207, 1/2

The morning dawned, and Erick was already hard at work in his workshop. It had been three days since his transformation. He and his overseers had sorted out quite a lot of problems that had cropped up during Erick’s convalescence, but problems came like summoned rain, and Erick was hard at work figuring out yet another major piece of infrastructure that needed to be solved.

He was not currently working on sorting dragons for conversion to Benevolence. Nor was he testing out his new body and finding all the limits of his new self. He was mostly done getting reacquainted with the new size and power of his magic, too, though sparks of power occasionally leaked out of him when he wasn’t in perfect control, or actively using his Benevolence-laden sunform. Leaving footprints of moss wherever he went was still a bit of a problem, but it was a solvable problem. He’d get the hang of himself, eventually!

One of the best ways of getting that handling was with precise magic, though, which was exactly what he was doing.

Erick had just finished his tenth [Zone of Peace] and [Spatial Denial] iron sphere. Once activated, it would lock into place with a bit of [Domain of Benevolent Light] and [Undertow Wall], preventing all other non-Domain magics from affecting it, as well as ensuring that it would remain stationary and powered, due to a 5-meter radius Draining field around the thing. All it needed to stay powered, practically forever, was about 3,000 mana per day. A pretty high price for an average person, but in aggregate, in the center of a city where hundreds of people could walk by and keep the thing powered, 3,000 mana a day shouldn’t be a problem. Such requirements of daily mana upkeeps were rather normal in the Gate Network, and fulfilling those requirements hadn’t been a problem so far.

Erick already saw the writing on the wall that it would not stay this easy, though.

He needed a full-city runic web, filled with [Renew], so that he and everyone else could power every single Gate’s continual upkeep cost from anywhere the [Renew] web lay. That was yet another piece of infrastructure that he needed to solve; to support everything a lot more easily, and to make something that anyone could tap into for power.

Like they did at Enduring Forge.

But that would come later, once Erick figured out how to make long lines of runic web power out of iron. He’d probably do, like, 5 meter long sections of sealed tubes, using his Denial Sphere design but adapted for length instead of effect. That way he could lay a bunch of them together in a line and they could share power through themselves, but also, if one section broke, he could replace that section.

… Complicated, though.

He could do the whole thing out of platinum right now if he really wanted to, but that was the easy, monumentally expensive solution, and people would steal that platinum, for sure. It’d be harder to steal iron tubular sections of a web, and a lot less profitable for the thief, therefore it was probably not something that most people would do.

People had already tried to steal Gates, though they never got very far at all with them.

But all of that was something to deal with later.

For now, Erick smiled. He had ten spheres ready, each of them able to Peace and Deny a roughly 10-kilometer-across slice of land, that extended up and down about 200 meters both above and below the ground. If the Denial Sphere got knocked out of position, tilting all of its magic at an angle, Erick had put in some more magic that would make the whole thing either slowly correct itself over the course of a day, or rapidly correct itself if it got an injection of a thousand mana.

Hopefully.

The tests had already proven it worked!

Erick smiled again, and then he went for a swim down below in the glowing waters surrounding radiant Yggdrasil.

Feeling great, Erick floated on his back, holding himself up with his power for he was too heavy these days to do anything but sink straight down. That was fine, though. He was comfortable as he gazed up at the veritable sky of ‘lightning’ made by Yggdrasil’s branches, and at the green world beyond, made of flaming leaves. He felt good. As the world outside his little slice of paradise began to brighten with the promise of day, Erick flickered, vanishing from his swim.

He reappeared at home, wrapped in robes.

Breakfast was a treat from the House; a small feast prepared by a 9 star Cook and their assistants. Pancakes. Two types of sausage. Eggs. A pile of potatoes. Juice. Erick made his own coffee, and then he sat down at his breakfast alcove and began eating.

He was done faster than he thought he should be.

And yet, his stomach still rumbled, demanding food. Sighing, Erick had an Ophiel go back for another bit of food, flitting through the breakfast line, waiting his turn to grab a small plate of sausages and pancakes again. Some of the other people in line smiled a bit at Ophiel; those people were new hires who didn’t quite know that this Ophiel was under the direct control of Erick. Others, who had worked there for a while now, or else they were simply better informed, looked to Ophiel with reverence. The person dishing out sausage gave a little bow, saying, ‘Welcome back, Wizard.’

Ophiel gave a little nod and then took off with his prize, leaving behind a few more people with a bit more knowledge of what to look for in an Ophiel, to understand that Erick himself was looking through all those bright white eyes.

When Ophiel reappeared at home, Erick took the plate and [Duplicate]d everything into a great big pile.

Finally, after eating enough for at least two orcols, his hunger pangs began to settle down.

