Exams are over~ and now I have week break. Expect more chapters next week :). And as usual, please reply any thoughts and suggestions you have about the story. Thank you for reading this story, and enjoy the chapter ;)

~ Somewhere in the darkness…

... where am I? It's dark out here… am I abandoned again…?

Darkness everywhere… is this blindness…?

No… I can’t control my body or move around… is this the afterlife?

No… this is not empty. I know it somehow. I can feel a surge of memories… it is telling me to prepare myself…

This feels like mind magic… but it isn't…

It comes… warm and gentle. It envelops my entire being, while being as gentle as silk.

Memories… I feel them. A huge surge of memories… it's almost as if they are never ending.

The memories zips past without stop, yet I can feel them all. The gripping sadness, the uplifting happiness, the raging anger, the overflowing love.

Thousands of years of memories and experience, none forgotten but all forgiven. That which was from another world, yet so similar.

Guess I was the one that's a thousand years too early. Hahahaha...

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“Hey, Salty, are you still alive?”, I sent my thoughts into the ring.

“...almost?”, Salty finally replied. Strangely though, I felt that she was going to wake up at this time. It’s something you just know that it's going to happen, like it's a natural reaction.

“Hope you had a good sleep. Feels like the last time you had that was a long time ago.”

“...yeah.”

“I'm going to assume you're fine for now. Is your physical body is trapped inside the ring?”

“...mmm. Ah...Ahem! That’s half correct. My real dragon body rotted away a long time ago, but my human body was sealed together with my soul inside the ring.”, She finally got back to her senses.

“Hmm? So your dragon body and human body are separate?”

“No… that usually isn't the case, but I have been using my human body for so long, maybe that caused them to be separate? It's such a long time ago, I can't remember.”

“Oh well then, are you able to materialize the body now?”

“Now?”

“I just wonder whether it is possible for you to maintain your body outside. Being stuck in the ring the whole time isn't very fun I would imagine.”

“Ahh… it would take more mana the further the body is from the ring. Even though you seem to be a decent supplier of mana despite being a puny human, my mana capacity is limited by the ring anyway, so it would not be able to last for a long time. If I run out of mana, I would be forced back into the ring, which knocks me out and while leaving a really unpleasant feeling all over my body.”

“I see, so that's how it is. I guess you will have to be stuck in that ring for most of the time, unfortunately.”

“N-no, don't worry about t-that… b-being with y-you is more t-than good enough…”, She went quiet. Hehe.

“Ah. I almost forgot (not really), it looked like you would need a bath, so I just want to let you know there is a hot spring in this lodge that you can use. And the clothes… I'll lend you mine for now.”, I told her as I took out a set of my uniform from my bag and placed it on the table.

I wonder what a couple thousand years without a single bath would feel like. I could only imagine it to be second to boredom. A year without bath is already seriously pushing the acceptable limits, but multiply that by several thousand times. Shivers ran down my spine as I tried to imagine.

“A-alright then, t-turn around and do not look, ok? I'll end y-your puny life if y-you do…”, She tried to warn me. I heed her cute little warning and turned to face the window in my room. The shadows from the world tree covered everything in this area and beyond, leaving a nice cool shade.

The ring glowed a faint white, and sounds of footsteps was heard behind me.

“D-don't you dare turn around!”

“Don't worry my queen, this little one is a gentleman. Oh and the bath is just to the right of this room. Nobody should be using it now, they're all out there training now.”

“T-thanks for t-the clothes…”, She replied softly, as the door was closed shut.

Phew. Now, time to inspect the ring.

On the surface, it looks just like a worthless simple gold ring. A smooth, reflective curvature all around, there were no carvings or ornaments, or anything fancy at all.

Small traces of mana could be felt emanating from it, but one who is good with mana manipulation can tell that it was amazingly sealed. The monstrous amount of mana kept deep within was as if it was sealed in the core of a planet, if the planet was the ring.

It's a mystery to me how something in the physical world can be sealed into something like a ring, and how well the mana was sealed within the ring, which was already sealing the physical body. And how a mind can even survive and live inside a ring, not to mention for a couple thousand years at that. Magic really is full of mysteries. Even with the technology I had in the dream lab, it was still not very much possible up to this extent. If spatial technology can be created to this extent in this age with magic, I wonder if I can create a dispatial anomaly by manipulating the planck particles to interfere and confuse the quantum linkage… maybe I’ll try that out later.

…

A while later, the suns are almost setting, but Salty hasn’t come back the room yet. I had let her take a longer bath than usual since she hasn’t taken one for such a long time, but this would be a little bit too long. I could feel her current mana condition in her body through the ring, so whenever she was lacking any mana, I just transferred some of my mana over to her through the ring, which does seem to work.

It has been a few hours since she went to the hot spring, the rest of the research team are coming back from their training and I would say it’s probably a good time to go and check on her.

I got up from the table, having investigated everything about the ring I possibly can. Once at the corridor, I went to the door to the hot spring, which was a literal stone’s roll away. Opened the fogged up door, I scanned the area, and as I expected, she was sitting at the edge of the hot spring, heads back and totally unconscious. I ruled out the possibility of getting attacked by a sneaky dragon or being threatened by a perverted magical beast, of which was very much a possibility in this world (or probably not).

As I approached her, I realized that her hair is now black, unlike the green that I had first seen.

I pulled her stimulative body out of the hot spring and laid her on a towel I placed on the ground. The two mounts are not unnecessarily big, I would say that it’s of a respectful size. The young-adult-sized body is surprisingly well-maintained and has quite the curves, but she has a large scar on her back that which seems to tell a story on its own. The smooth shoulder-long black hair was similar to mine, though mine is obviously still much smoother and silkier without a doubt.

With a swipe of my hair, I levitated her, still unconscious, and brought her back into my room and onto my bed. Her body seems fine to me, no fever or anything, just knocked out.

If anybody were to see this from outside, it would look like a case of “a boy and a girl alone together in a room” situation, and may expect things to happen, but it really actually is a case of “a seriously, unimaginably old boy and a very, very old girl alone together in the room” situation. Well, actually it’s almost the same thing, just that for the latter there is a little more self-control on one side.

But this situation would need me to keep transferring mana to Salty, if I fell asleep I would not be able to keep that up and she would be forced back into the ring, which she said wasn’t a very pleasant experience at all.

So the best method would be to wake her up. I grinned as I focused a large surge of mana and sent it through the ring to her. The ring heated up a little in the exchange, and suddenly Salty shot up from her sleep into a sitting position.

“Your clothes are on your lap. And yes, I carried your dying body over here. Thank your great and benevolent benefactor, Earth-sama.”

She looked shocked for a moment, then she looked down on to her exposed upper body, face turning tomato-red. It was at this moment, I knew I should have done better.

“K… KYAAAAAAAAA~!”

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