NOVEL NEXT 20 - Dragon Hunting
Chapter 20: Dragon Hunting
Still no notice about clearing the level. I decide to hike back to where the door to the start of the challenge appeared. There is the door again. I open it up and walk back into the bland and featureless room.
“Congratulations on passing the elemental dragon test of water. Hatch the egg for bonus rewards.”
Bonus rewards are always good. Gamer knowledge don’t fail me now. How to hatch a dragon egg? Let’s see some stories have them surrounded by their element, but this guy was just in a nest of rocks so it must be something else. What other things are needed in the stories?
Mana, in a lot of stories high concentrations of mana is essential for the birth of magic creatures. OK let’s see if this will work. I hold the egg in both hands and imagine my mana as a cool stream of water leaving me and being absorbed by the egg. This seems to be working. I have to stop after about 10 minutes and recharge my mana. The egg still has not hatched so I will repeat until I get a result. My mana recharges very quickly now due to my higher level and bonuses. One nap and about 10 cycles later I feel like the egg is about to hatch. That equals almost 50,000 mana , hungry little egg isn’t it.
The egg cracks and the cutest little blue head pops out and looks at me. I can feel a mental connection with the little guy. No words just mental impressions. These impressions make me realize a couple of things number one it is a guy and number two it now regards me as its parent. The largest impression I get is that this little guy is hungry. I feed it a few chunks of meat from my inventory and think up a name. Azure, I will call him Azure. As soon as I name him I get a “Great Game” notice.
“You have successfully tamed your first magic creature. You have been granted the title “Beast Master +1. This skill combines with infinite inventory to allow living creatures to be stored in your inventory in a limited amount. You can store your level X 10 living things in your inventory. Time will be frozen for stored creatures.”
This solves some problems, like what was I going to do with little Azure while I am fighting. Well as I always say sooner started sooner done. I store Azure in my inventory and head towards the fire door. Before I enter I swap out all of my fire gear for Ice and water ammunition and enchanted weapons.
As I cross through the fire door I see a smoking volcano in the distance. This should be a stereotypical place where a fire dragon is located. I keep an eye on the sky as I hike towards the volcano. There is my target. Surprisingly this dragon is not red but a black dragon with a smoky grey underbelly. Maybe to represent burned things, soot, and smoke? This dragon looks bigger than the last one. It is probably 30-35 meters long. This probably mean that each dragon will be stronger than the last one in the challenge.
Same strategy different element. The only change is that I put the dragon egg in this lair straight into storage to protect it. Let’s see 750 mana was not an instant kill last time and this one is bigger so let’s try an even 1,000 mana in an ice shell. A few hours later my preparations pay off. I am cold, the dragon is dead and back to the waiting room I go.
I call out Azure and play around and feed him while pouring mana into the new egg to hatch his new little brother or sister. Several hours later Azure has a younger brother named Bruce. Why Bruce, because he looks like a Bruce. More precisely he looks like a Sir Bruce Shadow Flaming Ember of Doom, but I am just going to call him Bruce for short.
“For being the first to tame 2 magic creatures you are awarded the title Master Tamer +2.”
Fantastic, Azure has a little brother and I get a new title. Two more doors to go, I think air will be next followed by earth. I just have this feeling that earth is going to be trouble.
Just shy of two days later and the air challenge is complete and my little dragon family has grown by one little sister named Elvira. She is cute mischievous little thing with white scales that have dark grey edges. She gets along well with the boys so no troubles there.
“For being the first to tame 3 dragonkin you are granted the title Dragon Tamer +3.” For holding 3 or more taming skills your entire inventory is now available to use for living organisms. Mana dependent creatures and plants can siphon off your mana to continue growth while in stasis if you allow it."
Another boost, these titles normally are probably spread out among an entire world. But due to my luck and unique circumstances I alone am receiving them which is just making me more and more over powered. I like it. This is what I was hoping for. With a few experiments, not with my dragon babies, I should be able to find the limits and how much mana this will take. The should be extremely helpful for the growth of my little dragons and with my ridiculously high mana regeneration rate I should be able to siphon off an amount equal to what I am regenerating and speed up the growth of my little ones making them stronger and more useful to me faster.
Before that can happen I need to clear this last elemental challenge Earth. The other doors while not life threatening did not seem up to par for a 150+ level challenge. Maybe it seemed easy because of my ambushes, but I feel that the final test will step up the difficulty.