He spent the afternoon on potions.
The method was simple enough once he understood the mechanic. Invest in the bottle, invest in the ingredients, fuse them, roll the multiplier. The grade of the output depended on the combined return value going into the fusion, which meant the longer he let the ingredients compound before fusing the higher the input and the higher the potential output regardless of the roll.
He had twelve bottles. He had VP. He had materials the market in Irongate did not know the value of.
He bought out the decorative materials stall entirely for eleven gold marks. The merchant looked pleased. The Compound Sense passive had flagged every item on that stall at between 40,000 and 180,000 VP world value each. He carried the haul back to his room and invested varying amounts into each material based on the world value the system had shown him, heaviest into the highest-value pieces, and set them to compound while he went back to the guild.
The sixth zone contracts board had three new postings since the morning. He read them without taking any of them. What he wanted was not on the board. He stood at the bottom of the board looking at the Ashen Regent contract for the second time.
Six years. Fourteen Champion-tier deaths. Zero completions.
He had a perception skill the creature could blank. He needed one it could not.
He went back to the room and sat with the panel open and thought about it practically.
Thermal Mapping operated on heat differentials. The Ashen Regent's null zone was a deliberate thermal absence, which meant whatever the creature was doing it was operating in the thermal register specifically. A perception skill that did not operate on heat would not be affected by a thermal null.
He had Wind affinity at A-rank with two sub-skills. Deflection Current was a force redirect. Slipstream was a movement enhancement. Neither of them was a perception tool.
He looked at the Wind affinity entry in his panel and thought about what a Wind-based perception skill would look like. Sound travelled on air. Air pressure differentials were readable. Movement created disturbances in air density that a sufficiently sensitive Wind skill could theoretically map the same way Thermal Mapping mapped heat.
He could not create a skill through intention alone. Sub-skills had formed naturally so far, always through action rather than design. But action could be directed toward a specific outcome even if the outcome was not guaranteed.
He went back to the sixth zone.
Not toward the interior. He found a section of the outer ring where the creature density was low and the terrain was open enough to work in, and spent two hours moving through it with Wind affinity extended as far as it would go, pushing at the air around him the way he had pushed at the fire affinity in the forest on day one, testing the edges of what it could do rather than using the sub-skills he already had.
The air told him things. Not clearly. Not with the clean signature resolution of Thermal Mapping. But the pressure differential between a moving body and still air produced a readable disturbance that the Wind affinity could feel at a range that extended slightly past what his eyes could cover. He could not map it. It was more like hearing a room than seeing it, an impression of occupancy and movement rather than a precise spatial model.
He pushed harder.
A creature moved through the undergrowth forty metres to his left and he felt the air displacement of it two seconds before Thermal Mapping would have flagged the heat signature.
He stopped moving and held the attention still.
The Record registered it quietly.
[Pressure Sense (B) — Proficiency 1]
[Passive wind-based spatial awareness. Maps air pressure differentials produced by movement, mass displacement and breath within range. At B-grade, range: 35 metres. Functions independently of thermal or visual conditions. Sub-skill of Wind Affinity (A).]
B-grade on formation. The highest formation grade of any sub-skill he had produced. He read the description twice and focused on one line.
Functions independently of thermal or visual conditions.
He invested 500,000 VP into Pressure Sense before he had finished reading the entry and turned back toward the interior.
The null zone looked different with Pressure Sense running alongside Thermal Mapping.
Thermal Mapping still returned nothing inside the 200-metre circle. But Pressure Sense did not operate on heat. Whatever the Ashen Regent was doing to blank thermal perception had no effect on air pressure differential mapping, and something inside that circle was displacing air with a mass and a movement pattern that Pressure Sense read as clearly as a signature on a lit map.
He stopped at 80 metres and held the skill's attention on the interior.
The creature was large. Very large. Moving slowly in a pattern that was not patrol logic, not the territorial back-and-forth of the outer ring creatures, but something more deliberate. Circular. Like something that had been doing the same circuit for a very long time.
He mapped it for four minutes without moving.
Then he went back to the inn.
The potions were ready when he returned.
He had invested in eleven sets of materials across the afternoon and left them to compound while he was in the zone. The compounding on a two-hour investment at the rates his VP was currently generating was not the multi-day accumulation he applied to skills, but the materials had high world-value bases and the Compound System's rate on high-value inputs was faster than on low-value ones.
