Odin did not mess around once he decided to teach me. The very next day, the giant green-and-gold lizard shifted his massive body and shrank down in a blinding flash of light that made my eyes water. When the spots cleared, there was no longer a mountain of a dragon. Instead, a short, stocky old man with a long white beard and a missing eye was standing there in simple, scratchy brown robes.
"The dragon body is too big for teaching proper sword forms," the old man grunted, cracking his neck with a sound like a dry branch snapping. "This is better. Now, sit down. We have work to do."
I sat on the grass, my mind racing. Okay, so he can take human form too. Good to know.
"We aren't just doing runes," Odin said, pacing in front of me with his hands behind his back. "You have all this raw power, but you're clumsy. You move like a drunk calf. To be a true master, you need variety. I am going to teach you illusion, light, darkness, barrier magic, space, and time. And every single day, you are going to fight me with a sword. Your battle awareness is trash, hatchling. I'm going to beat some actual instinct into you."
He wasn't kidding about the beating part. For the first few months, I spent half my time covered in bruises from his wooden practice sword. He was fast. Ridiculously fast. Even with the Eyes of Gilgamesh and the Great Sage trying to predict his moves, Odin in his human form was a monster. He taught me how to read the intent of an opponent, how to sense the slight shift in air before a strike, and how to use illusions to misdirect an enemy's eyes.
But the real kicker came when we started the Primordial Runes.
"Human brains are too fragile to memorize the true Origin Runes," Odin said one night by the campfire. He looked exceptionally serious, his one eye glowing in the firelight. "The only way for you to truly learn them without your head popping is for me to inscribe them directly onto your soul."
I gulped, dropping my roasted rabbit leg. "Onto my soul? Is that even safe?"
"Not really," Odin laughed, poking the fire with a stick. "But you wanted power, didn't you?"
He didn't give me time to back out. The process felt like someone was using a branding iron on the inside of my chest. One by one, over the months and years, Odin carved the ancient symbols of power directly into the fabric of my soul. I would wake up screaming in the middle of the night, feeling my very essence being rewritten, but I kept going. I had to.
He also taught me how to properly use the Eyes of Gilgamesh for clairvoyance. "You have eyes that can see the truth, boy. Stop using them just to calculate magic circles! Look at the threads of time!" Under his brutal guidance, I learned how to look past the physical world and peer into the past, the present, and even fuzzy, shifting glimpses of the future. It was exhausting. Looking into the future for even three seconds felt like someone was pouring hot sand into my eyes.
And just like that, fifteen years went by.
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During those fifteen long years, Odin turned me from a kid holding a stick into a living, breathing powerhouse of magic. The training was pure hell, but the magic explanations he gave me blew everything Martha and Jason had taught me out of the water. He didn't explain things like a teacher; he explained them like a force of nature.
Take Illusion Magic. I thought it was just making people see fake things. Odin laughed in my face when I said that, then proceeded to make me feel like I was drowning in ice water for ten minutes just to prove a point.
"Basic mages trick the eyes," Odin explained, tapping his head with a calloused finger. "They project an image in the air. That's amateur stuff. True illusion magic doesn't trick the eyes; it tricks the brain. You feed your Ethernano directly into their sensory receptors. You make them smell the smoke, feel the heat of the fire, and hear the screams before they even see a flame. If their brain believes the fire is real, their body will actually start to blister and burn. You aren't creating a fake picture; you are creating a fake reality. You can literally scare a man's heart into stopping without touching him."
Then there was Light and Darkness Magic. I assumed they were just opposites, like fire and water.
"Wrong again," Odin grumbled, smacking the back of my head. "Light is about absolute speed and purity. It's the energy of exposure. When you cast Light magic, you aren't just making things bright; you are accelerating the Ethernano particles to the point where they strip away physical matter. It cuts because it moves faster than the universe can calculate it. Darkness, on the other hand, isn't just a shadow or the absence of light. Darkness is the energy of consumption. It is gravity, weight, and void. When you use Darkness magic, you are creating a point in space that pulls everything in and crushes it down to nothing. Light pushes; Darkness pulls. Learn the difference or you'll tear your own arms off."
But the real mind-melters were Space and Time Magic.
"Space magic," Odin said, drawing a circle in the air with his finger, "is about understanding that distance is a lie. The world is like a folded piece of paper. To normal humans, walking from point A to point B takes time because they walk along the paper. A Space mage just pokes a needle through the fold. You don't move through space; you bring the destination to you by warping the Ethernano threads that hold reality together. It's not running fast; it's making the world smaller."
"And Time?" I asked, completely hooked despite the massive headache I had.
"Time magic is the most dangerous of all," Odin said, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly whisper. "Time isn't a river flowing in one direction. It's an ocean of possibilities. When you use Time magic, you aren't actually moving the world forward or backward. You are isolating a specific target and forcing its internal clock to speed up, slow down, or pause entirely. You are severing its connection to the universal stream of time. Use too much of it, and the universe will notice you trying to cheat and delete you to balance the scales. Never play with it unless you have no other choice."
