If there was one extremely contentious matter which personally affected Akevorax, it would be the problem with his exact power.

He flew about the sub-realm at supersonic speeds, every little movement a purposeful attempt to evade or block another slash of the teleporting glaive. Endless shockwaves fluttered through the air as both sides moved with such speeds that it gave the illusion of a blurry mess. A moving watercolour of yellow, blacks, and the occasional red.

All of this culminated in a battle between two top master tiers; a Starlite rank for the other side if talking about technicalities.

Obviously, divinity played a huge role. Even if he controlled less of it than used to create that giant incarnation, this purposeful control meant that he made effective use of its power instead of just randomly creating a set of armour. Furthermore, divinity was wholly composed of a great language, in what world could mere physical force break it?

The punches and kicks did nothing to Akevorax except knock him about and steal momentum, but as agon, his sense of control in the air was impeccable. The real problem with such movement was that it occasionally threw him into the ground where a sudden deceleration ruined his momentum.

As a whole though, power rankings depended on so many factors to fully analyse. However, two very specific states can be set apart. His ‘normal’ state, and this ‘enhanced’ state. The normal state only made use of his orb and simpler methods available at all times, conclusively setting his power to the low end of master tier thanks to his recent evolution. But this enhanced state, where he combined divinity and a True Will at once, its power was just that ridiculous.

If it weren’t, why would dragons care so much about the awakening of True Wills?

The funnier part was probably that a True Will’s offensive power was miniscule before its wings formed, instead, the manifestation of will primarily subjugated everything without a similar manifestation. Some weaker humans liked to call this function ‘Draconic Will’, but that was inherently false as a few other top races possessed similar True Wills… And it wasn’t all that hard to guess what made such a thing so frightening that it kept the Dragonlands an untouched neutral power for countless years.

Now, as the soul power and Origin Force available to Akevorax slowly drained with every evasive manoeuvre, he decided to try it out for once.

With a single thought, the merged True Will finally took top spot and forced itself into appearance. From golden runes of Divinus encasing Akevorax, a semi-transparent white mass, almost like ectoplasm, also spread all over him much like a layer of gel. It formed an extraordinarily thin layer all over, and besides the glistening as though filled with gemstones, a golden hue still radiated out from the runes behind.

But it was his ruby eyes which garnered the biggest threat.

As the warrior still trying to cut through him came to a stop, their body slowed to a snail’s pace when compared to the instantaneous movement through space. Every muscle grew frigid and locked as though it truly despised the actions sent by his brain. An instinctive desire to overthrow those mental signals came about.

Tensed, panicked, and mouth suddenly dry, the eternal received his first taste of unstoppable fear from a dragon’s True Will. However, this forced sensation with which their biology panicked under, finally came to an end.

Viscous strands of silvery white substances swirled around the warrior, and they began to move as though unaffected by the immense fear which stunned almost everything. Akevorax expected this, but spoke nonetheless, “So you do have an Exalted Soul. How old are you anyway? 100 years? 150?”

“I see why his highness even feared that thing, thankfully you’re too weak to kill me,” they completely ignored his question, focused entirely on their own thoughts surrounding the True Will’s suppressive effects.

An Exalted Soul was just the next level of defences created after a Formed Soul, and as Akevorax mentioned earlier, it took an unwaveringly long time to complete. Even the best soul-related evolutions could only reduce the build time to about 20% of its maximum. That still meant years to complete, on top of all the other training someone at this level required to grow stronger.

“Thanks for answering the question,” he rolled his eyes, secretly taking a chance to look into the somehow intact teleportation array and check on everyone’s return to the Dragonlands.

Several minutes had arrived since he sent them off. Surely they met up with an elder or supreme tier by now?

“You think I didn’t notice your cute teleporters before attacking?” The armoured warrior stepped into the dimension for a moment, walking through a higher dimensional wall as though wading through water. They not only easily guessed his thoughts, but long since prepared against the idea! What did that mean for– “Don’t worry your stupid head, I just slowed down their movement a lot. Can’t have her dying now, can we. It’s just the two of us for a long time to come.”

He could practically see their infuriating grin through their helmet. But there was nothing he could do.

Just… Nothing.

The illumination of his palace suddenly ended, the light which previously shone throughout the dimension and even penetrated to deeper layers was cut off and syphoned into a separated space. His eyes vanished just like that, and before he could even adapt to the situation, he watched a strange scene for several brief moments.

Watching his body fly forward as he toppled to the ground. His headless body, that is.

Faster than any attack since the ‘battle’ began, a clean slash of the glaive instantly decapitated him and dropped the dragon’s head onto the cold ground. The body without a brain fell soon after, smashing into the hard ground but causing no damage on its own. It was now as he spun about in the air, a mere head without its heart, that he was able to smile in recognition of what happened.

The mana in his head granted him a voice, as he said lying face-up on the ground, “So you really couldn’t kill a little dragon without revealing yourself. What a great ending. I hope you rot in–” The warrior’s glaive stabbed through his wafer skull and sliced his ice cream brain to a fine paste, those thousands of Divinus runes simply unable to stop the wave of oppressive power within that strike.

His smile remained though. A smile in recognition that it took authentic Cornem rank power to finally kill him.

And that meant something would have noticed that burst of power, no doubt the eternal now had to deal with dozens of top level beings hot on their tail. A situation backed up by the way they teleported away instantly without even verifying the destruction of his Mind or Soul.

In those final moments, as he smiled upwards to the overbearing warrior who mercilessly executed him, the golden runes he’d watched so carefully this whole time finally made sense. Combat worsened his general analytical skills, but just those few seconds of clear vision finally proved the link.

Salvation’s divinity, without a doubt.

The elves now formally entered the fray, purely dedicated to his death. It amazed him to think that his potential in the upcoming war and relationship to humans threatened these two major races to such a degree.