He knew the problem.

It didn’t take a genius intellect to understand what was going on. Jane experienced much of the same thing when she started getting new Familiar Forms, and she and Erick had had a conversation on the topic many times. Different forms had different caloric requirements. Jane got by with her requirements by sometimes eating the monsters she killed. Thus, she was never really hungry. If she ate a whole lot her other forms were sated, too. But she could always eat. She was much more than just some normal girl from Earth; she was also a unicorn, a rivergrieve, a few types of spiders, and more. Her giant blue tarantula form had her eating like a giant blue tarantula would, whenever she could, and she was still able to eat fine in her human form.

And now Erick was a dragon.

Human quantities of food were great for enjoying a meal with other human-sized people. But he needed to eat.

Erick set down his fork, unsatisfied. He was technically full. The food was there, inside of him. But as he watched his organs and digestive tract go to work, as it had been working for a while now, he saw that food seem to dwindle; to vanish off into some other place. It was freaking weird, but no more weird than everything else that had happened to him.

Poi finally came out on the porch, carrying his own small tray of food. “You could have copied our food.”

“Yeah. But… Thought about it. Decided it felt weird to copy other people’s food.”

Poi sat down. “Dragons are mostly carnivores, too, so you need to eat a lot more meat now.”

“That was one thing I was hoping to avoid.”

Poi instantly knew what to do. “Go grab the biggest scarlet king fish you can find at Treehome, kill it, copy it a hundred times inside a [Prismatic Ward], and then eat all of those crunchy meaty morsels. Leave the bones in, too. Dragons don’t actually need to eat every single day, so you might only need to do that once a week. Less, if you’re not in your dragon form that often.” Poi added, “And enjoy it. That’s like… pure decadence.”

“Ha! You’ve been saving that for a while now! How long?”

“All my life, actually. You have no idea how much dragons enjoy food, but you will.”

Erick chuckled. “Leave the bones in, eh?”

“A texture enhancer.” Poi said, “Fermented and fried silver minnows make a great sandwich filling for that exact reason. I have tried to replicate what I have overheard in the experiences of others through fried minnows, but it cannot be the same at all. And with scarlet king, you don’t have to ferment or fry them at all to make them palatable. I can only imagine how good eating a room full of that would feel, so you should go do that so I could live vicariously through you.”

Erick laughed again.

Poi added, “And you don’t want to be hangry when you get to all those dragon meetings today, right?”

“No; I suppose I do not.”

“You should go get a scarlet king and make a copy for us to have for dinner, too.”

Erick chuckled again. “Sir yes sir! Heard and understood.”

Poi smiled a little, then got back to his own breakfast, though his eyes were on the sky. He was already looking forward to some fresh scarlet king tonight.

“I am! It’s gonna be so good.”

While grinning and still sitting at the breakfast nook, Erick sent an Ophiel through a [Gate] to Yggdrasil at Treehome.

The big guy was very, very big up here on the edge of the Forest. Bigger than any of his other forms in any other location. Yggdrasil stood like a monkeypod tree above a field of small bushes, his glowing white arms and greenery and rainbow crown spreading out like a thunderhead cloud made of green fire.

But those ‘small bushes’ down below, which didn’t even reach a third of the way to Yggdrasil’s lowest branches, were each a kilometer tall on their own. Yggdrasil was big, and growing every day.

Yggdrasil instantly noticed that Ophiel and Erick were directly near him.

A large [Scry] eye appeared and Yggdrasil said, “Hello father!”

Erick smiled, still sitting on his seat at Candlepoint. “Looking for a scarlet king, Yggdrasil. Can you find a nice eating one for me?”

“There’s some right down here!”

Yggdrasil’s eye zipped through the sky, and Erick followed with Ophiel. As the other various [Scry] eyes of the Arbors of Treehome found their way back to Yggdrasil and Ophiel (and Erick), Erick bowed a bit to them, and they bobbed up and down in turn.

And then the Arbors started asking what he was doing here.

“In search of a scarlet king for breakfast!” Erick said.

And then Wyrmrest asked, “No. Really. What are you doing here?”

O’kabil interjected, “What he means to say is that we heard about the dragons and are worried that there will be a fight in our vicinity. If there is, could you help us stop it?”

“I’m currently on the lookout for those events myself, and will be [Reincarnation]ing a lot of dragons in the coming days. I’ll have my hands full in my own part of the world, so I probably won’t be able to help here.” Erick said, “And that said, I really am just here for a good scarlet king—”

Yggdrasil complained, “Father! Father! Follow me! I found them!”

O’kabil’s eye flew forward with Yggdrasil saying, “You don’t want those ones, Erick. Those are the breeding ones. Yggdrasil? Can you show us the fast ones?”

