[Xander – 13 years]

"Hi, Niels," I greet him after landing on his island.

He's made a spot which I think is meant for me to land on. It's at the part where I normally land, and it has a circle of purple blocks at the very center, then a circle of blue ones, then purple, then blue, then purple. It's like an archery target. Surrounding most of it are flowers and custom bushes, and there's a path he's currently making which leads away from it.

"Is this a landing pad?" I ask.

"Yup!" Niels answers. "And hey! How'd your weekend go?"

"It was good, I think," I answer. "Friday afternoon was fun, then Grandpa Adrian took me hunting and I killed a bunch of wyverns and some other things. That was both so I could learn more about magic, more about magic beasts, practice some magics, and to help cull the population of the excessively powerful beasts.

"I also helped out some local hunters with an issue," I continue. "After that, I went to Carter's with Sig, and the two of them and Tate rode horses while I rode Uncle Aurum. Then yesterday, Grandpa Adrian spent most of it teaching me how to butcher a wyvern. He's gonna butcher the rest of my catches. The one we did yesterday was a spatial wyvern, since its bones are going to be used for a construction project this week, to stabilize a spatial expansion enchantment. After that, Dad and I were going to go shopping to buy stuff for my party this weekend and the celebrations next week, but his parents made a surprise visit. That wasn't very nice… and dinner was weird. I don't think I like hot pot. Oh! And Sig apparently learned how to use chopsticks yesterday. He told me last night that he ate two giant dessert cupcakes to reward himself for eating his entire dinner with it. He apparently had chopstick-food for dinner, too. Something about a general's chicken? And some other chicken things."

"Alright," Niels chuckles. "And to clarify for our confused chatters: he was referring to a unicorn. You can check out some of his earlier streams to see, but Aurum's a unicorn. Also an uncle of his on his mother's side. That's all info he's made public, so I'm not revealing anything I shouldn't."

"People were confused?"

"You've got your chat in emote-only again, don't you?"

"Yeah."

"What were they doing this time?"

"Being weird."

Niels snorts.

"What were they doing that was weird?"

"I don't want to say," I tell him. "It was really weird."

"Alright," he chuckles. "How long are they in timeout for?"

"I set it for fifteen minutes," I answer. "So it should stop in about twelve. They were doing it toward the end of the talking period. And I wanted to come say 'hi' to you and ask you some stuff, so I did that after logging on and checking some stuff."

"Hello!" He says.

"Did you see the announcement?" I ask. "I don't know if you did or not, since you're streaming. I posted it during my talking period."

"On the server chat?" He asks, referring to the chat server for the SMP, not the in-game chat. "Yeah, I saw it. Is it public, then?"

"Yeah," I answer. "I told my chat about it and posted it to the SMP's news page."

"Oh, cool!" He says. "Wasn't sure if I could tell my chat or if it was a surprise. Do you want to tell them?"

Is this him telling me to tell his chat, or just asking me? This is so difficult… but I guess I can do it.

"We're having a Halloween party on the server on Friday," I tell his chat, though this might also be news to any of my chatters who arrived after I announced it during the talking session. "It'll be at twelve-thirty in the afternoon, my time. Oh, but I won't be participating."

"You won't?"

"No," I answer. "I'm helping design it, but I ain't gonna go. Y'all are gonna be noisy for sure and I don't want to do that. And-and I'm thinking of taking Friday's stream off to set up for my party. There are supposed to be decorations."

I don't want to take off Friday because it's a stream day, but at the same time, I don't want to participate in the noisy party here then go do other stuff where it'll be noisy. And I really do have to put up decorations for the party, and I'm not sure if I really want to do that after hangouts and dinner other days. Especially since Dad and I are now scheduled to go shopping after I hang out with my friends today.

Well, and the dorm rooms aren't getting added until tomorrow, but that shouldn't affect decorating time. Either way, I've got at least one less day for decorating, maybe two.

"Good luck!" He says.

"Thanks," I say. "You're making a landing pad even though I'm the only one coming over?"

"Yup!" He answers. "You usually use this spot to land, so I figured I'd pretty it up so that it's not plain and boring. After I finish connecting it to the other path, I'm going to build some custom trees around it – but leave open the part exposed to the edge of the island. That way, you can swoop in and out like normal."

