My Bugged System Made Me Too OP!

Chapter 125: I want cooked food

He shook his head slightly.

It wasn’t disapproval — more the mild, resigned acknowledgment of someone who had observed a pattern enough times to have an opinion about it.

Kael’s methods were effective. They were also, by any reasonable measure, brutal in a way that Noah’s own approach rarely was.

Not reckless — there was precision in everything the dragon did, and this was no exception — but there was something in Kael’s choices that went past efficiency into something that seemed to take a particular satisfaction in the specific manner of ending things.

The rod through the snake from one end to the other was a very good example of that.

The snake was advanced grade. Had been, more accurately — a genuine advanced grade mana beast with the horn and the mana signature and the territorial presence to match that classification.

Not something to be casually dismissed, not the kind of encounter that most practitioners at the middle ranks would have walked away from cleanly.

Kael had toyed with it.

Noah had watched the whole thing, and that was the honest description of what had occurred.

The dragon had let the snake engage, had moved around its strikes with the unhurried ease of something that knew the outcome before the engagement began.

He had also used the spatial portals to redirect two of the snake’s own attacks back at it, and had generally conducted himself with the energy of someone who had allocated an amount of effort to the situation and was not going to exceed that allocation regardless of what the snake attempted.

And then, when whatever internal timeline Kael was operating on had apparently reached its conclusion, the rod had appeared.

Inserted from the tail end, traveling through the full length of the creature’s body with the same impossibly clean passage that the previous dark constructs had demonstrated, emerging from the open jaw with the composed finality of a decision being executed rather than a fight being won.

The snake had been dead before it had fully processed what had entered it.

Brutal was the word. Precise and brutal, the combination that Kael seemed to favor.

Noah shook his head one more time, filed it, and moved forward.

Kael glanced at him as he approached.

The smirk that formed on the dragon’s face was knowing — the expression of someone who had accurately read a reaction and found it mildly amusing.

He held it for a moment, letting Noah see that he had seen the head shake and had formed an opinion about it, and then he dropped down toward the snake’s corpse with the focused movement of something that had already moved on to the next item.

Lying beside the body, separate from it, was a small orb.

Red.

The color reflected the snake’s element. Fire affinity produced cores that expressed it visibly, the accumulated fire mana giving the crystallized concentration its color the way the snake’s scales had been given theirs.

It was more vivid than the mutated cores had been.

Denser in its glow, the light from within it steadier and more present, the object carrying a weight of compressed mana that was legible even without the Eye of Truth or an extended mana sense.

Advanced grade expressed itself in the core the same way it expressed itself in the beast — not just more of the same thing, but a qualitative difference that the appearance of the object communicated before any formal assessment was made.

This was the second advanced grade core they had collected.

The first had come from a pig-shaped beast they had encountered twenty minutes earlier — thick-skulled, earth element, carrying the dense gray-brown core that earth affinity produced.

Kael had eaten it within moments of its retrieval, and Noah had watched carefully for a result.

Better than the mutated cores. Marginally.

The expression on Kael’s face after the first advanced core had been an improvement over the flat disappointment that the wolf cores had produced — not satisfaction, not the ecstasy of the consumption itself, but something that at least acknowledged the step up in quality.

Still not enough to produce a visible effect. Still not registering as the growth that Kael’s instincts had been pointing toward when he had first expressed the desire to eat beast cores at all.

But better.

In between the two advanced grade encounters, there had been other beasts.

Mutated grade, several of them, encountered as they moved through different territorial pockets within the deeper forest.

Some had dropped cores, most hadn’t — the drop rate was inconsistent at that rank in a way that the advanced grade cores weren’t, the accumulation at mutated grade not yet reliable enough to guarantee crystallization in every individual.

Noah had noted that pattern and found it consistent with what he understood about how cores formed.

The relationship between rank and core formation wasn’t linear — it was more like a probability that increased with the density of accumulated mana.

At the lowest ranks, cores were rare enough to be treated as exceptional finds rather than expected outcomes.

At mutated grade, the probability had increased but remained genuinely uncertain.

Advanced grade was different — the accumulation required to reach that classification was significant enough that core formation was nearly guaranteed, the mana density crossing the threshold where crystallization became the natural outcome rather than the occasional one.

Higher ranks, higher certainty.

Which meant the path to reliable, quality cores pointed upward — and pointed there by necessity, not just by Kael’s preference.

That was the consistent logic running through all of it — rank determined accumulation, accumulation determined density, density determined what the core was worth and what it could offer to whatever consumed or used it.

To Kael, the question was whether the difference was enough.

He looked at it for a moment longer.

Then he ate it.

The process was the same as before — the wide jaw, the silent consumption, the careful chewing that produced no sound the forest could register.

His expression during it was more considered than it had been with the wolf cores, less the instinctive ecstasy of first contact and more the focused attention of someone making a genuine assessment while the thing being assessed was still present on the palate.

He chewed for longer than he had with the previous ones.

Then he swallowed.

The exhale that followed was slow and complete, and when it finished, Kael was still for a moment in the particular way of someone arriving at a verdict.

"Yeah," he said, his voice carrying a measured quality that was new relative to his usual register. "This is better."

A pause.

"But still not enough."

Noah smiled wryly.

It was the smile of someone who had expected this outcome and had brought himself to a place of equanimity about it before it arrived, which made the confirmation of it land as mild rather than frustrating.

The search for appropriate cores was going to extend past this forest and past this morning, and he had already begun making peace with that on the walk between encounters.

He turned to the snake’s corpse.

The black rod that had been running through it — entering at the tail, exiting at the jaw.

It thinned at its edges first, the dense darkness of it becoming less absolute, the surface losing the solidity that had made it look like material rather than constructed mana.

Then it thinned further, the process moving inward from the outside, and within a few seconds it was gone entirely — disintegrated into nothing, released by Kael now that whatever purpose had kept it manifested had concluded.

The snake settled more completely into the ground without it.

Noah looked at the corpse for a moment, then back at Kael, who had risen back to his hovering position with his usual composed ease.

"Why don’t you just eat the flesh?" Noah asked. The question came out with genuine curiosity rather than suggestion — he wasn’t recommending it, just noting the available option. "I thought dragons were meant to be carnivores."

Kael looked down at the snake.

The look lasted about two seconds, which was enough time for an expression to form on his face that communicated his opinion of the question clearly before he had said a word.

Then he scoffed — a short, sharp sound that carried significant weight for its brevity — and pushed off upward, rising away from the corpse with the energy of someone putting deliberate distance between themselves and something beneath their consideration.

He came back up to Noah’s level and kept moving, circling slowly, his chest pushing forward into the puffed position it took when he was about to say something he considered self-evidently true and was mildly exasperated at having to say it.

"I’m not like these lowly beasts," he said, his eyes moving briefly downward toward the snake with the specific quality of a glance that contained an entire verdict. "Who stoop low and eat raw flesh."

He completed a small circle around Noah and continued, warming to the subject with the natural momentum that his declarations tended to gather once they started.

"I’m an ancient dragon." The emphasis on ancient was precise — not loud, but weighted, the word doing the work he intended it to do.

His wings adjusted slightly as he moved, the golden horns catching the filtered light through the canopy in the way they did when he was fully upright in his posture rather than in any relaxed configuration. "Whatever I eat has to be the crème of the top."

He paused for exactly the right amount of time.

"And it has to be cooked properly."

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