Chapter 168

"Let's see if the food tastes good enough to justify all the effort," the dragon said as she turned, and walked toward the dinner table, not bothering to hide the seductive sway around her hips, creating a beautiful sight.

She certainly deserved some assistance, I decided even as I leveraged the stray piece of mana I had connected to her dress earlier, ready to unravel her magically conjured clothes. Of course, rather than destroying it immediately, I started examining it first. I needed to make it look like it was her mistake, and to do that, I needed to understand the nature of her magical craft. It was a simple affair...

Or at least, it was supposed to be, but the moment I focused on the details, I met with a completely unfamiliar magical structure. It was supposed to be a little fun prank, only to come to a hard stop as I took a deeper peek into the construction principles. It was a very complicated, elegant design, showing an interesting combination of crafting and mana manipulation, displaying an expertise that wasn't often found in people who relied on the System.

However, the elegance wasn't the source of my confusion.

No, it was the complete uselessness of it. The mana strings and wards that created the dress were impressively complicated, but there was a point in crafting or casting that such elegant detail stopped being helpful, and started being harmful instead, threatening the stability of the construct.

It was about the natural movement of mana. Similar to water, mana had a tendency to evaporate, and even tricks applied to the construction of the wards only slowed that down. Of course, it was not a challenge for wards, as their natural spending far surpassed the natural evaporation, but even with a source, going below a certain size was unsustainable. Yet, the mana strings of her dress were far below that practical limit.

Of course, it was just a dress with no magical benefits, no additional protection, or magical enchantment, creating such a complicated design wasn't too magically intensive, and it could be refreshed easily. Not that it explained why she was deliberately using an inferior design.

I wanted to dismiss that track of thought, but it was making my brain itch, telling me that I was missing something obvious. It was a very unfamiliar sensation with my skills and stats. I was used to connecting discrete topics very easily.

Pity I couldn't just maintain the connection with the little mana I had left attached to her dress for long without making her suspicious. And despite the elegance of its structure, finding a core node that would destabilize the whole dress hadn't been too difficult. I destroyed it, and pulled my mana senses back.

The dress didn't immediately disintegrate, of course, that wouldn't be fun. However, I could see a few pieces of fabric losing substance around the skirt, getting slightly transparent.

Excellent, I thought even as I continued to follow her swaying hips, leaving the mysterious nature of the clothes to the side for the moment. Though, as her skirt got shorter, revealing more of her beautiful, if short, legs. When she arrived at the table, I was quick to pull her chair, which allowed me to get a glimpse of her beautiful cleavage.

Her back arched as she sat down, a movement that was too exaggerated to be accidental, enhancing her cleavage even more. "I hope you enjoy your dinner, mistress," I said as I pulled to the side, once again using the same exaggerated tone servant tone, not letting her forget that I was only playing around.

I was expecting her to enjoy the food I had created. My crafting skills, combined with a very generous amount of mana to serve the special preferences of a dragon, were not something to be dismissed.

However, I certainly didn't expect her eyes to close as a moan of pleasure, the kind that I was used to hearing in a different context, escaped her beautiful lips. She trembled erotically, which made her even more attractive, tempting me to abandon my role.

Her eyes jerked open soon after, showing that I wasn't the only one that was surprised by her reaction.

I could have teased her about that, of course, but with her dress slowly unraveling, I had a better idea. "Good try teasing me," I said, which was a touch excessive.

"Y-yeah," she stammered, happy to take my excuse. "I was just teasing you."

"I can tell with the way you're playing with your dress," I answered, pointing at the right side, where a piece had already gone. The way her eyes widened was beautiful.

"R-right!" she stammered even as her gaze turned down, noticing her dress was suffering smaller.

She raised her hand, but before she could cast a spell, I spoke once again. "Too bad you won't be able to stay like that for too long. You'll get scared and fix it back, making it pointless posturing."

"I never get scared," she said as she slammed her hand to the table — which only survived thanks to the numerous enchantments weaved into its nature. Her vehemence at the mention of getting scared surprised me. Maybe I had managed to touch a soft spot.

