69novels Chapter 118: Hunger for Cores
Chapter 118: Hunger for Cores
’That beast,’ Noah thought. ’was actually a mutated beast.’
The distinction mattered.
Mutated beasts had tough skin which had been enhanced by mana, so for Kael to reduce one to nothing but ash and bones said a lot about how powerful his black fire was.
It had probably been close to breaking through to advanced rank.
Yet, it had died in a single breath.
One breath from a creature the size of a small pup, and the mutated dog that had been approaching advanced rank was simply gone.
Kael, meanwhile, had descended.
He dropped from his hovering position with casual confidence, his wings folding as he landed on the chest of the corpse with a lightness that contradicted the weight of what he was landing on.
He stood there for a moment, his golden horns tilting slightly as he looked down at the burned body beneath him.
Then he scoffed.
The sound came through the mental link a fraction of a second before the words did.
’The stupid dog doesn’t even have a core.’
Noah raised a brow.
"You know about beast cores?"
The surprise was genuine. Beast cores were a specific and somewhat technical subject — crystallized concentrations of mana that formed inside certain mana beasts over time, their quality and density determined by the beast’s rank and how long it had been accumulating mana before its death.
Though the knowledge of beast cores were quite common, that was only among Magi, so Noah was a bit surprised Kael, who was only a few days old knew about them also.
Kael pushed off the corpse and rose back into the air, his wings carrying him upward with a few clean strokes before leveling out into his usual hover.
He gave a single nod, the movement carrying the particular composure of someone confirming something they considered obvious.
"Of course," he said. "I read about it in those books."
Noah smiled wryly.
"Right," he said. "Of course you did."
He kept forgetting that Kael’s baseline of knowledge wasn’t built from lived experience the way most creatures’ was.
It was built from everything Noah had read aloud during those early sessions — texts absorbed through the link and processed by an intelligence that was young in age but not in capacity.
If beast cores had appeared anywhere in those pages, Kael had learnt about them too.
Kael’s gaze drifted forward, moving across the forest ahead of them with a look that was less alert and more contemplative than his usual expression.
"I would like to eat one," he said. "A beast core."
Noah looked at him.
"Why?"
The question came out genuine rather than challenging.
It hadn’t occurred to him before — in the days since Kael had hatched, the subject of food had simply never come up.
The dragon had functioned without it. Active, vocal, fully present, his energy levels showing no sign of depletion or need.
Noah had constructed a quiet assumption around that observation: dragons drew their nourishment from their master’s mana, some kind of passive transfer through the bond, and didn’t require conventional sustenance.
It had seemed reasonable.
It had also, he was now realizing, been entirely unverified.
He looked at Kael with the slightly uncomfortable awareness of someone running a rapid mental check on whether they had been inadvertently neglecting a basic need for several days.
The dragon didn’t look starved — he looked exactly the same as he always did, which was healthy and self-satisfied and energetic. But looks weren’t a complete diagnostic.
"It’s been days since you hatched," Noah said, the thought moving from internal to spoken almost without deciding to. "You’ve never asked for anything to eat. I assumed you were getting what you needed through our connection."
Kael glanced back at him.
"I’m not even sure," he said.
"I just feel the urge to." He paused for a moment, his wings adjusting slightly. "And I can tell it would help me grow stronger."
Noah nodded slowly.
’So his dragon instincts are directing him toward beast cores,’ he thought, turning the idea over with genuine curiosity. ’Does that mean beast cores are the natural food of dragons?’
It was an interesting question with no immediate answer.
The books he had read hadn’t covered dragon dietary habits in any useful depth — the creatures appeared in mythology and magical theory but rarely in the kind of practical, biological documentation that would address something as specific as what they ate and why. Most of what existed was either vague or contradictory.
But the instinct angle made a certain kind of sense.
Beast cores were concentrated mana in its most refined natural form — compressed over years inside a living creature, processed through the beast’s own system until what remained was something far denser and more potent than ambient mana.
For a creature like Kael, who was built from mana in a more fundamental way than humans were, the appeal wasn’t difficult to reason through.
The problem was that beast cores were extraordinarily dangerous to consume.
For humans — and for most other species that had been studied — ingesting a beast core was considered one of the more reliable ways to end your own life.
The concentrated mana hit the body faster than it could be processed, flooding the mana pathways with more than they could handle and producing a poisoning that moved from severe to fatal with very little time between the two stages.
It didn’t matter what rank the beast had been. Even a low-rank core consumed by a magus was enough to cause damage that healers struggled to reverse.
It was the kind of thing that came up in cautionary contexts rather than instructional ones.
With a dragon, though.
Noah looked at Kael, hovering beside him with his usual composure, and found he wasn’t particularly worried.
A creature whose exhalation had just consumed a near-advanced mutated beast in a single breath probably had mana pathways that operated on different tolerances than anything the standard warnings had been written to address.
If Kael’s instincts were pointing him toward beast cores, those instincts likely knew something about his capacity that the human literature on mana poisoning didn’t account for.
"Fine," Noah said. "Then let’s find a mana beast that’ll actually have one."
Kael nodded, falling into position beside him as Noah moved forward into the deeper forest.
They didn’t have to go far.
The trees thickened further as they walked, the trunks broader, the undergrowth denser, the light reaching the floor in narrower columns.
The mana in the air was heavier here — not oppressive, but present in a way that the outer forest sections didn’t match, the kind of atmospheric density that came from a space where powerful creatures had been living and breathing and exuding mana for a long time.
Then the sound reached them.
Low at first — a collective rumble, somewhere between a growl and a breath, coming from multiple points ahead and slightly to the left. Noah’s eyes moved toward it without hurry, and through the gap between two wide trunks, he found them.
Wolves.
A pack of them, positioned in the loose formation that predators used when they were in familiar territory and alert but not yet fully committed to an action — spread enough to cover angles, close enough to coordinate.
There were several of them visible from where Noah stood, with the suggestion of more in the shadows further back.
Their fur was brown and white, the two colors distributed differently across each animal but present in all of them — patches and streaks and blended gradients that broke up their outlines in the dappled forest light.
Their fangs showed at the edges of mouths that were slightly open, and above their eyes, small horns sat in pairs — dark, short, each one angled slightly forward in the way that suggested they were functional rather than decorative.
’Brown horned wolves,’ Noah thought, the classification arriving without effort.
He had read about them. Vucious mana beasts, pack hunters, the horns serving as secondary mana conductors that allowed them to channel coordinated attacks across the group.
More dangerous in number than their individual rank suggested, which was the whole point of the formation they were currently holding.
His gaze moved across the pack with the practiced ease of someone who had learned to read groupings quickly.
Then it settled.
Near the center of the formation, slightly ahead of the others, was one that was different from its packmates in ways that were immediately apparent even without the Eye of Truth.
It was bigger — not dramatically, but measurably, the difference in shoulder height visible even at this distance.
Its posture carried a quality that the others deferred to rather than matched, the subtle body language of a creature that the rest of the pack oriented around.
And the aura coming off it was stronger.
Not just rank-stronger — the kind of stronger that came from long accumulation, from a beast that had been at the top of its local hierarchy long enough to compound the advantages that position provided.
Noah looked at it for a moment.
Then he activated the Eye of Truth and let it run its scan.
At the sight of what appeared, a small smirk appeared on his lips.