Yggdrasil looked to Ophiel. “But? They’re still scarlet kings?”

“Show me the fast ones, Yggdrasil.” Erick said, “The ones that are bright red and really fast, like rubies flying under the water.”

“Okay!” And then Yggdrasil took off in another direction. In moments, Ophiel plunged down into the massive lake surrounding Yggdrasil, turning to [Perfected Benevolence] to evade the water resistance. Yggdrasil’s voice called out, “This way! I see them!”

One very quick chase later, Erick had a very large scarlet king wrapped in lightning-light. One quick pulse of power killed it. He sent the fish home, but he stayed for a little bit longer to talk to the Arbors, giving some more assurances that he was on the dragon case, but that he could not actually assist Treehome with their own defenses. They seemed mollified.

Erick’s stomach was already rumbling.

Erick got up, leaving Poi behind, saying, “Your fish is already in the cold room, sir.”

“Oh gods, it’s gonna be so good. Oh man.” Poi got up, too, saying, “I have to go see it.”

Erick smiled.

– – – –

In a Privacy atop Yggdrasil, Erick unfurled himself—

It was like sinus congestion finally ending, like the opening of a stuffy house and an overpacked suitcase breaking at the seams and a dam finally breaking and flooding dry land, bringing forth life from the lifeless. As Erick settled, his happy tail whipped back and forth. His wings flapped behind him. His perspective shifted, and now he was a good 25 meters higher than where he had been before, but he was still where he had been, because now he was in both places.

He was also about 40ish meters behind himself, with his tail being rather long.

And also about that much off to the sides, with his wings flicking out on their own accord, until Erick got them under control once again. The switch between forms was still disorienting, but Erick supposed he would get a better hang on this eventually; this was only his second time, after all. Maybe not as quickly as he needed to, for this form carried a lot of connotations that would turn the public against him rather harshly…

Erick could survive that turning, probably, but there was no need to risk it right now, and probably not for a while. Years? Sure. Years. Candlepoint could probably handle Erick’s new self, too, but there was no need to go stressing all those still-building relationships, either.

Anyway!

He took a measuring stick with him for today’s transformation, so he could get a better idea of how big he was, and for ensuring that he was the proper size when he was finished. According to that stick, which hovered in the air, while Erick also sat on his haunches in the air, he was about 8 meters of neck, 16 meters of body, 20-ish meters of tail (though that was hard to measure directly because it would not stop wagging (did he have two brains in this body? Did another part of him control the tail, like a dinosaur? Answer: no. Dragons were magic and did not care about such things like ‘the transmission rate of nerves’ (probably) (he didn’t even have extra hearts!))), and a good 25ish meters of wings on both sides of himself.

His wings had little grabby hands on the front, like a bat’s. This made sense, since his wings were basically arms, and the ‘hand part’ was basically that grabby, main joint, giving him four fingers with which to grab with, while his ‘pinkies’ were much larger than the pinky fingers on a human, for those ‘fingers’ form the leading edge of his wings, extending all the way out to the tips of his wing-arms.

Erick looked at his chest, trying to understand how all those bones and muscles fit together. This was easy enough, even with all those massive muscles allowing for his second pair of ‘arms’ that were his wings. It was like he had pecs on pecs on shoulders, which was kinda funny—

His stomach rumbled, both like a minor disturbance, but also like a minor avalanche, if Erick was to consider his human-sized senses. Less focusing on form; more focusing on needs.

Yes.

Erick looked at his ‘prey’, hovering inside of his lightgrip like a fish-shaped ruby with a tiny dot of dark at its head where Erick had killed the thing. He leaned in and gave it a sniff—

A sudden well of wetness filled his mouth and he almost snapped up the fish that instant, but he controlled himself…

The scarlet king, which had looked huge when Erick was human-sized, at being about a meter long, now looked like it could barely serve as an appetizer, for Erick was ravenously hungry—

Ah. Yeah. He was hungry. Very hungry, and almost willing to eat that fish long before he was ready to eat that fish. He recognized that now.

A little worrying, that. He wanted to eat that fish quite a lot. But instead, he opened his mouth and had a look at himself through his mana sense. His mouth was filled with glowing white teeth and his gullet was a white hole. All of his interior looked white and glowing, though he only guessed it was white, for it was hard to tell color through mana sense.

Looking at his mouth again…

It didn’t look like he could really chew or taste his food; not with fangs and no molars, and with a tongue that was basically a tendril of taste receptors the size of one of his larger fangs…

Wait a second.

Erick looked inside of himself again.

No vocal cords?

So how was he able to speak?

Erick said, “Testing. Testing.”

His insides just vibrated that way, eh? Based on his desires?

