The dragon's harem

”Luckily for us, Isdis is more reasonable than Merida.” Isabelle looked at the table in front of her, where a long, beautiful blue dress rested. ”Sapphire and gold, those are what suit her the most.”

The seamstresses looked at her for a second. ”Unlike Lady Merida, Lady Isdis was a princess, and she had already gotten used to things like the ceremony.”

”I’m just saying that it’s good to finally be able to make something nice and have it worn.” She threw a glance at the other table. ”Well, besides the fact that she won’t wear a corset.”

”That isn’t just Lady Isdis. No one here wears them anymore.” One of the seamstresses looked down at herself. ”They were common back home, but I’m relieved that we don’t need to wear them anymore.”

Isabelle laughed. ”Well, I’m certain you aren’t relieved about having to work out. You can’t cheat with them anymore to have thinner waists.”

As they talked, they heard a knock on the door and a voice called. ”Lady Isdis and Lady Kory are here.” The maids standing guard outside called, and the door opened a second after. From it, Isdis and Kory walked in, fresh out of the bath.

”I’ve been waiting.” Isabelle stood and approached them. ”The dress is ready, but I’ll need you to try it. If something is off, we’ll get it fixed before the ceremony, but there is another thing I want you to do for me.”

Isdis looked at her. ”Another thing?”

”I want you to wear it and not hold back your cold. I want to know if this dress can resist it, or will it freeze and crumble into pieces.” She approached and touched Isdis’s stomach, ”I can feel it. You’ve gotten colder.”

Isdis approached the dress and lifted it up. ”Depends, I can now absorb more heat. Calling it colder is wrong.” She looked back at Isabelle. ”I can control heat; by absorbing it, I cool everything around me. Of course, that depends on a lot of variables.”

Kory approached Isdis and unlocked the buttons on the back of her dress, and then pulled it down.

”You’re going to change here?” Isdis looked at her with a smile. ”I don’t mind you stripping here, but Merida isn’t here; I can’t make changes on my own.”

”I don’t need you to fix things now; just take notes so I won’t need to come back more than a couple of times.” She fully stripped down and started to pick all the clothes that Merida and Isabelle prepared for her.

As Kory helped her dress up, she explained to Isabelle how her cold work and why the dress won’t survive no matter what it was made from. Isdis can’t just cool things down; she can rob them of their very thermal heat.

Everything has thermal energy stored inside it, and that energy takes the form of movement, the kinetic energy the tiny particles have while jiggling and vibrating. That is what is perceived as heat, and Isdis can steal that energy.

Of course, Isdis fully understood that her power isn’t omnipotent or limitless; in fact, she had countless limits and hurdles that she struggled against. The first was size: the bigger something is, the harder it is for her to steal its thermal energy because she’ll need to somehow reach all of its particles, or wait for the heat to seep to the edges.

Cooling a room is easier than cooling a hall, and it is practically impossible for her to cool an entire world like what Gamond could do; she just lacks the raw power for such a thing.

Another limiting factor was that she could only cool things directly touching her, and while cooling the air around her body could cause a cascading effect where that air cools the air around it, causing the heat to fall toward her, it is a slow effect called convection.

Those were the problems she faced on the outside, but her own body was also a huge limiting factor, and it was much harder to deal with than it looked. She has two main limits that directly link to her own flesh, and they are storage and pull.

Energy is always conserved; it is never erased or created from nothing. The heat that Isdis absorbs is stored inside, and she has an upper limit to how much she can store. Every now and then, she would have to discharge that heat; otherwise, she might explode.

Hearing that she would explode, the seamstresses looked terrified, and one of them asked with a scared face. ”Why? Won’t you just... burn from the heat?”

”I have enough heat stored inside me that the moment I lose control over it, my entire body would evaporate in an instant, turning into something worse than just gas. From what Kali told me, my very matter would crumble due to the heat, and I’ll burst with enough force to erase an island off the map.”

In short, the heat would cause her atoms to collapse and result in a massive nuclear explosion.

Isdis smiled, ”Ah, if I were to be killed while still having this much energy stored, I’d explode as well.” If she were to be assassinated in the ceremony, then the entire region would be erased from the map before Arad could even get a chance to get angry.

”It’s annoying, isn’t it? Discharging energy is always harder than absorbing it.” Isdis sighed. This was the other part of the problem: she had a limit on how fast she could absorb heat to cool things, and that process gets harder the colder the thing gets.

So, cooling something from 0c to -20c is much easier than cooling that same thing from -20c to -30c, and cooling it from just -30c to -35c is far harder than anything before. The colder something gets, the harder it is to keep cooling it down, and toward absolute zero, that difficulty extends to infinity.

Isdis didn’t have infinite energy or endurance to keep cooling something to extreme levels, so she only cools it as much as needed to freeze it and doesn’t bother going further. So, while she can cool ice to crazy temperatures, she usually just leaves it a bit below 0c to avoid exhausting herself.

So, how could she have frozen time in Arad’s room earlier? The method she used has multiple layers. First, the room itself was relatively small, and second, Isdis was running on an empty heat tank; she had just discharged the heat she stored that evening.

And the trick is that she didn’t really freeze time completely. She only cooled the room as much as she could to slow time enough for her to act. But how was Arad able to see her? That was the point: she couldn’t cool him, not even a bit. He is too massive, too hot, and too resistant to thermal convection that she cannot even begin to freeze him.

Then, the second catch was that she didn’t even touch time. Even in the frozen world, time still flows normally; it is just that matter cannot change while frozen solid. It is the same way with food, and of course, she has to be careful not to harm those she freezes. The water inside living cells can crystallize and tear their walls, instantly killing all living beings she freezes. To avoid that, Isdis had to freeze people so fast that those crystals cannot form, which is extremely hard.

That’s why Isdis wastes too much of her energy trying to rapidly freeze living beings first, and then cool the non-living matter at her own pace... which puts another limit on her. Even if she could freeze time in a mansion, she would never do it because if she did, all the innocent people inside would die.

To reach her ultimate potential, she has to surpass those limits the same way Isbert and Stillness did, otherwise; she’ll always be just an inferior copy of them.

Isdis blinked several time. ”My chest isn’t fitting inside.”

”Did you get bigger?” Isabelle sighed, ”For heaven’s sake... come here, let me measure you again.”