"Oh," I say. "Thanks. By the way, I was looking up sun beef, and it apparently isn't available in Kenzibri. No sun cattle. I couldn't find a way to order any, either. Do y'all do international deliveries? I know the krakens in the Pacific Ocean make it difficult to transport things that way, and the leviathan over in the Atlantic keeps taking potshots at planes, reducing travel and increasing risk. But since your family's mostly dragon with some actual dragons in it… I was wondering if maybe y'all might deliver it?"

That's not the leviathan Greyson found himself face-to-face with when I accidentally forgot to key him back into the workshop's wards that time. He was further north, if I did my math correctly. The one taking potshots at planes in the Pacific Ocean only started doing that recently.

"Ah," he says. "Yeah, international delivery is a thing for us, but not to Kenzibri. It's a bit tricky to get there because of those oceanic beasts. And the leviathan and krakens are actually stronger than most sapient dragons. We tend to plateau around two to three mil mana, and those came from much further south. Ma says she ain't sure why they haven't been dealt with yet. Otherwise, I'd be more than happy to take you some of our sun beef. So y'all ain't got sun cattle that way? Damn."

"I was looking forward to trying some, too…" I sigh. "So how strong is the leviathan?"

"Ma says it's about four mil," he answers. "It would have to be someone like Her Majesty to deal with them, I think. She's stronger by a decent amount and could probably handle it but at the same time… that particular leviathan is bothersome. I can avoid his potshots, though, so I can ask my parents for permission to fly some beef out to you."

"Okay," I say.

As I start to ask him the other thing I came to his island in the game for, Niels begins laughing really hard. His chat must have said something funny, and I wait for him to stop laughing.

"Ma heard me and said 'you are not going to try to dodge a leviathan, no matter how much you think you can avoid him!'" He tells me. "Traveling to Kenzibri is banned for me until the leviathan stops with the potshots."

"Oh," I say. "I'm gonna ask Grandpa Adrian why he's not doing anything with the leviathan."

"Alright," he says. "Do you mean now?"

"Yeah," I answer.

"Hello, Xander," Grandpa Adrian answers the phone. "You're streaming right now, aren't you?"

"Yeah," I answer. "I was talking with Niels and he said he wasn't allowed to come bring me sun beef because of the leviathan causing problems in the Atlantic ocean. That doesn't make sense, since he could just fly the other way, but I guess he ain't allowed to try and evade the krakens, either. And it has me wondering how come you haven't killed the leviathan yet."

"It hasn't affected travel from us too much," he explains. "Since it doesn't target every flight and we already don't see much international travel here. It also doesn't target the ships I have going out with exports, or coming in with imports. What little of those we have. That's mostly because it can sense the avatar I have on those ships and that it would likely lose its life if it targeted them.

"As for other reasons," he says. "I also don't know what I would do with that much leviathan meat or other parts."

"Oh."

That's really disappointing. Then it'll be awhile before I can try sun beef. Asking about taking care of it myself isn't an option now since there wouldn't be much to do with the remains. That would just be wasteful.

"If you really want to open up the path for your cousin," he says. "Make sure to get permission from your father, first. Drop the leviathan off at the processing facility and yes, you can have the camera on for that. They'll just see me working on some of the wyverns you killed on Saturday."

"But you said there ain't much to do with its remains," I say. "Since it's just so much."

"I did," he says. "But that doesn't mean I can't put it into stasis and have it used over time, it would just likely be decades for some things."

"Oh," I say. "Okay. Thanks, Grandpa Adrian! I'm gonna ask Dad now."

"Love you," he says.

"Love you, too!" I respond. "Bye!"

I hang up, then text Dad.

[Xander]: Can I go kill the leviathan causing problems with travel across the Atlantic Ocean? Niels isn't allowed to come deliver sun beef to me because of it.

"Grandpa Adrian said I could," I tell Niels after unmuting. "I've now texted Dad and… he said yes. I'm gonna log off for a little bit so I can go kill it. Bye!"

I fly back to my house on the SMP. It really looks like a tree now thanks to Niels's help last week, and I like its appearance. The interior even looks nice as well, thanks to my own efforts.

Setting up the inside was a lot easier than making the house look like a tree. There's room for several floors in the house, but I'm mostly just using the first floor.

"Alright, chat," I say. "I'm heading to the Atlantic Ocean for a little bit, but I'm gonna stream it. Lemme switch to an orb."

