(A/N: Drop some cursed GIFs in the chat—fuel me with nonsense so I can keep typing. Consider it the attendance sheet for today's chapter.)
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What followed wasn't a single event.
It was a montage of survival.
A trial of daily chaos.
A month of becoming Mavareth.
Week 1:
Found a torn emergency tent in the back storage area. Patched it up with duct tape and monster hide.
Ate more raptor meat than I want to admit. Discovered they taste like sour chicken.
Slapped a charging dino while panicking and broke its neck.
Fell into a stream. Fished out a waterproof backpack. Best find of the week.
[Level Up!] - Happened five times in three days. Scared me every time.
Week 2:
Tried to use a gun again. Broke the trigger with my finger strength. Oops.
Learned to control jumps better. Stopped breaking trees when I landed.
Killed a pair of Dilophosaurus by tripping over a root and falling onto them. Felt guilty. Dilophosaurus skewers. Dilophosaurus skewers taste good. Got over it.
Discovered an abandoned drone with a working camera. Started recording myself talking out loud just to stay sane.
Ate some herbs. Got high. Never again.
[Level Up!]
[Level Up!]
Week 3:
Finally found a pair of pants. Didn't fit. Cut them into shorts. Stylish.
Found another lab coat. This one had a name tag: "Dr. Morgan Park." I kept it. The name tag had a different look from the rest of dead researchers so I liked this one. It was only slightly torn too. unlike the other lab coats.
Started organizing my camp like a real home.
Accidentally blew up a Parasaurolophus by punching a tree and toppling it onto the herd.
[Level Up!] - Three times in one fight. Boss instincts kicking in.
Grew a little horn. Only noticed when I scratched my forehead too hard.
Week 4:
Woke up roaring in my sleep. Might be Mavareth's instincts surfacing. Might just be stress.
Found emergency rations in a hollow tree-plastic packed, ancient, tasted like old cereal and regret.
Got ambushed by a pack of raptors. Panicked. Slapped the ground in frustration. Earth cracked. They all fell into it.
Camp upgraded: added a lean-to and proper firepit.
Started tracking monster behavior and cycles. Wrote in journals with old markers.
[Level Up!]
[Level Up!]
[Level Up!]
My body felt stronger. Faster. Natural.
By the end of the month, I had a routine.
Wake up. Check perimeter. Forage. Hunt. Survive.
I had six lab coats. Two were too burned to wear, but the rest rotated like laundry.
I even collect their name tags, My pants were still a mess, mostly patches of fabric sewn together with vines and a lot of cursing. I was less clumsy now-no more flying into trees or accidentally suplexing dinosaurs with a sneeze.
I was starting to own this body.
And when I looked into the reflection of a stream and saw the glowing gold eyes staring back...
They didn't feel like a stranger's anymore.
They felt like mine.
I opened my status screen.
[Mavareth - Lv 24 Dragonoid]
Combat Power: A
Skills: Dragon Heart (S)
Only fourteen levels. Just fourteen. That's how far I'd come since waking up a goo-soaked mess in a lab coat and nothing else.
But my body didn't feel like it belonged to a level 24 anything.
It felt... monstrous. Heavy. Tense.
Like I was made of muscle coiled too tightly, vibrating with power I hadn't meant to gather.
There was a day last week when I did absolutely nothing.
Just sat around camp like a slacker, chewing dried raptor and poking at the fire with a stick.
Not a single fight.
Not a single punch thrown.
And yet...
The next day, I tripped over a tree root-and made a crater.
An actual crater.
The ground sank. Trees fell. Birds fled in terror.
And I just lay there, groaning into the dirt, surrounded by a smoking impact zone like I'd dropped out of orbit.
One day of slacking off, and suddenly a power creep. Sounds like a gacha game I played before...
That was my wake-up call.
And it sent me back to reread something I hadn't paid nearly enough attention to when I first read it.
[Dragon Heart (S)]
> The heart of a Dragon is also the heart of the progenitors of Magic. This heart generates Magic power infinitely and permanently. The amount of Magic generated will go up as the user levels up and ages. Body strength and understanding of Magic and world laws will also improve as the user ages.
"...Ah," I muttered.
Then louder: "Ahhhhhh. Oh no."
It wasn't just a passive buff.
It was a permanent exponential boost.
Even if I did nothing, I would continue to get stronger-because my heart was feeding my entire being like some infinite magic nuclear reactor.
Strength. Speed. Magic. All rising, with no plateau in sight.
