“So Warborne giants were gold tier. Spiritcallers were mithril tier… Then the Elder guards were masters? So what the hell fought those cornem lords? The demigod’s body was destroyed as well, but if I consume those warriors standing guard around it…” His eyes went wide at what sort of treasure resided in that battlefield.

But once more, he needed a way to absorb stronger bloodlines such that it didn’t outright kill him.

He put it off for now though. The library recorded far more information than he gave it credit for. In terms of history, the place answered practically every question he had about the mountain range’s past. Although, its lack of modern knowledge frustrated him a bit.

But that was merely how things went sometimes.

For now, he decided to make ample use of the alchemical materials which boosted his mental space as a way to finish the roof construction in just two more days. Unfortunately, the material he used was a rare item from one of the dream realms called weeping separation, a name given to how the plant grows in pairs, each within a different realm, and both flowers appearing like tear drops.

When the two are brought together, dried, and finally crushed into a fine powder, as the dragon did, resulting in a small crystal jar’s worth, simply a teaspoon full of the stuff had amazing effects.

It directly doubled the size of the connection between his mental space and body, allowing the mana he utilised at any time to also double! Naturally, one can figure out the implication of such a thing with a simple inference.

The small jar only contained four such doses of the gold tier material though, and the two he used already made his heart ache.

But just as before, upon completion, his body rapidly drew in masses of aura and mana, but he saw no incarnation of draconic will this time round. The golden drop of blood simply formed on a wall of the new building yet again, even though he hadn’t actually finished the door. A simple descent of his Mind palace allowed him to estimate that its suppression increased to steel tier, although real combat was required to test that.

Only combat could test the spell weakening effect it held as well, although the bloodline explicitly stated a limit, so he believed a second building at most increased the number of times that effect could activate instead of the effect’s power.

Still, a wonderful thing to have.

His mind now hit steel tier… As did his spells… Which left consistency.

That’s right, not his body which would realistically never catch up unless a bloodline completely removed the ice cream portion.

And he knew better than to accept a partial transformation. In fact, he’d rather remain vigilant until a way to completely reform his bloodline with the Nexus came about one day, but for now, the high-potential form was acceptable. Even if he literally became an ice-cream factory…

“There’s nothing left here for me now… I suppose I’ll start with that rattlesnake and the others. And then… Probably target their lords,” he said, confirming a near-future set of goals to complete before finally leaving. In the first place, he never intended to go this far…

But not everything can go according to plan. In the end, the wyvern grew too fearful for his own good and now it had to deal with the consequences of failure.

As he walked past the stone tablets, their excellent sculpting still struck him as impressive, especially as they remained completely intact after all these years. But now he returned to leave, and on the way out, he came to that first deadly room once more. With that eye attached to the ceiling, he couldn’t help but wonder if that would be the last burst of bloodline energy he needed for another evolution…

It certainly was possible, but how to cut off its mana?

His mana sight revealed two arrays in the room, much to his surprise. The one on the floor gathered mana rapidly, although this had been miniscule in the years prior and therefore left the eye in a sleeping state until mana returned to such high levels.

But this worked excellently in his favour. The two arrays clearly existed to provide the eye with all the mana it required, first and foremost, but then feed themselves on the leftovers such that everything remained operable. But clearly, it mattered most that the eye continued working more than the arrays fixing themselves or simply removing blockages of mana if any issues occurred. So, as long as the eye constantly drained a ridiculous quantity of mana, and he did his best to restrict the floor array which gathered more and sent it upwards…

The eye’s supporting array would fail and the thing would collapse!

However, it was harder than it sounded. Or at least, it would’ve been if not for it being extremely easy to capture a load of small beasts and force the array to over-react constantly. For example, if these small critters had a piece of gold tier ore inside them…

“Huh… That was easier than I imagined,” the youngling said.

The sun hadn’t even set for the day, and yet he stood in front of a giant eyeball, easily larger than his whole body, with its dim pupil focused on him but without the slightest semblance of control behind it.

When he began the attempts, it pleased him to know the eyeball’s targeting worked precisely as he expected from what occurred when entering the place and the memory of that cat who was unforgivingly turned to tiny particulates. It was interesting how even though only a tiny wisp of that cat’s mana escaped, it still knew how to create a spell strong enough to destroy its body in such a way.

And that same thing applied here. By throwing a live creature in, the eye first noticed mana from that critter escaping, but then carefully scanned it to notice how much power it actually needed to use to destroy it.

From there he merely had to throw in ten more creatures, and his mana control just barely restricted the transfer of mana from its collector array to finally disable the top array entirely.

Additionally, the eyeball was so unimaginably heavy that without the array to hold it up, the bricks instantly came loose and caused it to fall like a massive ball of metal. The bricks below even cracked slightly from such an impact, leading him to feel disgusted that the eye of a mithril tier beast already weighed such a crazy amount. If allowed to drop in the snow outside, he wouldn’t be surprised to see it fall all the way down until it hit the mountain itself. But now, he used one of the gold tier blades to cut out a section of its gelatinous eye and chewed the unpleasant substance in his mouth before seeing the result with his senses.

