The supply problem was the next thing to solve.
Arthur sat with it over the following two days, working through the arithmetic while the rest of the household adjusted to having parents who looked a decade younger than they had on Monday.
The dragon had been exceptional. He would not find another two-hundred-year-old dragon in the Veiling Forest — possibly in his lifetime, possibly not even then. The energy that had gone into those ten pills was the product of two centuries of accumulated vitality and magical density, and the sources available to him in his normal hunting range were not in that category.
He ran the numbers.
A Glimmer Rabbit — common, low-difficulty, manageable through Shadow in large numbers — held approximately one tenth the vitality of what had gone into a single pill. Ten Glimmer Rabbits per pill. Possible, but slow, and the magical energy component of a Glimmer Rabbit was thin. The pills he could make from Glimmer Rabbits would be weaker than what he had given his parents and would need to be taken in larger quantities to produce the same effect.
Stone Boars were better. An adult Stone Boar held three to four times the vitality of a Glimmer Rabbit, with a significantly higher magical energy component. Three Stone Boars per pill, approximately. More efficient, and the quality of the pill would be closer to what he had produced from the dragon.
The deep forest creatures were better still. The large magical beasts in the old forest — the ones he had been working toward for months, whose territory started two miles north of where the dragon had been — were in a different category entirely. A single large kill from that territory might yield three or four pills at the quality he wanted.
He had also been wasting absorption.
This was the realization that bothered him most. Every hunt for two years, the passive absorption had come to him and he had taken his share and passed fractions to his family if present. With his strength already so high, he could have been creating and stockpiling pills instead of absorbing it for himself. He had been rich in something valuable and had been letting it drain because he had not understood what to do with it until now.
He would not do that anymore.
◆ ◆ ◆
He found Shadow and Tsuki together in the corner of the basement — their preferred winter spot, Shadow's dark form and Tsuki's white tails in the specific comfortable arrangement they had developed over three months of coexistence. They both looked at him when he came down the stairs.
He sat cross-legged in front of them.
'I need to teach you something,' he said. 'Both of you.'
Tsuki's ears moved forward. Shadow's ember-eyes were steady.
He explained the compression mechanic — not in language, exactly, not for Shadow, but in the way he communicated complex things through their bond: the shape of the process, the feeling of gathering the energy rather than releasing it, the specific inward compression that produced the stable golden form. Shadow received it with the focused attention she gave to things he was teaching rather than directing.
Tsuki received it differently — not through a bond but through the old deep awareness she had, and after a moment the air around her went briefly still in the way that meant she had understood something and was integrating it. She looked at him with the amber eyes that were not entirely unlike Saya's and then looked at Shadow.
Shadow looked back.
Something passed between them that Arthur could follow through the bond with Shadow but not fully interpret — the specific communication of two creatures that had been hunting together for months and had developed a shared language for it. Then Shadow's ember-eyes returned to him with the quality that meant: yes, we understand, we will do this.
From now on, when they hunted, nothing would be wasted. The absorption that had been flowing passively to Arthur would be gathered first, compressed, stored. He had given Shadow a small containment vessel from the workshop — a sealed jade cylinder he had prepared for exactly this purpose — that she could fill over multiple hunts and bring back for his processing.
He looked at the two of them.
'Good,' he said.
Shadow leaned her head against his knee. Tsuki's tail, the left one, drifted across the top of his foot and rested there in the way she occasionally did things that were not quite accidental.
He sat with them for a while before going back upstairs.
◆ ◆ ◆
Clara was at the kitchen table with a length of dragon skin when he came up, and Mira was across from her, and between them was an expression of shared frustration that told him they had been attempting something and the something had not been going well.
'It won't pierce,' Clara said, holding up a needle that had bent slightly at the tip. 'I've tried four needles. It just — slides off.'
Arthur looked at the dragon skin and then at the needle and thought for a moment. Then he went back to the basement and came up with a small carved piece of dragon tooth — one of the fragments that had come from the jaw, dense and sharply pointed where he had worked it — and a thin strip of dragon leather he had cut and worked to thread-width.