No wonder I couldn't aim my jumps for crap. No wonder my casual tail slaps could send raptors through trees. I was changing by the hour, not the level.
If I kept this up...
I'd sneeze and vaporize a town.
The worst part?
There was no off switch.
Dragon Heart just... was.
Always on. Always growing.
My muscles, bones, and mind were evolving in real-time.
Slowly but surely, my reflexes weren't just sharper-they were different.
Inhuman. My thoughts were clearer but stranger.
Magic theory I'd never learned drifted into my head like instinct.
I didn't even know how I knew I could melt rocks with a palm strike if I tried.
But I could.
That left only one conclusion.
"I need to train," I muttered, staring into the embers of the campfire. "Like, seriously train. Meditate or punch waterfalls or... build a punching dummy made of stone."
Because if I didn't, the next time I yawned too hard I might accidentally nuke an island.
And while that sounded cool on paper...
...I was still wearing a lab coat three sizes too big and living off stegosaurus jerky.
I was many things right now.
But a stable queen?
Not yet.
How many days has it been?
I stopped counting after the thirtieth. Or maybe the fiftieth.
Hell, I wasn't even sure if I was still sane.
But every morning I woke up not dead, and that was already better than most of my life as a B-rank healer.
Each day blurred into the next: survival, hunting, fire, sleep. Rinse and repeat.
Well—minus the rinsing part, until I found a rusted bottle of half-empty detergent in what used to be a staff bathroom near the cliffs.
Don't ask me why there was still detergent in a broken-down facility next to a dinosaur-infested death island.
Maybe someone was considerate.
Maybe someone died screaming while clutching it.
I used it anyway.
My tattered white lab coat was finally less brown and more... dingy white. Progress.
I even stitched a belt out of brachiosaurus tendon to keep it in place. Gave me a nice necromancer vibe.
The level-up chimes came less and less often now. I'd gone from a shaky survivor to a seasoned monster in just a few weeks.
[Level Up!]
>Mavareth Level 51.
Again.
>Mavareth Level 52.
...
...
And again.
[Level Up!]
>Mavareth Level 55.
...and then, silence.
It didn't mean I'd stopped growing. Just that I needed stronger enemies to grind efficiently.
Unfortunately, I was now the apex predator. Yay me.
At some point—maybe day sixty, maybe day seventy—I stopped relying on the system to tell me what I could do.
The Dragon Heart's passive kicked in.
The part that said, "Body strength and understanding of magic and world laws will also improve as the user ages."
I always assumed that meant I'd live longer or something.
But then one afternoon, while skinning a velociraptor with my claws, thinking of toasting it, I felt... something.
Like the air was vibrating. Buzzing. Thick. Tangible.
I closed my hand. Focused on that warm hum around my palm.
A flicker. Then a spark.
Then—woosh—a small flame danced above my skin.
"...Holy crap," I whispered, eyes wide. "I'm a fire mage."
No. I was a dragon learning magic like it was muscle memory.
Like the world itself bent because I willed it to.
It started small. Fire.
Then heat.
Then lightning that zapped the tree behind me into cinders.
What about the opposite? I sat still, closed my eyes, and tried pulling in cold. Chill. The frost of winter mornings and snowy manga panels.
I exhaled.
Mist formed. Then wind. Then frost. Then crack, the vapor crystallized in the air into a shard of jagged ice.
Ding!
>[You have learned: "Mana Control"!]
"U-uoooh~!"
Mana... You mean like Mage class's kind of mana???
What followed was, well... experimentation. Cue montage.
I used magic to boil my water, dry my clothes, cook my meat.
Sometimes I got bored and launched lightning at the sea, screaming:
"I AM THE STORM THAT IS COPYRIIIIIIIIIGHTED—!!"
It felt great. Cathartic.
Then...
I started drawing in the dirt with sticks—symbols, sigils, glyphs.
At first, just circles. Then stars. Six-pointed chaos stars.
I had no idea what I was doing, but it felt right.
Maybe it was instinct.
Or maybe some half-buried memories of anime and isekai tropes were guiding my hand.
The symbols helped focus the energy.
Fireballs bigger than my head.
Shockwaves that sent raptors flying.
A single inscribed triangle? Boom.
Triceratops BBQ.
One time, I focused on the ground and tried to make it vibrate.
Thought I'd grow crops.
Turned out, I had no seeds, no knowledge of agriculture, and the only thing I "planted" was a crater.
Still, 10/10 effort.
Another day, while meditating (read: lying on a warm rock sunbathing), I funneled mana into my eyes out of boredom.
