Some hours later, the group completely left the Marigold Forest, completely intact, and continued their travel westward without many complaints. Though, there were two things that stood out in the conversations.

“You can still see the spear from here… Why do those things stand out so much?” Even so far from the city and with numerous hills on the way, the ridiculously long golden shaft shot up into the sky with seemingly no end. It made the mountains in the Evelard range look like nothing, and he even considered that the spear quite literally travelled all the way to space.

Though, no one really paid attention to his musings. The spear was large because it stood out that way, how else did a god gather the attention of a whole nation in a single move?

Preferably a move which didn’t result in mass destruction and hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians.

But as for the far more heated topic…

“If you knew, why didn’t you tell us it was quicksand? I don’t care if we got out in five seconds, the pit was infested with Bardkin,” Rebecca, out of the shadows for once, shouted at Jaren for the situation which happened just half an hour prior. If that hadn’t been bad enough for him, he somehow only dug the hole deeper in that time by making stupid arguments which ended up with four very pissed off people around him.

Oh, Raccelline and Icy completely evaded the situation though. Their placement behind the group made it easy to watch as the five adults suddenly fell into a pit of fine grains which rapidly devoured them, and then came the thousands of tiny creatures to feast on their powerful bodies.

“Jaren.” Mala turned to him with eyes simply begging to kill the man in front of her, the little shaking of her pupils only added to the sheer unhinged nature of her face right now. And while the group knew no one would actually hurt one another… It really seemed like she was a step away from changing that. But finally, after a heavy breath out, she followed up with, “You lot have it easy with your tight clothing… I don’t have that. They went everywhere. Places no one should ever have tiny moving things. Don’t think that I’ll ever let this go.”

Mala turned away and the group walked on as though nothing had happened.

Was that a threat? A warning? A reminder?

He certainly didn’t blame her, an experience of ants coating his body was enough to recognise how horrible it felt for any small thing to be biting into you… And it made him thankful that dragons had no obvious orifices.

Unfortunately, the berating of Jaren hardly ended there. As it turned out, Mala might have gotten it worse, but she was not alone in having the tiny things wiggle into the more private pieces of clothing.

Bardkin, as their name might suggest, are weasley little things which get into places that no one wants them and attach themselves to your mind in such an annoying manner that it almost seems as though they never left…

And then there are the little beasts which tortured the group.

Actual bardkin are a species of mice, and on their own are actually rather cute. They looked quite similar to dormice, with fur either a matte grey to a lightly shiny white, but the major difference was in their abhorrently tiny size. An adult bardkin might be no longer than a child’s pinky finger, in other words, barely half an inch in length. With squishy bones and highly flexible organs, they were almost like land octopuses in their ability to squeeze through the tiniest gaps and wreak havoc.

Due to this small size as well, this made fine, easily dug ground the best for their species. And in some cases, bardkin created patches of sand, then quicksand, through years of digging and breaking down bits of anything into finer grains.

And that often resulted in extremely fine quicksand which sucked down anything big and heavy… Like an evolved human, for example.

“If you’re done fighting. Will we camp soon?” He spoke in hopes that his question stopped their arguing, especially with Raccelline here and how they seemed just a couple lines from unleashing all manner of terms on Jaren.

Not that he was even horribly at fault, even if he saw there was quicksand, was there reason to believe bardkin occupied it?

Seeing what he wanted to do though, Korridan quickly replied, “Sure, we passed a nice clearing a minute back.” He didn’t actually remember such a thing, and as they walked backwards he even wondered if the leader made it up to break the tension up…

But nope. Somehow, he remembered this random patch of grass they passed by not too long ago with a small patch of extremely short grass near the centre, implying that they were not the first to think of staying here. However, somewhere between days and weeks passed since the last group rested here, and after a short minute of gathering dry wood, they had a small fire started for the sake of the humans.

Icy always thought that the group appeared rather casual in their journey, but seeing how Jaren noticed the quicksand and that Korridan remembered seemingly random spots suitable for rest or camping…

They were anything but idle even whilst appearing so unconcerned. Although, his obliviousness of his surroundings was mostly due to a high dependence on his mana sense, and while it made quick work of searching the surroundings and picking out dangerous mana spots from a distance, it wasn’t actually that good in identifying everything.

