Xavier floated high in the air in a frozen pocket of time at the top of the mountain where the two C Grade beasts—the Skeletal Dragon and the Elemental Dragon—called home.

  He looked over at the Spirit of Time and nodded to her. Thank you for your help once more.

  The Spirit of Time inclined her head in a short bow. You are most welcome, Xavier Collins. She looked out at the Skeletal Dragon, then down at the cave entrance. I hope to see you again. If you survive this fight.

  Good to know you have confidence in me, Xavier replied.

  This elicited a small smile from the woman. More than you know. She paused, raised her chin. Prepare yourself. Time will begin moving once more.

  The woman’s words rang true. In an instant, the beautiful spirit seemingly disappeared from existence—but Xavier was sensitive enough to feel her passing from the Mortal Realm. To feel her slipping back to the Otherworld.

  He had come a long way since the first time he’d cast Summon Otherworldly Spirit.

  Xavier didn’t hesitate. There wasn’t time for that. The fight with the C Grade Skeletal Dragon was one he knew that he would win, assuming he played it out perfectly. Many versions of him had managed it, and they were under even more pressure than he was right now.

  “All right, Bones, time to dance,” he muttered under his breath.

  Xavier felt as though he was simply going through the motions with this fight. He knew every single move down to a fraction of a second that he needed to perform in order to win the battle.

  He also knew, despite that, he couldn’t let himself take this fight for granted. One slip up. One misstep—or missflight—would spell his demise.

  Xavier couldn’t let himself see the Skeletal Dragon for any less of the real threat that it truly was.

  He played the fight out perfectly, pushing his mind toward this one purpose.

  The Skeletal Dragon was immune to soul damage, which meant Xavier’s most powerful attack—Soul Strike—was off the menu. That wouldn’t do a damned thing to this beast. But he didn’t want it to do anything to this beast. He was saving his soulkeeping reserve for the Elemental Dragon.

  He had other things up his sleeve.

  Chronomantic Mindforge being one of them.

  Celestial Energy—not Soul Energy, for Xavier knew the consequences of overusing that—flowed through every single one of his channels. The energy served to reinforce his body’s resistance to damage.

  But that wasn’t all that Xavier had managed to do with his Body Cultivation spell. Exploding strikes and protecting against threats like The Nightmare weren’t the only things he could manage with this spell any longer.

  During these fights, he had managed to unlock some more secrets of the long-forgotten spell. The more he managed to do with Body Cultivation, the more he wondered how the spell ever fell out of use.

  They may have used this before the System… But that doesn’t mean they were wrong to.

  He wondered if there was something that had happened, a long time ago, for people to abandon the spell. Perhaps it was because almost every other spell in existence came with not only a training manual—if you could afford one through the System shop—but also help from the System on how to perform the spell.

  The System… activated the spell for the user. For instance, when Xavier cast Soul Strike, he didn’t need to know how to actually perform the spell. He didn’t know how to manifest the souls from his reserve and harness their power against the enemy.

  He simply willed the spell to activate, and the rest… happened.

  Spells were, of course, more complicated than that as you grew stronger with them and became more creative in their use. Time Alteration and Portal were two good examples. He could simply cast each of the spells, but if he wanted to develop them to a high degree, he had to have a better knowledge about the spell’s use. He’d had to learn how to alter the time dilation field or change the speed. And with his Portal spell, he’d had to learn to grow the portal’s size, create multiple portals at once, and place them with expert precision.

  Body Cultivation, however, was on a whole different level to how those other spells worked.

  It was like… normal spells had pre-written code, and all he needed to do was press a button and that code would execute.

  For Body Cultivation, he had to write the code himself.

  Xavier grinned as he soared through the air. The Skeletal Dragon was soaring right back at him. The dragon was filled with rage. A rage that Xavier had learnt, in his many iterations of this fight, to take advantage of. The dragon was an incredibly intelligent beast, but when provoked…

  Xavier turned around as he soared, dipping down in the direction of the dragons’ den where the egg was held.

