One of the mysterious figures looked around for a few seconds before saying, “Ash stuck to the walls and blood all over. Collect 15 sets for blood tracing. Then prepare to leave.”

It took no more than three minutes for the five cloaked beings behind him to melt portions of blood and transfer it to a variety of vessels. The green-glass containers used simply appeared when reaching into their pockets, but not a single one of these individuals looked like wizards.

After collection, no matter how many individuals the mess all belonged to, they had more than enough to distinguish it all.

By the five minute mark they left silently as they came. Aside from the frozen blood pools appearing smaller there was no sign of anyone entering.

* * *

In the morning, the dragon awoke as usual and practised magic while eating a small meal. Making sure he memorised spells properly was an important procedure and formed into his daily routine a few weeks back. Additionally, he almost completely remembered the words for Ice coat and could adequately speak them in a sentence. It wouldn’t be long until some fire-resistance was finally available to him.

After eating, he quickly headed out to the poppy field. Today would mark another assimilation! He even reduced his breakfast portion in expectation of bones filling him up.

Walking over to the poppy field took just ten minutes, the speed of his larger and scaled body showed itself more and more. Once there he immediately got to work moving around to find more bones. Much to his surprise, a pair of ribs and leg bone from a gelid mongrel appeared.

[Consumed Gelid mongrel bloodline! Assimilation progress 9%]

No more bones for the mongrel appeared after that, although he annoyingly kept on finding black hoof horse bones over their evolved scarlet hoof variants. This always happened, but with the occasional scarlet hoof being found, the problem was minimised immensely.

Over the course of an hour he eventually did find some bones, but not even enough to fill up his stomach once. A small collection of snowy field roots did help with that though, additionally, he kept a larger piece intact to use for cooking. Supposedly the roots flavoured meat rather well.

Was that true? Well, he had yet to see any of the draconic books be incorrect. Why such a specific detail was included is a better question.

Regardless, he kept the large root in a convenient place whilst slowly locating more bones. It took hours of searching and digestion before he finally hit 90% assimilation, at which point he’d also found several more mongrel bones and even another Kandir giant one!

[Consumed Gelid mongrel bloodline! Assimilation progress 15%

Consumed Spiritcaller Kandir giant bloodline! Assimilation progress 2%]

Almost undoubtedly, a Warborne bone of equal size would have given multiple times the progress! If the basis proved correct, then he was looking at a bloodline far above the Mutated wolf by collecting this Spiritcaller bloodline.

“Too bad there are no bones for it,” he said with a laugh. After a slight depreciation of the situation, he continued the search for scarlet hoof bones. Inevitably, he found bundles more, and continued consuming them up until 99% assimilation. From there, he simply pulled a section of its spine from a hole before returning to the spot containing his roots. The two items were held with a Telekinesis and carried back easily, one finding its place in an empty storeroom while the other prepared to be eaten.

Finally, he’d get to see if his assumption of this horse was correct!

Grinding the bone into small shards, he scarfed it down as usual and felt them break apart in seconds. It didn’t take long for the Nexus to show what he expected, and the usual process to begin.

[Consumed Scarlet hoof horse bloodline! Assimilation progress 100%]

A violent burst of warmth erupted within him, instantly scalding him internally like the mutated wolf had done. But the effects proved far stronger!

The burning caused his body to scrunch up and the tension left everything aching soon after. Fortunately, the burning pain only lasted tens of seconds, passing and instantly throwing him into a deep dizziness. There was no weakness this time, instead everything simply felt woozy and the world around him swirled as his head bobbed about.

Eyes closing shut, his body stumbled to the side and fell over. Unconsciously wrapping himself up right after.

Without realising, he fell asleep to a deep state like never before. And on a rare occasion, he actually dreamed. The world made no sense unfortunately, one moment he found himself walking outside the cave only to be tumbling down the nearby cliff just an instant later.

Then, whilst walking around a tiny human village, he noticed a child come up behind him and just casually snap off his tail to eat. He couldn’t resist and tried his best to run away, soon leaving the village behind only to enter a large open field.

In some places he saw horses and cows grazing, but unsure of the situation he finally felt safe enough to rest in the dream. Finding an empty spot, he laid down and tried to close his eyes.

But when he opened them an endless field of red flowers surrounded him, very obviously poppies. But seeing they were all red allowed him to collapse… until he looked down to see a small bed of white poppies underneath him. Before even standing up two large rows of teeth rose from the ground and trapped him.

