Hunters in groups as small as five to processions of fifty began ascending the mountain as dawn hit the following day. Knowing that hitting the flatter range at the top would decide the success of any individual, a night spent on sloped ice was less than ideal.

Men died trying to do so in most cases, although it is absolutely possible.

The journey up is a slow climb, doing your best to lug around supplies almost half your weight. For most warriors such a thing is tolerable. And with some rough paths, climbing wasn’t ever a requirement to reach the top, although the steepness of some slopes could not be underestimated.

And so, they quickly began pushing up the mountain for their chance to hunt a hatchling, perhaps the only such chance of their lives. But killing a dragon is a tough feat, who knows if one or two Bronze ranks were enough to complete the task…

At the very least, someone had to actually see the dragon first. Until then, it was entirely up in the air as to who took the event seriously.

* * *

Meanwhile, the hatchling sucked down its daily breakfast of blood and meat. As well as the usual tail cone he grew used to consuming. This sweet quickly became his only relief in the mornings where the practically toxic blood awaited him.

Thinking some more on the matter, it didn’t matter if he ruined a portion, he wanted to see if cooking the blood made it edible. Such endless gagging annoyed him to no end.

[Consumed Stormfrost lord wolf bloodline! Assimilation progress 15%]

Long past dawn, the sun sat at an angle in the sky and he wanted to finish checking on the tree before noon. If it recovered fully then he’d drink another mouthful before heading off for more digging, if not, digging was still on the table but perhaps with a hint of sadness. Finishing the words for Weakened degeneration also mattered, and he generally tried to memorise words while digging.

He couldn’t continue putting off spellcasting for brainless labour. Now, did he do that?

No! His diligence only went so far in the end.

Checking the winter’s hope tree around 20 minutes later showed a sluggish but recovering mana flow. While his hopes of drinking the sap daily died down even more, it wasn’t too bad to have it twice a week. A substance to instantly halve his growth phase to actually match those hatchlings in better environments.

Of course, they could do far better if given access to a mana collecting tree.

Without a fully recovered tree, he left for the battlefield once more to dig up more bones. The time wasted on moving towards a plant easily slowed down progress the most, though the ratio of plants to bones being three to one made the digestion over time even clearer.

Perhaps it was only because of those rune-covered bones that the Elder guard ones even remained. The reverse is also possible, in that the balls protected their master’s bones.

Sometime into the afternoon he stopped to move up towards the surface a bit.

It was nothing to do with his position but because a recognisable sound entered his tunnels and confirming it was of the utmost importance. And while he did have a spell to amplify sounds… It really wasn’t that good for fine detail. Once near the top, his mana sense took note of the beings above, and he quietly moved up to identify them properly.

Humans again! This time a group of six, and their overall strength seemed far lower.

Not too far from the surface, he heard some of their words in between the bursts of wind. While obvious ones like ‘dragon’ could be understood even through the noise blocking gusts, he wanted to try and understand their speech properly.

Up above, as the humans passed by the poppy field it was an entirely different conversation. One of the men said, “What’s with all these damn holes? Was someone treasure hunting here?” His eyes lit up for a few moments before the others all laughed at the idea. Reality set in and he looked away.

“Probably just some moles or crap. Ignore it Chen, the mana here isn’t useful to a dragon,” their leader cut their laughter short with a more serious line, reminding their newer member of this expedition’s goal.

With eyes glancing at the hundreds of pits for seconds, everyone simply focused on walking past without tripping up. Not even five minutes later and underground, the dragon’s mana sense lost sight of these hunters, only really understanding that final part.

Mana alone isn’t useful to a dragon, that line fitted rather well, and he realised that the battlefield was a perfect hiding place for now. Only a stronger wizard could see through its strangeness, and how many of those come by desolate mountains?

Not to mention, the depth of this place likely exceeded anyone’s expectations or general understanding amongst these hunters. So what if they dug down ten metres to search? His deepest tunnels exceeded tenfold that!

And with an inadvertent hiding place, he would simply sneak out at night to take sap from the winter’s hope tree. Once more he came to a perfect plan, even considering other things…

Some of those humans should be higher in level than him, so killing them had to give adequate experience. Maybe a group or two would go missing amongst these hunters, and who would be any the wiser?

Ideas hatching, he also began thinking about the bloodlines some may provide him with.

For the next few hours, he kept an ear out on passing humans above, and the conversations actually provided a fair bit more information about things. Not enough to understand where in the world this mountain was, but discovering that a lot of these groups actually had sponsors who’d receive a part of the dragon if one group succeeded.

But even more surprising were the sheer numbers. In just this first day he came across 27 groups, all which contained a heavy male majority. Very few female warriors came here, and those who did often grouped together or were amongst the leaders.

However, it totalled over 200 humans altogether!

All of them searching and scouring to cut off his head and harvest… a bunch of ice-cream innards? He could only imagine how disappointed many would be about the lack of blood or flesh to consume.

Somehow that joke earned a chuckle, a strange, sardonic sense of humour for a dragon. Nonetheless, he stayed underground for several more hours with bones by the mouthful to swallow. The day’s progress was just slightly better than the last.

[Consumed Warborne Kandir giant bloodline! Assimilation progress 46%

Consumed Spiritcaller Kandir giant bloodline! Assimilation progress 12%]

On the way back, he first cast Rapid camouflage to blend in with the ground more. The original white ice-cream might have been able to go without it, but a light brown wafer stood out like a sore thumb in such an environment.