After I switch to an orb and my streamer glasses, I leave my room and locate my sneakers, then pull them on and head to the street before teleporting myself and the orb to the ocean. I already knew where to teleport to thanks to Greyson's information on the leviathan (he has it marked as something to avoid, though I don't know why he would be in its area since he can teleport to other continents).

"Hm…" I look around. "The leviathan's pretty deep right now. Okay, chat, you're gonna watch the ocean for a little bit."

After the stream feed changes to only showing the ocean, I change my shirt to a swim shirt, and take off the rest of my clothes. The moment I'm naked from the waist down, I use shapeshifting to give myself a fish tail.

To become a merboy.

As I transform, I make sure to alter my anklets to fit onto my tail, just before the fin.

I don't want to be a merboy because it's part-fish, but I don't think I can telekinetically lift that much weight from that deep below the surface. That means I need to go down to the leviathan and take him out from down there.

"Alright, chat," I say. "I'm gonna go kill a leviathan now."

Then, I drop myself down to the ocean. I close my eyes for this part because it's scary and when I crash into the water, I take a few moments for my breathing to adjust. Merboys can breathe both air and water (I don't know how that works), but there's a small transition period where the air or water still in my lungs has to leave them before I can breathe the other.

I swim down, down, down, the water feeling cooler at first, and also like it's attempting to squeeze me. Swimming as a merboy is a different from as a human and it takes me a minute to adjust to using my tail rather than my arms and legs.

Should I have given myself webbed hands and some fins on my back to help with swimming? I was basing this form off of the merfolk I saw in a movie Sig and the others watched a few weeks ago, and they just had a human upper body and fish lower body.

Well, I manage to figure out how to swim like this so I guess additional fins aren't needed.

The leviathan doesn't try to swim away, probably because he can't sense my mana so he probably thinks I don't have very much. He just watches me. He's also really huge – at least two thousand feet in length, and more than fifteen in diameter.

When I'm about three hundred feet away, he tries to shoot me with a blast of concentrated, high-pressure water. That spell is one which is designed to simply blast through things. On a weaker being, it would probably be a pretty instant death if it connected.

I'm not weaker, I'm stronger. And a merboy, so I can move through water quite easily. It doesn't give me the same resistance as it does when I'm a human.

Well, it also doesn't give me as much resistance as it used to, just because I'm strong enough to ignore it, for the most part. But being a merboy reduces it further. I think that's how it works, anyway. It could just be magic making it easier.

I swipe my left arm through the water and the water jet slams to the side, fading away and mixing with the regular water. The leviathan pauses for a moment, then begins casting several spells. Most of them are water jets originating from different spots around its head, but the one in front of its mouth seems to be a jet of acidic water.

The five jets around its head merge together with the acidic one after only a hundred feet, the intent probably to fool me into thinking they're all water jets so that I just try to dispel the magic creating the speed of the water he's conjured, unaware it's not actually only water in the jet.

Since the water was just water after conjuring and the only magic in it after that point was turning it into a jet, the water remained behind after. By dispelling his spell, all I did was remove that force. The water remained behind.

Unfortunately for the leviathan, I'm not that stupid. I can very clearly see the acid magic mixed into the water magic. His plan is probably something like killing me from the acid that mixes into the regular water. It probably wouldn't even agitate my skin due to the power difference between us.

I swipe my left arm in front of me again and send the blast to the side, the jet fading as it mixes with the regular water again. Cancel the spell and remove the force of the blast, and there's nothing but regular water left. Especially if I add in a factor to completely erase the acidic properties from his water.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

I'm unable to take him out via suffocation. That would potentially violate the "minimal pain" rule Grandpa Adrian gave me. How much is minimal depends on the situation, as a beast stronger in power would be more difficult to kill without hitting it a bunch. For something as weak compared to me as the leviathan is, I shouldn't have to hit it a bunch to kill it.

Grandpa Adrian did suggest using mind magic to numb a beast's pain if I'm doing something like suffocating it, but mind magic to influence another's mind is Very Bad, no matter how much he says otherwise. That was definitely a test, and also proof that he's able to fool my ability to detect lies.

If using mind magic to prevent the leviathan from feeling pain wasn't Very Bad, then I could use it when cutting off its oxygen supply… sort of. His scales seem to absorb water and convert it to the oxygen he needs in a magical upgrade from gills. It's not a scientific process, his body is straight-up transmuting water – or a molecule consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom – into oxygen gas – a molecule consisting of two oxygen gas.