Combined with the fighting, it was pure hell. Every day, Odin would combine these magics to beat the crap out of me. He would use Space magic to instantly appear behind me, Darkness magic to make my practice sword feel like it weighed a thousand pounds, and Illusion magic to make me think I was fighting five of him at once. I had to learn to read the flow of Ethernano in the air just to survive his daily spars.
I was twenty-five years old now. I stood in the same hidden valley, but I wasn't the scrawny kid anymore. I was tall, wearing my custom Merlin robes, with long white hair tied back and eyes that held the weight of someone who had seen too much. Every single Primordial Rune was now etched into my soul. I was, without a doubt, one of the most powerful beings walking the earth.
Odin was sitting on a rock, looking incredibly tired. He seemed to have aged a lot in the last few years. His skin looked like old, dry parchment, and his breathing was shallow and rattling.
"Odin," I said quietly, stepping up next to him. I didn't need the Sage or my eyes to know what was happening. "Are you... are you gonna die now?"
Odin let out a dry laugh that turned into a heavy, wet cough. He looked up at me with his one eye. "Those eyes sure are mature now, aren't they? You don't miss a thing." He smiled, a genuine, tired smile that reached his eyes. "Yes, Merlin. The Primordial Runes were my anchor to this world. Now that I have passed them all to you, my time is up. I am no longer immortal."
I didn't answer him right away. I couldn't. I looked at the patch of grass where he'd first taught me to hold a wooden stick, remembering how I'd almost melted his favorite metal sword before that. I remembered the first time he had swept my legs out from under me and called me a "clumsy hatchling." He had beaten me into the dirt literally thousands of times over fifteen years, but he had also kept me alive in an era of pure slaughter. He was a grumpy, brutal monster, but he was my master.
My throat felt tight. "Odin..."
"Ah, don't give me that face," Odin grunted, pushing himself up from the rock with shaking hands. He stood tall one last time, looking out at the valley. "I'm not leaving you empty-handed. I have a final gift for you."
Suddenly, his human body began to glow with a brilliant, warm golden light. He didn't explode or scream; he just started dissolving into tiny, floating golden particles that smelled like cedar and ozone.
The particles swirled in the air, condensing and taking physical form. When the light faded, a magnificent wooden staff was floating in the air before me. It was carved from ancient wood that hummed with pure etherno energy, and set into the top was a , glowing green gem.
My heart skipped a beat. I recognized it instantly. "A Dragon Lacrima..."
Then, Odin's voice echoed directly inside my head one last time. It sounded peaceful, devoid of all the grumpiness he usually had.
It is my final gift to you, hatchling. That lacrima contains all 3,000 years of my magical knowledge and my remaining power. Use it well. Protect the future.
As the last of his presence faded, the real horror began. It wasn't a peaceful transfer. It was a digital fire hose being shoved down my throat.
[Warning: Incoming data stream exceeding safe cognitive thresholds. Attempting to buffer—]
The cold, mechanical voice of the Great Sage was cut off by a high-pitched screeching noise that played directly inside my skull. Three thousand years of a dragon's memories, spells, and raw power slammed into my brain all at once.
"Agh! Son of a—!"
I dropped to my knees, clawing at my head. The green gem on the staff flared with blinding light. My eyes—the Eyes of Gilgamesh—spun wildly, desperately trying to map out a flood of data that didn't follow the laws of physics. I saw stars born and die. I saw civilisations rise and fall in the span of a single heartbeat.
My nose started to bleed. The Great Sage's voice started to glitch out in my mind, sounding like a broken cassette tape.
[N-No-Notice: Over-er-load im-minent. Crit-critical error. At-tempting to integrate 'Sage Dragon's Knowledge' with cu-current skill set...]
Do something! I screamed internally, my vision going white. I'm gonna die!
[E-Evolution initiated. Dis-carding existing parameters. De-constructing 'Great Sage'. Rebuilding core process with Draconic Wisdom...]
The pain peaked. It felt like my brain was being ripped apart, pixel by pixel, and then slammed back together. I stopped screaming because I forgot how to breathe.
Then, everything went dead silent.
The high-pitched squeal stopped. The burning in my brain cooled down into a smooth, icy chill. I opened my eyes. I was still on my knees, but the world didn't look normal anymore. I could see the exact flow of Ethernano in the air, the density of the dirt, and the molecular breakdown of the staff in front of me all without even trying.
A new voice spoke in my head. It wasn't the robotic, emotionless drone of the Great Sage anymore. It sounded deep, resonant, and almost bored like a tired professor who knew everything in the universe and was annoyed that I had to ask.
[Integration successful. The 'Great Sage' has been consumed to manifest the ultimate authority of intellect.][Greetings, user. I am 'Wisdom King Solomon'. Let us begin.]
I knelt in the dirt, gripping the glowing staff tightly as my mind hummed with a clarity I had never known. Odin was gone, but his legacy had just turned me into something beyond human.