Unsure of what to do beyond her father’s request, she decided to stay in the house as long as she could. The simple log cabin was quite large, for what it was, and contained three rooms. A bathroom, a bedroom, and the main room which housed the kitchen and dining table.

Besides the toilet and bath, which were fashioned from granite, pretty much all the decorations were wood or cloth. Ah, the bed’s mattress was also amazingly soft, likely because even a hermit couldn’t bear to sleep on a bundle of straw. The bed smelt earthy, like plants were growing inside it or something, although the whole house pretty much carried that scent.

The necklace she wore all the time, one with a smaller pendant which socketed a brilliant aquamarine gem, also kept the majority of items her father asked her to hold onto. This included a week of rations, not to mention the man’s hut contained quite a large amount of dried meat.

For the better part of four days, she ate, played, and thought about what happened before coming to a decision…

She’d go find that dragon and ask for its help.

Her uncle trusted it enough to hand over his statue to the youngling, and that was enough for her to trust it as well. Not to mention, it wasn’t anywhere near as frightened as all those other adults who met with her family. And perhaps the biggest reason of all…

In her memory, his home was the only place she actually remembered!

Even the hut she stood in right now, she didn’t have the foggiest idea what part of the world she was in. But for that dragon, she had clearly remembered the country she went to with her uncle. Surely, someone here could help her get there?

Dragons grow to be very powerful, so it could help keep her safe afterwards as well.

Of course, realistically, few dragons actually grow to the level of a Great sage… But the young girl didn’t know much about such things. Her education hadn’t even moved onto learning about the countries around the empire, let alone the determination of a dragon’s peak power.

In her mind, a few people strong enough to keep her safe existed, and she knew nothing about the places they lived apart from descriptions of their homes.

And with an insane amount of confidence in her plans, she stepped outside the hut, and walked towards the billows of smoke she saw outside the forest. Where there was smoke, there was fire. And that possibly meant people at it.

If there were people, perhaps there was a city! Or a town… Or a village.

She hadn’t really thought ahead far enough, but it didn’t take long for her to walk in a straight line through the woods. Nothing in the place possessed even the slightest capability to hurt her, and in about an hour of wandering, her guess paid off. To her right, a dirt road connected a minor forest entrance to a small town.

“I’ll come find you soon!” She looked towards a nearby mountain peak, with full expectations that the dragon lived there.

He did not.

* * *

While the emperor of the Ancient Empire of man possibly encountered the worst day of his life, the youngling had spent the better part of his last night and this morning combing his territory for dead terror realm beings.

The beings were formed of two parts. The dream realm body and their physical bodies which acted as shells for them to interact with things, and it was naturally the former he cut open to extract hearts from. Their dream world bodies all looked roughly the same at least, being a long slimy figure, of which only a fish head extended from their physical bodies to take the place where one expects a head to be.

In effect, he called them dream eels until finally remembering his abilities, upon which he just bit into one and received a Nexus prompt. As happened with any new thing he ate…

[Consumed Psychic shooter terror eel! Assimilation progress 1%]

Were they all called terror eels then? But that raised another question, which eating a completely different eel answered.

[Consumed Psychic wall terror eel! Assimilation progress 1%]

Given the couple hundreds of bodies all over the place, there might as well be tens of bloodlines he could assimilate at this very moment. Especially since only their hearts were of use to the wyvern, so what problem was there in taking the rest for himself?

As for the fleshy bodies with no internals, they weren’t of any use whatsoever. From what he knew, these bodies formed from the collision of the two worlds itself, where the dream world creatures could utilise some of the released energy to produce bodies. Of course, the strength of such a produced body depended on their actual power, which was why the king had a gold tier body unlike the hundreds of steel tier corpses all over.

He handed off the massive pile of dream hearts without a hitch, and besides drinking more wyvern blood, there was little for the two of them to speak about.