Or it could be destroying the hydrogen and merging the oxygen atoms. It could also be breaking the bonds and just merging the oxygen atoms into oxygen gas while letting the hydrogen atoms do their own thing. Either it's doing transmutation, or it's just using magic to do a scientific breakdown of water.

At least, that's what I think is going on, based on what I can see. That must be easier than directly constantly supplying himself with oxygen via magic. The latter would probably have a mana cost, too, while his current method doesn't. His scales simply perform the transmutation or conversion or whatever's going on.

That's also if I'm right about what's going on. I could be completely wrong since I'm not familiar with the magics I'm seeing and it could be something purely magical rather than magic messing with science.

Regardless of what's going on, I would need to coat his entire body in a barrier in order to stop him from being able to breathe.

He's absolutely huge, so I'm not sure I would even be able to manage that. I can probably cover half of him, but not all of him, so he'd still draw in water and convert it to oxygen through whatever magical process he's using.

Then again, a beast of an innate strength as great as a leviathan can probably generate oxygen on their own when needed. Cutting off his oxygen supply wouldn't necessarily stop him.

I could use lightning magic, but that would risk harm to the other fish here. I'm not fond of them… but avoid needlessly killing the local wildlife. Cull overly-strong beasts for an area, gather meat, but don't kill willy-nilly.

I still don't know what "willy-nilly" means, but that's what Grandpa Adrian said on Saturday.

"Hm… okay," I say as I swipe my left hand through the water in front of me, knocking to the side the water of seven combined jets mixed with acid magic as I dispel the jet and acid magics from them.

Did he really think doing seven of the mega jets would be more effective than one? If I can target an individual spell like that, I can do it as a wide-ranging spell as well.

"That's what I'll do," I decide on the kill strategy.

I extend my right arm forward, my fingers splayed. Multiple blades of force form in the water, surrounding the leviathan's neck. They're technically invisible, but I'm sure my viewers can see them due to the differences in how light affects them versus water. The orb can see clearly in the water even when it's darker or murky, so it's allowing my viewers to as well.

These blades are each fifty feet long and ten feet at their widest. They're also sharp all the way along their edges rather than only at their points. I made them shaped like rhombuses because that was the easiest way to structure this spell.

The leviathan notices the attack only when I clench my right hand into a fist.

Then the rhombuses pull together, their acute points slicing into its neck. I twist my first, and the rhombuses rotate, slicing the leviathan's head off.

Blood begins to fill the water as the rhombuses fade away, and I pull a pouch out of one of my bracelets as I quickly swim forward.

Once I reach the leviathan, I quickly draw its body and blood into the pouch, then put it away and swim up to the surface. I then make sure to transition my breathing properly before looking at chat's messages on my glasses.

"Hm?" I read a chat message. "How did my glasses withstand the water depths? Well, they ain't normal glasses, they're enchanted. I made them really sturdy so that I don't break them by accident. No, I ain't done it yet, it's so that I don't do it."

Though I do have to regularly increase their sturdiness, since I keep getting stronger, too. I really hope my power level plateaus sooner rather than later, so that I won't have to re-enchant a bunch of things on the regular. It's nice to be able to use the same dishes as Dad without worrying about breaking them.

But not when I have to update their enchantments every week to do so.

"Anyway," I float up out of the water. "Y'all are gonna look at the ocean for a bit again."

Once I'm high enough they can do that, the camera changes to showing them just the ocean and I start changing. My tail becomes legs once more and the anklets transition back to how they were before. Underwear, pants, socks, sneakers. The water shirt comes off and gets replaced with a long-sleeve and a hoodie.

Now changed, I switch the camera back to looking at me.

"Okay," I say. "Let's go drop the pouch off at the processing plant. It's where the stuff I hunted on Saturday is getting processed. That includes a bunch of wyverns. I can't remember if I said or not, but there's going to be wyvern meat in stores soon. There's a lot of wyvern meat. Like… a lot. I killed twenty wyverns in less than three hours, and that was while also culling other beasts which needed it. So we're putting wyvern meat for sale with their own labels and everything. Anyway, teleporting us now."

I teleport to the processing facility, where Grandpa Adrian has an avatar with his real looks working on a wyvern. Nine wyverns are currently hanging from hooks in here, all in various states of being processed.

