As seasons on the third world changed once more, it entered the dead of winter and the new year announced the shifting of time clearly to all. While usually a time of celebration or festivities for many, as well as a time fraught with starvation and the seeping cold for those less fortunate, there existed a heavy tension over the heads of all across the world. An acknowledgement made by all, from the common people to those high up.

Day after day, they awaited the declaration of war to plunge their lives into chaos. And yet it still had not come, the infesting cold a far closer worry for many at this time of year.

At least they could hide and ignore a war, the cold which stabbed into one’s bones was not so kind.

Many beast races lived on as usual though, some offered aid to humans with whom they built relations spanning centuries, but a great majority existed in equality at most. They agreed to a pact, and so, they agreed that none owed humans a single helping hand. Dragons too fell into this category as they traded and worked with both elves and humans quite often over the years. That marked their place in the war rather straightforwardly, something everyone expected otherwise due to a singular dragon. Clearly, his attitude could not sway countless other dragons though.

And in retrospect, many thought it ridiculous they ever assumed he could.

Of course, that dragon was none other than Akevorax who sat atop an active array without a single movement. With complete control over his body, he ensured that not even a tremble passed through.

A wafer-coated statue by all accounts, he still just sat there quietly as the array beneath him pulsed with mana. Within his heart, the concentration of crystals clearly differed across places as the size and variety of microscopic arrangements reached a new density, but only halfway across his heart. These new crystals existed with a dark brown lustre like molten caramel, but also reached a density several times greater than the previous concentration of crystal, along with it came a considerable boost in mana.

However, this body now limited him too much.

His power exceeded his actual growth immensely, but all attempts to locate more deposits of Kandir divinity failed horribly, which left the few Divine Phalanx bones as his final source. Advancement of his soul training continued smoothly as damage to his palace healed just minutes after every bout of improvement, and at the same time progress on the manor came slowly. He improved considerably in every single domain… Except for one.

His mana stagnated. Not just in capacity, but in limit.

As future spells required even more, he discovered that the volume forced through the body of ice cream now met a physical blockage. Attempts to push more through only obliterated his body as it took on a strain far above what he could manage, and he only had himself to blame.

The dragonstone never got a chance to improve his body after all, his purposeful decision.

“I still don’t understand how to merge the elements in my body. Ice, mana, space, lightning, and Origin Force… Will my body have to cut off some?” He glanced at the deposits of elements and mana all about the ice cream internals, but still came up blank for a solution. The obvious answer was a merger using Origin Force, but sometimes it was necessary to take a step in his boots. All in all, his thoughts concentrated on a single question.

How exactly did that idea work?

It sounded so easy, but what he built up now was his future crystal body. With the elements set in place, he locked out countless options for great runes. Furthermore, technically, the chosen elements also slightly changed certain attributes like mana capacity and the power of certain spells or abilities. These were too minute for anyone to care about though, by far and large, Elemental Bodies existed as a precursor to Rune Bodies. So many higher powers solely interacted with great runes, it was a brainless decision to transform one’s body into a substance composed of them. Ditching the unnecessary sack of flesh and blood also helped immensely.

If he actually figured out a method to merge so many elements into one body, or entwine them into a competent form, he’d gladly take them all. But for now he carefully considered his most important points for this transformation.

Ice, space, and mana were the three main elements within his body. Lightning took a major spot due to Stormbringer from long ago too, but even this only compared to his affinity with Origin Force…

These were the three elements he came to select almost a week ago, and as soon as a room opened up, he could stay within for a month and initiate the transformation process.

The party completed their respective transformations as well. Korridan further evolved not long after as the group always consumed it in fairly large quantities. Mala tirelessly researched as always whilst Darak prepared to receive the next boost of divinity for a Blossoming Priest. Then came Raccelline who instead fell unconscious every other day, her attempts to control such an overbearing bloodline never lessened.

She actually just knocked herself out even more often after she first realised her will restricted the burst of power released, turning days of sleep into just a single night.

Mala walked in without paying much attention to his frozen form on an array and asked, “The elders confirmed that one of the arrays is free, are you ready to use it?”

It seemed that further transformations to his heart would have to wait. With a single thought, he shut down the array beneath him and stretched in the massive, hollowed-out room designed to fit his whole body. Replying to Mala, “I’ll head over. Thanks for mentioning it.” She headed back to her own lab to continue whatever experiment caught her fancy today, the topic rarely remained stable. Much like most of her results, in fact.

Reaching the central mountain only required a single teleport as well. The lines of space around him mapped out everything nearby, and it took a small bit of willpower and some barebone calculations to figure out where he ought to move to, and then bend space to transport him there. The ability to teleport short distances like this made life unimaginably easier. Over the last month, he understood more than ever why Sages teleported everywhere instead of walking.

Now came the moment of truth as the central mountain’s array illuminated in a brand new form with a location unknown to him. Just like the vault, it existed in a sealed sub-realm for complete security and to stop the casual reverberations of the main universe from impacting these dragons’ transformation processes.

With a flash of light, it transported him not to a solitary room but instead a massive hall illuminated by a floating ball of crystals high above.

