Suchi. Central City. The Royal District.

After purchasing the missing ingredients for his power limiter, Henry went to a townhouse that contained hidden Alchemy manufacturing facilities. He’d installed similar secret crafting stations in every game zone in order to minimise travel time.

Since the place belonged to a fake Alchemist identity, 'Master Brady', that he'd used when organising The Slum Empire's downfall, one of their NPC spies was stationed at a cafe across the street from it, Henry noticing them from an incorrect choice of shoes for the caste they were imitating.

Henry just walked a block further to a different property.

Beneath the wine cellar of this one was a movie-theatre-sized space that was barren except for dust-coverd workbenches and a row of Arcane Compressors.

Squatting before a Compressor, he traced a figure on its surface, unlocking the device and causing it to present him with an interface listing its contents.

Soon, streams of motes began to trickle out and condense into dozens of Alchemical apparatuses. Microscopes, alembics, crucibles, balances, countless types of glassware, metal instruments for handling toxic reagents...as each finished materialising, they were telekinetically floated over to the workbenches. Henry's eyes jerking about like a cockroach having a seizure, he connected the equipment up and plopped them into position.

From a sloshing barrel, he ladled out a cupful of purified water, sipped it, and retained the liquid in his mouth. As mini-harpoons glowed in his irises, a torrent spurted from the barrel, before splitting into finger-thick strands, which chased after the beakers and test tubes to fill them.

After he’d added generic reagents, solvents, and catalysts, his Spatial Bracelet vomited out the power limiter's specific ingredients.

There were 331 in total. This number was slightly on the higher side for a single potion.

A stalk of Dragon Pepper landing in a mortar was mashed by a levitating pestle. As a glob of Red Snake Spit splashed into a metal dish, it began to solidify under the anti-heat of a turquoise flame.

Simple tasks such as those he automated by allocating them to The Pendant of a Thousand Minds, while the more complex ones he would have to perform himself.

To begin, he summoned the severed head of a Tigerlisk, a feline-shaped reptile with a petrifying bite.

Prying the creature's teeth apart, he draped its upper jaw over a funnel that fed into an Erlenmeyer flask. A glowing pocket knife of Carcassworker Energy condensed on the tip of his index finger, with which he stabbed the back of the creature’s skull. The Carcassworker energy surged into the muscles of its venom sac and, causing them to tense, made a glittering purple fluid seep from its fangs.

When he had the volume of venom needed, he sealed the flask with a film of Alchemy Energy that would prevent the oxidative decay of its petrifying proteins.

Next, not finished with the Tigerlisk head, he grabbed a cleaver and hacked off the top of its skull in a few heavy strikes.

Once he'd extracted its jiggling brain, he switched to a scalpel for delicate cuts.

Carcassworkers could produce a 3-D cross-sectional image of a monster’s body to assist with demanding operations. Henry, however, having dissected thousands of cloned Tigerlisks, could do the task manually.

Slapping the brain upside-down on a cutting board, he sliced off in two crude strokes the remnants of the brainstem and a chunk of hypothalamus.

A third stroke, in contrast, was delivered a hundred-fold slower as he carved a crescent flap into the grey-pink tissue. When this flap was peeled back with tweezers, it exposed a black gland smaller than a grain of sand.

This wee prize conferred the creature immunity to its own venom.

He transferred it to a glass dish brimming with an oil suspension medium.

Hearing a bubbling noise behind him, he summoned a Bloodmancer Spelltome for and fired it across the room at a beaker, the spell being absorbed by whatever was boiling inside.

The workbenches housed an intricate arrangement of glassware with the interlacing twists and turns of subway map. At this glass maze’s end, the last drop of a liquid without colour or smell dripped into a vial.

Henry, his arm protected by gloves of Alchemy Energy, plugged it with a cork stopper.

