Beneath an unknown winter’s hope tree, a group of twenty packed up their camp to begin moving towards the local node tree. Being a gathering spot of powerful creatures, expecting dragons to visit such a place made sense.

One of the crew kicked a pile of snow over their fire, snuffing out any embers as an additional measure, and just fifteen minutes later the group set off. A clear day meant easy weather, although the sun’s reflection in the snow proved a nuisance. While the two mages used some spell to adjust their eyes, everyone else simply had to deal with the effect.

“If the node tree holds nothing then we head to the western side of this mountain. The dragons were seen flying away from there,” Augusticus said to the group. Most her information was already known by Bachlar, with everything unknown pretty much useless to this expedition.

“The western side is massive, sir. We’ll be lucky to pass through it all with three full days of exploration,” one of the Bachlar’s knights tried to explain the problems before being cut off.

Bachlar saying, “Then we find a large enough cave to camp out in. We brought a week’s worth of food for a reason.” None of his knights dared refute. Looking over to the wizard beside him, she remained in deep thought with little attention to the surroundings. “Rare to see you this focused. Almost like the first time I had you-” a elbow hit his chest before the sentence ended.

Not enough to hurt, the strike just knocked the wind from him. A sneer he’d call adorable appeared right after. “Do you ever stop?” She rolled her eyes when he smirked.

“This dragon heart is that important to you then? So much that you refused to ask for help?” A rare moment of concern finally appeared on Bachlar’s face, but even then she didn’t know how to reply.

Almost showing her true feelings, she quickly pursed her lips and nodded a bit. Then said, “Yes, incredibly so.” Bachlar dropped the second question right after.

* * *

Inside the icy cave, the hatchling had dug a long, downward tunnel until finally striking the rock mountain below. On the way he even found some magical plants, none of which contained bloodlines. On the earthen mountain’s surface, he soon realised that the thing was inclined and decided against using the rock as his floor.

Instead, he returned to the top of the tunnel and expanded it slightly. Then he tried using Ice spells to fill in the gaps for support. However, this spell only formed a random crystal of ice, and for a proper structure he would need Ice creation, a different type of spell.

Most incantations simply had one version, and they completed a single role. For example, there aren't ten slight variations on Flame bolt which produced slightly different spells. This happened both due to draconic spellcasting making such changes tough to implement, and dragons themselves believing such a thing to be ridiculous. Why would a hatchling need to have so many versions of a spell they'd discard a year later?

But in some cases this wasn’t an option. The obvious case being all magic related to created shaped elements, such as: columns, bricks, tiles, and similar construction materials. In this regard, the idea of only having one version of an incantation utterly failed. So dragons instead utilised the normal way of spell casting to solve this deficit.

Ice creation as a spell was actually a gargantuan book of around 200 pages, part of it being a documentation for the basic ways to create shaped ice, and then a dedicated study of freely creating any structure one pleased by chaining words together. In theory, one could make an entire castle using a few thousand words and vast stores of mana!

Practically, no dragon had ever done this.

Pillars of ice, without any designs, proved to be incredibly easy though, being a five word chain which made use of the basic Ice spell. In just over an hour he correctly pronounced the full spell, although it meant little as he had to go over the sentence to ensure nothing was forgotten.

Even with that extra memorisation he knew the spell in just an hour! And it used less than 1% of his MP per cast, allowing him to easily create the small pillars all the way down. This alone was not enough to feel safe though. Every several metres, he not only used two pillars, but also created a sheet of ice above to act as a roof. While rough and appearing poorly made, he found it adequately supported the tunnel. Cave-ins would no longer happen naturally, but who knew what an Explosive bolt or two would do.

With that in mind, he also planned on leaving an escape route here. However, the construction of that required even more time, and he opted to get the main abode ready first. Somewhere to safely grow away from hunters’ eyes was far too important.

One important matter was moving his food downstairs, which meant carving the bodies into small pieces and slowly rolling them down the tunnel. Leaving the pile of meat in a corner was good enough for him at the moment.

But from a tiny room barely a fraction of the cave, he wanted to expand into a larger cavern. His first idea was to make the walls and ceiling of ice to better withstand everything above. From there providing support columns, probably using Earth creation.

He had big plans for his future home!

Thinking above the cave up above, while he still wanted access to it, he also needed to stop wandering creatures from entering this place. Not to mention something may decide to take his cave while it appeared empty, and something violent entering his delicate tunnel could mean a mutual destruction.

“I should learn something for moving snow better, in the future at least. And teleportation!” He talked to himself while making the slow climb back up to the cave, even with the recent boost in Agility he required a bit of time to make this trip. Yet, It didn’t even hold a flame to the tunnel to the Ice ant nest.

Once at the top, he checked that no possessions remained in the cave and activated Telekinesis. The heavy weight still ached, but he could easily see the snow from his digging and worked to pull it closer.

Bit by bit, it entered the tunnel and began compacting around the entrance. By no means was it a small amount of snow, but he already chucked a huge majority of the original pile outside! For the remaining parts, only by moving deeper and deeper could he make enough room, in the end completely barring himself underground.

For now that is, he quickly planned on creating other escape routes. He simply could not feel safe in such an open cave with dragon hunters roaming about. How did his species view the hunters?

Books only used a single word. Insatiable.

Whether the heart of an adult, youngling, or hatchling, myriad races wanted to kill and devour dragons. So few species possessed natural organs with mana processing abilities, and the dragon heart is one of the very best!

So what if those two hunters from before let him go? Every book on the topic made reality very clear.

