19th of Season of Earth, Year 9 AL

  Newt’s eldest younger brother would turn fifteen the next day. So, like every sensible big brother, Newt was in the jungle, hunting for a present. With everything he had learned about life, mana, and how realms worked in the past few years, he believed that the best gift for little Blaze XI would be an eighth realm core.

  Since he was Newt’s little brother, and despite the abysmal education Newt himself had, Little Blaze had a host of teachers and instructors to help him along. In fact, he had enough attention to put to shame what all but the most extraordinary members of royal houses and their direct heirs had.

  It wasn’t fair. Newt was alone, slaving away in a mine on his fifteenth birthday. And fourteenth. Perhaps it was the despair and endless suffering of those years that paved the way for him.

  Thanks to that, the solitude of isolation didn’t really hurt him. The grueling, repetitive tasks others found abhorrent had always been meditation for him.

  Newt sighed. Deep down, he knew Blaze would ultimately fail. He would reach the sixth realm at best. Even with everything handed to him on a silver platter.

  “If that’s the case, why kill an eighth realm beast for his sake?” Magmin asked, the two of them had been sharing the body more and more often as the years went by.

  “Because he deserves a chance. Even if I know he will squander it.”

  “I don’t understand how you know that?”

  In all fairness, Newt didn’t know. He just had a strong feeling everyone would compare Blaze to him the moment he awoke. And Blaze would come up short. Newt didn’t plan on teaching him realm sculpting.

  Not because he was selfish, but because that was his path. And one’s path was that of self-discovery. Even the realm layouts Dandelion had plotted out for Newt ultimately performed worse than the ones he later made himself using what he had as a model.

  That was because the only one who could truly sculpt your soul was none other than yourself. Everything else was an artificial product. Something not you.

  At least, Newt thought that was the case, and he planned to tell that to Blaze when giving him the core. Fortunately for Newt, his path didn’t diverge much from what Dandelion had started. Newt was a warrior and a scribe. His techniques focused on fire and earth, and he had slowly blended them into magma over the years. He wasn’t quite there yet, but by the time he finished sculpting his seventh realm, he should be.

  All those thoughts, doubts, and even the conversation with Magmin happened so quickly, the beast he had his sights on still hadn’t noticed his mana probing it. It was a massive dreadwalker, resting on the ground, two hundred feet from snout to the tip of its tail. The air and fire both radiated off it, but they hadn’t melded into lightning.

  All in all, it was the perfect core for little Blaze, assuming Newt succeeded in his hunt. A magma dragon would have been a superior option if he were Newt, but Little Blaze had an airy feel about him. He lacked the solidness that Newt was certain he had even when he was young.

  Dandelion had mentioned that the core’s elements mattered little in the grand scheme of things, but the collection of books he had prepared for Newt was lost in the battle between exalts, perhaps forever.

  As Newt once more regretted the loss, the dreadwalker raised its head and unleashed a wave of mana to scan its surroundings. The turbulent mana clashed with the fine cobweb Newt had woven, shredding it. Newt pulled back most of it in time, not suffering much of a loss, but he was blind and assumed the dreadwalker had sensed something amiss.

  He rose from the canopy and into the sky, only to see the massive monster also rising. Dreadwalkers rarely reached beyond the fifth realm, when their habits and massive advantages in strength and size suddenly became downsides because using brute force was all they had ever known.

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  For one to have reached the eighth realm was rare. A sign of both luck and talent.

  The beast soared towards the sky, using considerably more mana than Newt did to keep its massive bulk afloat. It took only a moment to locate Newt, and it flew towards him without the bestial roar one might expect.

  Posturing and warning served a purpose against manabeast peers. As for encountering a human at the same realm, there was no need for such formalities. There was no need for threats of mutual destruction or explanations about the damage both sides would suffer. In a fight between a human and a saurian, such matters were considered beforehand.