"Oh, really. Then why don't you show it by not casting a spell until you finished the great dinner I had prepared for you."

"That's nothing, of course, but why should I let you do it."

I could have raised the favors she owed me, goaded her into a bet, or start flirting. I chose none of those options. "Hey, if you want to be a coward, go ahead and be one. You don't need an excuse."

Her response was to throw a knife, which I deflected using a magical shield.

[-483 Mana]

"Hey, be careful," I said, panicked. Of course, it was also fake, and I used such a strong magical shielding because I wanted to refresh my connection to her dress, and not just to quicken the speed of her dress' disintegration.

I also wanted to continue examining the spell structure of her dress, trying to understand why I was finding it familiar.

"Don't call me that," she said, her eyes glowing even brighter, its green taking a threatening sheen.

"Sheesh, overreaction much?" I asked, but didn't push her any harder on that aspect. Her strength certainly was not a joke.

She said nothing else, just took another bite of the food. I noted that this time, it was much bigger. Combined with the speed of her chewing, I could see it was less about her fascination with the food, and more about wanting to finish it quicker, so that she could resolve the issue with her dress without eating her own words. Unfortunately for her, there was a big flaw in her choice.

The orgasmic joy of eating.

As she ate her food hurriedly, it impacted her even harder. To her credit, she managed to suppress her shivers, and most of her moans, the remaining subtle enough to be disguised as the reaction for good food.

Unfortunately, her body decided to disagree with her decision to keep things hidden. Her nipples started to get harder, pushing against the tight fabric of her dress — a view not helped by the slowly disintegrating fabric of her dress.

I managed to control the disintegration partially, directing the disintegration to safe spots, arms, shoulders, stomach, and the lower sections of her skirt.

I wasn't onset by a sudden invasion of charitable feelings, certainly not against a beautiful natural disaster like her. But I could see that the safer spots were already pushing her limits, and I didn't want her escaping from the table before she finished her food.

"Make sure to finish your food," I reminded her. "Because the mana will evaporate in a few minutes?"

"Why?" she asked.

"What do you mean, why?" I asked, surprised by her question.

Her gaze was equally confused. "I mean why the mana would evaporate that quickly, of course," she said.

Then, something clicked in my mind. The weirdly flimsy nature of her enchantments that could only last for a few hours, her shock at the possibility that the food would not be able to contain that much mana for long. Even the designs I had noticed on Oeyne's room flashed in my view, more similar to her dress than anything outside.

"It's because of the System, naturally," I answered with a certain tone, even though it was more of a guess than certainty. My hands were bound by the fact that I couldn't be honest about my lack of knowledge.

However, it wasn't baseless under the assumption that the System wasn't just connected to people, but also this section of the world in general, somehow affecting it. Together with the clear difference of free mana that was available that she had been complaining about, and the fact that a magical construct she had created habitually was too flimsy to survive under the mana evaporation — something I had written off as a natural phenomenon — I was pretty confident in my guest.

It certainly explained why the designs I found in Oeyne's workshop had been so weird that I was willing to write them off as impossible to work.

There was one important question. Why did it take me that long to actually connect the dots?

[Level: 32 Experience: 499110 / 528000

Strength: 46 Charisma: 63

Precision: 40 Perception: 42

Agility: 40 Manipulation: 45

Speed: 39 Intelligence: 49

Endurance: 39 Wisdom: 51

HP: 6528 / 6528 Mana: 7838 / 8000 ]

SKILLS

Master Melee [100/100]

Master Tantric [100/100]

Master Biomancy [100/100]

Master Elemental [100/100]

Master Arcana [100/100]

Master Subterfuge [100/100]

Master Craft [77/100]

Expert Speech [75/75]

PERKS

Mana Regeneration

Skill Share

Empowerment (1/1)

Teleportation

COMPANIONS

[Cornelia - Level 22/26]

[Helga - Level 22/26]