Chapter 353: Dragons, Hearts, and Horns

Aalam

With a huge amount of antimatter stored in his personal storage, kept from interacting with any matter by active use of his energy so no elder god could stop him from self-destructing, Aalam’s space element clone walked around Serpent’s Nest, the home planet of what had been the Divine Child’s faction and the Prime Material’s monster god faction before that. And, after taking about an hour to circumnavigate the planet’s defenses, he arrived at his destination, arguably the most famous natural wonder in the Prime Material.

The Dragon Gate was a large natural stone archway over the largest river on Serpent’s Nest, right above a large roughly hundred meter tall waterfall, and legend stated that a G or F rank creature that managed to make it up the waterfall with their own power would be transformed into a dragon via the natural wonder’s power.

In truth, there was absolutely nothing to the gate. It was just a pretty rock formation.

The valley behind the gate, however, was the ancestral nesting site of generations after generations of the most powerful types of dragons and where aging dragons powerful enough to live out their full natural lifespans often decided to die. Then, with the formations around the valley, originally written by the Radiant Behemoth and enhanced over dozens of trillions of years, none of the draconic energy released by the uncountable draconic births and deaths ever left.

The dirt of the valley was mostly dust made from ancient dragon bones. Every plant in the valley had grown up drinking almost as much dragon blood as water. And the very air tasted like draconic breath attacks.

What Aalam was after, however, were not the rare mortal resources the dragons who lived there knew about, but the resource the Radiant Behemoth had originally built the valley to generate and that the Divine Child had then benefitted from, the God rank material draconic essence.

At the center of the valley was a large statue of the Radiant Behemoth, extremely small compared to his actual size but still roughly a kilometer in length, which was made entirely out of a semi-translucent crystalline substance known as dragon stone, an A rank material created after a relatively more common A rank type of stone was submerged in the blood of God ranked divine, chaos, order, power, balance, and runic dragons for trillions of years.

The statue passively absorbed the radiant aura of draconic life and death to create draconic essence inside itself, producing on average one gram every three billion years or so. And, as the more draconic essence in the statue the faster new draconic essence was generated, most of the Prime Material’s draconic essence was inside, protected by seventeen different specialized God rank locks, locks which only the Divine Child knew all the passcodes to.

With the souls of the Collector, sludge monster Xor, the Radiant Beauty, the Magician, and the Origin of Life, however, along with a wife who could read the memories of the dead, Aalam had all the passcodes as well, so stealing all the remaining amount of the material, roughly 12 tons, wasn’t at all difficult when not a single god was on Serpent’s Nest. All he had to do was open all seventeen locks, take all the essence, and then re-lock the statue before running away.

It only took about a minute.

***

Linvorax

“Well, given the amount of energy involved, and the quality of my other resources, I’m thinking we’ll only need to do this three times in total,” the Heavenly Spark Soul King said as he appeared to study Linvorax’s house-sized heart floating in the space in front of them, Linvorax in his true dragon form like most of the time he’d spent imprisoned in the life elemental universe.

Then Linvorax’s heart disappeared, transported to some subspace that somehow worked in the elemental universe, and the God of War’s spear appeared in the Heavenly Spark Soul King’s hands before immediately flashing and removing Linvorax’s horn.

The process was painless, but being without the two main concentrations of his power made Linvorax feel far weaker than normal, weaker even than before he’d gained his Divine Role of Life, and it was not at all comfortable.

“I’ll see you again in 412,986 years.”

The Heavenly Spark Soul King then disappeared and Linvorax was left alone again, by himself with his boredom.

His heart and horn would regenerate within a few minutes—he was a god and a master of the life element after all—but they wouldn’t be the same as before until the year the Heavenly Spark Soul King had mentioned. And then the Heavenly Spark Soul King would come and harvest them again.

Given Linvorax had joined a force with the aim to kill the man and all his people, he knew his punishment was a lot better than it could be—he’d seen all the others die after all—but it was hard not to dislike a man holding him in prison with the intent to harvest his body parts.

