Adrian pushed himself off the mattress. He walked straight through the dungeon portal and stepped into the quiet stone room.
"Make me a bathtub." Adrian ordered the system. "Needs to be ceramic and fill it with hot water. Mix in a potion that helps with muscle relaxation."
[Affirmative.]
A massive white ceramic tub grew right out of the stone floor. Thick steam started going up as hot water poured in from nowhere. The bathwater actually had a very faint and pinkish tint to it.
Adrian quickly peeled his clothes off and casually tossed them right into the corner of the room. Then he stepped right into the bathtub and sank straight down into the water.
It was pretty hot. But the warmth was incredibly soothing.
So he sank a little deeper until the water hit his chin. And a long, heavy sigh finally escaped his lips. Because all the tension from the last three days of nonstop healing just completely melted away.
He tilted his head back.
He rested his neck right against the curved ceramic lip of the tub and stared straight up at the blank stone ceiling. Then he pulled up his system interface.
Because he still had a massive bunch of unread notifications floating right in the corner of his vision. And he just hadn’t bothered to actually check them until right now.
[Congratulations. You have successfully healed your Mana Veins.]
[System status updating.]
He read the text and scrolled down the list. Two more blue boxes hovered right below the first ones.
[Congratulations. You have ranked up as a Knight.]
[Congratulations. The skill Pain Tolerance has been upgraded.]
[Congratulations. The skill Pain Tolerance has been upgraded.]
Adrian just stared at the floating text.
He frowned.
"I still didn’t rank up as a mage." Adrian grumbled to himself as he stared at the system screen.
The system didn’t give him any response this time. He shook his head and swiped all the notifications away until his vision was clear again.
"Status screen." Adrian demanded.
The massive interface booted up right in front of his face.
[Status Screen]
Name: Adrian Sterling
Title: Baron
Knight Rank: D Rank
Mage Rank: Third Circle
Mana Veins: Calculating.
Daddy Status: Papa
Demonic Blessing: Dungeon Master
Divine Curse: Pacifist’s Shackles
Dragon’s Blessing: Draconian Mana Veins
Skills:
Gust (D), Telekinesis (B), Frost (E), Pain tolerance (B), Self Healing (C), Dad Strength (SSS), Daddy’s Love (SSS), Daddy’s Spanking (SSS), Dungeon Link (SSS)
Adrian scanned down the long list of skills. The mana veins rank that was being calculated was something he ignored since he knew that he’ll get an answer if he waited a bit, but there were some skills that ranked up but the notifications didn’t show it.
And that was his self healing skill. Though, there was one thing that caught his attention even more. He locked onto one specific line of text sitting near the bottom of his character sheet.
He just stared at it.
The Dragon’s Blessing didn’t look the same anymore.
It was Draconian Mana Heart before, but now? It was called Draconian Mana Veins.
’Hey system. Explain the difference between Draconian Mana Heart and Mana Veins.’
[Draconian Mana Heart grants the host a higher natural affinity with the ambient mana in the surroundings.]
[Draconian Mana Veins passively absorb ambient mana in the surroundings.]
"Ooookay... that’s kinda overpowered isn’t it?" he muttered to himself.
After all, there was no way for mages to immediately replenish their mana. This wasn’t a video game where they could just drink a potion and get a percentage of their mana back.
Mana crystals helped with replenishing mana but the mage would have to sit down and meditate to replenish their mana like normal. The only thing the mana crystals did, was to increase this speed.
Passively absorbing mana in the middle of a fight would effectively work similar to him having extra mana compared to others. And this was something he already had thanks to his system.
And once he realised that, he felt nothing but disappointment.
"... what’s the point of having passive mana intake when I have a shit ton of mana that I can just take from the dungeon? Welp, whatever. System, can you tell me if I can do anything else with this skill that seems useless to me? Also can you tell me why I didn’t go up to a 4th rank mage? After all, all that fucking recovery took me a shit ton of time."
[Not enough data to calculate hidden traits of Draconic Mana Veins.]
[Please test out some spells.]
[System was offline when host was healing the mana heart. Due to this, there is only partial information.]
[Conducting simulations... drawing data from stored library... none found.]
[Running simulations...]
Adrian waited for a few minutes and relaxed in his bathtub until the system finally gave him an answer.
[The mana veins were inactive when host was healing the mana heart. Due to this, when the host began to heal the mana veins afterwards, the blessing given to your mana heart spread to your mana veins. This cannot be done without permission from the one who gave you the blessing as the world laws do not allow it. The only reliable guess is that the Dragon of Prosperity allowed you to get your mana veins upgraded.]
[Due to this, the energy that would have gone towards thickening the veins went towards transforming them instead.]
[New data recovered in relation to hidden traits of Draconic mana veins. These have a high probability of being false.]
[Having Draconic Mana Veins does not make you a dragon. You are still a human.]
[Draconic Mana Veins have a naturally higher output capacity compared to Human Mana Veins. Highly recommending the host to test it out.]
Adrian immediately got excited the moment he read the last line.
’If that’s true, then it doesn’t really make a difference if I’m a fourth circle mage or not. As long as the mana output is higher, then I should be able to match a fourth circle mage.’
He raised his hand and pointed at the wall at the side with his index finger.