Too injured to care about the surroundings, he remained on top of the wolf’s armoured body and checked the Nexus. From the getgo he still had a prompt to check.

[Killed Level 18 Stormfrost lord wolf! Received 276% EXP

Obtained title ‘Lord slayer’’. Unlock requisite - Kill a creature granted a lord title by the Nexus]

This just barely amounted to enough that he hit level 15. Overall, rising up by two levels meant this fight was worth some of its danger.

Checking his status showed both the good and bad results.

Name

Title

Nexus Aid Bonus

Species

Dragon

Bloodline

Pure mana Ice-cream

HP

35%

MP

30%

Level

15

EXP

12%

Unallocated Stat Points: 17

Strength

0

Luck

0

Agility

3

Growth

10

Magic

10

Mutation Rate

5

Those numbers really didn’t feel great either. Exhaustion from mana drain as well as grievous pain continued to wrack its way through him, kept at bay primarily through quiet whimpering. But still he just waited and watched both figures rise, his MP hitting 100% ten minutes later.

With so many points, he now had to decide on allocation. He didn’t feel happy that his magic just barely killed his enemy, so throwing points into damage made a bit of sense. On the other hand…

He decided to at least look at the title, it wasn’t long until he received the right to use two at once as well. Just level 20, how far away could it be?

[Lord slayer: The stat buffs granted to lords are reduced in proportion to the number of lords slain. The suppression effect of kings no longer affects you. Current stat nullification 10%]

The wolf was a lord, so most stronger beasts beneath the winter’s hope trees should be as well. Didn’t this title simply advocate the extermination of lords? What did the Nexus achieve through such a thing? Also, the fact a king’s suppression no longer worked almost made it seem like the Nexus supported takeovers amongst beasts. The reasoning behind this whole title system still left him confused, and after questioning it too much he turned away.

Looking over to the argent tree, he fired an Earth bolt at its bark to no avail. If that was the case he’d probably have to bring a blade to cut into it, although that too might fail. Perhaps a spell for doing so?

Metal coat would allow him to test the effect of a real blade, but first he’d need to create the correct shape of stone. Not that a simple Earth creation spell turned out hard to copy, he didn’t even bother remembering the words and directly read it from the book.

As for using Metal coat, it turns out that he didn’t remember it as perfectly as imagined. But just fifteen minutes later he diagnosed the incorrect syllables and cast it on the stone blade. Then came the moment of truth as Telekinesis rose it to the tree’s bark.

With the full power of his mind, an ear-melting screech sounded out. Sparks flew off as the metal and bark collided and he released the coated stone blade to stop the noise.

Everything in the surroundings looked up and glared at him, clearly displeased by the noise made. With the blade becoming useless, he picked up once more and chucked it towards the cliff face behind. A regular metal blade wasn’t going to do anything against this tree.

Unable to think up an easy harvesting method, he went over the books on magical trees. Several of them mentioned the winter's hope tree, but few ever talked about consuming its sap for energy. Of course, they instead warned against such a thing as it weakened the tree, but this might be the only chance to hasten his growth!

There didn’t seem to be anything else capable of such things around here.

Still slowly healing, he did find something of interest and read it under his voice, “With most magical trees having some form of protection, an elemental counter must be applied to overcome this significant issue. For simpler trees this may be as simple as freezing the bark or suffocating the thing, but more intelligent plants can, and often will, counteract your attempts… That means I just have to burn it, right?”

With a potential solution he cast Lesser flame and approached the tree’s bark with it, instinctively the tree emitted a frosty mist and nullified his flame. The already small fire quickly dimmed into no more than an ember before completely vanishing, the mental link to this flame snapping off as well. The spell completely collapsed, and he was forced to recast it, but this time greatly increased the temperature to avoid the tree squashing it again.

As the new Lesser flame, thrice the temperature of the previous one, approached the tree, it released a similar shower of mist but remained active. The white mist faded quickly as a hotter flame overcame its magic and began heating up the argent bark.

Almost immediately he saw an effect!

Its white silver faded to reveal a brown trunk below like that of an oak tree, but that didn’t mean he stopped burning it now. Even with the large flame incurring quite a weight on his mind, it was not enough to stop an Earth bolt from being cast and striking the dark brown patch on its trunk. He fired it off, the tree unable to stop the bolt spell, and it clearly stabbed into the wood!

