When Gauss and his party returned to Lakeside Town, it was already noon. They turned in the commission and, while they were at it, updated his hunt points.
Might as well, since they were here.
Gauss: 1372
Herbert: 1117
Korman: 866
Tasha: 810
Gauss was back at the top.
His return to first place once again set the guild hall buzzing.
But Gauss no longer paid much attention to what people were saying. It was the same as before—marveling at his speed and speculating about where he came from, then guessing how Herbert would take it.
Even without asking around, just by existing in Lakeside Town he'd picked up bits and pieces of gossip about the names on the board.
The most famous, apparently, was "Frostwolf" Herbert—pretty much the poster boy of the younger generation of adventurers from the five towns around Blue Lake.
In his early thirties and already a Level 5 warrior: for most ordinary people, that was seriously impressive.
Once he got past Level 5 and stepped into the next realm, his reputation would climb even further. At that point, whether he stayed a free adventurer, joined the royal army, or attached himself to some noble house, he'd be showered with resources and opportunities.
Because of that early success, his style was flashy and overbearing. Even in his hometown, plenty of people had complaints about him.
Most folks didn't know much about Gauss, but just seeing him sit on Herbert's head on the rankings was enough to make them secretly pleased—even though the order of those names had nothing to do with their own lives.
Once they were done, Gauss and his party left the noisy guild hall behind.
The afternoon sun was warm and generous.
Back at their upscale inn, they had no urgent jobs lined up for the rest of the day.
Partly it was a small break for the team.
Partly it was because Gauss wanted time to work on Draconic.
After washing up, he let the others know where he was going, saddled a chocobo, and rode out of town to a lonely patch of empty ground.
There, he unfolded the borrowed Folded House.
He stepped inside, went straight to his room, and lay down on the bed.
His consciousness slowly sank inward, like dropping through deep water into the sea of his own mind.
There, waiting for him, was a clear, orderly cluster of information.
Because this involved "dragon" power, Gauss had refused to accept it in the middle of a commission or back in town.
Even for someone like him, dragons were the apex of this world's food chain. You couldn't be too careful around their power.
He didn't want any kind of uncontrollable accident.
Even if the Adventurer's Manual had been perfectly stable so far, it was better to rule out anything that might hurt someone else.
"All right… let's begin."
At his thought, that faintly solemn, imposing stream of information clicked open.
"Boom—"
Like a breaking wave, the knowledge bound to the Draconic talent crashed down over Gauss and swallowed him whole.
For a moment, his mind went into overload. He couldn't think at all.
It was a bizarre feeling—like every brain cell was packed to bursting.
Heavy.
And it made the gap between humans and dragons painfully obvious.
He wasn't just any human either.
Among humans, he already counted as exceptional.
His Intelligence was a full 15 points.
Even so, digesting dragon-speech knowledge was this exhausting.
If it had been an ordinary person, or a low-Intelligence professional, they'd probably have been shredded by this tide of information in an instant. At best they'd fail to absorb it, at worst it might turn them into a drooling idiot.
Humans had limits. The brain was delicate.
And the more sophisticated a machine, the easier it was to break. Push it past a certain point and snap—goodbye.
"Hah…"
He had no idea how much time had passed.
It might have been an instant, maybe several hours.
Finally, his awareness clawed its way back out of the flood.
He let out a slow, long breath.
He wasn't about to be turned into a vegetable by a partial dragon-language download, but the sheer amount of data had been overwhelming. His brain needed time to file it away.
Gauss opened his eyes.
In that instant, a glint of molten gold seemed to pierce the air in front of him.
A deep, ancient sense of authority poured off him without any conscious effort. It wasn't something he was doing on purpose—this was part of the Draconic knowledge itself. Like a forge hammer, it had reshaped his soul as it was delivered.
"Unbelievable…"
It felt like he'd just woken up from a long dream.
In that dream, he'd seen countless dragons.
Basking in lava, tearing lightning apart, freezing rivers with their breath, shaking mountains, turning stone to gold…
True Draconic was never just a language or pronunciation pattern. Even if the occasional kobold or gnoll managed to mimic a few surface sounds, enough for dragons to understand their meaning, it was still just parroting.
When a dragon spoke, its words tugged directly on surrounding mana—like a rule rewriting reality. It was far more domineering than the way human mages used complex gestures, incantations, and catalysts to coax magic into working.
And now, as a human, Gauss had stolen that language for himself.
He flexed his throat and jaw a little.
His control over breath and vibration felt much finer now.
He had the odd, instinctive urge to speak in a way that required all of those changes—a layered, non-human syllable.
Those were Draconic "reserved words": sounds most humanoid vocal cords simply could not produce properly.
Gauss kept sifting through this new ocean of knowledge while following that near-instinctual urge.
He focused, engaged new muscles in his throat, and finally released a short, strange syllable that sounded bizarre to human ears—and carried real power.
"Hmm…"
Like wind roaring through stone.
As the sound left his mouth, the air in front of him visibly rippled when seen from just the right angle. Concentric waves pulsed outward with it.
Gauss, though, actually understood what he'd just said.
The meaning fed back through his ears and into his mind, and his brain unwrapped it automatically.
It was simple.
He'd just spoken the word for Light.
A fist-sized ball of soft radiance flickered into existence, hovering in mid-air and brightening the room.
He studied the lightball for a while, the corners of his mouth steadily rising.
A basic Light spell, sure—but not the same as before.
First of all, he could feel the difference in cost. The mana drain was noticeably lower. As the Draconic word left his throat, the ambient mana had resonated with it, tugged into alignment somehow. His own power didn't have to do as much.
And this wasn't just true for Light. All his cantrips and spells were getting the same bonus.