Just to make sure though, he asked, “I don’t know if I harvested all the hearts, is that all of them?”

“Only two missing,” the wyvern’s near-instant reply made it clear his guess was right.

With a nod, he set off and spent while performing a deeper search for the missing hearts, but he only found one more in the end. His leader didn’t seem to care much about a lone one though, and the matter ended like that. He could now properly take control of the southern node tree, and he had access to several bloodlines due to the influx of terror eel corpses.

He hoped he could assimilate the elephant in the next few months, but he knew it was simply too unlikely. Who knew what the next few weeks would bring though, especially with the volume of problems brought about by that crab.

While he had a ton of steel tier corpses for the next few days, what really excited him was the visit to the wyvern. Today marked an important day.

He’d finally assimilate its bloodline.

Of course, he also actually assimilated a few from the terror eels as well. From what he found, four in particular were common, with about 200 bodies sharing the four. From the list of less common ones, he found upwards of ten more… But only three had enough body mass to assimilate their bloodlines.

He doubted more steel tiers would be coming through in such numbers as well. The gold tier’s body also provided a slight bit of bloodline energy, not that a single hope of assimilation surrounded its body.

A whole month of blood condensed into this single moment. And as he saw the wyvern fill up a bowl, as usual, he prepared himself as usual.

This bloodline wasn’t anywhere close to the elephant’s legendary bloodline, fortunately, but that did not make it entirely safe. The Nexus made it exceptionally clear that even if he resolved the heat issue of assimilation, it did nothing to resolve what actually plagued him.

The reason a higher rank bloodline might kill him was because it took over his body! Just like his bloodline did to those who ate it and evolved, except the situation was way worse than that. His natural endurance fanatically fought against the invading force, a dragon’s unconscious ability to restrain random mutations and other malaises. And the result of this ‘conflict’ was an insane release of heat, in most cases this didn’t actually matter, and in fact, he actually liked the sensation when it was extremely weak.

But turn that dial up to eleven… And well, his body wasn’t able to stave off the mutation.

When his already unstable bloodline mutated further, the result was natural chaos. And death followed immediately after.

So, that very easily meant to devour stronger bloodlines he just needed ways to restrain the rampant energies from mutating him! Problem number one is that no easy methods of such a thing are known… And certainly not to dragons.

As he just said, his endurance naturally fought off mutations. So what dragon would waste time on formulating spells or skills to fight them?

With his mind flush with thoughts, he knew the only way to stave off the mutation rather well. And took a few mouthfuls of blood whilst carefully watching the figures reported by the Nexus. Then it appeared.

[Consumed Blue storm wyvern bloodline! Assimilation progress 100%]

Heat exploded from his chest in an instant, and he knew it began.

Mana rushed to the heated spot and suppressed the mutation to the best of his abilities, a rudimentary method which meant that he had to exert every bit of force his mind allowed. But it seemed to work, and as a few more spots appeared, his mana split into streams and slowed them all down.

He couldn’t afford to cry out from the searing pain as even just a hundredth of a moment spent delayed meant his death.

Such a sudden release of heat caught the wyvern off guard as well, as concern ran through his mind. Why had the dragon suddenly began melting alive? Obviously that power absorbing bloodline was to blame, he thought to himself, but the wyvern didn’t understand why now of all times?

It looked around the room at the eyes of many beasts and made a decision in an instant, invoking an idea that there was little to no hesitation, and cast a spell and a chilly vortex of wind surrounded the young dragon. It clearly only eased the pain a bit, and so everyone simply watched to see the result.

Would the dragon they were all so jealous of succeed in whatever he was doing, or die?

* * *

Meanwhile, a young girl in a floral dress wandered around a town’s market and tried to talk to the busy and dry adults all around. She’d ask, “Can you help me get to a dragon?” or, “I need help finding a dragon!” with few results. Most adults wondered who let their child play around the market, but with busy schedules, they couldn’t afford to spend time on her.

