Tales of The Mighty Dragonair

Arthur suddenly felt his energy absorbed to grow larger and this wasn't a delusion of his. "This amount… they rival the early core foundation stages," he muttered while watching the great amount of energy going directly towards his mind node and star map there.

"At this rate, this little monster should be saturated soon."

As he expected, the star map finally showed another change the moment his energy swelled up inside his nodes and meridians.

It started to shake, yet this time he noticed it wasn't rotating the energy or compressing it; it was absorbing the energy at an alarming rate.

"Sigh, it's the old way of upgrading after all," he sighed, yet when the star map finished absorbing his energy to the last drop, no changes occurred to it for hours.

He doubted there might be something missing when he started to notice something.

A veil of cloud started to appear around the mind node. At first it looked like the early morning mist, with long separated wisps of faint white fog.

Then it started to condense until he couldn't see his mind node at all, and the fog turned from pure white to pitch black.

"What is going on?" he muttered while he tried many times to spy over his mental node and star map with no results for hours.

Until a new change appeared. Among the center of this strange cloud of fog he started to see some clarity. At first it wasn't that noticeable except for his sharp senses and his focus on this area, or else he wouldn't be able to detect it.

Then the area there started to grow cleared until the mind node began to appear once more, and for a finger breadth around it all the fog dissipated.

"Rumble!"

At this moment he felt this loud rumbling coming from his mind, and the next moment a strong gush of blue energy appeared inside his meridians and nodes, filling them instantly.

It was like a dam was broken and all the water inside went to flood his body. If not for the previous changes the star map did to his nodes, meridians, and body he was quite sure they wouldn't take all this gush.

Yet in the next hour he felt the energy got depleted again.

"Is it trying to breakthrough once more?" he was speechless yet he had no control over any of this at the moment. So he waited patiently for more hours until all his energy got sucked dry by his star map.

"Rumble!"

Again another finger breadth of the fog was cleared around the mental node, and another flood of energy assaulted his meridians and nodes.

This kept repeating for eight more times before the energy got sucked dry and didn't replenish for an entire day.

"Is it saturated?" he muttered before thinking of the more logical conclusion here, "or is it about to breakthrough a major milestone now?"

He sighed, as despite this was something great in theory, in fact he knew this wasn't much blessing. "Rapid breakthrough would largely affect my body in the next months to come," he sighed helplessly again as this decision wasn't up to him to take.

"I just hope what it did to my body was enough to endure the aftershock," he prayed, and he knew this wasn't a logical way of thinking.

"I need to think of a way to repair my body once finished," he had his mind working on a different matter now. He didn't need to wait for the results of this weird silence, he was pretty sure of his conclusion.

His star map went crazy and was going to make him enter the core formation stage directly.

"To form a core, I need to condense my energy and leave it there to mature into a core," he muttered to himself before adding, "a core has many forms, starting from linear, triangular, square, or even a circle. I just hope forming these won't damage my body greatly."

The highest form of core he knew of was the ball core, where the core would be formed from a huge number of circles intertwined together to form a ball. The more the circles formed, the stronger his core would be at the end.

Yet to form just one circle, he just didn't need to condense his energy. His energy needed materials from his body, muscle strands, fragments of bones, and even pieces of his organs to use in forming these circles.

So the higher the number of circles, the more damage his body would receive.

"If it was up to me, then I won't be this nervous," he sighed as he knew his star map was something he couldn't reason or control right now.

"I need to deal with the fact that my body might get badly hurt at the end of this," he took a deep breath feeling more helplessness towards not even being able to check on the changes his star map was currently doing.

"So… in theory the larger the body the better the odds, right?" he finally reached this conclusion before taking a long deep breath. "I hope a backlash wouldn't occur at this bizarre moment."

He shifted his attention away from his meridians and nodes towards his blood vessel. His blood carried his blueish strands of energy, and the next moment he started to slowly stir it up.

"Slow and steady," he muttered to himself like he was disarming a bomb, trying to be extra careful, not to make any harsh move or a rash decision here.

In the next hours, his dragonair energy got all stirred up and finally he started to feel the old feeling of growing into a dragon. "Let it be then," he let the energy go towards all his body parts to change them into parts of a dragon.

In the outside world, a giant dragon appeared laying strangely on his back, closing his eyes and there was a faint trace of blood coming from his nostrils.