Xavier hovered inside of the Elemental Dragon’s den, resting a hand upon the massive dragon egg that it had left behind. The egg that was now Xavier’s prize.

  The ritual he was performing was going ahead perfectly.

  The connection to the Otherworld had been established, and now so had the bridge.

  It was time to call forth the dragon spirit, Volkarin.

  The last he’d seen of the spirit, it had been injured in battle and forced to return to the Otherworld. It had fought for him. Protected him. Volkarin had given his all, knowing that he would not be able to return to the Mortal Realm for what could be centuries of time in the Otherworld.

  And yet, he had still done it.

  Xavier had already planned to bring the dragon into this world, but now he felt as though he owed the dragon a debt—though he hesitated to let the dragon know that.

  Breathing deeply, Xavier mastered his will and called to the dragon. When the dragon spirit had been injured, he had worried he would not be able to bring it forth into the Mortal Realm. In the past, whenever Xavier cast Soul Sacrifice, Volkarin would be the first through the bridge. That was no longer the case.

  But he had learnt how to do what he needed to do—it was the reason he had to use every single one of his souls in his soulkeeping reserve on this ritual.

  He needed to funnel those souls directly toward Volkarin, to bolster the spirit’s strength, giving it enough power to come through the bridge.

  With his eyes closed, Xavier pushed his will through the bridge. If he connected with the wrong spirit, all of this would go terribly wrong. But Xavier had spent more time with Volkarin than he had with any other spirit from the Otherworld. He would know what the dragon felt like.

  There.

  He could feel him—Volkarin—but the dragon spirit’s presence was incredibly faint, and the connection was even fainter. Xavier knew that it could falter at any moment, and so he couldn’t hesitate. He brought forth a thousand souls from his reserve and sent them through the bridge to the dragon.

  This better work.

  Xavier had already had one thing go terribly wrong for him today, and somehow come out of that situation unscathed. He couldn’t afford another thing to go wrong, not now that he was so close to leaving this floor. Though he had gained an incredible amount since coming to the hundredth floor of the Tower of Champions, he was long ready to leave.

  There were so many things out there he needed to experience. He wanted to return to Earth. He wanted to explore his sector. He wanted to explore his universe.

  And he even had the means to do that now.

  Xavier felt the souls disappear through the bridge, but he could not feel where they went. Before they reached their destination, his connection to Volkarin slipped away. It had been too weak to hold onto any longer.

  Xavier’s eyes flashed open, widening in fear.

  Had the ritual failed?

  He didn’t know. Couldn’t know yet. He had to keep moving forward. Just because he could no longer feel the dragon spirit, didn’t mean it wasn’t currently receiving the souls Xavier had just sacrificed.

  This will work, he thought to himself. It has to work.

  Finally, Xavier called forth the dragon spirit from the Otherworld. The bridge had been established, and now Xavier was opening it.

  He just hoped it was only Volkarin that came through.

  Suddenly, something seized Xavier’s mind. For a terrifying moment he didn’t know what was going on. It felt as though something was clawing at his thoughts, raking through them and cutting them to ribbons. He lost all concentration—something that could either make the ritual cease or potentially cause something else to gain access to the bridge he’d just opened.

  He didn’t know how much time passed before he regained control of his mind, but when he was again conscious of what was going on, Xavier blinked, trying to gain his bearings. He couldn’t see the bridge to the Otherworld, not with his natural senses, but he could feel it.

  He sighed in relief.

  It was still there—and so was the presence that had torn through his mind. He could see what it had tried to do.

  I was warned about this, he remembered. There were powerful spirits in the Otherworld that, once a connection or a bridge had been opened, were able to take control of someone’s mind, though occurrences of this happening were said to be incredibly rare, so it wasn’t something that he’d worried about.

  He reordered his thoughts. It felt as though he had to stitch his mind back together. His mental defences, as strong as they were, had been compromised, but whatever that thing was hadn’t been able to tear through them completely—hadn’t taken control of him.

  Xavier looked through his mind and saw nothing missing. He examined the bridge and found it to be intact, the restrictions upon it holding strong.

  Xavier endured five more searing attacks to his mind. Through all of those attacks, he struggled to hold onto his concentration. Struggled to hold onto his will. Several times he considered stopping the ritual.

  Something else is trying to get through. Something powerful.

  But he did not stop. He fought on.

  After the fifth attack, he finally felt a spirit come through the bridge. The spirit felt weak, faint, but even so Xavier could sense who it was. Volkarin, the dragon that was the Spirit of Vengeance.

  He was finally coming through to this world.

