“Mala, summon an illusory map.”

The group sat alone in a tavern, given a private room to avoid troubling the guests. While at first, they received some suspicion from the barkeep about the literal child with them, Darak’s identity as a priest easily cleared that up, especially since he was the one holding the child.

“Summon an illusory map, please,” she jabbed back at the bearded archer, Jaren, and created a large semi-transparent image of the continent’s map. Every student at her academy had been required to perform this task before graduation, and she certainly understood why a few years afterwards.

“So, little Raccelline, do you know where your dragon friend is?” But upon seeing the massive image which covered the wall, she couldn’t pick out a single nation from the other, simply staring in wonder at the thing. Obviously, they picked up on the fact that she didn’t have the slightest clue. As such, their leader, Korridan, changed the subject. “Do you remember the name of the country he’s in?”

“Uh huh, it was Remero. In a place with loads of big, snowy mountains. Uncle said it was the Ever-lard mountains.” While her pronunciation was somewhat wrong, the specific place was quickly recognised by all five members.

It earned fame across the continent due to the mana explosion which initiated a spurious Rite of Possession from various beast kings.

“I think you meant Remelo, dear. And on the map, that’s about here.” Mala spoke up, and instantly cast a first ring spell to add a small red dot to the map, rather far to the south but still a distance from any of the oceans. “And we’re here,” she said whilst adding another. Far to the north of the one in Remelo, a second red mark pinpointed their position.

“So it’s not far?”

Only Darak and Mala resisted scoffing at her innocent question. But they ran with it and Korridan asked, “You lived in the empire’s capital, I’d imagine?” As she nodded, Mala cast the spell once more to add another mark to the map, this one far to the east. “As you can see, the distance between here and the capital is less than here to Remelo.”

“So it’s just an hour away? That’s really not far then.”

The woman who hid in the shadows reappeared for a few moments to ask, “Raccelline, how did you get to the man’s hut?” As they already experienced the range of emotions from her story, they were just barely able to retain some straight faces whilst talking to the child who possessed more power than the group combined.

“Rebecca, why are you still trying that? You can stop trying to hide, she can clearly see you all the time.” Mala rolled her eyes at the rogue’s constant desire to be hidden.

“I was in the castle, and then my dad put this necklace on me, and then I was in mister’s hut just a second later.” Everyone in the room sighed from the obvious answer in hindsight. Of course someone of her importance was teleported everywhere.

Darak calmly said, “Dear, it takes about two months for people like us to get to the capital from here. To get to Remelo, we’d be looking at a three month journey.”

“How do we know the dragon will even stay there? He might be gone by the time we arrive!” Rather unhelpfully, Jaren pointed out a flaw in the young girl’s idealised plans which they all noticed… But tactfully avoided due to the expected response.

“NO! Uncle said he wanted to stay! And I made uncle give him a weapon! He’ll be there!” At the girl’s flustered response, they really didn’t know what else to say. On one hand, it was an insane risk to travel all the way down south on a child’s whim…

But if what she saw was true… Everything about a Great sage attacking her home and even the fact that the eternals had a new one. Was anywhere going to be safe in a few years?

Not to mention, that dragon might reward them for helping Raccelline, and even just some basic techniques or spells to reach mythril rank or get Mala to Mature wizard would be of unbelievable value to them all! Adult dragons had those sorts of things in troves!

With just a few hours of thought and planning, the group of formerly five rested for the night and planned to set off the following morning. It would be a long journey, but their group could handle any normal problem thrown at them.

A Steel archer, rogue, and shieldwall, alongside the Sprout wizard and priest. They’d escaped from gold tier lords in some of their escapades, travelling for a while?

It’d be a breeze…

And at the same time, they realised what sort of monster was joining them for this trip.

* * *

A full month passed since the dragon finally assimilated the wyvern’s bloodline and felt himself boil alive for a few moments. Rather than calling it unpleasant… He couldn’t really recall the sensation. At some point even the pain of such heat vanished as his mind numbed it all, and by the end, he just rested in the large cavern for the day. Not like he could even move his body after such a thing. But the results had been amazing, albeit far too dangerous to ever try again.

[Blue storm wyvern assimilated! 6 new bloodline directions potentially available]

[Completed Mission 2. A comparative difference between this bloodline and other Advanced rank ones has allowed the Nexus to denote this new rank as ‘Extreme’ rank]

He didn’t completely understand how the transformation of Legendary bloodlines worked, but he knew the elephant’s had to either be Extreme+ or even higher. There was no draconic hatchling in all of history who could raise their power to gold tier so easily. Even as evolved as he was, adult wyvern couldn’t possibly do such a thing.

Of course, that is not to say that stronger and older wyverns are incapable of it.

He had to keep an open mind about all this stuff, as much as he trusted his inheritance on all this information, it inherently did not know much about this topic. Whilst bloodline rankings weren’t new, there had never been such an intense drive for them as the Nexus never truly placed importance in them before!

That's right, the main reason no one bothered measuring bloodlines years ago was the Nexus itself!

It was no secret that the biggest developments in magic were originally due to Nexus missions precisely like the ones he received at this very moment. Although, the young dragon wilfully ignored the other facets of research which had been done, since they produced few results. The best anyone else managed was to create alternate methods of ‘controlling’ an evolution much akin to what the Nexus did anyway. And given how that pointed to a re-creation of the Nexus at best… Why bother?