Poison of Mercurial Debilitation (Legendary)

Quality: 100%

Quantity Remaining: 100%

Restriction: Alchemist 4-1

Effect: a hard-to-detect poison that causes the victim to experience an unpredictable assortment of impediments.

‘With this supreme power limiter, God himself could walk unnoticed amongst his flock!’

Congratulations! Your creation of Poison of Mercurial Debilitation qualifies as a miracle. Alchemy level has increased by 1.

"Hah."

-Hannes Heikken (Cologne, Germany): Madman, why would you waste so much effort on something so pointless? Just pretend to be worse!

The developer, bored at a meeting, had been observing from his e-assistant.

‘I can’t help it,' Henry replied.

He was a little addicted to mastering things.

He’d only planned on spending that one night developing the power limiter. However, the next evening, when he'd settled down to rest after practice to watch a Russian Deepsea Horror film, he'd realised that his initial formulation might be detected by his tournament's officiators. Thus, he recalibrated the poison to add a stealth feature to its effects. Then, a few evenings later, he thought that the non-standardised dosing might push him too far or above his intended level, so he made some more adjustments.

In the blink of an eye, 19 years had passed, and he still hadn’t learned whether Igor and Anastasia in their submarine had survived the sharktopede.

Oh well, there was plenty of time to watch the rest of the movie tomorrow.

But, before that, a final step to the power limiter remained.

Since it would be too attention-grabbing if he started each sparring match by sipping from a vial, he needed a disguise medium for carrying the poison.

Popping open the door of an oven, he slid out a tray of ordinary-looking chocolate chip cookies.

Congratulations! Your creation of The Supreme Chocolate Chip Cookie qualifies as a miracle. Cooking level has increased by 1.

-Hannes Heikken: .................................

"Hahahahahahaha!"

Every mountain, flattened.

Equipped with the supreme power limiter, he briefly visited an arena facility for a North American Duchy. There, he had a series of duels in order to, one, test whether the Alchemy ingredients procured from Suchi had introduced anomalies into his potion (it was perfect) and, two, grind his 1v1 rating into the top 10% of The Slums, the minimum to enter his own arena.

The visit passed without incident. Even though the poisoned cookies lowered him to the level of Suchi’s top 100th player, for now, this power was enough to beat up the American noobs without challenge.

After that, he finally went to meet up with Abigail.

The New Suchi Arena.

On The Slum’s northern edge, over half a kilometre wide, the arena was like a dam preventing the tide of shacks from flooding out into the plains.

Under the structure’s massive shadow, two Ibanmothe cousins were having a tea break. Between sips and long moments of silence, they whispered in the foreign tongue of their immigrant grandparents.

“Throw it away,” whispered the older cousin.

The younger was holding a pamphlet from the Ibanpita inviting workers to the revamped West Bank Autonomous Exclave.

“You know Éadaí?” asked the younger.

“Níos’s boy, the Textileworker.”

“He’s considering signing up. Said, with his level, he can bring a plus one.”

The older cousin spat out a stream of orange-coloured tea. “Good for Éadaí.”

There was another wordless stretch, the quiet being broken when a riderless stallion galloped past.

“You’re right...” said the younger sadly. “You’re right.”

Folding up the pamphlet, he tossed it into the wind.

A couple hundred metres further along, at the arena’s entranceway, a Cutthroat had also been weighing a decision.

Abigail was debating whether to inform Henry that her guild leader had rerolled her character. Septic Rose had assured her that her intentions were pure; however, she’d refused to elaborate on their ‘relationship’, growing indignant at Abigail’s use of the term.

Had Septic Rose been lying? Why did she seem to be stalking Abigail's friend?

This and many other perplexing questions, Abigail was steadily giving up on asking herself.

End of the day, Saana was a game, she wouldn’t take it that seriously.

Also, she had her own problems with Henry.

-Henry Flower: Here.

At the sight of a stallion galloping towards her, she became nauseous, her gut reminding her of the hell of yesterday’s training. Throughout the night, she'd sweated in bed through nightmares of a never-ending wave of rotting bug-zombies.

