The dragon's harem

Arad shifted back into his humanoid form and approached Zul. This was it, the time to start the operation. Using his Pricolici eyes he could clearly see Zul’s veins beneath her scales, her muscles contracting as she breathed and the large writhing mass consuming her fundamentum.

^Dragons’ bodies are really amazing. Even if she only has a tenth of her Fundamentum she is still able to stay alive.^ The more Arad looked at the inside of her body the more he admired the ingenuity of the draconic body.

Humans have essentially three vital organs, the brain, heart, and lungs. Dragons have their fundamentum added to that list which acted more like a heart for mana instead of blood. Arad had never heard of a human surviving with just a tenth of their heart intact.

“I’m going to start.” Arad conjured a sharp blade made with his void as he shrunk down to the size of a fly and flew toward Zul’s chest. Lifting one of her scales up, he slashed his way inside her as the nuns started healing her to make sure she didn’t bleed to death.

As Arad expected, Zul didn’t even wake up to him invading her body. With how small he is and how large she is, she won’t even feel him. But, Zul’s insides weren’t so simple to traverse.

All of Zul’s organs were floating in a stupidly powerful acid, an extremely concentrated sulfuric acid powerful enough to melt steel in seconds. If this was poured on a human they would probably melt into a liquid.

But, Arad wasn’t a human and such an acid could barely irritate his skin and eyes. He looked forward and could see Zul’s massive heart beating like a drum, that thing was the size of a cow, not something that he had ever expected to see.

^Why did I expect a dragon’s heart to be smaller?^ Arad swam through the acid and reached the upper part of the heart, stabbing the largest artery with his void sword. At this size, his sword could act as a needle, injecting the potion he made earlier directly into her bloodstream.

Arad then swam behind the heart and found the fundamentum. As he expected, that organ looked weird. It was supposed to resemble a peach but instead, this looked like a massive overgrown ulcer or fungus. Arad’s pricolici eyes could see a massive amount of blood, mana, and nutrients being delivered to it but nothing coming out.

^So this is why she was getting weaker and weaker, this thing was eating up all of her energy and mana. A dragon’s fundamentum is an organ that consumes a lot of energy but only when the dragon is using it to refine mana for magic. It acts like a heart, if you’re resting it’s extremely efficient but if you’re running it’ll start beating rapidly and consuming a lot of energy.

This was the reason why you could hear a rumbling akin to an engine revving up from a raging dragon’s chest. Arad took a moment to look inside his own body and noticed that turning into a pricolici didn’t just give him an extra heart, but an extra fundamentum as well. ^Now this explains a lot. ^

Now Arad was faced with two decisions he could make. He can chop Zul’s whole fundamentum out which would allow her to live but she’ll lose all of her magical powers or he could chop only the affected part and save the tenth of her fundamentum that remained, but she’ll only end up able to use a tenth of her magic and this strange disease might spread across her whole body through her bloodstream.

^My options are limited, but…luckily I’m not a normal dragon…^ Arad smiled, thanks to his different powers he could give himself and Zul more options.

After inspecting the overgrown part of her fundamentum he concluded that it was in fact her fundamentum deforming on its own. This wasn’t some disease that came from the outside or an infection, it was her own body malfunctioning.

^I can cut the bad part and after she is healed I’ll turn her into a vampire, which should allow her to fully regenerate her fundamentum…no, what if it spread across her body? And since this deformed part is a part of her body, won’t she regenerate it as well?^ Arad’s hunch was right, just like how his father Alcott had a great gut sense, his son seems to have inherited that. What plagues Zul’s fundamentum is an overgrown tumor, this cancer was eating away at her fundamentum but it was still her own cells. Vampiric regeneration would heal them just like normal cells. If Zul was to turn into a vampire, no matter how many times Arad would cut that tumor out, it would heal right back up. It was the same case if he gave her a werewolf’s regeneration.

^What about turning her into a pricolici? Won’t she get a working second fundamentum? I can then just cut this one whole and find a way to make sure she doesn’t regenerate it.^ Arad thought about it, but such a thing should be hard to achieve. He doesn’t know if Zul would even be able to control the powers of a pricolici let alone resist the urge of healing a missing organ and being in constant pain.

