Chapter Start

I spent the next six days recovering from the injuries I got from the Hydra. This is what happened during those six days.

Immediately after waking up the day after the fight, my back flared up in so much pain that I was unable to move around much, so I just layed on my stomach sleeping, eating homemade snacks I made a while back (because it turns out time doesn't pass in my inventory), and reading for the full day. It was boring, but I learned a lot more about magic theory. 

After waking up on my stomach the second day, I immediately felt like something was different, which wasn't shocking considering the new body parts I suddenly have control over. I now had a new set of wings and a tail. Though depressingly I couldn't mess around with them yet due to me still being injured.

My tail is about as long as I am tall, pure white, with a vibrant light blue tip that splits off into a large 'V' at the end. It's warm and has a rubbery texture all across it with the exception of the end, which feels like the paper on those cheap streamers. It's also extremely flexible, tough, and strong. It's to the point I can, without much difficulty, grab things, block a blow, or shatter someone's bones with it. 

While my wings, on the other hand, are about 1.5 times the length of my arm span. They have pure white feathers at the very top of the wings, before a bit further down they abruptly shift into an aurora of faded blues, greens, and pinks. The feathers are soft and fluffy, almost like cotton candy (they do not taste like it, however, I learned that the hard way. They taste like pidgeon feathers). They're very obviously affected by my Fae blood. I have very fine control over them, and I can also use them to fly if I run mana through them, which is something I learned to do recently. Though annoyingly, I still need to flap them to fly.

The rest of the days were mostly the same with only small details being different. Though I did obtain an Enhancement Scroll along with some studded leather armor through the Gacha. I chose to fuse the new armor with my hoodie and use the scroll on my swimwear, boosting my defensive abilities by a decent amount. I also started practicing mana control, and once done with that, how to reinforce my body using mana. 

By the end of the 6 days of rest, I was extremely bored and wanted to practice my wings a bit so I found the largest room on the 5th floor (which I returned to as soon as I healed up enough) to start practicing. The room was honestly massive. It was the size of two American Football fields sitting side by side and roughly 40ft tall (300ft×320ft×40ft or 91.4m×97.6m×12.1m). It was honestly the largest room I've ever seen in my life. The only reason such a room fits in the dungeon is because a lot of spacial magic has gone into its construction, meaning most floors aren't physically above or below the other floors. Each floor is more like a separate pocket dimension each loosely connected through the staircases.

I practiced a lot over a span of four days. I practiced slashing at the enemies while flying, turning, carpet bombing, hovering, low speeds, high speeds, going up and down sharp angles, turning at sharp angles, and more. I practiced a lot of aerial maneuvers. It took crashing into the floors and walls countless times, some of which I only survived due to my draconic reinforced bones. I did learn, however, that I can comfortably fly at a pace of 8mph(12.8km) or even half that without struggling to keep air. I can naturally hover or go much, much faster than that, but It's difficult to go too fast in a closed room like this, so I don't know my upper limits.

I also hunted down a bunch of monsters and tossed them around with my tail to see how effective it is as a weapon. I can honestly say I'm very pleased with it. I used it to retrieve and throw things from my inventory, I slapped an enemy about (not that it survived long due to the blunt force trauma) and even managed to grapple someone with it, though never again, as it was very difficult and felt gross to me.

Another thing I learned while messing around with my tail and wings (I was flying about the dungeon to hunt down enemies), is that I can apparently apply my Decay to my claws, wings, and tail. I found it out when a very gross looking slime appeared behind me. It wasn't one of those cute Dragon Quest or Rimuru slimes, no, it was a disgusting blob that looked like a blob of dark green, moldy flesh. As soon as I saw it, I pushed as much mana into my tail to reinforce it, causing it to be covered in black smokey mist, before swinging it full force at the slime. 

My tail hit the slime straight in it's disgusting face, causing it to explode as if hit by a cannonball. Due to the power of decay I accidentally coated my tail in, what was left of the body quickly started to rot due to the excessive amount of 'Decay' energy I hit it with. After a little bit of time and practice, I learned I could do that with pretty much any part of my body by focusing enough mana there and because my mana is naturally 'decay' aligned, if focused in a specific place, it can cause things to decay.