Namely, he still had to actually ‘look’ at things. In its unfocused state, his sense was like using peripheral vision, and using that to search for everything, was a horrible idea!

But the group finally settled, and they cooked a meal from one of the several random corpses he kept in his necklace. While all steel tier beasts, he never bothered keeping track of their assimilation percentages as eating only a portion of a corpse did very little.

As with every night, he switched out the spell keeping him cold from a short duration Ice Coat, to a long duration Winter Aura. An Apprentice true spell which made use of the Proto Barrier to create a small bubble, very much like the sea-freezing crab’s ability, but instead held a sub-zero temperature within it for long periods of time.

From what Mala managed to read, it was somewhere around the freezing temperature of quicksilver. Also called mercury depending on the wizard’s occupation.

The Winter Aura ‘barrier’ sacrificed defence entirely to focus on keeping something cold for excessive lengths of time. From what he knew, it was meant to be used as refrigeration for dragons looking to hoard food in warmer climates, and in that regard, it worked somewhat well.

But he just used it to keep himself solid at night, and dispelled it in the morning after an Ice Coat kept him cool.

Oh, and the frighteningly cold temperature did nothing to stop Raccelline from sleeping beside him. Then again, this was the girl who wandered around a mountain in a floral dress and matching pastel dress shoes.

As with every night, since he’d given Raccelline the child-proofed training manuals, she strangely spent at least an hour repeating the motions like a proper warrior undergoing training. Her diligence to something arguably boring was rather inspirational, given her age and circumstances, but at her age, it wasn’t an impossible sight. The impossible sight was her body, specifically, her mana.

It goes without saying, but everything is born with mana. If they weren’t, then either the being would never be capable of using the substance, or they’d be dead in an hour. Raccelline obviously stood out for having more mana than a tip-top gold tier like the wyvern. Again, they’d grown numb to that fact.

But then… Why?

Why was her mana moving as fluidly as theirs when she swung the sword?

The training method he provided her was designed for extremely young children to understand moving tiny amounts of mana in their wrists, which was precisely made to stop injuries whilst teaching basic swordplay…

But how the absolute hell did she do it? No one taught her to control mana. And when asked, she didn’t even know what they were talking about!

It took him some time to find anything about such a strange situation, even for dragons there were no cases of ‘instinctual mana control’. It always had to be controlled with intention, with the exception of some extremely rare bloodlines that dragons never took note of. With that in mind, he was forced to disregard the idea since every being is born with a basic bloodline.

‘Basic’ being relative to one’s body, and as humans are all roughly the same physically it meant they should all share the same bloodline from birth till their first evolution…

[The Nexus advises that you stop attempting to pry into this]

Pry into what?

He was just trying to figure out where Raccelline’s ability even came from. In the first place, it didn’t really make sense for her body to simply have innate power, the concept is rather ludicrous and even the dragons couldn’t truly identify where it was sourced. The only answer they obtained was that it related to Manus in some form, and that it resulted in her having a ridiculous potential even amongst dragons.

Was the Nexus telling him to stop searching for a reason then?

Although… If he drank a bit of her blood he’d be able to easily check if she had a bloodline or not?

“Raccelline, can I have a drop of your blood? Just one is fine,” given that he asked a favour, he did his best to phrase it kindly. Whether or not it came that way was a different thing entirely.

She snapped back instantly with, “But that’ll hurt.” A response he really didn’t have a comeback to, especially since he didn’t have any way to safely extract a drop of blood without making a pinprick at the least. He stood in thought whilst looking at her, trying to think up the best compromise. And then his eyes focused on her head.

“Your hair… Should also be fine. Can I have a little bit?” She tilted her head for a moment, and nodded right after. Thank goodness for that.

Without waiting for anyone to advise her, she grabbed a curl of her hair and raised the sword she trained with to cut it, slicing through it after applying more than a little force. No one even realised she did that until the tuft of hair was held out for Icy to take.

It really wasn’t a good cut. And from Mala’s glare he could tell it really didn’t look nice either.