He fused them one at a time.
[Fusion roll: 71]
[Post-multiplier value: 4,847,120 VP]
[Fusion complete.]
[Void Clarity Draught — Rare T2]
[Effect: Enhances perception skill range and sensitivity by 40% for 20 minutes. Affects all active perception skills simultaneously.]
He looked at it. Rare grade, 40% perception enhancement for twenty minutes. He set it aside.
[Fusion roll: 23]
[Post-multiplier value: 1,124,880 VP]
[Fusion complete.]
[Minor Resilience Tonic — Uncommon T1]
[Effect: Reduces incoming physical damage by 8% for 10 minutes.]
Low roll, low result. He set it beside the first one.
[Fusion roll: 89]
[Post-multiplier value: 12,847,330 VP]
[Fusion complete.]
[Thermal Ward — Epic T2]
[Effect: Nullifies incoming thermal damage entirely for 8 minutes. While active, Fire attributed skill output increases by 25% from redirected thermal energy absorption.]
He looked at that one for a longer moment. Nullifies incoming thermal damage entirely. If the Ashen Regent's null zone mechanic was thermally based rather than purely perceptive, a potion that absorbed all incoming thermal damage would remove an entire attack category from the engagement's threat matrix.
He continued down the line.
[Fusion roll: 94]
[Post-multiplier value: 18,340,220 VP]
[Fusion complete.]
[Galeforce Surge — Epic T2]
[Effect: Wind attributed skill output increases by 60% for 12 minutes. Movement speed increases by an additional 30% during active Wind skill use within the duration.]
[Fusion roll: 47]
[Fusion roll: 62]
[Fusion roll: 81]
[Fusion roll: 38]
[Fusion roll: 77]
[Fusion roll: 55]
[Fusion roll: 91]
He laid them all out on the bed when he was done. Eleven potions. Two Uncommon, three Rare, four Epic and one that sat apart from the others because the grade display on it was not reading correctly.
He looked at the last one.
[Fusion roll: 91]
[Post-multiplier value: 31,847,220 VP]
[Fusion complete.]
[Ashen Veil — Legendary T2]
[Effect: Renders the user's thermal, pressure and visual signatures undetectable to creature perception for 15 minutes. While active, the user generates no environmental disturbance of any kind. Void attribute: active. Passive creature aggression will not trigger within range.]
He read it twice.
Undetectable. No thermal signature, no pressure signature, no visual presence. For fifteen minutes. In a zone where the primary threat was a creature that could blank SSS-grade thermal perception from 80 metres.
He had rolled a 91 on an ingredient set that had produced an Ashen Veil.
He looked at the eleven potions and then at the Ashen Regent contract in his memory and then at the investment panel.
[Heat Control (SSS) — Return value: 51,847,330 VP]
[Current rate: 2,284,110 VP per hour]
[Combustion (SS) — Return value: 18,340,220 VP]
[Current rate: 834,110 VP per hour]
[Pressure Sense (B) — Invested: 500,000 VP — Return value: 500,440 VP]
[Current rate: 22,840 VP per hour]
[Unknown Egg (???) — Return value: 1,247,840,000 VP]
[Current rate: ???]
The egg was at 1.2 billion.
He looked at it for a moment and then looked at the crack lines covering the surface, the dark shell showing through in progressively smaller sections as the web of fractures spread, and thought about the breathing wave of the investment bar that had been moving since day ten and had not changed its rhythm once.
He set the Ashen Veil on the bedside table where he could see it and lay back and looked at the ceiling.
He was level 67. The Ashen Regent was estimated at level 180 to 200. Champion tier was the minimum recommendation and fourteen of them had not come back.
He had an Ashen Veil, a B-rank pressure perception skill that bypassed thermal nulls, Heat Control SSS running at 2.28 million VP per hour, Combustion SS with Penetrating Burn and a Voidforge Absolute with Core Surge available.
He also had four more days of compounding before any of the numbers he was currently looking at were where he wanted them before engaging something that had killed fourteen Champion-tier cultivators.
He closed the panel.
Varn was going to be in the common room tomorrow morning. Kael had a reasonable idea of what Varn's expression was going to look like when he came in from the eastern gate again.
He found he was looking forward to it slightly more than he had expected to.