Chapter 6: WHAT THE STORE OFFERS
The private quarters I'd claimed in the south wing were small and functional — a cot, a work table, a chair that had been salvaged from the collapsed east wing and only wobbled slightly when I sat on it. The window faced west, away from the swamp, which meant I could open the shutters without staring directly into the wrongness that permeated everything on the eastern margin.
Thirty CP sat in my system account like a down payment on futures I couldn't afford yet.
I pressed two fingers to my left temple and held the gesture until the primary interface expanded into something more detailed. The System Store.
[SYSTEM STORE — TIER I ACCESS]
[CP AVAILABLE: 30]
[ITEMS DISPLAYED: 14/47 (TIER-LOCKED ITEMS HIDDEN)]
The inventory arranged itself in columns based on affordability. Green items on the left — things I could buy now, if I wanted to spend everything I had on a single purchase. Yellow in the middle — one or two more milestones away. Red on the right — the long-term goals, the things that would take months of systematic CP accumulation to reach.
And then there was the amber item.
Not red. Not unattainable. Something else entirely — a color that felt significant in ways the others didn't, as if the system was drawing my attention to it specifically.
[ITHLINNE'S CODEX OF FLESH: THE REVERSAL OF IMPOSED BARRENNESS]
[COST: 500 CP]
[SYSTEM FLAG: HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT — CONTINENT-LEVEL IMPLICATIONS]
I stared at the description for a long time.
The Witcher. The books. The games. The Netflix series I'd binged during the winter when there wasn't enough clinic work to fill the days.
Yennefer of Vengerberg. The sorceress who had traded her ability to have children for power and beauty and spent decades trying to undo that choice. The woman whose quest for a cure had driven some of the most important plot developments in the entire canon.
And here it was. The solution to her deepest wound. Available for purchase from a system store in the body of a disgraced nobleman in a swamp at the edge of nowhere.
Five hundred CP. At my current earning rate — one milestone every few weeks, assuming I could keep the settlement growing — that was six months minimum. Maybe a year.
But if I had it...
The implications cascaded through my tactical brain like a veterinary diagnosis mapping complications. Yennefer of Vengerberg was one of the most powerful mages on the Continent. In the canonical timeline, she spent centuries chasing false leads and dead ends in pursuit of exactly this. A document that could actually reverse the damage would be worth more to her than gold, more than political power, more than anything she could be offered by the kingdoms or the Brotherhood.
A blood oath contract. Services rendered in exchange for the Codex.
I could see the shape of it now — the strategic architecture of everything I needed to build. The settlement was the foundation. The species integration was the engine. The Wilds Registry and facility construction were the CP pipeline. And the Codex was the key that would unlock the next phase.
Yennefer as court mage. Her expertise. Her protection. Her connections.
The contract would have to be genuine — no hidden clauses, no deceptions. She would read every word with the paranoid thoroughness of someone who had been betrayed too many times to trust easily. But if the terms were fair...
[SECONDARY ITEMS — MEDIUM-TERM ACCESSIBILITY]
[ELDER SPEECH FLUENCY PRIMER — 200 CP]
[EFFECT: GRANTS COMPREHENSION AND SPEECH CAPABILITY IN ELDER SPEECH]
[SCRYING MIRROR — 250 CP | SCI REQUIREMENT: 1.3x]
[EFFECT: REMOTE VIEWING WITHIN TERRITORY BOUNDARIES]
Two hundred CP for Elder Speech. Two hundred and fifty for the scrying mirror, but that one had an SCI requirement I hadn't reached yet. My current multiplier sat at 1.20x — one species integrated, Kasimir the Doppler, whose carpentry was excellent and whose loyalty was absolute because I'd given him something no one else had.
At 1.20x, I was still below the threshold. I needed more species. More integration. More CP.
I pulled up the Wilds Registry and scrolled through the current entries.
[WILDS REGISTRY — 5/10 ENTRIES REQUIRED FOR TIER I BONUS]
[SPECIES DOCUMENTED: DROWNER (VELEN VARIANT), NEKKER (VELEN VARIANT), RAT (COMMON), DEER (VELEN), WILD BOAR]
[BONUS AT 10 ENTRIES: +20 CP]
Five more species. The swamp had them — I'd heard reports, seen the evidence, documented the edge cases that didn't quite fit standard bestiary classifications. Rotfiend, mentioned in Marta's notes about a corpse that had exploded when approached. Foglet, described by Kasimir from the eastern villages. Water Hag, reported by two separate sources with consistent behavioral descriptions.
That was three. I needed two more.
The Nekker Patriarch. The entity beneath the swamp that the CDM kept flagging as submerged anomaly.
If those counted as distinct Registry entries, I could hit the bonus threshold within weeks instead of months. Twenty more CP. Progress toward the Elder Speech primer, which would let me communicate with the non-human species I was trying to integrate.
The strategic map assembled itself in my mind like a treatment plan for a difficult patient.
Short-term: Document five more species. Hit the Registry bonus. Earn twenty CP.
Medium-term: Continue settlement construction. Hit facility milestones. Integrate at least one more species to push SCI toward the 1.3x threshold.
Long-term: Accumulate 500 CP. Acquire the Codex. Send a letter to a certain inn near Vengerberg where a sorceress with violet eyes and a notorious temper was known to take occasional lodging.
It would take months. Maybe the better part of a year. But the path was visible now, and that was more than I'd had when I woke up in this body at the edge of a cursed swamp.
I found a scrap of parchment — actual paper was precious out here, but I'd salvaged some from the manor's ruined study — and wrote "500 CP" on it in large, clear letters.
Then I pinned it to the wall above my work table.
A target. A goal. A number that meant everything and nothing simultaneously.
The Codex was the lever. Yennefer was the multiplier. And the settlement — the forge, the south wing, the fourteen settlers who had started to believe this might work — was the foundation that would make all of it possible.
[CP EXPENDITURE OPTIONS ANALYZED]
[RECOMMENDATION: MAINTAIN RESERVES UNTIL STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITY THRESHOLD REACHED]
[CURRENT PROJECTION: ITHLINNE'S CODEX ACQUISITION — 8-12 MONTHS AT CURRENT EARNING RATE]
Eight to twelve months. The system was optimistic or pessimistic depending on how you looked at it. I preferred to think of it as diagnostic — a baseline projection that I could beat if I optimized correctly.
The evening had turned fully dark while I was planning. Through the west-facing window, I could see the forge's dying glow and the scattered lights of candles in the south wing rooms where the settlers were preparing for sleep.
Tomorrow I would start the active documentation campaign. Kasimir knew the locations of the Foglet reports. Marta had the Rotfiend details. Gervin could escort me to the eastern margin where the Water Hag had been sighted.
Five more species. Twenty more CP. One step closer to the number on the wall.
The subsonic hum from the east continued beneath everything — the constant reminder that the gate was real and getting worse. But the hum was also opportunity. Whatever was down there had to be classified eventually, and classification meant a Registry entry.
The gate was a threat. The gate was also leverage.
I filed the thought under "THINGS TO UNPACK WHEN I HAVE MORE DATA" and closed the System Store interface.
The number on the wall watched me as I prepared for sleep. Five hundred. A mountain made of small numbers stacked on top of each other.
I fell asleep calculating CP earning rates and woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of the subsonic hum, louder than it had been before, pulsing in a rhythm that might have been coincidence.
Or might have been something else entirely.
The parchment on the wall caught the faint moonlight through the window. 500 CP. Written in my handwriting. A promise to myself that I would keep building until the promise was fulfilled.
The night passed. The hum continued. The number stayed where I'd put it.
And in the morning, there was work to do.
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