"Oh!" I say. "You're working on wyverns right now!"

"I am," he says. "Want to get this done in a reasonable time, so I've got an avatar here and several golems to help. A little bit of temporal acceleration is being used as well."

"Um… I don't think I've told my viewers about your avatars."

"That's fine," he chuckles, then looks at the orb, which turns its iris to face him since it seems like he has something he wants to tell my viewers. "It's become known that this is my real appearance, not the gracefully-old man I've used in public. A less-known fact is that I use an avatar spell, which allows me multiple bodies. It's all the same mind, however, just channeled through multiple bodies. Allows me to handle much more than a single body does.

"Also, Xander," he looks at me. "Did you update the mind of your orb again?"

"Yeah," I nod. "I made it smarter. That's why it turned to face you when you looked at it like that, because it thought you wanted to tell my viewers something and knew that I'd be okay with that."

It's Grandpa Adrian. Not being okay with him wanting to say something is Super Extremely Bad.

"Alright," he says. "I had an avatar watching you from a distance. Good job. You didn't take any longer than necessary to kill it, and did so swiftly and quickly. From the moment you conjured the rhomboid force blades to the moment it died was only zero-point-eight-one seconds. It was quick and the beast felt only a brief moment of pain before it died."

Oh. I should've assumed he would have an avatar watching me, like back when I killed Akrolnomak. He definitely wanted to make sure I didn't do anything that people shouldn't see, like the spatial severing spell. If I did, he probably would have interfered with the stream feed.

"I'll give you an A for that," he says. "As for the shapeshifting spell… how did you learn that one?"

"I figured out how to become a merboy on my own," I tell him. "Figured it would make swimming in deeper water easier. I don't want to be part-fish because fish is disgusting, but it definitely made swimming a lot easier. And I wasn't as affected by the pressure as I'm sure I would be if I were in human form like this. It also made it so I can breathe in the water."

"Alright," he chuckles. "The pouch."

"Here," I pull it out and hand it to him.

"Is this made from leather from the spatial wyvern you killed on Saturday?"

"Yeah."

"You're already making pouches with it?"

"I wanted to see how it differs from pocket hare leather," I tell him. "I can make way bigger spatial pockets and expanded spaces now, though adding on the stasis enchantment for those bigger sizes is more difficult. Takes more mana. But if I use temporal wyvern hide… maybe it'll be easier, since they have gravity magic innate to them and that's in the spatial magic category? So then it'd have both spatial and temporal magics. But we didn't process that one yesterday, just the spatial wyvern."

"I've already finished the temporal wyvern," he tells me. "Its leather is over there," he indicates a direction behind me. "Go ahead and take the hide if you want."

"Okay!"

I put the temporal wyvern's hide into one of my pouches and look at the packages of jerky sitting on a table here. There are nine packages, each listing a different flavor. The magic in the jerky doesn't look like it's got any special aspects to it, so I don't think it's from the one we processed yesterday.

Either that, or it's from the spatial or temporal one, but with its additional magical aspects stripped out.

"These are all from a normal wyvern, right?"

"Correct," Grandpa Adrian says. "I was experimenting with some flavors. It's rare I have this much wyvern meat to experiment with, so I thought I'd try some new ones. Those are flavors I wanted to ask if you'd sample with your friends, for feedback."

"Oh," I say. "Is there a feedback form?"

"There will be in about ten minutes."

"Okay," I put the pouches into my bracelet.

"By the way, Xander," he says. "Yesterday, you gave me all of the stuff you hunted on Saturday. That didn't include the pouch with the other two wyverns, though. Did you want me to handle those?"

"If you're okay with that."

"I wouldn't offer it to you if I wasn't," he says. "And I know you want Akrolnomak's hide to experiment with, so I'll make sure to keep that for you."

"Okay," I pull out the pouch and hand it to him as chat starts freaking out. "I killed him over the summer, chat. Carter introduced me to a video game that had a boss which was weak to air magics but not fire magics even though it was part-plant, and it was apparently based on Akrolnomak. So I went to see if Akrolnomak was the same way, because that didn't make any sense.

"I'm not allowed to release footage of the kill," I tell them. "He was not, in fact, vulnerable to air magic. Not anymore than something else of his strength would be. He did burn quite well, though. I wanted to send the recording to the game company so that they'd know they were wrong, but Grandpa Adrian told me not to."