That alone was huge.
"No wonder…"
No wonder so many high-level spells can't be cast by human mages—or can only be cast a handful of times—yet dragons throw them around like toys.
It wasn't necessarily that dragons had better technique than archmages, or more discipline.
It was that their entire system for interacting with magic was more efficient.
Add that to their ridiculous mana pools and monstrous bodies, and of course they could sling those spells more casually.
Gauss narrowed his eyes slightly.
The Light spell in front of him wasn't just cheaper.
Normally, his Light needed to be anchored to a physical object: a staff, shield, wall, stone, whatever. That was how the spell was designed.
This time, though, the light existed as a free-floating orb, hanging in the air.
Technically, it was still attached—just not to anything he could see. It was bound to the dust suspended everywhere in the air, to things his magic couldn't latch onto before.
He nudged the thought.
The light dimmed down, almost winking out.
Another nudge.
It flared white-hot, lighting up the entire room in a painful flash.
"…That's just a flashbang, isn't it?"
The original Light spell gave you one brightness level for the spell's duration. The new version could shift instantly from pitch-dark to retina-burning, back and forth on command.
Very nice.
It didn't sound like much, but with Gauss' combat experience, he immediately saw the value. Used well, a cantrip like that could rival—and sometimes surpass—second or even third-circle spells in impact.
He half-closed his eyes again, playing the brightness like sliding an invisible dial.
He had to admit, with Draconic in hand, cantrips really did feel like breathing.
"Looks like I should carve out some time to pick up more cantrips."
The strain they put on his soul now was practically negligible.
He could just learn every one he could find.
Master of Cantrips—honestly, not a bad title.
Gauss stepped back out of the Folded House into the open, then tested a few more spells out on the empty ground.
Just as he suspected: everything was cheaper to cast now, but the lower the spell's circle, the more ridiculous his control became.
He couldn't help it.
For the first time, he truly understood how outrageously biased creation was in favor of dragons. Even the mentality of a former "baseline human" like him felt rattled by it.
Their mana pools were already absurd, and now they got to use less mana for the same spells? What a bargain.
If there really was a creator god, then when He was sculpting dragons He'd clearly gone overboard, made a walking bugged stat-block, and then had to hotfix the species afterward by making them rare just to keep the world from breaking.
Otherwise, dragons would've conquered every inch of land on the map long ago.
He tossed the thought aside and kept testing.
"Hmn—"
Another short Draconic syllable rolled from his throat, deep and resonant.
The temperature ticked upward.
A spurt of red flame appeared in front of him out of nowhere, then dropped to the ground and set the dry grass alight.
"Again…"
A heartbeat later, another Draconic syllable, this one carrying the concept of water.
Above the burning patch, a little cloud of clear water blinked into existence and promptly splashed down, dousing the fire with a hiss.
Success, again.
Gauss stared at the scorched patch for a few seconds.
He hadn't actually cast any specific spell there.
He had just… spoken.
And nature had listened.
He said "fire," and the world dug up a little heat and fuel.
He said "water," and it produced a little water.
The flames were weak, the water unimpressive, sure, but it was fundamentally different from spellcasting.
On the small scale, it was free elemental manipulation—no personal mana spent.
On the large scale, it was speaking and having reality react.
The essence of "words made law."
Just like a true Word of Power.
He kept testing with other elements.
Rock. Sapling. Breeze. Flickers of lightning. Frost.
Just tiny, simple effects.
It was all… insane.
And he could feel that this "word shaping" had room to grow, tied directly to the strength of his soul.
And while soul and Intelligence weren't the same thing, they ran on parallel tracks.
In other words, as his class level rose, his soul would grow too.
"I wonder how much better Comprehend Languages is now…"
He remembered the way it had worked on Maggie.
That could wait until they got back to town. He wanted to try it on his party and Hefeis properly.
"Next…"
He looked at the talent entry in his Manual.
[Elementary Draconic – White (Upgradeable)]
The icon was glowing faintly.
[Requirements met for quality upgrade. Evolve "Elementary Draconic" from White to Blue?]
"Yes."
He didn't hesitate.
He wanted this talent stronger as soon as possible.
At his mental confirmation, his Elite Points dropped by a clean 100.
A wash of blue flooded over the Draconic entry, swallowing the white and deepening into a rich, luminous azure.
[Elementary Draconic – White successfully evolved.]
His mind and soul both shivered.
The upgraded talent hammered his soul one more time, hardening its core.
Gauss' eyes shifted again, turning a clearer, sharper gold.
The light in them was deeper now, almost physical, like twin beams boring through the air.
This time, the evolution didn't take nearly as long to process as the original data download.
Maybe his upgraded "hardware" could handle it better.
Elementary Draconic had quietly become Intermediate Draconic.
So purple would be "advanced," then?
What about gold, and red?
A new wave of curiosity washed over him.
[Intermediate Draconic – Blue]
"Your grasp of Draconic has moved past baby talk. You've left the wobbly hatchling stage behind."
"Your Draconic now carries more dragon's might and rule-power. Sound- and language-based spells are strengthened, and your resistance to similar hostile effects is greatly increased."
"Your 'word shaping'—commanding ambient mana with Draconic alone—has improved in scope and potency, and element-based spells are further enhanced."
"Your soul has been tempered by Draconic power. Mental resistance is up; you're more resistant to fear, charm, and similar attacks. Your soul's long-term growth potential has increased slightly."
…
Lines like that kept scrolling past.
Gauss read them in silence—then let out a soft breath.
Now this—this was what being a "patch baby" looked like.
~~~
Patreon.com/NotEvenMyFinalForm
–› please check my patreon page for more chapters! Thank you!