The Lord of the Seas - An Isekai Progression Fantasy [ Currently on Volume 2 ]

The first few times Lukas used the Crest of the Lord, the result was always the same—an hour. That was all he could withstand before the weight of thousands of voices, lives, and lineages clawed at the edge of his mind. Before the storm of memory threatened to drown him in what was and what could have been.

But he endured it. Again and again.

Each session with Rodan started with Styx holding his hand, grounding him—her presence a fixed point in a sea of unraveling timelines. Her voice, her warmth, the steady beat of her heart — they were the only thing that kept him from completely drowning in the memories of lives that were not his own.

Gradually, that hour stretched into two hours. Three hours. Then, Lukas eventually could somehow bring himself to use the Crest for five hours at a time.

Rodan was not a gracious teacher If anything, he was harsher now in memory than he'd ever been in life. Rodan did not coddle Lukas, simply because they had "all the time in the world" in Kairos Castle. Rodan did not reassure him when Lukas failed, time and time again; he simply expected Lukas to rise again. That was the bare minimum for Rodan Drakos.

The moment Lukas had chosen this path—had chosen to truly master the Divinity of the Seas—Rodan had decided to make sure he earned every single piece of it. His brother had been a genius of the mystical arts. But that didn't mean that he had not put in blood, sweat and tears to ensure that his talent was fully realized. Lukas was not a genius. So he wouldn't only have to work hard, he'd have to work harder than Rodan ever had for the possibility of rising to what his older brother had eventually been capable of.

Lukas spent the next hundred years—a full century—doing nothing more than mastering what he thought he already knew. Rodan made him tear everything that Lady Kaitlyn, his mother, had taught him apart, rebuilding them from the ground up. The former dragon lord drilled Lukas until his voice was hoarse, until every gesture felt like instinct, not technique. Rodan broke down every principle Lady Kaitlyn Drakos had once taught him, reshaping it in the truest image of the Lords who came before.

Only after that…did Rodan begin teaching him the other spells that formed the foundation of the Drakos Household's greatest weapon. The weapon that had been passed down every single generation of the Drakos Bloodline.

The Divinity of the Seas was not just spellwork or flow. It was a philosophy. It was balance. It was power so old and so deep it sang to the core of Lukas' draconic soul.

And Lukas learned. He suffered. He grew.

Through each session, each exchange, each grueling hour beneath the storm of the Crest, he grew. Lukas changed. It was subtle but Styx could see the difference. Before her eyes, the dragon she'd first met at the beginning of these Trials was nearly unrecognizable from the Lukas Drakos who now stood before her.

By the end of the Second Flip, his voice carried the rhythm of tides. His blood pulsed with the weight of oceans. His soul resonated with the songs of the Lords who came before him.

In doing so, Lukas finally learnt the spells of the Divinity of the Seas:

I. Generation and Control

"Simple, isn't it?" Rodan had said once, water rising around him in spirals. "But simplicity is deceptive. It's the sea's favorite lie."

At its core, it was the most elemental form of power: creation. The spell allowed Lukas to generate water—either creating it by using the energy within his Mana Pool, or drawing it from the world around him. Humidity. Fog. Ocean. Glacial ice. But each method came with trade-offs.

Bringing the water into existence was an immediate process, seamless—but taxing. Drawing from the world took longer—half a beat to tame the wild tides—but cost far less energy.

The key, Rodan taught him, was mastery of intent.

"The water you create is yours," Rodan had emphasized, " You are the will that binds it. Always. But lose control of it and the seas will no longer obey your command."

Once created, Lukas could shape it. Mold it into weapons, shields, waves, or silence. With this, he claimed sovereignty over every drop he summoned.

It was a spell he already knew well. Yet it still took him years to master, forming the foundation of the spells to come.

II. The Tension of the Waters

This spell came with far more complexity and learning how to master the second spell was much more painful than the last.

Rodan had first hurled him into a river, then turned it to sludge mid-battle. Lukas couldn't move, couldn't breathe, until he understood.

"Water is weak only to those who do not respect it," Rodan had said. "Change its nature. Make it something else."

This spell allowed Lukas to alter water's cohesiveness and viscosity. With a gesture, flowing water could turn to rubbery tension, or sludge thick enough to drown an army's charge. He could harden it into pseudo-solid walls, flexible barriers, or chains with the density of stone.

Lukas had barely scratched the surface of what the spell could be used for when he'd been up against the Rear Admiral of Nozar, the Second Prince of Nozar.

The cohesion spell didn't alter water's elemental essence. Drown someone in it, and it would still behave like water. But manipulating molecular bonds meant he could delay evaporation, resist heat, and maintain forms even under elemental duress.

Only beings of significantly higher power—especially those aligned with flame or heat—could shatter it with ease.

"You're just not sculpting water," Rodan had told him. "You're rewriting the laws of what it wants to be."

III. The Water of Life

The third was both the most divine—and the most dangerous. For when life is given, it is also taken.

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"Every dragon knows hunger. But we—sea-born—know thirst," Rodan whispered as he invoked it for the first time.

The Water of Life was a spell that fed Lukas from the world itself.

Outside of battle, the spell acted as a passive intake. He could draw moisture from air, fog, rainfall, oceans. It didn't fuel his power directly—but gave him stamina, longevity, a constant stream of elemental communion. He could run for days. Last for weeks without a second of sleep. Endure.

In battle, it turned ruthless.

The moment Lukas engaged, the passive spell would be undone—and the third spell had to be recast for war.

From the earth, from the air, from the skin of his enemies—he could pull. A radius of space around him became a siphoning tide. Pulling water from life itself…was a death sentence. It was not a spell that differentiated between friend or foe. All would be subject to its pull.