The world shifted.
Suddenly, I could see like a hawk. Hear like a bat. Smell like a bloodhound on steroids.
...Then I couldn't turn it off.
"W-WAAAH!!!!????? My eyes!! Wait, no... my nose!! Wait, huh? My skin????!!!"
Everything was too much.
The flap of a butterfly's wings. Stench of dirt and grime amplified 100 x.
The tremble of a beetle underground.
I screamed and shoved my face into the dirt until the sensory overload calmed.
When I looked up again:
Ding!
[You have learned:"Dragon Sense"!]
"You can now perceive the world in extreme clarity. Good luck turning it off."
...
Rude.
Then came the laziest day of all.
I was too tired to move. Magic drained. No meat. No salt. My head throbbed.
I just lay under the ruined solar panel canopy and let the world spin.
Didn't even hunt. Didn't even think.
But my body still hummed with energy.
Mana still trickled inside me, stabilizing my cells, recycling heat, conserving movement.
That evening:
Ding!
[You have learned:"Mana Sustain"!]
"You are now capable of maintaining every bodily function with only mana."
"...I got rewarded for being a couch potato."
Peak isekai moment.
Then... silence.
I woke up one morning and nothing moved.
No birds.
No lizards.
No footsteps of distant predators.
Just an eerie, unnatural stillness.
I crept through the jungle, claws quiet on the earth, wings tucked close to my back.
No scent. No tracks. No roars. Nothing.
Then finally, I saw a triceratops herd near the marsh. I crouched.
They were grazing. Normal. Calm.
Then I whispered, "Eh?"
Their heads snapped up.
Eyes wide.
Then they ran—bolting like death itself was behind them.
I didn't move. Didn't cast. Didn't make a sound.
And yet...
Ding!
[You have learned:"Dragon Fear"!]
Your presence exerts instinctual dread upon lower beings.
"Goddammit."
Now I had to figure out how to turn that off, too.
---
[Mavareth - Lv 55 Dragonoid]
Combat Power:Special A
Skills:Dragon Heart (S), Mana Control (B), Mana Sustain (C), Dragon Senses (B), Dragon Fear (A)
I dismissed the glowing status screen with a flick of my claw.
It faded into the dark like it had the good sense to be afraid of me.
About time.
Down here in the underground levels of the facility, time moved weird.
With fewer dinos spawning above and no tasty EXP left to farm, I needed something to do before I lost my mind.
Again.
So... I started reading.
Yeah. Me. Reading.
The place was littered with research papers.
Most were rotten beyond recognition, decomposed and stained with mold and regret.
But some? Some were sealed in glass folders or vacuum crates, preserved like apocalypse-aged wine.
Aged with just the right amount of corporate hubris.
I gathered them. Read them. Sorted them into piles by subject.
Took notes with charcoal and dinosaur hide.
But the weird part?
I could understand them. English. German. Japanese.
Even some bastard hybrid of Latin and machine code.
Somehow, I knew what each word meant.
Not "translation spell" kind of know. More like my brain just... filled in the blanks on its own.
Another passive from Dragon Heart, I guess.
The gift that keeps on giving.
Then, one day, I felt something.
A hollow space. Beneath the floor.
My Dragon Senses kicked in like a sixth sense injected with espresso and caffeine pills.
"Hm?"
I raised my hand. No thoughts. Just instincts.
STAB.
Metal shrieked under my claws.
A cold echo.
Not a stab, more like a clang, but my hand still punched through clean steel like it was wet paper.
I grabbed the edge, peeled it back, and dropped into the darkness below.
The lower floor was colder. Sterile. Pressurized.
The air stank of old blood, nitrogen, and silence.
Even without light, I could see. Dragon Senses: still the best upgrade in the system.
My foot landed on something squishy.
"...Please don't be a person."
Nope. Dinosaur.
Or... something like a dinosaur.
It looked like a T. rex, but off.
Too many bone ridges.
Scales layered like armor plates.
Joints reinforced with metal pins.
An exoskeletal freakshow.
The tubes nearby weren't much better.
Some held nothing but brown sludge.
Others had skeletons half-melded with flesh.
One had a fetus-like creature curled in it, staring at me with bulbous eyes through the liquid.
This wasn't science. This was sorcery with a PhD.
I found a table—mostly intact.
Among the scattered debris sat a folder, its name stamped in bold across the cover:
"Subject: Reconstruction of Suggested Genome Design: Erebosaurus Rex"
"Erebosaurus? so it's E... Rex?"
