Haku felt a little offended to hear Darbi turn off his communication device; he could have at least warned him before doing so. But it didn't matter: by now Rhaegal had told their sisters that important truth, and he had already voiced his opinion for all to know, and apparently their sisters had accepted the situation. Sure, they were angry and disappointed, and would probably be short-tempered for weeks or maybe even months, but he was sure they would respect Rhaegal's wishes. So one way or another they had gotten what they wanted... or at least, his brother had gotten what he wanted, because Haku was still convinced that the best thing was to go find those bastards and tear them apart until they were extirpated from the world. But after all it was his brother's choice, and he had a duty to respect it even if he didn't share it. With that thought in mind, he removed the now useless communication device and returned to concentrate on what he was doing: inspecting the enormous amount of knowledge that Akenothustar had left him.
Since Haku had chosen to stay in Tigu-chtu-tal, he hadn't gone a single day without sitting for hours on end in front of the magic tablets and learning the knowledge they contained; he had stopped only sporadically to eat and sleep, but if he hadn't had these needs he would never have stopped studying. The knowledge left to him by Akenothustar was written in ancient Draconian, but fortunately the old dragon had been farsighted and had left him a dictionary to translate; even if the arachnes knew that language in fact many of the terms used by Akenothustar were too technical and scientific and an explanation was needed to understand what he really meant. Haku didn't know how Akenothustar had come to know the current language, since surely no modern language existed twenty thousand years ago, but then he concluded that the dragon probably learned it by looking into the future and observing the interactions of the various people who used it. Although dragons were able to memorize things very quickly, the ancient Draconian was such a complex and detailed language that it took Haku three days to learn it enough to understand it at a basic level and seven days to be able to understand more complex sentences, and sometimes he still needed to check the dictionary to be able to get an idea of what Akenothustar was talking about in his notes (by now that's what he used to call them: real notes stored in the tablets in the form of some spell). The ancient Draconian was a very unique language: it was based not only on words but also on different types of sounds and alterations of the vibrations of the air, as well as on a complex body language and a system of smells, and the written form of everything this was an alphabet of lines and circles forming very numerous figures; moreover, for some reason it was written from right to left and from top to bottom. In short, it was a language system like no other Haku had ever seen, and learning it had been difficult even for him.
However, what he had achieved as soon as he was finally able to read those notes had been fully worth the effort of learning that alphabet: an immense sea of knowledge had opened up before him, and considering that technically it was only an eighth of what Akenothustar had left him (given that the dragon, as he said, had divided his knowledge into tablets that he had distributed to the eight races who remained faithful to him), Haku couldn't imagine how wise that dragon must have been. The amount of information contained in just the tablets held by the arachnes was such that it would have taken years to acquire them all. Thousands of notions of magic, biology, engineering, architecture, meteorology, metallurgy, fabrication of objects, military strategy, and an infinite number of other fields, all concentrated in those tablets. Luckily Akenothustar had been kind enough to leave him an outline indicating which notes to read first and which ones after, otherwise he would have just made a huge mess: after all, he couldn't have figured out how to calculate an exponential growth formula without knowing what the time intervals and growth rates were (incidentally, all of these things he had just discovered thanks to the mathematical notions he was learning, and he was still technically struggling to establish how exactly they worked). And also sometimes there were also some things that Haku still couldn't understand despite the explanations: for example among the very first notes there was a number, 7, above which the writing 'authorization code' was written, but Haku couldn't understand understand what he was referring to, and there was no explanation about it. He could only continue and hope to figure it out sooner or later.
For Haku, studying all that knowledge was like a party. For him who had always wanted to know as many things as possible, while he was in front of those tablets he felt as if he were at a banquet full of his favorite dishes. He knew he'd barely begun to scratch the surface of all that knowledge, yet he could already see all the possible uses for what little he'd already learned. By siphoning out all that knowledge, he could have created much better defenses not only for himself and his family but for all their allies as well, and he could also have produced food more easily and granted multiple magical breakthroughs. The only thing that displeased him was that divine magic was not covered in Akenothustar's notes, since the dragon knew very little about it (it was magic given by the gods, therefore unknown to dragons and the inhabitants of that era); so no light magic, dark magic, life magic or death magic. However, the multiple uses that Akenothustar described regarding elemental magic were very advanced: by combining different spells based on fire magic, earth magic, water magic and air magic one could do incredible things, even replicate some uses of divine magics (for example create illusions, a prerogative of light magic). Haku just had to learn them well and then he would understand by himself the multiple uses he could make of them.