However, when she caught sight of a group with mana, her eyes sparkled and she ran off to meet them. From what she saw, it was a group of four, but one of the members seemed to be hiding towards the back in a strange stealthy manner. No one probably even saw that fifth member, but she didn’t think much of it.

When standing in front of the two men in front, she didn’t at all let them speak before asking, “Hi! I need help getting to Remero and finding a dragon. Can you help?” The two men came to a sudden halt, almost missing the young girl entirely as they argued about something, the three behind them also stopped but paid no real attention to what caused their group to stand in the streets.

The two men were almost complete opposites, one a burly warrior who wore thick leather reinforced with metal plate, the few places uncovered revealed thick hair and muscle unlike anything she’d ever seen. But his face was clean-shaven, and with a rather thick head of hair, he somewhat resembled her father in that way.

As for the other, he too had a head of hair, but a scruffy beard clashed with that quite a bit. Also, this second man was way scrawnier. She feared that a bone or two would break if she touched him a bit too hard! Besides that, unlike the burly, hairy man, he only wore a simpler type of cloth clothing with leather on his arms and legs.

The large man reacted far sooner to the little girl’s question, and crouched down to see what was the matter. He asked, “Do your parents know you’re wandering around the market like this?”

Before anyone had a chance to reply, the woman in a massive hooded robe locked eyes with her and grabbed the two men by their collars, the larger one falling over due to his crouched state moments ago. Raccelline quite liked the robe’s colour, a deep navy blue, as well as its texture, but that appeal fell soon after. The woman didn’t hesitate to pull out a wand and point it at the young girl, drawing more than a few stares.

“Mala! What do you think you’re doing?”

“She’s full of mana, for Manus’ sake, she can’t be human! There’s just so much…” Unfortunately, with a mana-filled weapon now pointed at her and a commotion raised by the action, she cried on the spot. It left the two men in front and Mala unsure of what to do in response to this situation.

A man beside the aggressive woman pushed away the wand and sternly eyed her down, a strange awkwardness descended as he approached the young girl and gently pulled her into a hug. He wore a similar sort of long robe, but his was far coarser and instead dyed a light brown. With a bald head like her uncle, it did not take much for the child to warm up to the kinder man. Something about him filled her with safety as well, not that she particularly cared what caused it.

“She’s a human, the power of Manus on her is far too converged for any other race. Let’s get something to eat and we’ll find out what happened. Little one, do you know your father’s name?” The man, a devout priest, was not exactly bound to help humans, but no part of his heart dared to leave a young child of immense power in the streets.

Raccelline’s cries died down in his arms, and it took a few seconds for her to whimper out her father’s name, at least the parts she knew, “Gallifar Manus… I think. Everyone calls us Manus though.”

All of them blinked a few times, but didn’t think of it much as many families took on the name of their god in respect for the being. All of them except the mage, Mala, who instead cast a three ring spell to block out her voice from the outside world.

She spoke harshly to her less-educated compatriots, “Her father is the fucking emperor. No, shut up and listen.” But before she could lay on a history class to the adventurers, she met with a slight impedance.

Raccelline interrupted her with, “My dad said you shouldn’t say those sorts of words… It’s impolite.”

“Didn’t you cast a silence spell?” As their leader spoke, everyone turned to the stunned mage. She couldn’t understand what happened, nothing in all her years ever simply disregarded a spell… In her mind, even if one was powerful they had to break a spell at the least.

“I… I did.” Just as a test, she cast a second one, ensuring the young girl was not included in its exclusion effect. And with a tinge of remnant fear, asked, “Can you still hear me?”

And with a nod, that portion of magical knowledge unravelled in mere seconds.

“You said something about needing to find a dragon?” Out of thin air, the final member of the group finally appeared and spoke to the child. There was no surprise even as the woman in black leather practically blinked into existence.

“Yeah! He’s made of ice-cream!”