The shard of rock ejected from the bark moments later but a small indent remained. He injured the tree, and that meant he could acquire sap!

That was enough testing for the day though. He first had to return home with the stormwind lord wolf’s corpse, a tough task for anything his size even with Telekinesis. Although, he wondered what gave this wolf the title of lord, as it clearly wasn’t strong enough to be a king. There was technically a difference in the titles, with the latter superseding, but the dragon’s book on the Nexus didn’t adequately explain where the ‘lord’ title came from.

But it did say that if a creature obtained the term ‘king’ in its name, then the Nexus had empowered it greatly. Earning such a name isn’t exactly the easiest of feats, requiring a creature to be above many other species in the first place, practically dominating a whole region!

Those were most of the thoughts which occupied his thoughts on the way home, the rest of them complaining about the size of the beast behind him. Telekinesis simply could not lift such a thing, weighing at least half a tonne by his guesses, probably more if he was venting his opinions instead.

Getting it into his home was another issue entirely though, and due to the overall weight he first dragged it to his cave for processing. From the journey back he identified two problems.

Firstly, its blood didn’t freeze in this weather like several other beasts he’d seen so far.

And arguably more important, it was really damn big. Like absolutely massive.

A single intact leg matched the full height of an adult human, even then there was the humongous body attached to it… This required a lengthy process of draining and collecting the beast’s parts. And most important is blood, the primary way he aimed to assimilate its bloodline.

All those human pots and containers came in handy now, left in the cave for his convenience.

To drain the wolf’s body he simply positioned its neck over a large pot, probably used to feed all the hunters in its former owner’s group at the same time, and cut open its throat to allow blood to seep out. On top of that, he used Water control to hasten the process and stop spillages.

He filled up the pot five minutes later.

A significantly smaller pot then came out, as did another one not soon after. Immediately moving the third filled pot away, the strong-smelling blood continued to fill them up without end. As each single pot was filled to the brim without fail, it quickly amounted to a couple gallons of blood by now… But this still wasn’t enough.

With no better options left he found an Earth creation spell which made large hollow cylinders, quite literally called ‘stone baskets’ by the spellbook. Simply creating one used a frightening 10% of his MP, but even then he quickly repeated the spell five times over just to quickly get back to throwing blood into them.

“How much blood can it possibly have! Why! Why hasn't it stopped!” Feelings of distress began to appear, but nothing stopped his rushed Water control from pouring litre after litre of blood into new containers.

Even after all that, having dropped to 30% MP from the continuous process, blood poured out of the wolf’s corpse at a thinning rate. Just one more… But he physically couldn't bring himself to use the spell.

How the hell was harvesting becoming more exhausting than the battle?

Regardless, he had no choice but to rest momentarily as his MP refilled. Just 15 minutes later he hit around 85% once more, not at all surprised that his body’s absorption outpaced the surrounding mana completely. Because of this, he often had a void of mana all around as there simply wasn’t enough to sustain his requirements! It was no wonder those two beasts lived under the tree at all times.

Still, this amount was enough to create another stone basket to store the last of its blood. In the end, he acquired enough crimson fluid to fill six baskets, a pot similar in size to them, and an assortment of smaller cookware which came to another two baskets worth.

Nine baskets of blood, and he guessed each basket to hold a gallon and half each.

But with its corpse drained, he began the dissection process. As always, starting by skinning it with Telekinesis to make the next carving section easier. By using some of the humans’ tools he quickly removed the pelt, throwing it to the side so that a larger sword could focus on cutting off limbs.

A lengthy, frustrating sawing process ended with him removing the limbs of the beast and opening it up. Throwing away the guts and stomach as he usually did, everything inside was left in fair shape. The body itself had to be cut further, but eventually he was able to get all the meat underground. The blood ended up staying in the cave.

First, he placed stone sheets across the tops of all the containers, and then vented the cave to the best of his abilities. Using Wind spells to create constant gusts and airstreams, he replaced all air possible to remove the heavy scent of blood. And now, underground with his wolf corpse, came the sweet taste of his labours.

Slicing off meat from a leg, it was quickly reduced to small diced chunks before being roasted in the single remaining pot kept down there. While a bloody smell permeated his cave, a remnant of the meat itself, he still scarfed down the product before heading upstairs to indulge on blood.