But what Haku liked the most was studying the very numerous notions that Akenothustar had left him on the dragons themselves: countless information on how their bodies acted and functioned and what potential they had. In those notes there were many words that Haku had struggled to understand: cell, neuron, cones, papillae, sweat glands, and so on, and therefore before being able to actually study the anatomy of dragons he had needed some notions of biology ; fortunately the pattern left by Akenothustar had helped him a lot. He had just begun to study the information on dragons, and already it was enough to surprise him. Some of them he already knew: for example the fact that dragons actually had two hearts, one in the rib cage and a much smaller and subordinate one in the pelvis, to better pump blood through their enormous body; however, he did not know that there were specific muscles adjacent to blood vessels that exerted small amounts of energy to stimulate flow, or special valves located in veins that helped carry blood back to the lungs, and that at the time inside the lungs it penetrated into ducts called alveoli inside which a specific gas exchange took place, which Akenothustar called oxygen and carbon dioxide (apparently oxygen was the gas necessary for respiration, while carbon dioxide was the product of waste), or again that each heart was divided into four different cavities in order to prevent the blood rich in oxygen from mixing with that rich in carbon dioxide, and that the movement of the heart was due to a muscular contraction of the various chambers (called atria and ventricles) which was what generated the heartbeat (technically there were two heartbeats, since dragons had two hearts, but since the second was smaller and subordinate to the main one, its heartbeat synchronized with that of the first, so it was as if it were only one). Or he could have discovered new information about the nervous system: since he had personally dissected the bodies of the parent supi he had noticed that in some points of the body the spinal cord seemed to enlarge and form structures similar to brains, but only by studying the notes of Akenothustar had been able to understand what they actually were. Apparently, dragons had three brains: this obviously did not mean that they suffered from triple personality, given that the only area where cognitive thought took place was in the head, but simply that in the rib cage and pelvis there were two enormous masses of neurons subordinate to the main brain that had the task of receiving stimuli and translating information and reacting accordingly before the main brain did so, this because due to the size of the body the impulse would have taken too long to reach the head. The first subordinate brain served to guarantee a greater optimization of the flight, since it directly perceived impulses from the wings, while the second subordinate brain served to react promptly to any attack coming from the shoulders, since it could issue short and simple commands without the intervention of the principal, such as moving the tail like a whip to catapult an attacker away.
But other notions were even more interesting and mindblowing. It had taken a while for Haku to accept them when he first read them. For example, he had finally discovered why some dragons seemed so obsessed with hoarding gold or precious metals and stones in general. For a long time he had wondered about this reason, never being able to understand why. But now he knew the truth: the reason… was that dragons could eat precious metals and stones!
The reason had been as absurd as it was simple: apparently, metals and precious stones had the ability to absorb large amounts of mana. Depending on how deep a mineral might be, it bathed in mana; and some ores were better able than others to hold such mana. In particular, gold could absorb large amounts of mana and hold it for a very long time. By eating the gold, the dragons could absorb this mana and convert it into energy: their stomachs deprived the gold of the mana it contained and transformed it into large quantities of energy which, as Balagaberan's story confirmed, could replace real food for long periods. After that the gold was defecated and if placed again in great depth it could absorb mana again and therefore be reused. Gold was obviously not the only mineral capable of providing energy to dragons: many other precious metals and stones could also do the same, even if not with such efficiency. This explained why during the past civilization dragons had been wont to surround themselves with great treasures, and why in the modern world some dragons seemed to want nothing more than to amass wealth: probably those dragons had rediscovered this secret by accident (since no sane dragon would have thought of trying to eat a coin), and since it was much easier than creating a territory they had decided to become a keeper of treasures. This diet obviously wasn't perfect: periodically it had to be supplemented with real food, but if dragons combined eating gold with long periods of hibernation, they could go on for centuries without touching a single piece of meat.
And about hibernation...
Haku had received confirmation of something quite worrying, and that he had technically suspected for a long time: for a dragon, going into hibernation meant stopping the advance of age. The normal life cycle for a dragon was actually only 10,000 years: apparently for the first 1,200 years they unlocked a domain every 400 years, based on a single element; then after that they unlocked a new one every 800 years, and it was based instead on the fusion of two different elements. Even if a dragon had two domains in fact it could not combine their spells: only once it had unlocked a domain that included both could they do so. After that, a dragon could unlock one domain every 1,200 years, based on three different elements. And then… for some reason, they couldn't go any further. After unlocking all four possible combinations of three elements of different types, dragons were unable to unlock a combination of all four elements: their bodies simply decayed and collapsed, apparently from excess mana in their system which became unsustainable. Therefore, no dragon could live beyond 10,000 years.
But going into hibernation meant halting this process and postponing aging by even hundreds of millennia. That wasn't really a problem... but it was a cause for concern for Haku, because currently four of his sisters were in hibernation. He wouldn't have worried if they were already adults, but hibernating now only meant delaying the moment in which they unlocked their dominion and thus obtained the overflowing power that would grant them protection against most of the world's dangers. In a nutshell, hibernating at their age was what an expert would call 'a very bad idea'.
"I'll have to warn them as soon as possible. I'll ask someone to send an avatar to the Jurao Kingdom and look for them to warn them" Haku muttered to himself. Unfortunately, he couldn't just wake them up while they were in hibernation. "By the way, who knows what they're doing now... it's been months now since we last spoke. What have they been doing all this time?"