I stood, basking in the moonlight, soaking it in while enjoying the night breeze against my face. Fresh air at last.
“You know, you didn’t have to ask. I was going to bring you out here anyway since it’s time for my daily barrier management,” the human said, taking a seat on the grassy hill.
“I assumed as much, but it’s better to be safe, isn’t it? Besides, I wasn’t sure how you’d react to bringing me back to where you found me.”
“Well yeah, I guess... That being said, if you’re here to look for something, I don’t think you’ll find anything. President Victoria already did a sweep of the area to ensure that there’s no trace of you having been here.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’d just like a more relaxed view of the area.”
This, however, was a lie. I had another objective for coming here. I found the spot where I’d arrived and crouched down by it. As I thought. Though very scant, traces of my mana are still here. I began moving my fingers through the air, keeping my back to the human so she’d have no direct view of my actions. After glancing over my shoulder to confirm she wasn’t paying me any attention, I reorganized the mana into glyphs. Glyphs were formed through a very high-level technique, which was a specialty of elder dragons. I’m assuming that most beings in this realm can’t see glyphs like those in ours.
Glyphs were very versatile. They could be used not only to leave messages but to “command” as well—whether to command lesser beings or the mana itself. In this case, I was doing both.
I was very fortunate that my elder dragon mana from before the limiter was put on me had lingered because, otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to accomplish the idea I’d come up with. Elder dragon mana was special in the sense that it was almost alive. When normal mana left the body, it’d quickly dissipate, never to be seen again. However, elder dragon mana dissipated at a much slower rate, which made it ideal for writing glyphs since the messages wouldn’t disappear quickly.
Elder dragon mana also replicated at explosive speeds, meaning that elder dragons seldom ran out of mana despite having to consume a lot to function. Mana normally only replicated up to the maximum amount that its users could hold, and it remembered this value. For example, due to the limiter, right now, my mana would register my full capacity as a much lower level than it’d usually been, and it’d only try regenerating up to my current cap. However, that limit didn’t exist on the mana I’d exerted when I’d first arrived in this realm. Essentially, if I could access it, I could command it to replicate back to its memory of my maximum capacity.
The only problem was that it would take a while for two reasons. For one, the prime location for mana to regenerate was within a living being. Mana regenerating externally did so extremely sluggishly and took at least a hundred times as long as it would in a body. The other reason was that since I currently didn’t have a body that could store all of that mana, I had to get creative.
The plan I came up with was to have my external mana pool form a network linked to this glyph. By spreading my mana out into nearby trees, blades of grass, small critters, and so on, I could not only still draw on the full reservoir of mana whenever I tapped into this glyph, but I could also make sure nobody noticed the vast amount of mana being accumulated.
It was regrettable that stockpiling enough mana would take a while for me, but at the very least, I now had a backup plan undetectable by the denizens of this realm. They might be able to sense a faint mana trace, but they’d never be able to interact with it since it’d be in glyph form. This was fortunate since mana also carried faint traces of the host’s memories, especially their most traumatic ones. If people could tap into the mana and see my past, they’d no doubt be able to figure out who I was and what my objective was.
The limiter the human had put on me might have prevented me from storing enough mana to return to my usual state; however, if I had an external source to draw on, I’d be able to at least regain a portion of my full strength. All I had to do was add a command to have it send me the mana when I remotely activated it.
After finishing my work, I turned to the human, who was leisurely lying on her back and staring at the moon.
“This is your Guardian training? How nice,” I scoffed.
“I get to manage the barrier of the one place in the realm where nothing ever happens. And then I get to write entries in a journal that’ll never be read. It’s ridiculous, I know. But every time I ask my master about it, he insists that this is the best training for me.”
“Sounds like he doesn’t want to deal with you,” I observed, plopping myself down next to her.
“Heh. Yeah, it does sound like so, doesn’t it? I used to work by his side, you know? I really thought that in just a few years, I’d be a full-fledged Guardian, but instead, I’m stuck here. I guess it’s what I deserve after royally screwing up a mission,” she dryly chuckled.
“I doubt you’re missing much. Guardians are worthless.”
“I really don’t get your hatred for Guardians. Did we ever do something to you?”
“No... It’s what you didn’t do,” I muttered under my breath.
The human looked at me with a puzzled expression. In my mind, there were only so many ways that the Blade Saint could’ve made his way into our world, and I was almost certain that he’d done so with the help of the Guardians. Despite touting themselves as a neutral organization dedicated to keeping peace, they obviously had put their finger on the scale. That’d been why, as elder dragons, we’d taken peacekeeping into our own hands. And that’d been why that entire war had begun. It’d all been for the sake of peace. And yet...