  Humans sometimes spared manabeasts that backed off and offered some of their hoard in exchange for their lives, but manabeasts almost always devoured humans to advance their realm. The fight with the dreadwalker would be one to the death.

  Newt’s glaive appeared in his hand, and Magma Skin covered his body, but those were the only techniques he used. His greatest advantage was, ironically, the opposite of what saurians were often going for - maneuverability and small size.

  He flew towards his opponent, less than one thirtieth the size of the titanic beast. Most awakened would have been cowed, and yet, compared to the dragons with which Newt had recently been interacting with more and more, the dreadwalker’s size seemed quite insignificant.

  Soon, Newt and the dreadwalker were only a thousand feet apart, and the monster snapped its jaw open. Flames and air condensed, blazing until the fire turned white.

  A beam as thick as an ancient tree shot from the saurian’s maw, but Newt dodged. His danger sense didn’t even activate, since the move was so obvious.

  In the next moment, Newt was next to the dreadwalker, slashing with his glaive. A whirlwind of fire erupted from the saurian, consuming Newt, and he could sense some of the heat passing through his defenses as air fed fire, fanning it beyond the level it should have been at.

  Newt reacted to the vision, but instead of backing away, he fed more mana into his shield. Fire exploded and still passed through his defenses, but the burns were minor. The heat was still pouring into Newt, but his glaive struck the dreadwalker’s hide at the base of its neck.

  Scales shattered, and flesh parted. Opening a gap for Newt.

  The wound was minor, but the petrifying power of earth entered the wound, doing something Magmin had suggested as Newt attempted to emulate the effect of Magmin’s poison. The earth energy bonded with the dreadwalker’s fire mana, reforming into magma from which Newt had separated it in the first place.

  Dreadwalker swept its tail at Newt, roaring in pain, but Newt just moved away. The saurian slapped itself brutally while Newt stabbed it in a different place, once more applying the poisonous mana, all the while working to draw the hostile energies the dreadwalker had injected into him.

  But the difference between the two was huge. The dreadwalker’s fire and air combination was damaging Newt’s body slightly as he fought to refine the fire and grind down the air.

  Newt’s earth mana, on the other hand, stuck to the dreadwalker’s fire mana like tar, slowing it down, and forcing the air energies to collide against two elements while doing little damage.

  While the beast thrashed, unleashing ever-weaker explosions of air and fire, Newt kept stabbing and poisoning. Until what he wanted happened.

  The dreadwalker tried to unleash another burst of air and fire, since they were obviously injuring Newt, but then the air and fire clashed with magma inside its body.

  The reaction was no different from Newt’s failed experiment from decades ago when he blasted a hole in his chest. The dreadwalker burst in a shower of fire and gore, dropping down to the ground.

  Newt dove after the dazed saurian. His glaive sank into the monster’s eye, and Newt unleashed a spear of magma inside his opponent’s skull, boiling its brain.

  The dreadwalker landed with a crash, shattering trees and sending a tsunami of soggy ground splattering in all directions.

  Newt fell to the ground right on top of it. The battle had lasted a handful of seconds, ten at most, and yet, when Newt removed Magma Skin, he revealed the full extent of his injuries. His skin was covered in burns and even charred in a few places.

  His hair and clothes were gone, and the heat was still ravaging his body.

  “Is it just me, or is air-fire more potent than earth-fire?” He asked Magmin while drinking a potion.

  Burnt and injured flesh fell off him; his muscles and skin squirmed as they regenerated.

  “There’s a tradeoff to everything,” Magmin replied sagely, pretending he didn’t notice Newt’s poke.

  Newt drew the sword he got as an engagement present and gutted the dreadwalker, smiling widely when he found the core.

  “You could have defeated him without suffering injuries, you know?”

  “I know,” Newt said aloud. “But I needed to finish it quickly if I wanted this little thing.”

  He wrapped the core in his mana to preserve as much of its properties as he could.

  “I think little Blaze is going to have a very happy birthday.”