He handed Clara the tooth needle and the thread.
She looked at both. She pushed the needle point against the dragon leather and it went through cleanly, the hardness of the tooth finding the seam in the material that a steel needle could not.
'Oh,' she said.
'Dragon tooth through dragon skin,' he said. 'Like materials.'
Mira picked up the thread and examined it. Thin as fine silk, with the same faint texture as the skin it had come from. She tested it between her fingers — it did not stretch or break.
'All right,' she said, with the composure of someone who had decided to simply accept that this was the material they were working with and adjust accordingly.
The work took three days.
It was not fast work — the dragon leather required attention at every step, the needle finding the seams rather than piercing randomly, the thread pulled with more care than ordinary stitching required. But Mira and Clara were both skilled, and Clara's telekinesis — which Arthur had taught her months ago and which she had been developing steadily since — turned out to be the key the dragon leather had been waiting for. She could hold tension on multiple thread lengths simultaneously with the magic while her hands worked the needle, which allowed a precision of construction that ordinary sewing could not produce.
Mira adapted to the material with the thoroughness she brought to culinary problems, and the same result: she figured it out and then she was very good at it.
They combined the dragon leather with fabric for the garments — not all dragon leather, which would have been too rigid for everyday wear, but structured layers, the dragon material forming the underlying panels that mattered most while softer fabrics gave the clothes shape and comfort. For the girls this produced dresses and blouses that looked completely ordinary from a distance and were built, underneath, to stop a blade. For the boots it was simpler — full dragon leather throughout, lined on the inside with wool from the farm's stores, with a sole Arthur had constructed from the compressed scale fragments that had been too small for other applications.
The whole family had a set by the end of the third day. Edric's boots. Thomas's work jacket, reinforced at the shoulders and forearms. Mira's winter coat, rebuilt from the original with the mended cuff replaced entirely. Lyra's dress, which she had specified the pockets for with considerable precision. Saya's outfit, which had been a collaboration between Saya and Clara that had required some negotiation about the tail accommodation.
Maren's, which Arthur had made sure was included without discussion.
Clara's, which was her favorite color and had the fire-stitch detail along the collar that she had added herself in the last hour of work and which was, Arthur had to admit, very good.
Arthur laid them all out in the main room and looked at them and thought: functional. Then he took them back to the basement.
◆ ◆ ◆
The enchantment work took a full day.
Dragon materials could hold complex enchantments in a way that ordinary cloth and leather could not — the magical conductivity in the scales and skin meant that multiple layered spells could be imprinted without degrading each other, each one settling into the material cleanly and holding without the constant maintenance that enchanted cloth usually required.
He worked through each garment methodically.
Physical defense first — the base layer, woven into the material itself, a reinforcement that worked with the dragon leather's existing properties rather than on top of them and produced a resistance to impact and blade that was significantly beyond what the material alone offered. Then magical defense, a separate layer that addressed what physical defense could not: environmental magic, offensive spell work, the kind of incidental magical exposure that people who lived with an unconventional household encountered regularly.
Light heal, calibrated to the wearer's signature — a passive activation that would address minor injuries automatically without requiring the wearer to do anything. He had built this for the rings and knew the mechanic; adapting it to a larger surface area was straightforward.
Last: the fitting enchantment. A growth accommodation he had been designing since the first week of the project, because Arthur, Lyra and Clara were still growing and making clothes for children that would not fit them in two years was a waste of the material. The enchantment read the wearer's current proportions and would adjust gradually over time — not dramatically, not visibly, but the boots that fit Lyra today would still fit her when she was sixteen, and the dress that fit Clara now would grow with her without needing alteration.
He finished the last garment and stood back and looked at the completed set.
He was seven years old. He had just made his family dragon leather clothes with four layered enchantments each, sewn with dragon tooth needles and dragon thread by his mother and his 12-year-old sister.
These could easily be considered national treasures. He was fairly satisfied with this.
He carried them upstairs.