“Testing, testing. I am the very model of a modern major general. I don’t believe in animals, or vegetables, or minerals.”

Did the original lyrics go like that? Erick had no idea. He had heard Jane say something like that when she was a kid, and it had stuck with him all these years later.

And yes; his insides did just vibrate that way allowing him to talk.

—He wasn’t breathing? Oh. Yeah. He wasn’t breathing.

Erick purposefully breathed in and out—

A small burst of streaming clouds and lightning flashed out like a burp from a demigod, before Erick realized what he had done and shut his mouth. Glowing white mist continued out of his nostrils like steam from a kettle, flickering with sparks all the while.

Erick focused on what had just happened.

A few more tests later revealed that he did not actually need to breathe at all, or at least not while he was running his [Perfected Benevolence]. Erick held onto one of Yggdrasil’s bigger branches, securing himself to a solid surface so he wouldn’t fall when he turned off his aura. And then he did so. With his lightning turned off, he did have to breathe, and it sounded rather menacing.

Ophiel instantly tried to replicate that sound.

Three Ophiel working together were able to get the deep bass and the rumbling drums worked out enough to approximate Erick’s natural breathing sounds. Kinda cute, in a horrifying sort of way.

But back to his breathing. With his aura, he didn’t really need to ‘breathe’. Like with Jane’s shadow spider form that could not exist on its own without using its aura to breathe, Erick’s dragon form’s ‘breathing’ was best done through a constant, low level Elemental Body. That low level functionality got turned up really high for dragons, though.

When Erick purposefully breathed in and then out while running his aura, a massive cloud bank of bright white Benevolence billowed outward across Yggdrasil’s branches, leaving patches of greenery wherever it landed. Mostly just more moss, up here at the top of Yggdrasil, but a few flowers and ferns, too—

Yggdrasil giggled like a child, telling him that it tickled, and then to do it again. Erick happily obliged, sending Yggdrasil into a ticklish fit as sparking light caused vines and greenery to grow everywhere, and the happy laughs of a child sent rainbows scattering across Yggdrasil’s crown. And then he said that was enough, so Erick stopped, smiling wide—

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Oh. That’s a menacing smile.

Yggdrasil turned his attention back to Treehome.

Erick turned his attention back to what he came here for.

Time for breakfast. Erick looked back to his scarlet king, waiting to be eaten. His mouth salivated again, his tongue licking out, tasting the air— which was apparently something he could do now. Dragons were part snake. So that was fun. The air tasted delicious.

At least his dripping saliva didn’t cause more random growth wherever it touched Yggdrasil’s bark. That would have boded badly for the rest of what his body could do. Erick imagined pissing out flowers. Uncomfortable, for sure.

Hopefully this dragon form didn’t need to go to the bathroom more than once a week, too, but Erick supposed he would get used to that eventually, if he had to. Humans could adapt to a lot, and… Well. He had already adapted rather far from ‘human’.

… Erick looked at the other parts of his draconic body that he had been ignoring. He would get to that part of himself too, eventually, but not today.

Erick had an Ophiel cast another small [Prismatic Ward] around the still-floating scarlet king, and then Erick copied it. Just like when metals were [Duplicate]ed inside [Prismatic Ward], becoming magical metals, copying meat and vegetables and other things had the same effects on those other things.

One magical meat fish became two magical meat fish.

Erick floated the second one up to himself. He opened his mouth.

He took a tiny nibble—

“OH GODS IT’S SO GOOD!”

Erick rapidly copied all the fish he wanted, eating all he could, the fatty, thick meat seeming to dissolve in his mouth like bits of cream, but sprinkled all throughout with flakes of crispy skin and bones as easily broken as the surface of a crème brule. He tasted it all the way down his throat, too, so that was an experience. The fish skulls were actually the best part; like finding a bit of carrot in a soup of deliciousness.

Erick finally felt full after around a hundred fish. Maybe a bit more. He wasn’t quite sure.

But he was sure that he loved every second of that experience, and now his stomach was finally full. That was the best part of all this. Being a full dragon. Wow. It kinda reminded Erick of being a kid at Thanksgiving and being allowed to eat everything he wanted to, and then feeling like everything would be alright, right before he slipped into a wonderful food coma.

No food coma today, though.

Erick kept himself awake.

The sun hovered right above the eastern horizon. Erick had taken only about half an hour to do all this. Next time, he would put himself in a time bubble too and truly take his time.

Cleaning up was easy, since there was no cleanup necessary at all. Putting himself back into his human body did take some doing, though, now that he wasn’t some sort of starving dragon; he was full and happy and his body did not like being crushed back into its tiny little Erick-shaped box. The horns were especially annoying this time.

But it had been worth it.