When he shapeshifted into his human form, she became even sicker.

“This?” Henry looked down at the gore splattered across his Mithril chestplate. “Fake police patrol.”

It was pointless cleaning it since it’d soon be dirtied again while sparring.

Peeling off a string of intestine and throwing it to a flock of seagulls, he and Abigail joined a short queue of players being processed through the gates.

“By the way," said a squirming Abigail, "when I mentioned to the others that we were checking out this place, a new Byzantine recruit begged to join us.”

“Oh?” Henry, pulling out a cloth sack stuffed with cookies, used a Cook skill to float one into his mouth, his fingers being too dirty with gutjuice. “My first spy, that's quicker than expected.”

He supposed, though, that he had been less discrete than usual.

The appearance of the spies meant that his monster army plan would have to put on pause lest it be discovered and stolen. However, the concept was essentially confirmed, so he could implement the rest at his leisure.

“So where are they?” he asked.

Abigail, looking back, caught a head of hair ducking behind a fruit stand.

-Zàngméi33: Not ready! Make up an excuse!

Abigail frowned.

Her guild leader was a ruthless, world-famous assassin...since when did she become so timid?

“She’s grinding her 1v1 rating?”

“Cool.”

Henry wasn't excited by any emotion to probe further. Prior to arriving in Suchi, he’d mastered the habit of ignoring the spies beyond their impact on his missions. And after The Overdream, their presence could not affect his martial arts conquest.

When it was his turn to be processed, he had the clerk arrange for attendants to supply him with restorative foods, repairs, and all the other tools of time-saving.

As they then passed into the arena’s interior, Abigail paused in awe.

The wall on the opposite side of the entrance was so far away that the guards patrolling atop seemed as tiny as ants. Whatever lunatic had funded this place, had made it large enough to house 11 sets of full-scale 3x3 arena sets from The Company's tournament.

Stranger yet was an unsettling atmosphere of authoritarian calm that did not belong in The Slums. The arena floors were not slick with gore, teams of workmen moving around constantly to clean them up. At a well-furnished repair station, the duellists waited in orderly queues. In the 3x3 arena set closest to the entrance, where a tournament was being hosted, she saw a competitor who’d lost being hauled off by medics without slinging a single insult at their foe.

“That’s different,” she remarked.

Henry snickered. "As it should be."

For it was here, in this opulent bastion of civility amongst Saana’s poorest, least-relevant zone, that The Cripple chose to make his glorious return.

He raised his arms with the pride of a Roman commander being welcomed back into the capital through his triumph. “Yes, I am back, motherslummers, and now I’m a martial arts genius!”

Abigail had no response to this bizarre action.

Henry's waving at the invisible crowd was mistaken by a Metalworker at the facility’s smithy as an attempt to hail him.

"Repairs?"

“Sorry," Henry apologised. "We're fine. Abigail, come; I've reserved a spot."

They walked along a row of arenas, passing the duellists butchering each other.

With the numbers of entrants restricted, each battleground had four pairs using it at most. Only 1v1s were permitted, Henry having forbidden the 6v6s he didn’t care about.

On the one hand, it warmed his heart to see the youngins struggling in pursuit of their goals. On the other, his stomach twisted at the clumsy inefficiency with which they executed their flaw-riddled styles.

He forced out a smile like a professional pianist watching their infant child botch Chopin’s Mazurka in G Minor.

“At least, they’re doing their best.”

"Huh?"

With such trash training, the success of most noobs at this level was determined purely by their motor skills. In this respect, about four in ten of the people Henry spotted were superior to himself. One might find this fact disheartening, but, for him, it was a wonderful source of joy, as that proportion would have been around seven in ten without his acquisition of The Cap.

Improvement, however minor, even if it took almost four decades to produce, was always a cause for celebration.

“By the way, what’s with biscuits?” asked Abigail.