But those thoughts were cut off right after on account of the giant hole right through his brain. The one which ‘killed’ him, if not already clear.

While his palace quickly dispersed, the illusion just that in the end, his Soul pulled itself from the headless body and jumped into the ruined head to meet with his Mind. Unfortunately, the world went black from there, but from the destabilised sub-realm, one could see a small glint of white fly out with a misty white trail left in its path. The trail remained for hardly a fraction of a second, the light which caused it moving so fast that it’d instantly crossed the vast empty gulf from this sub-realm to the main universe. And even faster still, in the third world it shot straight into the human continent and entered a small cave in the Evelard mountain range.

Located all the way in the back, below a layer of snow which connected to a strange vacuole within the mountain, sat a small seed of crystal bursting with incredible power.

As the white light entered, the static object burst to life and shook wildly, finally drawing copious amounts of mana as the crystal seed expanded into a large chunk. Slowly enlarging over and over until it formed a pulsing crystal heart. The body of ice cream, sorbet, and all things sweet slowly reformed soon after that, and with a body stuck in a block of snow, the dragon returned to life.

He casually tore space apart to stretch his limbs in the open cave above, flexing his neck and legs first, then going for his wings… His wings…

The two he very much should have on his body?

A quick turn around showed the two wings, but in a half-grown state much like the days when he ran away from the demon elf progenitor. “Why are they… What even killed me? Right, eternals attacked– No, an eternal. Just one, at Cornem rank, why is my memory so poor. Nexus?”

[This was within expectations, albeit a bit worse than predicted. You’re currently being showed scenes from incredibly volatile soul memory, it’s natural that the situation was fragmented since your soul only hit master tier after that evolution]

“Something about Rebecca as well… What expectations did you have?”

[Obviously, the seed only stored memories up to the moment you placed it, but this also applied to bloodlines. We always expected these losses, fortunately, that final evolution raised your mana capacity enough that your soul reached a critical stage and rushed to store memories. That allowed some of the past few months to be imprinted in your soul before death]

“I know how soul memory works! Stay on topic, please! So I lost a bunch of memories, and my bloodline was reset to the time I placed the seed… That’s unfortunate. What was worse than you predicted?” Akevorax didn’t miss a beat this time, his powerful mind parsed information rather quickly and he soon moved past his death with ease. But it didn’t change the fact that he was currently without usable wings.

[Besides those losses, there is a cost associated with this survival method. Firstly, it did cause your heart to be reset completely to the last successful transformation. Secondly, it cost you some of your growth, this is likely a flaw due to the eternity fern’s revival process. And lastly, you lost a hefty amount of lifespan from the process]

That wasn’t simple in the slightest, he groaned to himself as another crystal seed appeared in his heart. However, it was clearly too weak at the moment as this one lacked the lustre or smoothness of his first seed. Akevorax left it within him for now, and quickly teleported himself underground to the little abode he made long ago. In preparation for a situation like this, he dug out a bit more space and placed a moderately strong teleportation array here.

It wasn’t designed for anything fancy besides a hasty return to the Dragonlands in case someone chased his Soul and Mind back here.

And so, as he carefully calibrated the array, the explanations for everything came rolling in.

[In regards to your growth: This appears to be a flaw in the eternity fern’s assimilation into your bloodline. While such problems were expected, we hadn’t considered your growth as a payment for this process. Yes, in retrospect it was clear given the ferns return to a nascent state as part of their ‘eternal’ aspect. Currently this process seems to revert you half a growth stage, so be careful when you place the seeds]

“And the lifespan loss?”

[The energy to transport your Soul and Mind back has to come from somewhere, surely you realised that? Since lifespan is an intrinsic property within the Soul, it’s the easiest to burn power here. Why else would so many techniques default to lifespan?]

He hadn’t considered it that way before, certainly, there were a lot of ‘secret’ techniques which devolved into the use of lifespan to temporarily empower oneself. After all, losing a few years to win a fight might as well be a win to any warrior. That didn’t answer Akevorax’s main concern though, and as he finished up the array coordinates, he asked, “How much then?”

[87 years total. 10 years to exit the sub-realm, 2 years for the distance in the outer world back to the universe, 72 years to re-enter the main universe, and 3 years for the journey to your seed]

The numbers themselves didn’t mean much, to a dragon, 100 years of life wasn’t too serious a loss. However, it raised another problem in the form of long-distance deaths. The twenty sub-realms Mala picked out for their teleporters were all located rather close to the third world, this was purposeful as it massively reduced the distance between teleporters and gave them a way out if necessary. Numerically, the distance as a scalar was 400,000 kilometres, tiny on a galactic scale.

The third world’s moon had a further orbit than that, for reference.

What would happen if he entered a spatial tunnel to a far-off sub-realm and died? And what if that sub-realm had unusually strong dimensional walls due to some unique aspect?

That tiny 2 or 3 year portion of the journey could easily jump straight up to decades or centuries. And it wasn’t like he’d forgotten about the minor lifespan loss slowly building up from repeated evolutions. He was approaching 3 years per evolution at the moment, still ignorable compared to the total life of a dragon, but far more worrisome with this new fact. Akevorax couldn’t find the heart to deal with it straight away though, and just threw himself into the activated teleporter, straight back to the Dragonlands as quickly as possible.

The metal alloy which formed this temporary array’s lines showed cracks and dulled from this use, a natural fact as he never built this thing to last. It merely moved his weakened, revived body to safety for a short while. He could place another crystal seed down in the future once he nurtured it properly, but for now he wanted to evolve a couple more times before doing so.

Obviously he needed more Conquering Juggernaut bones, but that could wait until he regrew his wings.

Quick, simple, and far less dangerous.