^Think Arad…think…^ Arad stood there thinking for minutes until an idea flashed inside his head. Absurd, reckless, stupid, but possible. He lifted his hands, [Elemental expansion]

His void engulfed Zul’s whole body and the nuns outside gasped, for a moment they thought something went wrong but quickly realized that their healing magic could still reach Zul. Arad must be trying to use his void for something.

^I got extremely bigger with size magic before, but I should be able to get even smaller with it. And the death curse, it only kills living beings, if I got small enough I might be able to understand how it works and kill only the mutated part.^ Arad knows that he could just try using his void to erase the overgrown part, but since it’s a part of Zul’s body, configuring the void for it is extremely hard.

Arad started shrinking and shrinking until he became no bigger than a spec of dust. His powerful eyes could see something, the inner construction of flesh. ^Not enough, I need to get smaller, even smaller.^

This had put a huge load on Arad’s body but it wasn’t something he couldn’t endure for a few hours. After shrinking to the size of a cell Arad looked for the border separating the mutated cells and the healthy ones. It was there that he started using his death curse{Radiation} to kill the mutated cells without cutting them open so nothing would spill out. After killing the cells he would suck them into his stomach and go on like that for a few minutes.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

Suddenly, something grabbed him from the back. When Arad turned he saw a massive white blob akin to a slime extending hundreds of tentacles to catch him. He immediately cut the tentacle that grabbed him and flew away and looked around, he was surrounded, millions of them had come to get rid of him.

White blood cells were the first to arrive at the scene to clean this parasite.

“Since when do monsters live inside dragons’ bodies?” Arad looked at the white blood cells with a smile, “But I guess you think I’m some kind of invader? Don’t worry, I’m here to help. Are you willing to talk this over?”

After a moment of silence, all of the white blood cells charged at him.

Arad started running away. ^This is bad, those things protect her body so I can’t harm them. I don’t even know how fast they breed.^ Arad didn’t know what white blood cells were, where they come from nor how fast would their numbers recover if he killed them. He can’t risk killing them or Zul might be left defenseless for weeks, months, years, maybe even for the rest of her life.

After running from them for a while he finally noticed something, those things…they were blood, they looked a bit weird but blood nonetheless… Arad stopped and looked at them. They stopped with a single glare from him.

^I can control them with vampire powers the same way I can control blood.^ He approached one of them and patted it, “Good, I’m happy to see you so eager to protect Zul but look there,

those are weird.”

The white blood cells looked at the cancer cells, and then back at Arad, at the cancer cells, and once more at him…they looked confused for a second and then one of them turned toward the veins, spitting a strange substance out.

“Who did you call?” Arad asked and the white blood cell looked confident.

A moment later an even bigger white cell appeared, this was a killer T cell. The white blood cells looked at it with admiration and fear, like soldiers standing in front of their mean

general.

The killer T cell approached Arad, looked at him for a second, and tried to swallow him. He immediately smacked it down and took control with his vampire blood magic. The killer T cell looked both confused, afraid, and embarrassed to be humiliated like this in front of all the

while blood cells.

“Forget about me, I’m here to help, go check those.” He pointed at the mutated cells. Scared,

the killer T cell had to obey. She slowly crawled toward the mutated cells to check them but she knew there was no problem with them. If those mutated cells were a problem she would’ve been notified long ago, look how many of them are there.

Surely, there was nothing wrong with them.

She was about to back away when she noticed that Arad was right behind her. “Check the

inside, or I’ll shove my fist inside you.”

Under the threat of being killed, the poor killer T cell pushed her tentacles inside the mutated cell…after a moment of silence.

“OHHHHHHHHHHHHH! MY GO0000000000000000000000D!” Arad could hear a scream inside his head. For a moment he thought the cell spoke but it was just his blood magic

interpreting the killer T cell’s panic attack upon realizing what that mutated cell was.

She couldn’t believe it, they were all cells working together to protect their world and maintain it. She had even protected this very part of the fundamentum from invaders several

times.

“Didn’t we swear to keep this place safe together? You provide it with magic and I protect you all…” The killer T cell growled in pain and sadness…sparks and chemicals slowly seeping from

her back.

“You damn traitors!” She cried as the signal flashed through Zul’s whole body and the entire immune system came ready for war.