And then he fell, for longer than he could reasonably guess in the dream. Things stopped changing at that point, although the sounds of draconic chanting occasionally entered his ears throughout the fall.

There was no sudden wake up or shake as his body underwent a phantom fall, his eyes simply opened with slight tiredness and watered slightly. There was nothing to say about the dream, remembering enough to understand what fragmented parts of it meant.

He hated thinking about all that stuff a lot.

[Assimilated Scarlet hoof horse bloodline! 4 new bloodline directions potentially available]

With another bloodline down, he could begin focusing more on other bones in that battlefield. So far he focused more on the outer regions with primarily striped poppies, having searched less than a quarter of all the space there. Needless to say, he wasn’t worried about running out of bones.

The damn digging though! It took so long to get anything done!

Few options remained and he accepted that spellcasting in the near future would not greatly boost his power. Whatever resided at the depths of the battlefield required him to grow and evolve, perhaps even a few times.

Also, he learnt Ice coat and covered one of the deadliest vulnerabilities which remained. Not entirely removed, but it raised his confidence. Setting off after a light meal, he returned to the battlefield covered in holes, it wouldn’t be surprising to think families of moles moved into the area.

Immediately setting off, he repeatedly used Water control to quickly dig up any items which garnered attention. The lightly specialised spell allowed him to quickly pick up chunks of ice and snow almost equal to him in weight! While a bit costlier, it made digging several times faster than using Telekinesis. On that note, he didn’t see a point in learning Ice control, and now completely ignored super-specific ones like Snow control.

This archaeology, if one put his handiwork nicely, took a lot of time for little payoff. Time and time again he came across bones he no longer needed, in fact coming across another Kandir giant tooth but ignoring it given his last tooth eating attempt.

Besides all that, he found an annoyingly large quantity of scarlet hoof bones over the next few hours. For some reason, one side of the battlefield killed off far more of these stronger horses than the other… and he really couldn’t understand why.

It made sense for Kandir giant bones to be deeper within, after all, they’re stronger, thus purer poppies should grow around their remains. Ironically, this meant that most of them would have also broken down faster due to said poppies. He refused to believe that so few bones existed for a battlefield like this though, with so much land to cover, it had to have been a major site one time in the past.

Eventually, he stopped worrying about it and got back to digging, the day having been slightly productive as he actually found useful bones and the occasional earth-frost carrot.

His gelid mongrel bloodline hit 22% with the help of a sizable leg bone while a selection of giant bones pushed his Warborne assimilation to 20%. Lastly, earth-frost carrots hit just 19% assimilation… They were small carrots.

[Bloodline energy has reached an evolutionary threshold. Prepare for evolutionary measures to begin]

That wasn’t good. Actually, it was very very bad.

Still stuck in the battlefield he couldn’t make it back in the next few minutes with enough surety… Given that he immediately decided to burrow instead. A hole underground was better than nothing.

Finding one of the larger holes recently dug. A quick use of Water control helped dig out enough space for his body to both fit and rest inside comfortably. It did not need any proper support as he planned on leaving soon. Taking just 30 seconds to build it, after climbing in and finding it suitable, he piled snow from outside over the top and left himself in a pitch dark space.

A simple Light spell appeared above him and kept the small space in mellow but bright light. And so he waited.

His heart pounded from the sudden situation but he found relative safety in it all. Thinking about it more, predators never dared to enter the battlefield, whether scared of the poppies or the beast lurking at the depths. With even the outskirts being entirely safe, there was no reason to fret over those problems.

Just five minutes later he received a message and narrowed his eyes to begin rapidly reading far too much information at once.

[Evolution imminent. Your possible bloodling pathways are the following:

Chocolate Ice-cream

Strawberry Ice-cream

Pure mana Ice-cream

Spell Storing Ice-cream

Volatile mutant…

Icy mana…

Draconic fused…

Soul-mana hybrid…

Thick furred…

Strong-legged…

Heightened acceleration…

Frost coated…

Mana winged…

Memoriser…

Mind-splitting…

Swordclaw…

Heavy bodied…

Heavy smashing…

Nature reading…

Animal subduing…

Spell sniper…

Stealth spell…

Nature’s ally…

Spearhorn…

Blazing trail…

Skystepping…

Nation traversing…

Overenduring…

Please make a selection in 4 minutes, or a random pathway will be used]