The room itself was bare with walls of cobbled stone far off in the distance and no adornments besides that light source. The floor stood as its sole exception, as a dark green stone, coloured like seaweed, formed the foundation for dozens of arrays periodically placed throughout the room. A thin beam of light, no thicker than a coin, shot up in the distance to which he flew over and landed on the array it shot out of. Efficient and automated, the dragons came and went as directed through this process, Akevorax just had to step on the lit array and now found himself in the closed off room.

Barely twenty metres in length, the cubic space fit him but still felt oddly claustrophobic given how space cut off right behind the neatly-crafted stone bricks of its walls. He was not used to sub-realms of such extremely small sizes, but settled soon enough.

Below him sat the monstrous array which allowed for near-universal element accumulation and concentration, a thing not only kept unobfuscated but littered with microscopic notes and texts to explain how various layers and components worked. All dragons using this array were expected to manipulate and change it as needed, but such clean descriptions only inspired him to create similar constructs.

It also utilised some ideas he only read about in books or notes, but never saw applied in practise. The layers of arrays arranged not in parallel but at angles or even wrapped around one another to connect usually unattached junctions or runes, or the part which gradually changed alloys alongside…

His eyes flared with disgust at what laid beneath him, not a hint of love or appreciation by such an outrageously well-crafted array. It wasn’t at all hard to see what gained his anger as he commented on it too, “No reason why. It’s such a waste of time to make this stuff, and what’s even the cost for it? I can save by using less materials, but how expensive are the replacements? Using space-independent alloys just to maintain array shape!” He scoffed at how much time he placed into the idea of creating such optimised arrays in the past, it’d all been an utter waste of time!

Those legendary figures and masters of their craft should never care for fancy or beautified projects, but things of raw efficiency and lowered production costs! Artistic sense could be applied later as necessary.

However, the array beneath him did teach some valuable lessons in regard to building practices. Certain combinations of junctions actually acted as highly effective filters when at extremely small scales, providing an analog solution to element separation. Rings of runes could also be engraved onto the transfer lanes themselves to provide specific effects to whatever flowed within, for example a boost in velocity to slow-moving ice or earth elements. The hyper-fine array beneath him contained so many such efficient and masterful techniques that only someone with countless years of experience could think them up and implement them so expertly.

Learning theory and remembering to implement it in the field was a massive hurdle to all craftsmen. In some cases there just existed too much knowledge to reliably cover every single possible methodology as well.

Needless to say, he spent the better part of an hour familiarising himself with the array before it finally activated. As a whole, it began with a gentle glow of blue light as mana filled the ashen-white metal hidden underground, but this pure mana quickly changed to a mixture of elements which joined together to release a stream of white light from the array as a whole. To Akevorax, this white light still appeared as all its individual colours though, and he noted a few elements missing as the colours negatively interacted.

Light and dark cancelled all too easily as an example, so it relied on a switch in the array to move from one to the other. Fire and Water also reacted, but due to a far less volatile nature, they could exist in the same array at once without any issues.

“Let’s see, it should be these ones. Oh, and that too,” he muttered as the array spewed out concentrated streams of visible, coloured gases and held them in place not too far above the ground.

He began with a few tests to first confirm what he trialled on his own in the cave.

Easily grabbing a cluster of white-ish blue particulates with mental power alone, the cloud of icy fog blew into his body and settled around his abdomen as a rather central location in his body. He repeated the process over and over for every element desired, as per the original plans this included lightning too… And then psychic elements… And then soul power as well?

As the elements continued to accumulate onto one another without any threat of instability, he finally pushed a portion of Origin Force to the selected region and spread it throughout the mass of elements. They cared not for the stickiness of it all, and even transformed into a golden mass as the seven elements combined into a clump.

But it wasn’t the gas cloud which everyone struggled with, but rather the following step. One for which he activated another switch on the array, and found his body crushed against the ground as a heavy force pressed down on his back.

A moment later it applied more force, this time on every single side of his body at once, crushing and compressing the ball of elements at his centre without care for the damage it inflicted on him. An array like this lacked the ability to care, he told it to do this, and so it followed those orders precisely.

Now with the forces lined up and active, he took action alongside it and crushed the dense golden fluid tighter and tighter. Just as he would condense gaseous mana into a brick long ago, his Mind packed it tightly and held it, but this time the act of packing was not enough. He forced it all closer together than normally allowed, to a density so great that it now forced itself into the ice cream cells of his body and tearing that substance to fine milky goo as concentrated elements frollicked under high pressure.

The combination of elements eventually slowed and came to a stillness though, and finally ended with the crystallisation process. All of this amounted to a tiny chip of ice cream at his abdomen condensing into crystal, but as the forces on his body dispersed he sighed out. Successful in his tests just as was the case now, but as soon as he released…

A golden crystal sat there. Nothing happened? Why did it fail in all his tests though?

“It’s meant to detonate! Why didn’t it detonate?!” The surprise in his exclaim made itself quite known, and only one thing could respond to him at a time like this.

[We told you to simply repeat the process. When you finish this, we have another matter to mention as well, it helps to do them all at once]

At first he trusted those words, but his test proved countenance pretty quickly. Yet just applying more pressure stabilised it?

None of this made sense to him, but it definitely eased any decisions placed upon him in this process. He could forge the Element Body of all his bests, and now all that remained was the lengthy repetitions much like the heart’s transformation as well. A month of nonstop work more or less made sense.