More would come. For days, weeks, months, sometimes even years. And as he grew stronger, those who wanted his heart would as well. For now some rather weak Swordsman tried to capture a dragon… but what about adult dragons hunted by sages and masters?

Killing an adult dragon is incredibly hard, that much is never mistaken. But for those reaching the ends of their talent, it was the greatest tonic in the world. With that in mind, he now had to prioritise a spell to further improve his strength.

If he really wanted to, then learning a True spell was possible. It might just take a few days, or a week for something slightly harder. As for Snow control, it was a derivative of a derivative. Water control was a modified Telekinesis with limited use-cases, but exceptional at them. The more precise an elemental control became, the stronger its effect on that very specific thing. In that regard, he would prefer to learn both if not for Snow control being an 18 word spell… Meanwhile, Water control was 15 words.

“Maybe a trap spell is best… Some advice would really be nice.” Still somewhat yearning for company, he decided to flick through the book of incantations in hope some simple traps existed. An 8 word spell would be best, but he didn’t get his hopes up.

At the same time, he heard thumping coming from above, something big moved into his cave.

However, he quickly realised the thumping was a whole family of footsteps merged together and assumed it to be a family of animals. Checking on things a bit more, he moved up the tunnel to see if they contained a dangerous amount of mana.

But as voices travelled downwards, he froze in place and quickly descended once more.

The humans had returned! And this new party was massive, at least having ten people from the voices he barely made out. Just maybe he could fend off one or two, given he started at a distance, but ten?

He did not understand much of what they said, just a few words came through like ‘camp’ and ‘here’, but those alone made it frighteningly clear that they were just some distance above. He slowly walked back down the tunnel, making sure to avoid bashing into any of the support rods or producing loud footsteps. By the time all the noises above merged into an assorted cacophony he felt safe enough to resume walking as normal.

He expected more humans to be appearing in a day or two, but why in the eight worlds were they staying in his cave of all places! At least he brought down most of his possessions in advance, all that remained up top were some pelts he left to the side. Unlike the mutated glacier wolf’s pelt, those held no use to him.

“Guess I’m stuck here then… I should build that tunnel.” Breathing out in annoyance, he looked towards the walls of his underground abode to pick a suitable direction. Obviously, digging towards the cliff was a poor choice.

As was the ant nest considering the damage he inflicted, no doubt their queen would hunt him down at first smell. Following that logic, he chose one of the other two directions, towards the winter's hope tree or the root sending mana to the node tree.

In the end, he chose the latter. Digging too close to one of those trees might anger the creatures nearby, and he very much preferred to live.

Understanding the direction of his abode, roughly, he picked a wall and began casting Fire spells at it. Digging wouldn’t work here as the snow had to go somewhere in the end. Instead, by melting the snow he could let the water seep downwards and freeze somewhere it couldn’t cause problems to him.

But it came with a downside. Each Fire spell barely dug a few inches further, and at his current rate it was looking to take at least half a day to reach a point where he felt safe digging up.

Giving in soon after, he looked through the book of incantations to find one called Flame source. Very simply, it created a controllable flame which constantly drew on mana to stay lit. However, strong enough water or ice magic can extinguish the flame.

Being a seven word spell, it took a little while to learn. Only a little since its form matched the Controlled light spell to a high degree, and the words related to fire had been learnt ages ago! With that in mind, it took just half an hour until he memorised the two new words and worked them into a sentence. Learning the spell was barely even an inconvenience if he were to be honest.

Upon checking the mana reaction, he saw his MP drop by 4% for activating the spell, rather costly to activate. From there it dropped another 1% every three seconds. While not too inefficient, the far higher cost over Fire was clear.

However, he preferred this spell immensely as he could freely reposition the flame to quickly melt snow in a tunnel. Just two minutes later, now being at 55% MP, the new tunnel barely half his length was over ten times the distance! For now he stopped to add supports, unsure of the stability for this method of digging.

Besides eating meat on occasion, he sat down to learn about whatever met his fancy. Sometimes he looked into plants often found in cold climates, finding out more about the plants he often ignored due to lacking bloodlines. Other times he researched more into the species in both strong and weak mountains, also doing his best to find ‘Kandir giants’.

One thing he noticed early on was that most giant bloodlines are separated according to their geography or environment. He knew for a fact that Kandir was no such thing, and had to be the name of a kingdom or empire. So where exactly was it?

No, he was seriously asking that. Which one of the hundreds of books in his head talked about the Kandir giants?

Not to mention, nothing guaranteed that any of the books mentioned them at all! He might have to find a scholar of this niche species just to have any chance of researching them, and such an idea was far too tedious. Although the danger is what mattered more, as entering any magical academy across the world isn’t exactly a bright idea for any dragon.

Spellcasting was something he tried for the past few hours as well, but attempts at doing so had all died off relatively quickly as focus waned. Hollering, singing, stomping, and a strange, pungent smell all intervened with all those things earlier on. So much for those humans acting calmly after making camp, but that just made avoiding them even more important. Too bad he couldn’t even sleep with their noise.

It went on for hours. The smell at some point getting so bad he had to return up just to check what it was, quickly realising what happened through the yellow snow in between him and those hunters. This was well over a couple metres of snow… Just how much did they?

He shook off the thought and just decided to use some snow to block up this tunnel for now. The noise couldn’t be cut off, but in no way did his sense of smell have to suffer as well. But by now the stench firmly wafted into the room and refused to leave easily...

He was stuck with a wretched scent of piss all night long. The sounds stopped, inevitably, but the assault on his senses was never ending.