  The Skeletal Dragon was filled with even more rage at the sight of where he was going.

  Good. Let that rage fill you. Let it cloud your judgement.

  As this was happening, Xavier watched notifications flood across his vision.

  Body Cultivation has taken a step forward on the path.

  Body Cultivation has reached Rank 85!

  …

  Body Cultivation has reached Rank 95!

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  One cannot step backward on the path.

  The notifications kept coming. Xavier had, through observing the other versions of himself, watched as each of them had flowed through his different energy channels. He’d seen the great strides that the other versions of him had managed to make with the spell—and seen what those strides had done.

  The more he had experienced being an observer in his own body, the more aware he’d been of what his body was doing. He could discern the workings of the spells that were being used by the other versions of him in a way that he wasn’t sure he’d ever managed before. Simply by being there, but not having to fight himself, he had learnt a great deal.

  And each time another version of himself had been created, that knowledge had compounded. Not only knowledge of the fight itself, but of the breakthroughs in the different spells that he possessed.

  Breakthroughs beget breakthroughs.

  And now, Body Cultivation was capable of so much more than before. He had trained the spell in the few days between fighting The Nightmare and coming to fight the Elemental Dragon, but the progress he’d made then paled in comparison to what he’d managed during this fight. He pooled Celestial Energy around all of his muscles, boosting not only his strength, but his speed. It didn’t alter his actual attributes, but it enhanced what he was able to do.

  And that was how he’d become faster than the Level 385 Skeletal Dragon.

  The rage he’d instilled in the beast didn’t only make it come after him, it made its mind more vulnerable. When one felt great emotions, it became increasingly difficult to protect oneself from mental attacks.

  That didn’t just hold true for humans or other like races. It held true for dragons as well.

  Xavier soared through the air. The Skeletal Dragon didn’t only possess the ability to knock his spirit out of his body. It had other spells at its disposal. It opened its giant, graveyard maw, with its ragged teeth, and launched a stream of gaseous energy toward him.

  Another version of Xavier had had the misfortune of discovering what happened when hit by that spell. It melted armour and flesh and tried to turn the one attacked into a skeletal creature. It had given him a strange status effect saying he would turn into an undead entity if he didn’t recover from the attack.

  That had terrified him and intrigued him in almost equal parts.

  Suffice to say, he didn’t let himself get hit by the attack again. The last thing he wanted was to become one of the undead. He needed to become the most overpowered entity in the entirety of the Greater Universe if he was to fulfil his ultimate goal—a powerhouse of epic proportions that had never been seen before, the very Weapon of the System—and becoming one of the undead felt as though it would take him in the wrong direction.

  Xavier weaved through the air, dodging the Skeletal Dragon’s attacks with expert precision.

  Then he took the fight to the enemy.

  Looking as though he was going to soar straight into the dragons’ den where the egg was held, Xavier instead created a portal directly in front of his flight path. The twin portal appeared behind his enemy, and he slashed a giant wound into one of its bones with his Celestial Energy enhanced claws.

  His attack exploded on impact.

  Craaack!

  A spiderweb of cracks fissured out from the explosion point, weakening one of the major bones in the Skeletal Dragon’s wings.

  An attack like this wouldn’t have been possible if he hadn’t had learnt so much more about Body Cultivation during the different iterations of this fight.

  Body Cultivation gained several more ranks, reaching all the way to Rank 100.

  Xavier grinned, then darted out of range as the Skeletal Dragon whirled around, pulsing its spirit-knockback spell out at him. Xavier couldn’t duck back through the portal—he would be too close to the enemy’s attack if he did so, as the dragon had been close behind him when he’d soared for the cave entrance.

  But he didn’t need to zip back through the portal to create enough distance. He was fast enough on his own. The energy pulse of the dragon’s spell missed him by a hairsbreadth, but it was enough.

