World Seed

Author’s Corner: Greetings all. Chapter time!

After giving some time to do the ceremony to honor the people that died in the battle, I got in my void elf form and flew out of the ship. My destination, the giant white dragon carcass still being disassembled several hundred miles away. Thankfully, there was no atmosphere to limit my acceleration, so I was able to use the Gravity Affinity and Plasma Affinity to make a makeshift personal engine that would quickly carry me over. All I had to do was wrap the plasma in a magnetic bubble, punch a small hole in it, and steer myself with gravity. Homemade ion drive!

Anyways, after about ten minutes of constantly speeding up, I was rapidly approaching the body, and began my deceleration. Once I was there, I landed on the dragon’s body and oriented my gravity so that I could calmly stand on it. Now… let’s get started.

I let out a smile as I spread my mana sense across as much of the body as I could. There was no hope of me covering it all at once, but I didn’t need to do that. I opened my mouth to speak, but naturally no voice could come out in space. Run partition program, highlight and assemble scan data.

This was one of the custom programs I had written for my augmented brain during my stay with the Qu’Lopti. Its purpose was to divide a part of my short-term memory enhancement to create a separate area in my mind to analyze and put together information. In this case, it was information I would receive by scanning with my mana sense. This information would then be compiled into a ‘file’ that contained a three dimensional representation of the stored data.

In other words, after activating the program, I simply walked along the dragon’s body while maintaining my scan. The further along I got, the more information I received. And since the Qu’Lopti mechs hadn’t had the chance to take the pieces they disassembled already back to the ship yet, I was able to scan those as well, adding them into the file like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. To be honest, I wrote this program one day when I was really bored and had a flash of inspiration, thinking it might come in handy for scanning monsters. Sadly, a dragon never appeared over the last five years!

Thankfully, I finally had my chance to study the aura of an actual dragon. Though this wasn’t exactly the type of dragon that I originally wanted, it still possessed extremely formidable defense. I’d have to go through the aura later and see if it was hiding any special abilities. But for the most part, what I was interested in was its defense, and its ability to enter and exist in subspace without any special shielding.

After scanning the body and assembling the aura in my mind, I began absorbing the pieces of the dragon that had already been removed. I’d probably have to come back out here again later to finish the job, but I might as well get what I can while I’m here. With that taken care of, I flew back towards the ship.

While waiting to re-enter the ship’s airlock, I partitioned my mind again. However, my goal this time was different than before. This time, I sent half of my consciousness into my grove, finding one of my testing ground planets. Afterwards, I quickly assembled a body there, one which looked identical to my own. Although this body has no soul, and cannot be considered alive, it was enough for me to use to experiment with creating a new form.

“Seriously… did you have to make so many programs while we were at Kithorun?” Celeste asked in my mind, and I could feel her rolling her eyes mentally. “If you had spent that time actively cultivating, you might have gotten one of your affinities to 100% by now, you know?”

I chuckled at that, shaking my head. “The affinities will get there on their own eventually. But those programs will help solve a few of my issues.”

“Uh-huh. And the program you wrote to make mental simulations? You only ever use that to reproduce video games!” She chided tiredly, but she wasn’t really wrong. While that program would be great for playing out battles and coming up with strategies, it was also good for stress relief.

“It’s fine. We’ll probably need that stuff sooner or later.”

“Fine, fine… Ackbar’s wanting to meet up with you, and I got a report from the Qu’Lopti piloting the Executioner.” When Celeste told me that, I paused, and changed my direction to walking towards the War Room. This was a new room we recently added to the ship, which was basically just a wide room with a large hologram projector in the center for planning missions.

“Well, tell him I’m heading over. And what did they want?”

I heard a chuckle over the mental link before Celeste explained. “Basically just to report the rewards they got from the fight. Out of the eleven flights, they all received benefits except two. Those were the two that were blasted away by the dragon’s breath. As for the others, the Judgement pilots each received between twenty and thirty levels. But each Executioner pilot was granted fifty levels for the kill. It seems that there is considerable experience to be gained from fighting space monsters in close quarters.”

I nodded my head slightly at that, before an idea came to me. “Celeste, can you head to the temple for a moment? I need you to get an answer to a question of mine from the market.”

“Hmm? Sure.” I would have gone myself, but I was on my way to meet Ackbar, and I could only be in so many places at once.

“Thanks. The question is whether or not groves are connected to subspace. If they aren’t, then there is no point trying to test that ability in my grove.”

I had managed to isolate the part of the aura that provides a resistance against subspace. Specifically, it was integrated into the scales of the beast, and gave off a faint aura of lightning and magnetism. I was still looking for the ability that would let the dragon cross between subspace and normal space, and was greatly anticipating that power. Depending on how it worked, it might allow me to dodge attacks by temporarily entering subspace.