He took the hair from her hand sheepishly with a short, “Thank you,” before Mala took her away to fix up the mis-cut hair. Without waiting much longer, he took some of the cut strands of hair and swallowed them with water. Pushing them down his throat took quite a bit of time, but eventually, they reached his stomach. And in just a few gulps he’d swallowed all the hair, much to the confusion of everyone present.

An interesting point to start off then…

The hair didn’t instantly break down, and from what he saw, these few strands weren't reducing in size at all. Either this required a lot more time or his body simply couldn’t digest her hair.

“I have a way to identify bloodlines by consuming them… But why can’t I digest her hair?” He explained the situation rather simply, and it was clear that Mala amongst all of them grew the most excited about this information. For a while now she also wanted to know just what in the world Raccelline was. But hearing that even a dragon’s stomach couldn’t digest her hair, really made them wonder just how powerful her body was.

Frankly, he should be capable of digesting flesh and blood from mithril tier beasts, or even those at master tier if given enough time!

[Allow movement of divinity?]

That was abnormal… Didn’t the Nexus normally say that the divinity was fusing with copies of the bloodline to create derivatives? Maybe this was just a case of its unique messages being different.

[The question was intentional. Kandir divinity is not fusing with the bloodline]

“What do you mean?” He asked in Draconic, hoping for a response from the Nexus, but it stayed silent this time round. Without thinking about it too much, he simply accepted the matter as this part of assimilation wasn’t that dangerous, unless a tiny tuft of hair could actually supply him with a full bloodline, wouldn’t that be funny?

“Allow movement,” he told the Nexus.

Darak’s arm twitched immediately as he felt the rush of divinity clearest, to the rest it felt no different from a mass of mana suddenly collecting around Icy. He focused on the young dragon even more, and just about noticed something which left his mouth gaping.

That divinity, enough of it to kill Sages with ease, if fully controlled, was fighting some other force within the dragon... and barely winning.

However, whilst Darak might’ve been engulfed with that shock, it was the dragon who felt that problem clearest. Except it was also so much worse than that. He knew what the Nexus warned him about now…

A blast of heat washed over all the members of the camp. The freezing spell which kept the dragon cold instantly broke as a tsunami of warm air and mana shattered it to dust, leaving the wafer-scaled dragon to howl as its body instantly began to melt. Pushing through the pain, he quickly cast the makeshift spell to reduce the speed of any bloodlines within him, and pushed every ounce of mana within to move at its maximum speed.

It still wasn’t enough.

The tuft of hair slowly broke down from both ends, shrinking as though placed near a fire and allowed to burn away.

Mala had returned quickly due to sensing the magic of this process and upon seeing the dragon literally melt into a puddle in front of her, she cast an Apprentice true spell to freeze him, a shower of snowflakes instantly fell onto the group, but every single one melted before even touching his body.

Somehow still conscious, Icy looked over to Darak and shouted, “Healing magic! Now!”

Not standing in a stupor, he immediately cast some quicker spells in hopes that it stabilised the dragon’s situation before he used anything for more serious injuries. At the same time, Icy painfully pulled out some crystal containers from his dimensional storage and threw the substances down his throat. All of them ingredients to produce evolution slowing potions, in this case, his only chances of stopping the overpowering 'hair' from killing him.

Mala stopped trying to cool him off and switched to using frost spells designed to instantly freeze an opponent, but even those only helped remove some of the heat, it was a miracle his body hadn’t completely melted into goo!

However, in the end, their efforts were enough.

The last strands of hair fizzled away and the collapse of his body finally came to a halt as did the overwhelming release of heat which exceeded even the time he almost died to the Warborne bloodline…

[Consumed Exeter (dormant) human bloodline! Assimilation progress 0%]

Several more healing spells eventually allowed his half-melted ice cream body to reform into a solid state, whilst everything cooled off with a few more frost spells from Mala. But on the side, Rebecca, Korridan, and Jaren could only hold onto Raccelline and soothe her slightly. From the tears in her eyes and the way she shook gently, it was clear she realised that her hair caused this. Almost killing her friend.

That day ended up giving a very important lesson.

Never eat the child.