Wild Dragon of Rome 29 (Patreon)

Lillian was sniffing hungrily as she stepped out of the cave, looking far better.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” I greeted cheerfully once I stopped chewing my food and waved to her. She looked at me, smiling at first, then her expression turned serious. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“What are doing?” she asked as she pointed the hide in my hand, which I had been sanding to get rid of the blood and the meat layer.

“Well, I’m tanning the hide,” I explained.

Her eyebrows rose. “No, you’re not tanning it, you’re murdering the poor thing,” she said as she walked toward me.

I shrugged, surprised by her vehemence. It wasn’t something I expected her to react to, not with the way she treated the mere act of mending clothes as an incomprehensible language. She grabbed the hide, but as she raised her hand, she froze. “Can I use magic?”

“As long as it’s a simple spell,” I said, curious about what she had in mind.

I watched in surprise as she put her hand on the hide, and a small blade of water appeared at the edge, scraping most of the mess I had created. At the same time, she pulled some of the water from the hide, drying it like it was under direct sun for a week, and cleaned it further.

Merely a minute later, I was looking for a hide perfectly prepared for making clothes. “Where did that come from?” I asked.

She blushed. “I was responsible for processing the fur and leather of the second-order beasts, especially the ones too fragile for ordinary methods,” she said as she avoided my gaze, suddenly shy. I recognized it as what it was.

She had been a part of the noble family, and unlike me, she was not effectively exiled. While the noble circles appreciated certain types of crafts, actually dabbling in anything with actual utility was seen as servant work.

“Yet, you can’t sew,” I chuckled.

“I don’t need it, do I? After all, I have you.”

“True,” I said with a chuckle, decidedly ignoring her blush getting more intense. I wasn’t ready to acknowledge the subtext she had put there. Not when we were still busy running away. “Do you think you can use the same trick to make some dried meat? Our journey will be much easier if we can carry it rather than hunting at every spot.”

“It should be doable,” she said as she took a step toward the carcass.

“Eat first,” I said as I pointed at the small flame, where five large pieces of meat were slowly sizzling. “It has been a long day.”

“Roasted meat for breakfast. Unusual,” she muttered. “But I guess I should embrace the camping experience.”

It was a poor attempt to deflect the true nature of our situation, but I rewarded it with a soft giggle. She looked happy with her small success as she walked to the fire. “Isn’t it a bit much for both of us?” she said. “Even cooked, it’ll spoil in a couple days.”

”Believe me, it’s not,” I said as I finished my piece, took another … and another. Then, under her astonished gaze, I put another five pounds of meat to the fire.

Only then, did she pay attention to the boar, and realize how much of the meat was missing. “What’s going on?” she asked, her tone serious.

“I’m guessing it’s a side effect of all the physical effort I had put in. I’m feeling famished,” I explained.

“And, you just started eating without asking me to check first. Come here!” she said.

I didn’t expect it to help, but playing along was easier, particularly since her sudden anger came from a place of caring. I sat next to her, and she put her hand on my chest. Once again, I felt her elemental energies turn gentle as they infused my body.

I closed my eyes, using it as an opportunity to look inward, trying to see if something was wrong … but saw nothing. Well, not nothing. My body was still filled with impossible amounts of mana, I still had a crystal lodged in the middle of my heart, radiating even more mana, and my elemental cores still floated around that crystal, drained of their vitae.

I ignored the temptation of trying to repair them. I wondered whether they could be recovered, or at least I could reconstruct new elemental cores with the infinite mana that was flooding my body. As much as throwing away the effort that took a decade was a great loss, but creating new ones would be much faster with infinite mana.

However, neither option was I willing to attempt right now. Be it repairing or reconstructing, neither activity would be very subtle. Add in the risk of an injury, at it would be madness to attempt them before I was nestled in a more mana-dense location, preferably at the other side of the border where our mysterious followers couldn’t chase after us casually.

“Everything looks fine,” Lillian said after a long period of silence, her hand still on my chest. She looked relieved, but also perplexed. “Too fine. Not even the slightest strain, like you have been resting for a week.” She caught my gaze, her expression an interesting mix of frustration and fascination. “How the hell are you not an exhausted pile right now! Any apprentice mage would have died of exhaustion. Even a shapeshifter, with their legendary endurance, would have collapsed.”

She had a point. What I had done was outrageous, and so were the improvements I had received. Unfortunately, I had no answer, so I just shrugged. “You know as much as I do. Even my extremely risky plan only required me to mix four vitae into one. The dragon heart following that and invading my body was unexpected. Maybe it was your ‘healing’ spell that worked.”

“No, that’s impossible,” she said.

“Why?” I asked, and she blushed.

“Technically, it was not a healing spell,” she admitted. I quirked an eyebrow. She hurriedly continued. “It has some healing effect as well, it was why I had used it, but originally, it was one of the rituals the druids of the olden times used while tending their grooves of great ancestral trees.”

“Explain,” I said, my voice sharp. As much as I wanted to ignore it, I was unsettled with the changes. Any answer, no matter how minuscule, was completely helpful.

She blushed even harder. “I … I don’t know much. Most of the secrets had been lost. What do you know about great trees?”

“Other than they could actually uproot and attack, which allowed them to resist the Roman Legions for almost thirty years before they were defeated, nothing,” I said. “How does it relate to … whatever you have done?”

She took a deep breath. “It’s complicated, and most of its secrets are lost, but as far as I could understand, those trees carry the imprints of the beasts and people that died in the groove. Those imprints need appeasement occasionally. The ritual calms them down and also heals the tree.”

“And, you used that ritual because?”

“Because it has healing as a side effect. With the beasts attacking and you unconscious, I didn’t exactly have a lot of options. That was the fastest option. Just a quick blood sacrifice and I didn’t have to interrupt my other spells.”

“Do you remember anything during the ritual? Anything else that made you choose that instead of something else?”

“I … I don’t know. It was all a blur,” she admitted, blushing. “I thought that I had felt some kind of presence, similar to what I had felt when I visited the remains of one of the holy groves, as if some kind of soul imprint was roaring in anger.”

“Good to know,” I said, ignoring my desire to shout at her for neglecting to mention such an important detail. It was understandable that she had ignored that detail with everything that had been going on since that spectacular failure.

And, looking back, there was nothing I could do differently. It warned me that the sudden strong emotions I had been feeling might not belong to me, but even before knowing the exact details, I did my best to control them.

After all, a sudden flood of mana was enough as a warning. Even with the benefit of hindsight, there was nothing I would have done differently during the escape.

Silence ruled the groove we focused on eating. She ate several bites more, and I ate several pounds more. Once she finished eating, she started experimenting, trying to figure out how to make dried meat. It didn’t take long for her to come up with a method. It wasn’t perfect. I doubted the meat she prepared could barely last a week, but considering I had finished almost half of the wild boar before I finally started to feel satiated, I doubted it would be a problem.

The silence soon turned charged when I asked her to remove her shirt so I could mend them. She put her hand on my bicep and whispered. “I … I think I need more mana,” she whispered.

I smirked. “That, I can help with.”

After all, we still had a few hours to kill.