Grandpa Adrian pulls Akrolnomak's head mostly out of the pouch.

"It doesn't seem as big as before…"

Grandpa Adrian laughs.

"You've grown a few inches since you killed him, Xander," he says. "The bigger you get, the less big larger things appear since the ratio shrinks."

"Oh."

That makes a lot of sense.

"How come you pulled his head mostly out?" I ask.

"To show the chatters who were doubting the claim about Akrolnomak that you did, indeed, kill him," he answers. "And to respond to the chatter asking why I'm letting you do whatever you want… I'm not. The reason I let Xander kill the leviathan was partially because it did need killing to restore what passages were interrupted, and I would have likely ended up doing so in the next year or two, anyway. With various other things, Xander has been told 'no' plenty of times."

Now the same user is asking him why he would allow a thirteen-year-old to do stuff like that. I recognize the username as the one Grandma Lily has. Is she doing this because most people are too scared to ask Grandpa Adrian things?

He's not that scary.

"If he were on another world," Grandpa Adrian says. "One where his power level is the norm, it would be the same as when normal mages go hunting. And to the noble dragons of Earth, that would be normal hunting. Well, for the older and more powerful of them, but considering he's at that power level? It's fully acceptable.

"When it comes to Xanson Technologies," Grandpa Adrian continues. "It allows me an easier time monitoring what he and Greyson are making and restrict what gets released to the public… or made at all."

"Greyson really should stop making bombs."

"Yes," Grandpa Adrian chuckles. "He really should. The military welcomes his research, though. They also welcomed your device for detecting Rifts. It's much more accurate and precise than their old system, gives an earlier warning, can detect even smaller ones, and gives them a better gauge for how strong a Rift really is."

"Have they finished installing them?" I ask.

"Including the redundant ones," he answers. "They offered to pay the full amount on delivery and since the systems are superior, I saw no reason to delay building them and sending them over. And I saw someone ask what sort of things you've been told not to do."

That was once again Grandma Lily.

"Want to tell them something I've told you not to do?"

"Kill the next person who tries to rape me," I answer. "That I should restrain them and contact you, and you'll make them regret ever even thinking about doing such a thing. Also that I'm not allowed to try and sabotage Greyson's next unnamed rocket to Mars and that I should call you if I notice him working on one so that you can put a stop to it. That reminds me, can I open a gate to Mars to retrieve the first one? I can make sure nothing passes through, just like how Rifts do it. And I wouldn't go there, I'd just use telekinesis to pull it through. Or did you already do it?"

If my calculations are correct, I have more than enough mana to open a gate that far. It'll still use up a lot of my mana, but I have enough.

"Greyson still hasn't started working on the one to send over to fix the first one so it can return?" Grandpa Adrian asks.

"Ain't he not allowed to do that?"

"Greyson is more likely to ignore that in the name of research and development than he is to follow it," Grandpa Adrian says. "So I've been expecting him to start working on it. And no, he's not allowed. That's why you're supposed to contact me if he does. The reason I hadn't retrieved it yet was because I was expecting him to build the one to upgrade it. Whatever tech he builds for it would be interesting, so I want to see it."

That makes sense. Greyson would need to figure out several things in order to make the second rocket function. Also a reminder that it needs a way to return on its own… or else he would need to send a third rocket it over to fix the second one.

"Oh," I say. "Um… okay. So I can't do that, then."

"Will it fit in here?" He asks.

"It's eighty feet tall and thirty feet wide."

"That small?"

"Yeah."

"Go ahead," he holds out a hand. "I'll store it in one of my pocket spaces, so don't worry about where to stick it."

I open up a magical gate to Mars, to a little bit away from the rocket. It's still cloaked in its anti-detection magics, but I can see it just fine. The rocket is tall and has a sort-of rounded conical top, seven legs, and griffins painted all over it.

"Oh, jeez," Grandpa Adrian groans. "How many laws did he break building that?"

"You would know better than me."

Grandpa Adrian laughs and tells me to dispel the magics preventing it from being noticed by rovers and people.

"Not that it's hiding it from your chatters…" he says. "Your orb is showing it just fine on the stream."

"I figured out how to give the orb my perspicacity."

"That's not going in the ones in stores," he tells me.

I look at the orb.

"One day," I say. "I'll figure out how to upgrade the normal version of you in a way which is allowed to go to stores. That's the fifth thing he's told me isn't allowed on the one for normal sale."

