#dominating aura and blood drenched rocks are BASICALLY THE SAME you dumbass

[blueteller]

So like, why did the White Star leave the Dominating Aura behind...? And why in some random swamp?

So if fiction has ever taught me anything, is that when a supervillain claims they have done something "for the sake of the future generations" – 99% time it's absolutely FALSE.

What kind of megalomaniac with a god complex inspiring for immortality cares for the next generation?? The answer is NONE. So yeah, Cale Barrow telling Cale left half of the Dominating Aura "Just Because" gotta be bullcrap. Why would he leave such a cool power!? It's useful as hell, especially if you have actual power to back it up!

It's actually very simple, now that I think about it. Obviously, the White Star was lying to Cale about his reasons, trying to intimidate him (or childishly impress his Mortal Nemesis, which is kind of hilarious). And we know that WS wanted Blood-Drenched Rock, a pretty similar power which only differed from the Dominating Aura that 1) the fear was more "visceral" and long-lasting, and 2) it had an elemental affinity unlike the aura 3) it belonged to the OG WS, which obviously mattered for our dear deranged fanboy a great deal. (I so wanna make fun of WS for being such a big fan of someone who completely LOST and got forgotten. It's like you were begging to repeat all of his mistakes!) We also know that WS needed it to complete his plate.

But that's the whole problem, isn't it? It's his plate.

Cale Barrow and Cale Henituse share the same problem (which makes sense, considering it's implied that their bodies are biologically cousins): their plates are large but extremely fragile. The strain of multiple ancient powers is slowly killing them. Cale manages to avoid "exploding" due to Vitality of the Heart according to Eruhaben. Later he completes his plate with the five different elements and it makes him stable. But WS lacks an earth attribute for most of the novel – why isn't he exploding then??

My answer is: he is absolutely exploding. His body dies young in every lifetime. Because it's been explained that the ancient powers are attatched to a person's soul, and as long as he's reincarnating, he isn't leaving them behind. He basically starts off as a multi-ancient-powered baby in every life, and that probably hurts like crazy (also probably kills his less-sturdy bodies very early on). Any additional strain is absolutely fatal and he can't afford it if he wants to live past twenty.

Enter: Jour Thames' method of "breaking your plate to leave half of your power behind".

It isn't completely clear to me whether there's ANOTHER method of leaving behind an ancient power. OG Cale and Cale's conversation implies that there isn't. Although the Fake Dragon Slayer did give his powers to Choi Han. Did he break his plate, too? Maybe... it wasn't explicitly stated. Let's assume it's the only way, then.

Obviously, death isn't a problem for WS. He can break his plate as many times as he wants, since he'll just get reborn again. So he gave up as much of the Dominating Aura as he could to "clear" some of his plate and didn't give a crap who got it next, since he considered it "a useless scam of a power". And of course he wouldn't admit that to Cale, since his plate being so fragile is a pretty big weakness.

It's also implied that he didn't have any non-elemental powers aside from the Sky Attribute (which I am not sure whether it counts or not). He did have some power that let him thelepatically speak to people, but that could be just magic or an artifact. The Dominating Aura was also the only power that we know for sure that WS abandoned, but there could have been many others. Perhaps he couldn't know what elemental affinities ancient powers had before he picked them up. He could have done something similar dozens of times.

Still, why leave it behind in some random swamp?

It was still a legacy from the Dragon Slayer village. WS didn't care about them enough to let them live, but he did care enough to ask them "to not resent him" – also the curse killed them, so he must have cherished them at least a bit. Why throw the last memory of them away at a random spot like a piece of trash? Not even passing it along to Syrem? He probably could have taken it, as a "Next Generation Dragon Slayer" with a huge sturdy plate.

Well, I am no detective, but I have reason to believe it was kind of coincidental. In the swamp in the Forest of Darkness, there was a corpse of a Dragon. It's no brainer who killed them and why – WS must have killed the Dragon to give their the heart to the Dragon Half-Blood. The location could be just where their battle took place. Perhaps the Dragon lived there? That's kind of doubtful, since Choi Han probably would have spotted them at some point... Maybe it happened before Choi Han showed up in this world. Or maybe WS just lured the Dragon there somehow (like robbing their lair or something, since he did the same with Eruhaben). I don't think WS moved it there, since moving a Dragon's huge body in secret would be quite a hassle. But the location was surely convenient for hiding the corpse, and using it later for extracting dead mana.

I have a guess about the battle, tho. WS is an experienced Dragon Slayer, but that by no means implies that fighting an adult Dragon is an easy feat. WS must have used his ancient powers to fight, and it probably messed up his plate pretty bad. I imagine he'd be at the verge of death by the end of it. So WS woud be like: "fine, if I don't have much longer to live in this body, I might as well lose some baggage". He breaks his plate right there and leaves the Dominating Aura behind. His minions take him away, he might live long enough to visit the Dragon Half-Blood to give him a freshly harvested heart, then he dies. He reincarnates with at most half of the Dominating Aura and his plate is in a slightly better shape now. He isn't keen or coming accross it again out of fear he'll accidentally absorb it again. So he leaves the power and the corpse be for a couple hundred years.

So when Cale shows up much later with Dominating Aura, WS is like "Haha, you picked THAT garbage of a useless power? I completely forgot it existed! Let's make it sound like I planned for this and it does not intimidate me at all". And despite wanting to own another power that instills fear and works basically the same, he calls it "useless", because clearly sanity is something he still has after stewing in self-made suffering for a millenium.

Our villain, ladies and gentlemen 🤡