studiobondurri Chapter 123: Poor quality
Chapter 123: Poor quality
Kael moved toward the cores, stopping in front of them.
The size discrepancy between Kael and the cores was quite much, that even Noah noticed it from where he stood.
The cores were not small objects — mutated grade beasts accumulated mana for significant periods before the concentration solidified, and the result was an orb with genuine mass to it.
Against Kael’s small body, each core was almost as big as his head.
Noah looked at the dragon and looked at the cores and found himself genuinely wondering how this was going to work.
The question resolved itself quickly.
Kael opened his mouth.
It opened wider than his jaw suggested it could — the same quality Noah had observed when the black fire had come out, the sense of dimensions that the closed state didn’t fully advertise.
He lowered his head toward the nearest core and took it in, the orb disappearing past his teeth and into whatever interior had made room for it.
Then he chewed.
The sound that should have accompanied the chewing of something that dense and that solidly material — the cracking, the grinding, the noise of significant force being applied to resistant substance — simply didn’t happen.
The chewing happened in a silence that felt less like absence of sound and more like the sound had been swallowed along with everything else.
His face changed.
The expression that moved across Kael’s features as he chewed was not one Noah had seen on him before.
It sat somewhere in the territory of ecstasy — eyes half-closed, the tension that was usually present in his expression softening into something that had no performance in it, a response that was entirely internal and entirely genuine.
Whatever the core was producing as it was processed wasn’t simply nutrition in the conventional sense. It was something that reached the dragon in a more fundamental place than that, registering as something close to profound satisfaction at a level below conscious enjoyment.
He swallowed.
A slow, complete swallow, followed by a moment of perfect stillness.
Then his eyes opened fully again, and a smile settled across his face — not the smug, theatrical smile of a creature performing contentment, but something quieter and more real.
He moved to the second core without pause.
The process repeated itself with the same quality — the wide jaw, the silent consumption, the expression that crossed into ecstasy during the chewing, the stillness at the swallow.
When the second core was gone, Kael exhaled.
It was a long exhale, slow and complete, the breath of something that had just finished doing something it had been built to do.
Noah watched him.
He waited, his mana sense still extended around the dragon in its quiet, unobtrusive way, his eyes moving across Kael’s body with the attentive patience of someone who had been told to expect a result and was giving that result appropriate time to manifest.
Several seconds passed.
Then several more.
Noah kept watching. The mana sense kept reporting. The forest kept making its ambient sounds around them, indifferent to the observation happening at its floor.
Nothing changed.
Not visibly. Not through the mana sense. Kael’s aura remained exactly what it had been before the cores, the signature of it unchanged in quality or density or any other dimension that Noah’s extended perception could detect.
No growth surge, no visible shift in his physical form, no flare of mana that would indicate something being processed and integrated at a fundamental level.
Noah looked at him and waited another beat.
Still nothing.
He was about to say something when he noticed Kael’s expression.
The quiet, genuine satisfaction from the consumption had left.
What replaced it was disappointment — specific, visible disappointment, sitting plainly on the dragon’s features without the theatrical packaging he usually applied to his reactions.
His eyes had taken on a slightly flat quality, his tail had stilled completely, and the angle of his head carried the particular downward tilt of someone who had expected one thing and received something that fell noticeably short of it.
Noah looked at him.
"Kael."
Kael’s eyes came up.
"What’s wrong?"
The dragon was quiet for a moment, which was unusual enough on its own to be informative.
When he spoke, the words came out with a resignation that sat oddly on a creature whose normal register ran toward declaration and proclamation.
"The quality of these beast cores," he said, "is far too low for me... what a pity."
Noah’s brows pulled together slightly.
"Far too... low?" he said.
The words came out with the particular quality of someone repeating something back not because they hadn’t heard it but because hearing it again helped them confirm it was what had actually been said.
He looked at the spots on the ground where the two cores had been sitting moments ago, then back at Kael.
"So you need even stronger beast cores."
Kael nodded, and the nod carried none of the reluctance that admitting a limitation usually introduced into his posture.
