I prowled around camp, looking for Garth. He was the only kid around my age, so I got along with him the best. Most of the captured people were adults or little kids. Only a few teenagers would go across the ocean.
School mostly went from middle school to university, so only a few teenagers would be going on trips. Only the little kids who had to accompany their parents would come along. Kids are educated by their parents until they are ten. Only then would they go to school.
Noble families preferred to wait to send their children until they were 14 and instead would hire tutors until then.
I knew Garth was using his actual appearance and age because of the shape of his soul. You could change your body, but your soul would always take on your everyday appearance.
After exploring camp for a while, I found Garth near the beach. Some fish folk, one of the eight primary races, wanted to explore the ocean. There was almost one of every race here. I was one of a couple of humans. There were five beastmen, four elves, four dwarves, seven fisherfolk, three orcs, and seven humans.
Garth was the one daemon here, and I was another human, for 32 people. We only needed people of the spirit race to complete the eight races.
I walked up to Garth, waiting for him to finish his supervision.
"Is… is that you, Alex?" It took Garth a second to recognize me.
"Meow." I was currently a cat. Using a mixture of shape and density shifting, I got my body down to the size of a big cat. I was in the form of Jasper, my family back home in the Duchy.
I changed back to my body. My nanomachines replaced my clothes. I could now wear whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, a side benefit of having my body be entirely malleable.
"What are you doing here?" I asked Garth.
"I'm just watching over the fisher men. Enough about that, what was that just now? A new spell?"
"No, my body can do that all on its own."
"Wha… How?" Garth was a bit flabbergasted.
"Nanomachines, son."
"Nano-what now?"
"You wouldn't understand."
"Alright, so can you transform into anything now?"
"Yeah, I guess." As long as I had enough energy, I didn't need to eat or drink. Even now, I was a walking solar panel charging my internal battery and a battery I constructed in my inner world.
For the rest of the day, Garth experimented with all my different capabilities. I could even separate into multiple different bodies.
-----
The next day, we left our campsite. We fully stocked up on food and whatever else we could find, and I removed any trace of our being there. We were unlikely to be tracked, but it never hurt to be sure.
It was a long trip: another week of travel up the coast and then four days inland. Our spot wasn't too far from the beach—only a day of travel by horse—and it was in a fertile valley next to an extensive mountain range.
Garth had come here before when he ran away for the first time. The strongest beast around there would be seventh-ranked. The stronger beasts were way up north.
It was another boring trip, but the stone I was hatching was opening up. I could feel the shell becoming thinner. By the time we arrived, the shell would be almost entirely gone.
I wasn't slacking off, either. I cultivated my mana core. With my body getting another upgrade, it could handle up to 6 lines of mana around my core, and every cell in my body could handle four times more mana.
I also experimented with neutral mana and its effect on the world. My best element was neutral, or rather just plain mana manipulation. Mana was a sort of energy, but it could also become tangible in a high enough concentration.
Annihilation separated atoms and was my best magic. It was also of the neutral element, using pure mana manipulation to sever each bond. I wanted to do the opposite and make things by pushing together atoms.
I wanted to be able to restructure atoms at a high enough level, but that would require a higher core rank.
I am trying to bring a bunch of dirt metal atoms together. By using annihilation on a piece of pure iron inside a vacuum, I knew that everything inside it would be pure Fe, so if I got it to work, it would turn back into a chunk of iron.
Reverse engineering the annihilation process wouldn't work for all cases, so I need a new magic. People always say destruction is more effortless than construction.
-----
On the ninth day of travel, I felt something from the egg. It was nighttime, and I was sleeping on the coach's roof. The egg was on my stomach, held up by my clothes. I had trained to be a light sleeper in the dungeon, and currently, I didn't even need sleep, but sleep was nice.
I felt the egg shake slightly, prompting me to wake up. Over the next couple of hours, the egg continued occasionally shaking. In the morning, the shell finally thinned enough for a crack to appear.
I noticed the egg was using the crack to absorb mana. I couldn't see anything through the rest of the shell, but the crack gave me a glimpse into a little ball of life. Wanting the chick to have enough energy, I supplemented it with my mana.
By noon, Garth came over to watch it hatch with me. The crack was slightly more prominent, and the vibration more energetic. The whole time, I was supplying the egg with heat and mana. I wanted this baby to have the best chance of survival it could.
It took until the afternoon for the egg to make any more significant progress. The cracks had now spread all over the egg, and I could feel the child coming out.
Garth had to lead the caravan again, but I used all my attention on the egg. It had to be good as a loot drop from a tenth-rank dungeon.
The egg hatched around five in the afternoon. I watched as a little claw stepped out first, followed by the leg, head, and body.
It was a scaly, feathery, winged animal. It was a deep green shade with little black and red speckles. It almost looked like a baby dragon, but the egg was too small, and no dragon I knew looked like this.
As it looked up at me with its beady little eyes, covered in the egg's goo, it started eating its eggshell. I kept a small piece for research later. The thing reminded me of a dinosaur, like a pterodactyl or pteradon.
Its head and body were scaly, but its wings, feet, and tail were all covered in feathers. The hungry little chick was still absorbing more mana, so I fed it more of mine. My mana replenished faster than it could take.
I hoped that if I fed it, it would imprint on me with my mana. As it finished its eggshell, I fetched some raw meat for it to eat. While small, the baby had noticeable canines and fangs, like a predator's.
As I cut up the meat for the little bird to eat, Garth came over to meet the new addition. By now, it was full and stopped absorbing mana. I quickly washed the goo out of the bird, and it fell asleep in my lap.