  As injured as Volkarin was, the spirit wouldn’t be able to remain in the Mortal Realm for long. Even with the Time Alteration spell active, that wouldn’t have an effect on how long the spirit could remain.

  Time dilation fields couldn’t solve everything. Xavier would need to get the spirit inside of the vessel as swiftly as possible.

  When the dragon spirit came through, Xavier’s eyes widened at the sight of it.

  Volkarin was far larger than he had ever been in the past. The chamber that Xavier hovered within had held the massive Elemental Dragon, and was large enough to comfortably have the Skeletal Dragon inside of it as well.

  Volkarin’s spirit, though injured and feeling weak to Xavier, was large enough to dwarf those two dragons combined.

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  Whenever I’ve summoned him in the past, he has been weakened by the spell I’ve used to bring him here to the Mortal Realm. But this… This is different. This is the spirit’s true size.

  But if Xavier had summoned the dragon spirit—or any other spirit from the Otherworld—in this way for battle, he would have had no assurances that the spirit wouldn’t have simply attacked him the moment it had appeared.

  Unless I made a deal with it…

  Xavier pushed those thoughts away. There was work to be done. He needed to act fast.

  Xavier performed the final part of the ritual. One of his hands had never left the surface of the dragon egg’s shell. All the while, he had been channelling Spirit Energy into the shell. Not with any spell, but simply with his Cultivation skill—the one that allowed him to bring energy into his respective cores.

  This was something he had never done before, but it had come naturally to him after all of his work with Body Cultivation. This was how he was to prepare the vessel for the entrance of Volkarin’s spirit.

  This had been described to Xavier by spirit he had summoned using Otherworldly Communion. The way he understood it, placing a spirit into another being was somewhat akin to having an organ transplant. The body was liable to reject the new spirit, especially if the vessel was incompatible.

  There were ways for the incoming spirit to mitigate these risks, but Volkarin was too injured to be able to use any of those ways.

  Which made Xavier’s job a little harder.

  With the power of his will, Xavier coaxed the spirit from the Otherworld into the waiting vessel of the dragon egg. He watched, in wonder, as the massive spirit flew toward the egg. The egg felt miniscule compared with the size of Volkarin, and yet as the dragon spirit reached the egg it was sucked in, like smoke into a vacuum.

  The dragon spirit hadn’t made a single sound. Volkarin hadn’t even registered Xavier when it had appeared through the bridge. The dragon was usually quite boisterous and vocal, but on this occasion he had been reserved.

  No, not reserved. Determined.

  Once the last of the spirit had entered the egg, Xavier took his hand away from it. He cut off the connection to the Otherworld, closed the bridge he had formed, and glided down to the ground to stand before the egg.

  The flames beneath the egg continued to burn, licking the shell, constantly heating it.

  There were no notifications to tell Xavier whether or not what he had attempted had been successful. Nothing to show that what he’d done had actually worked. He tilted his head to the side as he looked upon the egg.

  He had expected there to be something… more. This was something he had been working toward for quite some time. There was no fanfare. There was, well, nothing.

  How did he even know if the spirit had taken hold of the egg?

  Rhaalir.

  The elf spirit had been absent during the ritual. He appeared now before Xavier.

  Have you completed the ritual?

  Xavier inclined his head. I have. He explained what had happened, then asked his burning question. How do I know if it’s worked?

  The elf spirit floated up to the egg, unmoored by mortal restraints such as gravity, and examined the egg with a sigh. The only way to know is to hatch it.

  Xavier inclined his head once more. He had thought that would be the case, and he was more than ready to do so.

  Inducing the hatching of a dragon egg could be a dangerous thing. There were risks involved if it was not done carefully. But Xavier didn’t know how much longer he would have to wait for the egg to hatch naturally, and he couldn’t carry it inside of his Storage Ring.

  The risks, he would have to take.

  But there was still something more that would need to happen once the dragon hatched—something Volkarin would need to agree to if he wished to follow Xavier back to the Tower of Champions, and not remain stuck within this world.

  We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

  Xavier once more hovered up to the egg. This was one of several ways he had learnt of hatching a dragon egg, and it was the one that he thought worked the best for someone like him. Other ways involved the use of fire magic or devices that could control the level of heat, but none of those felt right to him.

  Just as Xavier had poured Spirit Energy into the egg to prepare it for the entrance of Volkarin, now he funnelled pure Celestial Energy into the egg.

  He had to do this slowly, lest it overwhelm the being inside. It was a delicate procedure, one that he wasn’t able to practice. But being dragonkin came with advantages he hadn’t known he would have when he’d first learnt of what he needed to do to hatch this egg.