"The rocket, Xander."

"Right."

I use telekinesis to pull the rocket through the gate sideways, so that it takes up less space. Making the gate only a little bit wider than the rocket made it cheaper to create and sustain than if I made that wide but also as tall or taller. By a lot.

And since I opened it to a whole other planet, the cost is already pretty high.

As the rocket passes through the gate, Grandpa Adrian sends it into a pocket space of his own. That one's entry point is about ten feet from the gate, so there's plenty of the rocket in the room as it enters and exits. Then it's entirely in Grandpa Adrian's pocket space and I close my gate.

"Wow," I say. "Opening a gate to Mars was really expensive. It cost me almost half of my mana! And I take so long to recover it… I did my math wrong and thought it'd be less."

"Here," Grandpa Adrian tosses me a bottle with a glowing blue liquid inside.

"Mana potion?"

"You used a lot of mana the past few days," he tells me. "Go ahead and drink that, it should restore most of what you're missing."

"Okay," I start to tip the bottle to my lips.

"Slowly," he says. "Don't gulp it down like the mana eater you are. That's too much to consume that way. Take a drink, then a breath, then a drink, then a breath, again and again until it's gone."

"Oh," I say. "Right. "When I drank the one Greyson gave me in July, it was really uncomfortable because of the sudden rush.

"Also because your body wasn't adapted to the amount of mana you can hold," he tells me. "Or even that much. It was too used to burning up your mana as soon as it was formed to be able to strengthen and become resilient and had to heal the damage from that as well. This one shouldn't burn since your body can handle that much mana, but you'll get a stomachache if you eat too much mana too fast."

"Okay."

Grandpa Adrian monitors me as I drink the mana potion, and tells me to slow down twice. My body assimilates the mana a lot faster than when I drank Greyson's mana potion, probably because it wasn't tailored for any particular person this time.

"Alright," he says. "Why don't you get back to your regular stream? Unless you wanted to do something else?"

"No," I answer. "I just wanted to take care of the leviathan so that Niels can get permission to come deliver sun beef. I also want his help fixing up the main village on the fairy islands. I'm… still not sure how to build trees that are houses."

It's a lot more difficult than it seems.

"Alright," he chuckles. "Good luck."

"Thanks," I say. "Bye."

I teleport home and head inside, pull off my sneakers, and head up to my room. My hoodie comes off inside, then I sit my desk. There's an ice cream sundae sitting here and chat is talking about it when I sit down.

They don't get to see my bedroom. The stream stayed looking at my chair until I was out of my room when I left earlier, and it switched back to my office's camera when I touched the doorknob to my bedroom.

"Thanks, Mom," I say as I swap my glasses back to my regular ones.

[LadyKatie]: You're welcome! I figured you'd be hungry after that, and it's made entirely with magic ingredients, include mindwave dairy.

"I could tell!" I say. "Thanks! Okay, time to log back onto the server."

I do that and fly over to Niels's island, where he's finished making the path and is currently adding in a second pond, this one with benches around it.

"Welcome back," he tells me. "How'd the hunt go?"

It wouldn't have counted as metagaming if our viewers told him what I was doing and how the hunt went. Hm… they must have gotten hit by the chathopping part of the automod. Unless he asked them what I was doing/how it was going and is asking me now just to be nice?

"It was easy," I tell him. "Took me less than a second to cut off its head once I figured out how to kill it quickly. Grandpa Adrian has his remains now and will probably eventually figure out what to do with all that fish meat and its scales and bones and stuff. So you should be able to get permission to come over, now."

"Alright," he chuckles. "Hey, Ma! Xander killed the leviathan, so I won't need to dodge potshots anymore! Can I head over to his place sometime to drop off the meat?"

Niels is quiet for a few moments, then he laughs.

"Permission has been granted," he tells me. "We could do it in place of one of your baking streams, if you'd like? That is, I could come and teach you some tricks for cooking with sun beef, and maybe do a little baking with other related ingredients, like sun cow dairy products. Tomorrow is one possibility, or we could do the week after next, or another time. Or I could just drop it off at some point and we not do it as a stream."

Tomorrow is so early.

"Um… I'll have to ask Dad," I tell him. "Um… for now, can you help me? I want some help at the main fairy village, with redoing their homes."

"Sure!" He says. "Do you want to do that now?"

"Yeah."

"Let's go!"

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.