“I will keep that in mind. I guess I have gotten lucky that all the dragons I have met have been friendly.”

  Everburn says “Friendly might be an exaggeration. I have been tempted to eat you a time or two.”

  “Just because I ask too many questions is not a good reason to eat me!”

  Everburn says “Hence why you are still around annoying me with your questions!”

  “Ha ha! You know you need me to keep you from getting bored!”

  Everburn says “Not even close! Anyway, any more questions? Or can I go back to enjoying my sleep?”

  “I’m pretty sure that I had other questions that I wanted to ask you, but I can’t think of them right now. My mind is locked onto the battlefield right now. So, I guess you can go back to sleep.”

  Everburn says “Great!”

  Everburn immediately kicks me out of his soulscape before I can come up with any more questions. It’s not like he actually needed to wake up to talk to me since it was in a soulscape. He just loves yanking my chain and he enjoys these kinds of things, especially if it annoys me.

  Still, he is a great source of information and it is worth putting up with him for that. The fact that he can easily eat me is beside the point, but it is hard to ignore when he shows me his teeth. Even if he was grinning at me at the time, I got the point, exactly as he wanted me to.

  I’m sure that the comments about eating me were specifically to see me flinch when he smiled. Just his small way of reminding me that there is always a bigger fish. His not so subtle way of telling me not to go back to the battlefield if I don’t want to get eaten.

  Not that I mind the warning, just his delivery was annoying, but I wasn’t going back anyway. Not until I have some more strength to defend myself with at least, but that shouldn’t take long. However, it is too late to start anything else tonight, so I will have to wait until tomorrow.

  When I open my eyes it is still a couple of hours before dawn, so I try to get some sleep. However, as usual of late, sleep eludes me and it is starting to worry me a little. I am not worried about missing some sleep, I am worried it will all catch up to me at some point.

  I don’t want to end up sleeping for a week or more like I did when I used the drake form. Although, if I am more like a dragon now, I might not need sleep as long as I have mana. Thanks to my tattoo, I will never be low on mana unless the world loses its mana.

  Even when I was enchanting and used up most of my mana I didn’t feel tired. I don’t think just draining my mana would do it, it would need to stay drained for a while. Still, I think I would feel better if I could make myself take a nap once in a while.

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  Since I can’t sleep I check my messages on the network and it turns out that I have quite a few. The messages tell me that there were indeed demons in my territory and all but one were killed. The last managed to fly away with serious wounds, so the demons know about the detector now.

  Still, I doubt that they can crack it, so we shouldn’t have to worry about demon infiltrators. Then again, the demons do have humans that serve them so we do still have to worry about them. Still, they shouldn’t be anywhere near as big of a threat as the demons are, so it is some relief.

  Other than the information about the demons, there is a message from Pol saying that they arrived. They are still in demon hunter city, but everything is going well so far and no one has caused them any problems. Zachariah is taking good care of them and the trading is looking really profitable.

  I am not worried about the money, but knowing the trade route is viable is important. It is good to know that my empire’s economy has the potential to grow and prosper on its own. Not that I was really worried about it, not with Pol in charge, but it is still something of a relief.

  Of course, it is only currently viable due to Athena, without her we don’t have a way to keep it open. We don’t have any other ships capable of making the trip, in fact we don’t have any other ships at all. I should probably assign someone to see if we can get a shipyard set up, but I’m not sure who.

  I don’t actually know of anyone serving me that has any knowledge of ship building. As far as I know, there has never been much ship construction done on the peninsula. Mercy would know more, I will have to ask her when she wakes up and see what she thinks.

  I know that there are some ships because there is ocean trade, but I have never seen them. I have no idea how good they are or if they are capable of that kind of ocean travel. However, from what I have seen of the peninsula’s technology level, I kind of doubt it.

  You never know, I might be pleasantly surprised, but I am not getting my hopes up. On the other hand, there are a lot of ports on the coasts of the main continent and I know they build ships. Maybe I can hire some ship builders here and send them back to the peninsula.

  That is also something that I am going to need to discuss with Mercy before I do anything. After all, I may come up with the idea and get things started, but I won’t be the one to manage it. While I am waiting for Mercy to wake up, I reply to everyone who left me a message.

  I congratulate those that did well and make sure they know that I appreciate their work. This includes Pol, even though I know he is having a lot of fun making money and probably doesn’t need my acknowledgement. Still, writing a bunch of messages helps to pass the time while I wait for Mercy to wake up.

  When Mercy finally wakes up we have some morning fun and then head down to breakfast. As we are eating I explain my thoughts to Mercy and then ask what she knows about ship building.

  Mercy says “We do have ship builders, but the only ships we have are those that are called coast huggers. The empire was ahead of us in ship technology, but I doubt that is still true now.”

  “If I found some ship builders and gave you the funds, do you think you could build up the industry?”

  Mercy says “Of course, at that point it would be easy, but is it worth it? Just one trade route, couldn’t you just make a ship or two?”

  “I could, but wouldn’t building the industry be better long term? Besides, there are islands that we can explore.”

  Mercy says “Islands? Do you mean the island of Osanaka?”