[Consumed Stormfrost lord wolf bloodline! Assimilation progress 0%]

That slower progress made sense as the chunks of meat vanished over a few minutes, but by the time he reached his cave, a somewhat different announcement met with him.

[Consumed Stormfrost lord wolf bloodline! Assimilation progress 1%]

Clearly, its meat contained a high quantity of bloodline power, and perhaps through eating alone he could assimilate the bloodline… But why would he ever wilfully choose the slower option?

Reeling at the scent of its blood, a gooey ice-cream tongue dipped into the pot in front of him and began drinking rapidly. Unlike the slow-absorbing meat, its blood only took a few seconds to break down, allowing him to rapidly guzzle dozens of mouthfuls at once.

The problem with that? He gagged so much that his throat wanted to invert itself just halfway through this small pot.

Pulling his face back, a shudder passed through to his tail before looking at the Nexus’ update.

[Consumed Stormfrost lord wolf bloodline! Assimilation progress 3%]

Just by comparing what remained, he calculated all the blood when drunk accounted for about 50% towards his assimilation progress. Now he just had to consider if it was worth the suffering. Perhaps some seasoning like the field roots could help with flavour?

Cooking blood was absolutely considered a delicacy in some places as well, supposedly rich humans loved consuming the blood of powerful creatures when brewed into a drink. The mana contained within benefitted their bodies at the very least.

Unfortunately, while the cooking books provided by dragons included some… Methods, if he dared to even call them such a thing, they had nothing on the consumption or cooking of blood. Unless one included drinking it directly, a staple for hatchlings to do as clean blood gave a secure water source.

Not everyone gained the useful ability of never feeling thirsty.

Still, that didn’t leave him without an option. Deciding to take drastic measures, he used an axe from some human to cut off his tail in one swing. The cut itself hurt, but compared to other wounds he barely felt it, like something just bashed into him with great force. His tail having reduced sensitivity of all places was strange, but perhaps it was some evolutionary advantage. Dragon tails do grow extremely long and are easier to cut off.

Fortunately, he now had some of the best tasting food on the mountain available to eat! The taste of wafer scales and ice-cream easily removed the dreadful blood’s horror on his senses like so many times before. Although the irony of this all wasn’t lost on him.

Cutting off his tail to drink blood… If his newly born self heard that he might have ended up crying for hours.

Licking the ice-cream from his tail cone quite easily, he finally stopped feeling an urge to gag and decided to stay at the tree today. With a small dagger being held in his mouth, he left feeling quite bloated from a meal of blood, meat, and his tail.

The regrowing process was rather long as well, appearing no different even after appearing at the tree. Like before, the elk continued to take its place, but the spot opposite remained empty. Not a single creature dared to take his spot, and once returning they moved away to avoid his path.

Simply by taking a spot beneath the tree he became the ruler of this place, and he absolutely liked it as well. Nothing made problems for him here, and he gained access to a mana-rich spot which made his cave look third rate. Most importantly had to be gaining access to the tree’s sap though, a goal he waited weeks to achieve.

After settling in for a little while, he finally created another Lesser flame and had it melt the tree’s silver coating. From there casting Telekinesis and stabbed into the tree repeatedly with the blade’s tip. Each jab wiggled the blade around, creating a small hole several inches deep after sufficient work.

The dagger tip clearly blunted due to the constant impacts, but as a string of thick, sticky, sap began to drip out, he placed it down and moved his body over to lick off the substance. While his tongue ran up the warm bark, he found that the sap remained stuck together and quickly followed the trail into his mouth.

This was not transparent like other trees, the sap best described as a snowy white with a faint diffusion of gold throughout. Not once had he seen such an interesting fluid, easily beating over the mounds of unfreezing blood he swallowed.

As for taste, it was none other than a chillingly refreshing mint. Any normal creature may have frozen to death instantly in that moment.

While part of the fluid dissolved relatively fast, he quickly saw the sticky, white sap change into a clear water with wisps of some golden essence floating about. This water reduced continuously until only a miniscule remnant of the golden substance remained. His body couldn’t absorb it directly, but within he felt immense power.

[Consumed Winter’s hope tree! Assimilation progress 2%]

That single string of sap equaled hundreds of leaves… But what was the remaining gold part? Actually, only a few things remained in the realm of possibility and he chose to assume the most obvious.

This would accelerate his growth phase quite a bit.