His month hadn’t been dull though, although that was by his standards. He spent a little over 90% of it training or sleeping, not a thrilling story for any humans watching.

After he assimilated the legendary elephant’s bloodline to 99% he stopped touching it entirely, and then focused on the major terror eel bloodlines he found. After assimilation, he found that only two of them were Rare rank. The rest were just Magical+ according to estimations, although he still had yet to assimilate them all.

It amazed him how weak they were in comparison to what he usually consumed on the mountain, but then he remembered that most beasts here grew up with poor mana density which stunted their possible evolutions. In a decade or two, he didn’t doubt that a beast which achieved steel tier here would at best sit in the middle rung, as a mana gatherer tree owner.

Anyway, he assimilated all the bloodlines possible, but still appeared to be a distance from his next evolution, but it couldn’t have been much further, right?

On the mental front, he finished half the walls on his Mind palace’s second building, as well as completed a set of torches for the first and wrote down all his spells into a book. On the topic of spells specifically, he filled in some gaps in his spells’ lacking diversity by learning a few more Apprentice true spells, which were then condensed to roughly half their size.

Such as Icicle rain, a far stronger Snow blade storm, which started at 36 words, but its ice shards were also transmuted slightly with mana to empower them. It was suitable as a wide area attack in large scale battles, although not inherently lethal.

Necrosis was a 30 word dark curse which specialised Degeneration into the destruction of living organisms instead of the original’s general effect. The benefit of this curse was that simply cutting off a limb couldn’t remove the energy involved, and thus had more staying power against intelligent creatures.

And to avoid going at length over all the spells he learnt. The rest had more indicative names: Illusory body, Mind warp, Lesser spatial link, Dream sense, Soul talk, and the final big one, Magic barrier.

Magic barrier is a 50 word spell, reduced to 26 words with compression, which not only created a barrier strong enough to resist steel tiers, but also increased the power of a single element for spells cast within its radius. A whopping 30% increase at that! There was a small modification to the barrier for each element, but he learnt it without any issue by memorising the whole thing through his Mind palace. The glazed cherry on top was that the barrier’s amplification was on top of the Nexus’ boosts!

Unfortunately, from what he found, aura stopped the Magic barrier’s enhancement from working. This meant no way to combine an auric enhancement with the barrier’s augmentation for a spell of almost transcendental damage.

Speaking of aura, his spirit consumed several doses of aura daily but seemed no closer to a change. He didn’t mind though since his body was its real limit anyway.

But none of this makes the timespan of a month any different from two or three, however, after this month, something special happened.

For the third time in the last week, a steel tier beast had attacked the node tree and attempted to take it from him in battle. But with the spells he recently learned, combined with his Draconic Mind palace, they didn’t stand a chance. As none of them were close to the peak of steel tier, or lords designated by the Nexus, he didn’t struggle to fight off a single one.

Not just these powerful beasts as well, a few searches using Sky sight barrier revealed hundreds of bronze tier beasts arriving at his mana gatherer trees every single week. This far exceeded the number which lived here prior to the terror realm invasion, and the wyvern didn’t exactly know the source of all these beasts either. In fact, he only learnt of it through the dragon’s inquiry.

On top of all that, of the beasts which attacked him, only extremely fast ones which seemed to know all his abilities ever came by. Of course, his first thought was that the beasts surrounding the node tree sold him out.

But after some more thought, that made no sense. For some reason, all the beasts arrived with some sort of spell to further protect their mind against his descended palace… But he knew for a fact the haughty elk would never do such a thing.

At least, he confirmed it couldn’t be that bronze tier beast once he learned Mind warp and saw his bespelled enemies resisting his Apprentice true psychic spell! This was equal to a steel tier attack on their mind!

Someone set it all up, but who?

There was no small list of beasts who wouldn’t prefer a dragon like himself dead. None of the steel tiers he saw of the three attacks matched those he saw back in the battle against the other lords, which left a reasonable explanation and a conspiracy at best.

Some other lord was hoping to use ‘neutral’ steel tiers as a way to either injure or kill him.

Or it was that anaconda who actually dared attack him!

For now he kept it simple, and focused on the attacking beast today. A thin, bony dog. So bony that he would’ve believed it to be resurrected, if not for the hot breaths it gave off regularly. Its skin was an unnatural crimson with purple tinges, and its shrunken pupils gave off a small red glow. Its ribs, legs, and even tail were so tightly wrapped by taut skin that he wondered if it was a beast which went to the logical extreme of speed.

But even though it was fast, and damn did it almost catch him even whilst merged with the spirit, it was clearer who possessed the best senses. Once he cast Magic barrier, and descended his Mind palace, it was a trivial battle. Its spells laughably bounced off and his spirit helped tie it down as a Necrosis struck its body and quickly caused chunks of its already thin body to dry out and directly fall off. The dragon knew in an instant that unless all its attacker’s mana went into preserving its body, the bony dog would truly turn into a pile of bones.

Strangely enough, he wasn’t at all worried about these battles against steel tiers, beasts which ordinarily could slice him in two with a single move. Not just because Necrosis and his spirit paired together too well, but because he grew confident.

And that confidence came from a single line of one particular evolution’s description.

He finally understood how exactly his ‘will’ enhanced the Auric spirit.