“Oh well,” Linvorax sighed to himself. “At least he’s open and honest about what he’s doing, unlike master.”

With almost a million years to think, it hadn’t been hard to piece together that what the Heavenly Spark Soul King had said about the Divine Child was likely true, and Linvorax felt like an idiot for how he’d seemingly been manipulated for his entire life.

***

Mila

“And done.” Leaning back against the wall of one of the gray metallic rooms in the death star like space station, Babylon I, Mila’s main body relaxed. She’d just finished infusing concentrated karmic merit into the last of the station’s many sub-array formations that Aalam had designed for guiding the process of his bloodline and race upgrades, and she was exhausted. “Do you want to take a break now?”

With her sensory domain, she could see as Aalam quickly wrote several spacetime runes around her, so she didn’t put up any fight as she was teleported away, appearing in front of her husband in a control room located about a third of the way from the station’s core.

The room was empty of furniture, designed for Aalam, who’d built up the habit of using telekinesis to allow himself to float while working, and it didn’t even have screens. Instead it transmitted information in localized bursts of non-visible light that Aalam could easily read with his sensory domain. And, as neither of them had any need for light to see, it didn’t have any.

She’d been teleported in with her back to her husband and he reached out and started massaging her shoulders with his hands, the emotions related through the action so much better than if he used telekinesis.

“A break sounds nice.” Aalam kept up the massage. “We pretty much just have to wait for the last of the resources to grow now.”

With the resources they’d stolen from the Collector and all the other gods they’d killed, the resources they’d extracted from their dead opponents’ bodies, and the resources they’d pilfered from the homes of the missing elder gods, they already had enough for both Diana and Isaiah to advance. But Isaiah’s bloodline advancement depended on Diana’s and Diana’s bloodline advancement depended on Aalam’s, while they also both had classes which required Aalam to advance first as well.

Meanwhile, as always, half of Mila’s advancement depended on Aalam’s as well.

And, for Aalam’s advancement, they just needed to wait for the twelve scarab gods to fully regrow their hearts and horns twice.

It had been hundreds of thousands of years since Earth had undergone its integration, so the population of the United Federation of Planets’ universes had swollen, providing them with ample faith energy. More universes had been conquered, giving Aalam as much Territory as his B rank soul could handle. And the Laws of all of them had reached the point they needed for their desired advancement, Aalam’s 36 Laws at the peak grade Law Dragon level along with Mila’s while the main Laws of Isaiah and Diana, whose energy was based on the power of chaos and thus mixed in several hundred sub Laws, were all at high grade.

Still, it would have been much easier if they hadn’t been trying to maximize their power.

Nitya, Nitya’s husband Anton, and Mila’s grandmother, for example, had already become A ranks, along with Javier Garcia, Silvia Davies, Silvia and Mila’s grandfather’s daughter Evelyn, and about a dozen other individuals, with several hundred others having met all the most difficult requirements and just waiting to maximize their foundations.

Granted, none of them could kill gods in one on one combat even after advancing, but their life expectancies were now all over two hundred million years, and, with Mila’s control over faith energy, most of them would likely become immortal. And this wasn’t even mentioning how they didn’t have to do any of her ridiculous feats.

“So, Mila, what would you like to do for the next 825 thousand years?” Aalam moved his hands slowly down her back, relaxing the non-existent, and impossible, tension in her B rank muscles.

“You know, I have no idea.”

For the first time since her death when she’d been a mortal, Mila had nothing she needed to do. No organization to run—they’d put the systems in place and other people they trusted would do the work of monitoring them. No resources to gather—they had a huge excess of everything. And no one to target for assassination—the Primordial Sovereign too powerful to face until they advanced, Bellessia left for Diana, and the Lady of Laws and the Divine Child missing. They couldn’t even advance their Laws until they became A rank, or at least it would be difficult and pointless enough to try that they didn’t want to make the attempt.

“What do people with unlimited free time do?”