With a somewhat effective white coating on his scales, he walked back to the tunnel to return home. One part because it was closer, but who knew if one of the many human groups decided to stay in his cave. Rather than risk anything seeing him dig, he tried out a use of his only teleportation spell, Instant shift, for the first time since evolving.

Casting ended up taking a bit of time as he forgot a word, but soon after he got things under control. Finding a missing word is always a lot easier than poor pronunciation, the latter requiring him to occasionally check other books for clarification.

Now came releasing mana at required points, the part which concerned him far more. At first just releasing 5% of his MP at word ten, that immediately rose to 10% by the fourteenth word, and at eighteen he released 25% of his MP. Yet the spell continued to guzzle down more, only ending around 36%!

The cost remained a massive amount even after an evolution and significant growth. But as the spell activated, he found himself tied down completely. Like ropes suddenly anchored him to the ground, not a single part of his body could move in any direction, not that his mind could even consider it at the time.

The world around him appeared in his mind, precisely five metres in any direction. It all appeared in complete and refined detail, nothing like merely looking at an image of reality.

However, this ball of vision shrank with every passing second, and he couldn’t afford to recast this expensive spell straight away. He hurriedly picked a point inside the tunnel, believing this to be a choice to teleport him over.

However, the spell still did not activate. It took a few tries before he finally vanished from the outside and appeared in the tunnel, dropping just a small height as he inadvertently appeared in mid air.

“This spell only works in air? Where’s that in the book?” A quick re-read actually showed no sign of such indication, however the later spatial spells instead pointed out that ‘teleportation protection is removed’. He couldn’t help but snort and drop the matter.

As always, he cooked some meat, but this held off on drinking blood until absolutely sure of the cave’s emptiness. Fortunately, no humans decided to camp in here tonight, but could he say the same about tomorrow?

[Consumed Stormfrost lord wolf bloodline! Assimilation progress 18%]

To avoid losing such valuable stuff, he decided to bury it all not too far outside the cave with a sheet of ice covering everything and snow placed above and below as a cushion. The original stone slabs remained, ones of various sizes on top of individual pots and baskets.

A little extra protection never hurts.

But with that, his daily routine returned to an oddly similar state of spending the day in deep and complex tunnels, while at night he checked on the winter’s hope tree before sleeping at home. By doing so, he avoided any interaction with humans and still being able to consume whatever he needed.

Four days since he first devoured the sap everything seemed to be back to normal, and he took a re-sharpened dagger to pierce its bark once more. Lesser flame quickly overcame the white mist and soon after drinking, he created another scab through Snap chill. In a process of no more than 15 minutes, he left the tree once more in its weakened state.

[Consumed Winter’s hope tree! Assimilation progress 12%]

This time, the quantity of sap was less than before, and he now made a new decision regarding his stat points. Having given it more than enough thought, under the leaves of snow and ice, he said, “Nexus, 5 points into Growth.”

He did not know if more would ever be necessary, but from this he roughly estimated that each mouthful of sap aided him with one week of growth.

All that remained was the walk back home, whereupon he slept to receive precisely that much.

This cycle, while important, had very little going for it. If not for requiring the stormfrost wolf’s body he’d probably have just stayed in the battlefield digging for bones all night and day. Especially since he spent well over 90% of his time awake underground…

[Consumed Warborne Kandir giant bloodline! Assimilation progress 88%

Consumed Spiritcaller Kandir giant bloodline! Assimilation progress 21%]

After eight days of doing this menial task he had to say progress showed itself clearly. Just a couple days more and a new assimilation awaited him.

Needless to say, not a single human found him. Over the course of a week he heard tons of conversations, most of them completely random and beyond his vocabulary. But the occasional one talked about places like ‘Mountainwatch‘ and ‘Swordfield’ which he guessed were names of places.

The problem was that Mountainwatch didn’t seem to be the name of any specific city or town, pouring over a few maps revealed at least twenty such places with the name, and he guessed that every single one had its own specific name which rarely saw use… In which case Swordfield became his only lead, although that too meant nothing.

It could literally be the name of anything! How many fields are there across just one planet? Not to mention, the swordfield might just be a cultural name of a place, not even its real name!

As for other information, he heard about a group keeping an eye out for dead humans. As expected, some of those in the first group held a special position, and people still wanted them.

But the biggest news came in the fact that most of the nobles simply wouldn’t be coming to the mountain. He amounted the words of a couple groups to this, although the possibility of mis-translation remained.

However, if what he heard was true then he’d be pretty much safe to stay for the foreseeable future, as only those wizards with advanced searching methods could reliably find him.

And so, he heard worthless conversations with the occasional nugget of information for the next few days. On his next trip home from the winter’s hope tree, his chance to strike actually appeared. Already in a pleasant mood from the golden pearls within his belly and a prompt he closed not long ago, he looked forward to his target.

[Consumed Winter’s hope tree! Assimilation progress 19%]

A team of four humans meandered through the snow at nightfall with eyes peeled, he doubted their ability to locate him with a thin crescent moon and a small lantern as their only sources of light, but he wasn’t one to decide these things.

Picking out the strongest through mana sense, he quietly approached with Rapid camouflage active to take a close look at their armour. Whether or not he attacked depended on that factor most. Somewhere in his mind, he hoped their blood froze quickly…

He really needed these assimilations!