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Once the same Dragon Tongue word for [Gravity] was uttered from every elder wyrm in attendance for a minute straight, I felt the effect of my [World's Weight] diminish. Not because it was not capable of producing the same effect anymore, because the word for [Gravity] was born, but because, like most things in nature, when it comes to energy, it takes the shortest and usually the most efficient path, which turned out to be [Gravity]. And with every wyrm in the hall coming into their own understanding of [Gravity], multiple pockets of gravity formed, each wyrm testing the limits in their own pockets.
By now, I was both physically, mentally, and magically exhausted. My eyes felt heavy, and I landed on my butt, barely having enough mana to sustain a gravity sheath around myself, so I was not affected by the elder wyrms playing around with the [Gravity] spell.
Seeing my exhaustion, Professor Sageira trotted over to me, scooped me up with a hand, and deposited me in one of her wings that she curled into a tube to hold me. She nodded to King Brakkh'zhaarn, and we left the elder wyrms to explore the new spell.
As I was carried down the hallway, my heavy eyelids finally won their battle, and darkness took me.
***
When I opened my eyes again, the morning sun was peaking through the blinds into an unfamiliar room, and as I stretched my body, I noticed that my legs were not only numb but also weighed down.
When I looked down at where my legs were, I saw Spot splayed out over my legs. His wings spread and paws up in the air, twitching occasionally like he was running around in a dream, and all the while, he was letting out a quiet whistling snore.
I sat up and prodded the hippogriff chick. "Come on, boy, time to get up." I saw him somewhat startle, but he turned over while pretending to sleep.
I just sighed and reached over to pick Spot up, and he took the opportunity to grapple me and nuzzle into my neck while trying to keep up the guise of being asleep. I just surrendered to this cuteness and carried the chick out of the room to find some breakfast for my grumbling stomach.
"Enjoy this while you can. Soon, you will be the one carrying me." I whispered to Spot.
After exiting the room and finding the place empty except for my luggage, I explored the place and found that I was currently in a cottage that was somewhere lower on the same mountain, somewhere just below the clouds, but still very high up.
Deciding I should get breakfast out of the way first before contacting Professor Sageira, I dug through my bag and took out some cured meats, hardtack, and some spices. And after cleaning a small copper cauldron, which looked like it had not seen use in a long time, I cooked up a stew for me and Spot.
It was only when I was done cooking that Spot stopped pretending to sleep and joined me for breakfast.
After we were done eating, I contacted Professor Sageira via her scale, and after a few minutes, she came in through the cottage door in her human form.
"Are you feeling better?" she asked as she pulled a chair out to sit.
"A bit sluggish, but overall, I am fine. Do we have any further business around here? When can we get out of here?" I asked, feeling homesick.
"Yes, we can go home. Even if there was business, the elders are currently too busy playing around with the new gravity spell and spreading it among their bloodline, so I doubt any of them would be available to bother us even if they wanted to. So once you freshen up and have your stuff packed, we are out of here." she said as she sent me on my way.
But just as I took a few steps toward my stuff, she called out to me. "Oh, talking about business," she said as she pulled out a few rolls of parchment from her dimensional storage and handed them to me. "It seems you already have some clients that want to use your services."
As I read through the parchments, half of them were written in dragonic script, a few in common, and the rest in dead languages, some of which I had to have Professor Sageiratranslate for me. In short, they were job requests from wyrm parents asking me to conduct the Broken Scale trial for their children.
As for why some of the requests were written in dead language, when I asked Professor Sageira about it, she said that some wyrm bloodlines are so isolated from civilization that the only language they know besides draconic script is the language of the mortal races that used to live in their territory before they died out and assumed that the language that they knew were still used by mortal races.
"Why did they not just use draconic script?" I asked.
"They were just trying to be polite and wrote it in a language they thought you would know." she explained.
Well, that was nice of them, but what was even nicer was the rewards promised in the request. Most of them stated their payment in the form of gold ingots, but a few of them promised the equivalent of letting me walk their hoard and pick out what I wanted. Now that was an interesting offer, especially if I find some rare treasure or magic tome, that would be sick.
As for the time period of the trials, they were set to be within the span of a year. And since the trial was supposed to be a surprise, there was not really a fixed time. So I will need to arrange an appointment with my soon-to-be clients. But that is for the future, I just want to go home, see my family, and bum around for a week before I start getting any work done.
Within half an hour, I was flying on Professor Sageira's back while Spot was being flown like a kite tied to one of her spine spikes.
Our plan before going home was to drop by O'zet the World Tortoise to introduce myself and have a chat, but before we even got to see him, we heard him first. As for what I was hearing, it was a sonorous rumble that ebbed and flowed in a rhythm.
As I looked around to spot where the rumbling sound that traveled for hundreds of kilometers was, I could not find it. Professor Sageira told me that that was the sound of O'zet snoring, but I could no longer see his head, which had previously been munching on vegetation.
The only thing I could see was a small and oddly out-of-place mountain jutting out of a sea of trees.
I asked Professor Sageira if we should wait for O'zet to wake up, but she told me that when someone of O'zet's size sleeps, it is counted in a matter of days to weeks, so I should not hold my breath.
But what she did recommend was exploring the mountain O'zet calls a shell. Because O'zet is such a powerful creature, the natural excess of mana he exudes is absorbed into the mountain that has accumulated over the time he has been alive. This, in turn, gives rise to a higher probability of natural treasures growing on his back.
Seeing that I might not be coming back to this part of the world any time soon, might as well take a look and maybe find something valuable growing on good old O'zet.