knew very well that the dream was not real, but it still irked me. I saw memories of when I was a child, even before meeting August or Donna, maybe even before I knew my own name. There was a blade, a dagger by the looks of it, stained with dried blood, hanging from the waist of someone. I tried to see the person’s face, but it was shrouded in darkness. Yet, I knew very well that a sickening smile existed on one half of their face, whilst the other half sported a dreaded frown. They were scared, yet happy to see me.

Behind me was someone else, Flynn. I recognised his face immediately, and his arms were open, as if waiting for me to run into them. A warm and soothing presence emanated from him, but I also saw sadness, discontent, and fear. It made me feel queasy, and sympathetic, for I knew he didn’t deserve to feel the way he did. I was about to hug him, but behind him I saw looted treasure, stolen goods, and a few people bound and gagged.

It didn’t take long for me to start panicking, and I stepped back, into a pair of bloody hands. The person’s face was revealed to be Mary’s. Mom hugged me, and slowly passed her hand along the side of my head, comforting me. It, felt reassuring, it felt like I could breathe again. I realised that mom had her hands dirtied by blood when she was quite young. She, like I, sought thrills, but through very different mediums. She, by all means, was a cold-blooded assassin. And despite never telling me, one could feel her tremendous killing energy when things got sticky. It was right in front of me this whole time, yet my eyes refused to acknowledge that my mom, my caretaker, would ever be associated with such nefarious deeds. Yet here I was, in my most visceral, being comforted by a killer.

Dad hugged the killer and her son, despite his crippling fear, despite the paralysing insecurities he had. Father was born into abject poverty, and had to resort to crime to feed himself. After being sold into slavery because his family was poor, he escaped and found his only family, Gassity’s underbelly; his path of lawbreaker was booked. The man was always haunted by his past, never thinking he was worthy of someone from a rich and prestigious family like Mom. With nothing but skills of deception, stealing, kidnapping, and manipulation, how could he ever compare to one like Mary? To top it off, he was part of the gang that kidnapped her. How could he ever be an equal to her? These are the fears that decimated father, yet I found him to be the strongest man I’d ever seen.

I realised, despite their negative sides, they were still able to be wonderful parents, friends, and citizens.

In a quick shift, I found myself running along the streets, playing with August, my first and best friend, the person who knew me better than I knew myself. He was the only person it was easiest to be myself around. He complemented me so effortlessly, without losing an edge of integrity, without losing on ounce of character. August was authentic, and you could feel his trueness down to the way he breathed. August never painted his face, never blurred his emotions, never wore masks. The man was a paragon of stability, an open book with his heart on his sleeve, a peerless listener and perfect friend, with a sinister hatred for me. Yes, a part of August hated my guts. Ever since his father died, he looked at me differently. Mayhap it was my first meeting with Isana Belgrave, a Sword Paragon, that he felt I was responsible for his father’s death. He held me in contempt afterward, but chose to direct his anger and rage to Ulanos. Despite his guts telling him to hate me, he still remained my friend.

Suddenly, I was in a dark room with a single candle, a spell tome, and a quill dipped in ink. The place was quiet, but echoey. I sat on the bench and leaned forward onto the table to read the tome, but they were blank, just like the white codices. Donna sat next to me, and told me everything would be okay. She taught me how to see the words, she taught me of what the words meant. She was a stern master and older sister, a great friend and second mother, a wise mentor and a fun lover. Even with my qualms about her seeing my thoughts, I would never want her out of my mind, and she thought much the same. She grew to like me, grew like me even, until she even began speaking like an indifferent and straightforward young man instead of a respectable queen. Sometimes, she wondered what it would’ve been like if she was never killed, if she found the answer she was looking for and was able to become immortal. Sometimes, she would weigh the reality of her life bonded to mine, to the fantasy of the immortal queen. Admittedly, the fantasy was sometimes more coveted. I could hear her regret in the way she spoke sometimes.

This duality those four important people I met early in my life kept looping over and over. My mind’s eye kept searching tirelessly for the right answer for them, but it realised it could never arrive at the correct answer, because I simply was not omniscient. How could I ever come to a decision on how to deal with the subtle elephants in the room when speaking of my loved ones, when I was ignorant? How would I achieve enough knowledge? How will I know when I know enough?

Other memories pushed my inclination to certain decisions, but just when I think I’d come to a conclusion, other memories float to the top and become combative thoughts, proving that I should instead be pushed the other way. I was in a whirlpool of thoughts that wrapped along themselves, becoming thicker and stronger like the fibres of worked muscle.

It, it can’t happen… I said to myself. It’s impossible to know everything! A choked snigger escaped me, followed by a very relieved feeling. No matter how hard I try, I can never know everything. All I can do is keep an open mind, make a decision, rejoice if right, fix if wrong, then move on. I began laughing, being truly happy and contented with myself, despite the long tears falling out my eyes.

In a very smooth transition, I woke up. I was no longer in the dream-like state. It was amazing how free I felt from everything. I wasn’t worried about the coalition or Apollyon. I wasn’t worried that my family and friends could die if the coalition failed. I wasn’t worried about meeting my own death. In fact, I was happy that there would be an ending of some sort. There would be an end to all of this. All the injustices that occur in reality felt like mere scratches now, compared to the fatally-wounded feeling they once gave.

“Congratulations on becoming an avatar of mind,” Arcana said, helping me stand up.

I looked at her and smiled, then gave her a really big and warm hug. She had a satisfied look on her face, but I didn’t think it was because of the hug. It felt like I was unknowingly drawing closer to something she wanted me to be closer to.

Renew helped my mind balance out from its blissful state, and I became focused once again. Alright, so that’s total control of mind and void. My attention turned to nature magic, and I wondered how far along the manipulation course I’d gotten. Since I merged with that unwilling dragon on its way to destroy the humans in Et Draco, I could now sprout ecru leather wings, and boy were they huge. My skin could turn scaly, and I was able to see a little farther into the distance.

I pondered the purpose of the wings besides flight, but couldn’t come up with anything. Oh well, at least it’ll add for good dramatic effect if I’m trying to scare someone.