I blinked.
E-Rex.
"Bro, that sounds wrong on so many levels."
Kinda reminded me of a word to describe certain action a man's "PARTNER" could do to begin reproduction. Who the fuck named this?
But then again, it was a dino I'd never heard of.
Wait—was it that...? Right, it was that, wasn't it?
The dinosaur movies I'd watched before had already gone down this road a dozen times.
After the few first trilogies, the next problem for the sequels always started the same way: some lab cooking up hybrid dino monstrosities instead of sticking to the original creatures.
And just like that, I could already piece together how this whole "themed dungeon" came to be.
Wait—no. Had I really assumed this island was a themed dungeon?
Dungeons overflowed with magic. Every stone, every drop of water inside them was mana-made, artificial.
Themed dungeons, on the other hand, usually had real environments.
But they came with obvious signs—like a giant welcome banner or a location name plastered under your status window:
[Kingdom of *** - *** City]
So... was this place even a dungeon at all?
No place-name under my status screen. No "Welcome to Jurassic-Vania" banner.
No signs this was a replicated environment.
Everything here was real.
Which left me with two options:
1. This wasn't a dungeon.
2. This wasn't even my original world.
Alternate dimension? Parallel Earth? The Isekai DLC?
Thud.
My foot hit something—a raised button on the ground.
It glowed red.
"...Oops."
Crackle... PSSSHHHHHH—
Alarms shrieked in the ceiling.
Metal gears screamed to life.
Cold mist hissed out from vents.
Liquid nitrogen flooded the room in pale fog.
The floor opened in a perfect circle.
It wasn't a pit.
It was a vault.
Inside: a massive cryogenic capsule. Glass frosted.
Tubes pumping coolant. Wires still alive after gods-know-how-long.
And in the middle of it all—
A thing.
Massive. Reptilian. Its wings stretched in mid-flight, but its body was frozen solid mid-roar. Its head was a cross between a pterosaur and a T. rex. Two talons legs.
Two long front arms. And... two more longer limbs—too big to be called a glider now, they're wings extending from its back.
Six limbs total.
A goddamn dinosaur cosplaying as a dragon.
"They were trying to make a dragon," I muttered.
"Of course they were. Why wouldn't they?"
PSSHHHHH.
A speaker crackled. Still working.
Must've been wired to a separate generator.
A siren blared. A digitized voice declared something about "containment failure." Duh.
I looked back at it. The ice was melting.
"Ho? Perfect timing..."
With no more exp, my growth was stuck at 55, Maybe this wannabe dragon will be enough to push me past my current level.
"ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAR!!!"
My Dragon Senses screamed.
I shut down everything but my vision.
Even then, my eyes hurt from the sound.
"God—shut up—"
"ROAAAAAAAAAAAR!!"
"Ugh, you—『STOP AND SHUT THE FUCK UP!』"
I stomped the floor.
A shockwave rattled the walls. Steel cracked beneath my foot, leaving a spiderweb crater.
Silence.
"...Huh?"
The creature froze.
Not figuratively.
It literally locked up—wings spread, mouth open mid-roar, eyes twitching like it was trying to move but couldn't.
"...Wait, what?"
DING!
["Mana Control"has reached maximum proficiency.]
[Skill has evolved into:"Dragon Tongue"!]
"A master of Magic is also a master of Language! The laws of the world will bend if you use it correctly!"
I blinked.
『Well what do you know...』
(A/N: These brackets 『』are for the use of Dragon tongue)
Hm? My voice was weird, it was still my voice, but it has more authority. In fact... it was truly Mavareth's voice.
The E. rex didn't move.
Didn't even breathe.
"..."
"..."
"..."
『Go shit yourself.』
FRRRRRRRRRRRRT!!!
『...EW! EW ew ew ew—STOP!』
This too, I shall learn to control it.
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And not too long after that...
[Mavareth - Lv 59 Dragonoid]
Combat Power: S
Skills:Dragon Heart (S), Dragon Tongue (S), Mana Sustain (C), Dragon Senses (B), Dragon Fear (A)
Survival had no calendar.
Just hunger, exhaustion, and the occasional thrill of not being eaten.
Though I never exactly felt any of that except boredom.
Then—finally—something interesting happened.
A voice.
Human.
"You punks, listen to me!"
An old man's shout cut through the beach windy shore.
My head snapped up, ears twitching. People? Here?
I didn't move. Didn't breathe. Just watched, silent as a shadow, from the treeline.
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(A/N: 3075 Words)