Refreshing Dragon Heart

When they came out of the carriage, Harris was quick to apologize and squeamishly said, "please, please come on through! Nice day, isn't it?"

"Harris, back up a little. We're taking the fossils back, the dragon escaped."

"Sir? But how is that possible, we didn't see or sense the mana moving."

"There was a compass stone, it belonged to an intelligent being. There could've been a chance it was teleported away."

"Yes, sir!" Harris turned to the others who came off their horses and yelled, "Men! Get to work!"

They carefully picked up the skeletons, moving them to a wooden crate. It was easily able to accommodate the many skeletons despite the box's small size, it couldn't have been bigger than Zeeth.

Zeeth finally looked at the horses closely and realized they weren't exactly like horses. They were a little wider and they had six legs, three on each side. They had fangs like bats and their black eyes were indiscernible.

Two and half days later, Black spoke to Zeeth for the first time after the fight with the dragon. They were still sleeping in the carriage when Black yelled, 'Zeeth, wake up!'

Zeeth jumped up out of bed from the yell in his head, surprised and scared. 'Zeeth, I need you to consume the dragon's heart.'

'What? Why? Wait, first, why haven't you replied to me at all these past two days?'

'During the battle with the dragon, I sucked up as much mana from it as possible and was focusing on stabilizing it within myself. My years of hibernation has caused my mana to run a little low. But the dragon heart, eat it and I shall be able to advance onto a new level.'

'But wouldn't it kill me?'

'No, I will help sort out the poisons and disintegrate the mana until we can absorb all of it.'

'Okay… it better not kill me.'

'No worries, I've grown quite fond of this body and I don't want to go back to hibernation to look for someone else to eat me. I won't let you die.'

"Page. I need the dragon heart."

"It's under your bed." he said sleepily, "it shrunk, remember? So I left it somewhere smaller. It's yours, I can't claim the potion." and he promptly fell asleep.

That's right, he had forgotten. For some strange reason, the back and red heart had shrunk over the last two days. He looked under his bed and found a simple black cube. It was roughly a foot on all sides, similar to the dimensions of his original Fluctu Potion. Inside, he found the heart, once larger than his entire torso, but now the size of a normal human heart. The outer structure had changed from the soft fleshy texture to a harder, more crystalline surface. It felt as hard as a rock and a single hole showed him the insides, the vessel they had opened to look inside. The rest had hardened and closed up, resembling a potion bottle-shaped out of a large rock by an amateur.

'Can I even eat the outside of the heart?'

'The dried-up flesh has no value to me. I only need the blood, that is where most of the mana lies. Drink from the vessel you opened.'

'This might be the second weirdest thing I've ever consumed.'

'What's the first?'

'You!'

'Ah, right.'

With that, he tipped the hole in the heart into his mouth and gulped down mouthfuls of the liquid inside. It tasted like a cold, refreshing drink while also like stale blood and a strange bitterness that hurt his mouth, tearing and pulling at his skin just lightly enough to be ignored.

When he emptied the entire bottle, each drip sliding off the crystalline bottle, his entire body throbbed for a second. And then another, and a third that happened faster than the last. Soon, the throbbing pulsed through his body so quickly he thought he was having a seizure, his hands dropped the bottle back into the box with a light thud from the pain his fingers felt just holding it.

The world was soon blurring and the throbs were mixing in together, he was unable to tell if they were throbs or simply a long wave of pain rushing through him. He tried to stay standing for as long as possible, fearing that if anything else were to touch the floor, it would hurt as much as his hand did while holding the heart. But the pain eventually forced him to kneel, and more shocks pierced his knees. His hands hit the floor in an attempt to raise his knees up, but it felt like hot needles were being pushed into them constantly, he could hardly think.

He remembered he needed to control the mana in him and force them into a single, calm line flowing through him. He tried to find where the pain started, right in the center of his belly. The entire time, Black was strangely silent but he could feel the eye working to control the mana however he could.

He didn't know how much time had passed, but he eventually worked his way to his bed, where the pain was noticeably less painful. He stood there, only his toes in contact with the bed, and everything else held as far away as he could get it. His arms were held straight down, his hands parted a little away from his body, and his legs split by a small fraction.

He eventually got the mana under control, the waves didn't pour out from the center anymore, but instead followed his usual line of mana, going from the middle of his ribs to his belly button and through the rest of the body from those two spots.

By the time he opened his eyes, the sky was already blue and the sun hung low. Page had just picked up the hardened shell of the dragon heart, with an aghast expression on his face.

"Did you drink the entire contents of the heart?" he asked when he saw Zeeth was looking at him, awake.

"Yeah," he said, jumping down from the bed. The pain was gone and he felt amazingly light, a sense of power flowing through him that allowed him to carry himself like a feather even with the weight of all his slimes. Up until now, he had strained himself to carry them all and it was a wonder they didn't break the carriages, he simply spread his weight and cautiously entered to make it work.

'But- how are you not dead then? It was a serious concentration of a bunch of deadly things, it should've taken more than a little practice and concentration to take all that in."

"I dunno."

"Well, I guess it's good that you took it now. It won't be long before it happens." He said darkly, "the gates to hell are about to break."

They stared at each other for a moment and Page continued, "this means little creatures from hell are going to show up soon and start attacking our world."

"Wait, wait, wait! What do you mean? There's a gate to hell? How can the gates of hell break?"

"I believe something went wrong with the world when a new matter was added, forcing a tiny little nudge in between the world that started to crack and spread. Through the butterfly effect, a term I learned from your world, that little nudge grew so big that it began affecting even the gates of hell. It couldn't handle the crack and couldn't repair it in time, so the beings on the other side, who are trying so hard to get out all the time, finally have a chance. And you better bet that they will not be wasting it.

The walls between the worlds will begin to break and at first, only the smallest of hell's creatures will breakthrough, but soon all will attack the cracks in the wall and burst out."

"This little nudge. Is that me?"

"Yes. As you know, no matter can be created or destroyed. Yet an entire human worth of matter was created along with a necklace and a skill. I'm pretty sure this put a wedge in between our world like a nail in concrete. And usually, the concrete that this nail pushes aside would rise up and not push to the side anymore, but the idea is different for the world. The matter that the nail displaced cannot simply be shoved aside, there is something around the space we live in that overpowers this nail. This means that the crack this nail made is now spreading and affecting the world, the concrete that we live on."

"So… so what should we do?"

"We are currently heading to the first location where hell babies were first found escaping hell. We are going to kill them before anyone else finds out."

"Shouldn't we let people find out? If others know about the danger then they will help defeat them."