It indeed stayed intact when entering his stomach, and even decreased at a noticeable rate… But this mush still took over 30 seconds to fully digest in the end. He also ignored the Nexus prompts whilst this happened, too excited by the prospect of an evolution from this eye.

[Consumed Blackness incarceration turtle bloodline! Assimilation progress 0%]

“Well, it doesn’t seem likely I’ll get a bloodline… But the energy alone is enough. Too bad I didn’t actually use the World veiler bloodline’s bonuses all that much, and now they’re going to be replaced…” The fact that the Nexus only allowed him to keep one set of the stat bonuses it gave was a pain to many beasts, but even more so to him as the constant evolutions switched them out way too quickly.

Losing that 45% boost to all attributes from the Auric spiritual bloodline still hurt, admittedly. It directly reduced his strength from low-steel to high-bronze in a single hour.

But now, another evolution was precisely what he needed for that movement to the next tier, permanently. And then the spirit on top of that to further boost him?

Today was a good day.

Not for the eye though, he ate it bit by bit throughout whilst getting some furniture into the new building for his Mind palace. Additionally, he’d begun work on a second floor which would double the effective space in this building, something he drastically needed.

“Very lengthy name for a turtle though. Why does it have ‘incarceration’ in its name though? The Nexus really does have strange names sometimes.” Of course, he could scour through books to find one on strange turtle or darkness element beasts just to finally locate the source of this eyeball, but he really couldn’t care less.

Eat eyeball, evolve, focus on revenge.

Did the plan need to be more complex?

Yeah, there was the matter of doing things afterwards. But the third world was already pretty damn big, there was no small lack of things to do.

[Consumed Blackness incarceration turtle bloodline! Assimilation progress 35%]

This eye certainly provided a fair bit of assimilation progress, but as he was more than three quarters done with it, one could easily see that completion was unlikely. Besides, he believed this to be either an Extreme+ bloodline, or another one which went beyond that level! He still hadn’t found any ideal spells which slowed down mutation enough for a test of his hypothesis.

He said whilst exiting his inheritance memories, “Well, Evo-stalling is the perfect spell if it wasn’t 120 words long… And if the first 100 words alone didn’t drain all my MP.” He actually found one further useful spell, but it never even became a consideration as it nicely sat at 338 words.

Needless to say, one was achievable in the near future, and the other was literal years away!

With just a tiny bit of the eye left, he went back to the inheritance room to grab a few more valuables as the loss of ores naturally gave way to a bit of space. He simply took some more coins, but this time went for a kind which one of his memories mentioned as being minted by some major bank across the continent. And since his memories generally stayed up-to-date, he knew the currency to be legal tender at the moment as well.

At the very least, he could ask to have it exchanged to a local currency if need be at any of those banks… When he overcame the issue of walking about as a dragon.

“Surely I won’t have to transfer myself to a human form? Maybe I can try to find a human companion and use them as an excuse to wander about freely…” He came up with an idea pretty quickly, but the validity of his idea remained rather low.

In the meantime, he finally finished the eye but had yet to evolve even after all that. Naturally, it made him pretty damn annoyed.

[Consumed Blackness incarceration turtle bloodline! Assimilation progress 48%]

“Too bad there wasn’t a second eye, or I’d actually have a chance to assimilate it. But, no matter.” He ditched the complaint straight away and finally moved back up the long sets of stairs while in deep thought about his first target. However, before he stepped out, a stream of Draconic came out of his mouth as he cast an illusion spell that’d been chosen precisely for the upcoming few weeks.

Image recreation, a 55 word spell which used a little over 50% of his MP to create a sort of ‘cloak’ over his body and make him appear as anything he desired so long as it fit beneath within the cloak’s bounds. At first he went through choices of a few mammals, but speed always proved an issue and so he began to think up more and more options.

Until one particular memory came to him.

The golden brown wafer scales he’d worn for months transformed to glistening azure, tightly overlapped and tough like steel. His eyes appeared a deep yellow, like a cat’s, and his claws sharpened to the point where they could cut better than a razor. Finally, around his neck, an overlap of skin was created, and when he controlled the spell this skin suddenly became erect to reveal a deep blue frill.

Indeed, he chose to hide himself as a crystal-frilled lizard, beasts which only stuck with him as it was the first real battle he’d used the Auric spirit in, and it demolished them.

But in the end, this was merely an illusion, anything which attacked him would dispel his image instantly, although a physical attack shouldn’t destroy it, given specific circumstances that is. A physical attack from a mithril tier beast would still actually dispel it as the surrounding mana would warp so much from the attack that his image cracked.

Besides that though? The World Veiler bloodline strengthened this illusion so much that he doubted any steel tier beast would ever see through it unless he acted strangely.

And on the off chance he actually came across a beast with strong illusion-piercing powers, he’d just have to hope they didn’t recognise his true form. Then a quick elimination or running away ensured his identity would remain hidden over the next few days. Some beasts would suddenly vanish, that's for sure…

Did these steel tiers matter that much to their lords though?