"Yes, master," he said, his voice picking up the thread of his usual energy now that the disappointment had been named and set aside.
"Those wolves were very weak." His tail moved once, purposefully. "If I can find mana beasts even stronger, their beast cores will be even better."
Noah looked at him for a moment.
The logic was straightforward, and it was correct.
Beast cores weren’t uniform objects. Their quality scaled directly with the beast that had produced them — the rank, the age, the density of mana accumulated over the creature’s lifetime.
A mutated grade core and an advanced grade core existed in the same category of object the way a copper coin and a gold coin existed in the same category of currency. Technically the same thing. Practically, not comparable.
The wolves had been mutated grade.
Kael had consumed two of their cores and felt nothing beyond the taste of them, which was the most precise possible illustration of the gap between what the wolves were and what Kael was.
They were below him in a way that their cores couldn’t bridge regardless of how many were consumed.
The nourishment — if that was even the right word for whatever the cores provided to a dragon — required a source that was at least in the same conversation as the thing being fed.
Noah found himself doubting that even an advanced grade core would satisfy the requirement.
Advanced grade mana beasts were significantly more powerful than mutated grade.
The jump between those tiers was quite huge, especially due to the fact that advanced grades could actually use elemental attacks.
Their cores reflected that, denser and more potent, the mana within them more refined by years of higher-level accumulation.
But Kael had just casually destroyed an advanced grade wolf with a single breath of black fire.
A creature that had been at the top of its local hierarchy, that had accumulated enough mana to push toward the upper boundary of its rank, had been consumed in seconds by a dragon that was less than a week old.
The distance between Kael and advanced grade wasn’t meaningfully smaller than the distance between Kael and mutated grade — it was the same kind of gap, just with a different number attached to it.
Which meant the cores that would actually register for him were considerably further up the scale.
’The main problem,’ Noah thought, his eyes moving to the forest around them as his mind turned toward the practical shape of the issue, ’is finding mana beasts even stronger than advanced grade.’
High grade mana beasts were rare.
Not rare in the way that certain materials or certain weather phenomena were rare — uncommon but findable with sufficient effort and the right information.
Rare in the way that changed how the word was used, the kind of rare that meant most magi went their entire careers without encountering one directly and considered that a reasonable outcome rather than a failure of effort.
They didn’t live in forests like this one, didn’t occupy territories that overlapped with areas where humans moved with any regularity.
And beyond the rarity, there was the intelligence.
That was the other dimension that separated high grade mana beasts from everything below them — the point at which the accumulation of mana crossed a threshold and produced something that behaved differently from the instinct-driven creatures that populated the lower ranks.
High grade beasts thought. Not in the way humans thought, not with language and abstraction and the full architecture of reasoning — but with enough awareness to recognize patterns, to make decisions that went beyond immediate stimulus and response, to avoid situations that their assessment told them were disadvantageous.
They were never as reckless as advanced grade and below.
An advanced grade wolf charged because its instincts and its territory and its threat assessment converged on charge as the appropriate action.
A high grade creature of equivalent investment in aggression would have already left the area before Noah and Kael had gotten close enough for direct engagement, having processed the available information and reached a conclusion that the advanced wolf’s instincts hadn’t been equipped to reach.
Finding one wasn’t a matter of walking deeper into a forest until something appeared.
Noah exhaled through his nose, the sound quiet and thoughtful rather than frustrated.
’Well,’ he thought. ’I’ll ask Yuan about it. If there’s a way to find stronger mana beasts, the guild will know.’
The adventurer guild’s network was built on exactly this kind of information — the location of powerful mana beasts, the territories they occupied, the conditions under which encounters with them were survivable and the conditions under which they weren’t.
It was the kind of operational knowledge that the guild accumulated and maintained because its members needed it to do their work and stay alive.
Yuan would either know or know who to ask.
He looked at Kael, who had recovered from his disappointment and was now watching Noah with the alert attention of a creature waiting to find out what came next.
"I’ll find you something better," Noah said simply.