14

I wanted to let off some steam. I was hoping to catch me some skilled bandits. The experience I would get from some skilled fighters was a far cry from the experience I would get from some skilled fighters. A few million vs closer to a billion XP was much more like it. I frowned to myself as I kept one eye on my spatial senses, and the other half of my mind stretched to reach out to Ethan.

It wouldn't take me long to figure out how Ethan, and the others were doing. Ethan wouldn't leave the planet without me so I didn't really need to think about it all that much. With only half of my mind focused on connecting with him all I could do was assess his state. My senses stretched out from him trying to connect with Savannah, and Jax as well. I simply didn't have enough focus on Ethan to be able to tell how the other two were doing beyond them still being alive.

The road was far quieter then I wanted it to be. I wanted something to go wrong sooner rather then later. Yet my spatial senses didn't alert me to anything. We had a few small run ins with beasts, but they were easy enough to handle. I could kill most of them without putting any effort in at all.

It was too easy, and the XP I got reflected that. I only got ten or fifteen XP per beast. I was actually kind of surprised they had the balls to attack me in the first place. It was rare for creatures this weak to come after me at all nowadays. Once I was done confirming that my bonded were fine I started circulating my mana. The system already told me I didn't really need it anymore so it would be better for me to put in the focus, and effort required to get a feel for my mana, and elemental limitations.

I would need to be able to use my affinities freely once the system was gone. That was one of the reasons I wasn't using my spellcasting skills. I'd gotten quite good at rune casting as well. I'd refrained from using the system while rune casting. My ability to grasp shapes, and split my mind allowed me to create more complicated runes.

Weaving commands into the borders of the runes. It took time to create a proper rune weave. I wasn't anywhere near perfect when it came to creating rune commands. Some of my runes were placed poorly making my more complex constructs fail. That was why I preferred to focus on less complex runes structures.

Less chance to fail, but higher chance of someone breaking the rune before it could finish the job. Granted people who knew how to read the out of date runes that I used were few, and far in-between. I frowned to myself. My out of date runes were far weaker then the modern ones, but there wasn't much I could do about that now. It took time for me to imprint a rune to memory well enough for me to create it on demand.

Even now my battle instincts were far stronger then my normal learning capabilities. It was difficult for me to learn knew things without pressure applied. Now that I was having pressure compounding down on me constantly my abilities were definitely improving at a constant rate. My growth could be considered explosive at times. I was glad that I was allowed to ride the bird at the moment.

Not having to focus on walking fast enough on top of everything else I was focusing on allowed me more freedom then usual. I frowned to myself quietly as I worked on creating a runic constellation on my individual scales. My new nature was interesting to say the least. While this human body was entirely human in nature, and appearance I was not a weak little human. How could all the strength of a dragon be contained within a human sized body?

Truth was it couldn't. While this body could appear human in every way, and behaved, and moved as a human body it was not my true body. Why did I have three cores when all other creatures have one? Those were the first things I wondered when I realized I had three cores. The second core appeared to be focused on divine energy.

The second core was in my head. While I didn't know which order the two additional cores had formed I considered the divine energy core in my head my second one since it was a secondary source of power. The one in my chest didn't give off any power at all so why was it there, and what did it do? I soon realized that this human body of mine was not a normal ability that dragons had. The connection between my mind, and the third core was hard to find because the third core was entirely rooted in my body.

It only had a small connection to my mind. That tiny impulse that allowed me to change between forms. In my experiments shifting from dragon form to human form I found that the third core would vanish entirely. Whenever I was something between dragon, and human my third core always receded back into my body. That gave me an idea.

Why would the core disappear whenever I was in a hybrid state? Why didn't it cost me mana to shift between the two? Why did shifting between the two forms eat through my stamina the way it did? Granted I have a massive amount of stamina, and didn't notice the loss of stamina until I shifted rapid fire for over an hour. So what was the purpose of the third core?

The truth of the matter is that third core was never a core in the first place. It was my body. My second body. I had two overlapping bodies, and the core acted as the minimal needed space to store a dragon body. The magic required to create a secondary body that could switch back, and forth freely without disturbing my mana flow.