  When he’d rested his hand on the dragon egg, he’d been able to feel something of what was inside. He could feel the dragon burning within the egg. Feel the sheer life that was inside it.

  He might not be able to determine whether Volkarin had taken hold of that life or not, but being able to feel it meant that he could adjust the exact amount of Celestial Energy to feed into the egg.

  And, when he touched the egg, he could feel the aura of the dragon within. It was strange, being able to feel the aura that a beast was giving off—this was something different to the sense of the dragon he got from being dragonkin himself. This was what he had been able to do when he had first entered the Tower of Champions. All the beasts and Denizens that he faced these days were able to hide their auras.

  Xavier started with a trickle of Celestial Energy. Barely more than a few F Grade units per minute.

  He could not use his Identify skill on the dragon within the egg and using it on the egg itself only gained him so much—and nothing he didn’t already know. But he had to imagine that this hatchling was only Level 1.

  It might even be Level 0, if Level 0 is even possible.

  Though that made him wonder—human children, and other races of Denizens, didn’t have access to the System until the age of sixteen. Was there a similar restriction for beasts?

  It occurred to him that he had never seen a beast born before. He wondered how levels worked for them. Surely it couldn’t be the same as it was for Denizens…

  Xavier pushed away his thoughts as he poured more Celestial Energy into the dragon egg. The dragon within was building a tolerance for the energy. The more Xavier flowed into it, the more it was able to take. This was something that was supposed to happen during the inducement of a hatchling, but it was happening much faster than he had expected.

  That gave him a bit of hope, for Xavier imagined the reason that the dragon was able to take more energy faster was because of Volkarin’s soul residing within it.

  Hours passed within the time dilation field as Xavier slowly and with care fed the dragon egg more and more Celestial Energy. Though Xavier had a great deal of patience, he had to actively restrain himself from upping the amount of energy he fed the beast too quickly.

  Crack.

  Xavier’s eyes widened. He drew his hand from the egg and flapped his wings to move him a few feet away, giving the egg some space. It was dangerous for him to feed energy into the dragon while it was hatching, and he had been waiting for this moment to come.

  It was only a small crack, at the very top of the egg.

  The egg shuddered.

  Crack!

  Xavier smiled, beaming at the egg. Whether he had succeeded at placing Volkarin within the vessel was yet to be seen, but even if he hadn’t, he struggled to believe that he was about to watch a dragon hatch.

  This was one of those moments where he wondered how his life had become this.

  He was hovering, massive dragon wings holding him aloft, within a cave chamber atop the largest mountain he had ever seen, watching a dragon hatch.

  He’d come a long way from reading and writing fantasy stories. Far farther than he let himself dwell upon each day. Most of the books that he’d read back before the System had integrated Earth had never been on the scale of what his life was like now, either.

  I’ve fought goblins, met elves and dwarfs. I’ve summoned spirits, defeated dragons, turned into a different race. I’ve stolen souls and stopped time and created portals.

  He shook his head in absolute wonder.

  This was his life. He had accomplished more than he could have ever imagined, and yet still he felt as though he was only just getting started.

  There’s so much yet to come.

  Another crack, and Xavier caught his first glimpse of the dragon’s nose, nudging some of the shell away. The shell cracked ever more and bits of it began to fall down into the fire that burned below.

  There was a part of Xavier that wanted to expedite the process, but he knew that wasn’t how these things worked. The hatchling had to make its own way out of the egg.

  The dragon did something strange, then—it started munching on the egg instead of letting it fall, attaining a slight red glow as it did so. Xavier was surprised to find the dragon had been born with teeth.

  Xavier wanted to ask if Volkarin was inside, but he was frozen in a moment of pure awe. It wasn’t until the baby dragon had devoured the rest of the egg it had just burst forth from that he finally cleared his throat.

  “Volkarin?”

  The baby dragon—who was not small, but rather the size of a velociraptor—turned to peer at Xavier. It cocked its head to the side. The beast opened its mouth, but no words came out, only small coo.

  Xavier had grown adept at reading the emotions of dragons from their facial features. It was something that he had gained when he had become dragonkin, and the more time he’d spent with Volkarin, the more he’d grown to understand the dragon’s own emotions from the way he moved.

  The baby dragon opened its mouth and cooed once more, then shut it in sheer frustration. A frown settled onto the hatchling’s face, and it made the beast look far, far older than it truly was.

  Xavier couldn’t help but laugh.

  Volkarin was inside that dragon, all right. But he wasn’t yet able to talk. After all the research Xavier had done, surely that should have been something he anticipated.

  “Welcome back to the land of the living, Volkarin.”

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