You see, there's all sorts of different 'elements' of mana, those 'elements' can be quite literally anything, natural things such as 'fire', 'cold', 'light', something artificial like 'sword', 'vehicle', 'glasses' or even vague concepts such as 'good', or 'evil'. Most people don't have a specific mana element, meaning they can use any type of magic with a bit of practice. 

However, some people's mana can naturally have an 'element'. When someone's mana has a specific 'element', they find using magic of that type easier, while possibly finding magic of other types harder. This is because they have to first 'unalign' any mana they want to use in a spell. It's impossible to completely 'unalign' any mana, so if used in a spell that conflicts with Its element, it becomes difficult or even impossible to cast spells that conflict with their natural mana element.

For example, my mana has multiple different elements. Mine are 'Space', 'Time', 'Decay', 'Ice', 'Souls' and 'Stars'. Though because of this, I'd struggle to cast any sort of spell that has earth, growth, or fire in them due to them conflicting with my elements of 'Stars', 'Decay' and 'Ice'. However, because of this, any spell that is of the same type as my 'elements' becomes much more powerful or easy to cast.

According to Yuki, dragons normally only have one element, with 1 in every 1,000,000 having a second one, due to the way they function. Even for other races, three elements was thought to be the hard limit. So I guess I'm special in multiple ways.

At least that's what I learned from both Yuki and the book. After hearing about mana 'elements' and learning I had five of them, I quickly tried to replicate my decay mana coating with my other elements with varying successes. 

Ice was easy, if not a bit useless. It worked and covered me in rather easy to move in ice and gave me claws made of ice, but it was much weaker than my natural capabilities. Though if I don't create the armor, it gives a transparent and intangible blue aura around me that looks like I'm encased in a form fitting case of ice.

I had some success with time. It created an aura that looked like transparent bronze clockwork gears surrounding me and allowed me to speed up or slow down my own personal time. The gears were sadly not touchable, but looked very smooth. Slowing down my own personal time caused the gears to spin more slowly and seemed pretty useless when combined with the backlash, so I didn't mess with it too much, speeding it up on the other hand, was much more fruitful. If I sped up my own time, the gears also sped up and I could move 'faster' when compared to others, or I could focus it on specific parts of my body to do something else. I could speed up my brain to increase thinking speed, I could speed up my nervous system to increase reaction speed, I could do all sorts of things. 

But both speeding up and slowing down my personal time both came with downsides. You see, the rebound of my personal time readjusting to the time flow of the rest of the world hits hard. I was able to partially resist it, but only partially. Even after partially resisting the rebound, the pain was so intense I couldn't breathe. 

Yuki said it's because I'm not reintegrating myself into the standard flow of time smoothly enough, which I agree is probably what's causing the pain. I am far from skilled enough in mana control to be able to manipulate time to that degree without casting a full blown spell though, so it'll probably take years to get to that point.

Back to the original topic though, Space was the element with little, though not the worst, success at coating myself, despite it being the element with my second highest affinity. All it did was create a thin, transparent, purple, form-fitting barrier around me. I failed to do pretty much anything else with it. I could coat myself in it, yes, but It didn't do anything of note. It didn't increase the damage of my claws or make me take less damage, so I have no clue what it does. Neither does Yuki. I also don't want to experiment with it too much yet, not until I learn to control my Mana better and maybe learn a few spells.

Meanwhile 'Stars' and 'Souls' refused to work with me at all. Yuki said it probably has something to do with the fact that I'm in a dungeon that has no access to any natural starlight.

So once all my training was done, I returned to the staircase that leads to what we assume to be a separate set of floors.

Due to me being tired due to a day of practice and experimentation, I return to my room and sleep to prepare for going down that staircase.

Chapter End

Neve's magical affinities goes like this from best to worst. I'm only counting the ones that she has natural elements for.

1.Decay

2.Space

3.Stars

4.Time

5.Ice

6.Soul