  Xavier continued on like this. Portalling close to his enemy and hitting it with pinpoint accurate strikes that served to weaken all the major bones in its body. The injuries would heal, but they weren’t healing as fast as he was able to inflict them.

  This wasn’t how he would ultimately defeat his enemy—these attacks weren’t enough—it was just the beginning.

  When Xavier had weakened the Skeletal Dragon to the degree necessary, then came his next round of attacks.

  He launched Spirit Break at the dragon, then instantly cast Chronomantic Mindforge. The beast was still enraged—if anything, it was more enraged. All those small attacks were building up, and the beast hadn’t landed a single attack back. The beast might not have flesh on its bones, but Xavier somehow managed to read its emotions simply by the way it moved. And that was something he was getting better and better at doing.

  Xavier grinned a fraction of a second before time stopped around him, freezing his face in a grin as his mind continued to work.

  Body Cultivation wasn’t the only spell he’d advanced his knowledge in. The more he began to understand the inner workings of the spells he used, the more he was able to manipulate those spells into being more efficient and powerful.

  Chronomantic Mindforge was no exception.

  Xavier seized control of the Skeletal Dragon’s mind, a feat that wouldn’t have been possible if the beast’s mind had been working at its normal speed.

  It had been marginally weakened by Xavier’s Spirit Break spell, but it had been all of the emotions Xavier had been making it go through that had made this beast’s mind the most vulnerable.

  The young dragonkin took advantage of that vulnerability as best he could.

  It wasn’t just his spells that he had grown more familiar with—he had also grown more familiar with that of his enemy’s mind. The more he manipulated it through the different iterations of this battle, the more he understood it, the more he was able to manipulate it.

  He also understood his enemy’s energy channels better—and so, he was able to drain an incredible amount of energy from the beast.

  Not all of its energy—Xavier wasn’t that powerful. Not yet. But a great amount nonetheless.

  As Xavier’s Body Cultivation skill raised in power, he was becoming better and better able to harness the Celestial Energy under his possession.

  All the energies that he funnelled into himself from his enemy were turned into Celestial Energy. It further powered his Body Cultivation spell. He cycled the energy through him, having to siphon off only a small amount of it so it wouldn’t overwhelm him.

  Then the world started moving at its normal speed again. The Skeletal Dragon flinched. Xavier didn’t know what it felt. Didn’t know if it knew that its mind had been violated in that moment. But clearly it felt how much of its energy had been drained.

  The beast’s rage became ever more intense.

  The battle continued on like this.

  Xavier harried his enemy with physical strikes—always avoiding its attacks, always being just out of range. And at the same time, he made the Skeletal Dragon’s mind ever more vulnerable.

  The fight dragged on. It wasn’t one of those quick fights that he had experienced in the past, where he had thrown up a time dilation field and barely a moment passed outside of it.

  No, this fight went on for hours.

  Xavier was blessed with an incredible amount of stamina. He no longer possessed the need for sleep. He no longer needed to rest as much as he had even as an E Grade. He could fight for days on end if he had to.

  But this fight, he knew, would not last days.

  Over and over, he used a succession of different spells on the Skeletal Dragon.

  Spirit Break.

  Chronomantic Mindforge.

  Core Burn.

  Willpower Infusion.

  He cycled through these, again and again, weakening the beast’s body and mind. The spells grew and grew in power as he used them. The more influence and pain he was able to inflict against an enemy of this level of power, the more the ranks of these spells were able to budge.

  I shouldn’t be capable of anything like this fight. The System—or whatever it was that truly governed an increase in one’s power—knows that, and therefore I am rewarded.

  There would come a point, when the enemy was weakened just enough, that the Elemental Dragon would be lured out of its cave to join the fight.

  Xavier came to the precipice of that moment.

  He strained his hearing to its limit. And when, finally, he heard the dreaded Elemental Dragon roar within the cave, he executed the second part of his plan to take down the Skeletal Dragon.

  Accidental Champion!

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