Using the spell, Lukas could restore his Mana, heal minor wounds with each pulse. With time—and enough water to draw from—Lukas could even recover from wounds that would have felled any lesser dragon entirely.

But it came at a cost. Fatigue. Burnout. Hunger of the soul.

"Don't get greedy," Rodan warned. "Take what you need, not what you want. The sea punishes gluttons."

Be merciful. But not kind. This was the principle of the third and it took Lukas a while to learn this.

IV. Domain of Fortitude

The final spell was not something the eye could witness, instead a passive enchantment that allowed Lukas to see the world in greater clarity.

It linked his body to the water in the air, the subtle vibrations, the micro-shifts of humidity and particle tension. Every footstep, every breath, every spoken word within the world around him rippled through him.

At first, it overwhelmed him.

Lukas saw too much. He heard everything. Every heartbeat. Every vibration of blade against air. But Rodan had guided him through it, again and again.

"This is not just sight. It is not simply sound. It is awareness," he had said. "You do not react to the world. You feel it. Long before it moves."

With this spell active, speed became a lie. Invisibility a joke. Even ranged attacks had to reckon with the moment before momentum. For it would only take a second for the wind to give them away.

Lukas couldn't always outpace his foes. But with Domain of Fortitude, he would rarely need to.

Together, these four became the foundation of the Divinity of the Seas. Rodan had taught them with fury and love. Lukas had learned them with pain and perseverance.

But the two hundred years had finally come to an end. It was the final day of the Second Flip.

Rodan watched Lukas shape the tides with careful precision. His spells were no longer clumsy, no longer raw. Each gesture summoned water with discipline, each movement controlled its weight, density, and rhythm like an artisan commanding his craft. Lukas had learnt the fundamentals—the skeleton of Divinity. But Rodan's eyes didn't shine with pride. They hardened.

"It's time."

Lukas turned, confused. "Time for what?"

Rodan pointed to the sea. A silence stretched between them, held together only by the whisper of the waves. He stepped forward, drawing a circle in the sand with the tip of his foot. "You've mastered the 'how.' But you've never once asked yourself why you move the way you do. Why you use these spells as tools and not weapons of wonder. See, Lukas, you are still trapped within this circle. You lack the freedom required to break out of it."

Lukas frowned. "Freedom?"

Rodan looked him dead in the eye. "It's more than just the spells that make the Divinity of the Seas great.. It's not just manipulation. It's creation. That's what you came to me for. That's why you put everything on the line—to learn how to match me in combat, no? And the truth is that knowing how to cast these spells is just the pre-requisite brother. Our Divinity's strength lies in how to imagine."

Lukas felt the weight of the truth hit him like a slow wave. Rodan's armies, his barriers of glass-clear water that moved like steel, his creatures birthed from nothing—none of it was textbook technique. It was innovation. It was art. And Lukas had none of it.

"How do I learn that?" Lukas whispered, realizing how much farther he had to go. Mastering the spells had just been the start.

Rodan grinned, excitement alive in his eyes. He had been a strict teacher, guiding Lukas every step of the way. Now, it was his turn to put his magic to proper use.

"You fight me."

The Second Flip of the Hourglass came to an end.

But the Trials were not over, far from it. Lukas knew what he was getting himself into and he knew that he needed more time. That was the whole purpose of the Trials of Kairos Castle.

It didn't feel quite as grand a decision as it once had as he flipped it for the third time, adding another three hundred years to these Trials. But it was necessary. Lukas knew it was. It could not come to an end now, not until he knew that he was strong enough to protect Linemall. To protect his people from the ones in the living world that threatened their very existence.

Thus the Third Flip began.

Rodan was no longer his teacher. During this time, there was not a lesson that Lukas would learn. There were barely conversations to be had.

The centuries that followed were Three Hundred Years of Battle.

Rodan did not go easy on Lukas. He never explained his moves. Never offered advice. Every day, Lukas was thrown into chaos—a storm, a war, a trap, a miracle. Sometimes he was crushed under a tide that had no beginning or end. Other times, he stood before armies of water-forged beasts, with only seconds to think. And slowly, painfully, beautifully—he began to change.

He came to learn that "Generation and Control" was not simply a spell.

It was a brush.

A stroke of blue to paint the battlefield.

He learned to use the Tension of the Waters mid-attack—turning spears to sludge midflight, walls to rubber underfoot, crashing soldiers in tides of pseudo-liquid horror.

The Water of Life became more than recovery. It meant sacrifice. It meant balance. Lukas learned to give, to take, to trade injuries for opportunities, energy for vision. He began to heal while striking, draining enemies dry mid-motion, using droplets hanging in the air like threads of silver, all moving to his silent tempo.

And through the Domain of Fortitude, he learned to stop hearing—and start feeling. He felt footsteps before they landed. Breath before it left Rodan's lungs. Intent before it became action.

It wasn't mastery. It was madness. A beautiful, devastating madness.

Rodan watched, silent through it all. And when Lukas finally summoned not a spell, but an idea, crafted from nothing but intuition and need—a thousand tendrils of razor-thin water spun into a shield that bent with the blow, then snapped like coiled snakes in return. It was a glimpse. Not quite there yet. But he was on his way. Lukas was slowly getting the hang of it.

Rodan finally smiled. Not as his mentor. Not as his brother. No, he was smiling because Rodan had finally meant a worthy rival and he was going to relish in this opportunity that he had not had the fortune to chance upon when he had still been alive.

And thus, the Third Flip wasn't Lukas learning how to use Divinity of the Seas. He had spent the last two hundred years doing just that.

Now, it was time for Lukas to inherit it.