“Baked ‘em from a recipe I found in an Aionian ruin. Want one?”

Henry floated her a cookie.

When she bit through the crunchy shell, her eyes flared with astonishment as the soft interior, neither too moist nor dry, crumbled across her tastebuds, an avalanche of flavour containing sweet boulders of milky chocolate and vanilla with a subtle berry tinge.

Her mind exploded with the reawakening of lost childhood memory, from when she’d spent a weekend at a Swiss ski resort. After a rough fall on the ice, her four-year-old self had thrown a tantrum refusing to get back up. She was taken back to her family’s cabin by a young nanny who’d quit shortly after to marry and whose name Abigail had forgotten. From inside the cabin, she’d stared through a window at slopes, at the snow dusting the skiers, and felt a growing embarrassment for wanting to return. The nanny, trying to cheer her up, had taken her by the hand to the kitchen where they found some stale ingredients in the pantry and whipped up a batch of cookies.

The buttery gold aroma that perfumed the cabin...the warmth of the fire...the softness of Miss Martin’s palm.

"What the &$#!?"

This cookie tasted better than anything she’d ever eaten!

Her friend had, after dropping out of school, worked at his parent’s restaurant...in that time, had he discovered a natural talent for cooking? Was this why Septic Rose pursued him, his irresistible treats?

With the next bite, she felt the nausea of his brutal training regime melt away.

“Henry, do you want to be our personal chef? Dad pays well.”

He shook his head. “It’s 99% that recipe from the Aionian ruins; I myself have no talent in the culinary arts.” Not yet. “Besides, as has been established, I’m filthy rich. I even sponsored this—”

He slapped Abigail’s thieving hand away from his cookie bag.

“Not that one.”

He gave her a couple more non-poisoned cookies.

Continuing along, Abigail absorbed in her snacking, they were immediately stopped by a Fighter with a flame-red perm.

“Battered Daisy!”

The dashing young man was with a group of Australasia’s finest duellists.

Feeling out of sorts in this alien facility, they’d united through their common geography for the security of numbers. Through the weeks to come in The New Suchi Arena, competing against the region's best, shedding tears, sweat, and digital blood, they would forge an iron-bond between their hearts, would together create many priceless memories of vibrant youth, eternal youth.

“We're signing up for the next tournament together. You guys are welcome to—“

“Not interested."

The supreme martial art was a 1-player quest.

In the furthest corner of the stadium, the two arrived at an empty 3x3 arena set. Unlike the others that were accessible to all, this one was auctioned off each day to the highest bidder for exclusive use.

To maintain his cover in Suchi, Henry'd initially intended on winning the bid with a variety of moneybag identities. For the creation of The Cripple’s dramatic comeback, though, he’d changed his mind and decided to claim it himself.

This decision had a bonus benefit with The Slum Empire side-issue. Ramiro would deduce that the mystery sponsor for the stadium was himself, and from this, the 'king' would confirm his suspicion that his smuggling operation had been uncovered by The Company when the Senior Director unluckily sought to scam a member of Flaming Sun. In turn, this conclusion would confine The Empire to a limited set of responses, increasing their predictability.

There was a chance of retaliation, but Henry didn't fear it.

At the foot of the empty arena, a mob of players were complaining to a stone-faced officiator.

“It’s going to waste!”

“Ten minutes, we'll leave when our tournament rounds begin!”

“Meanie! If we lose, it's all your fault!”

The rabble were being stirred up by an Earthfriend wearing a pretentious gold-coloured beret. When he marched up to the officiator himself, one could practically hear the gold jingling in his pockets.

“Contact that fellow at once and tell him that someone wishes to utilise the battlegrounds during his absence. Once he hears that it is I, Destined To Rule The Stars, Knight of The Golden Lion Village, I do not believe that he will refuse."

Henry sighed at the idiotic scene.

These ungrateful little slumbags...he’d given them a spacious, state-of-the-art training centre for free, yet they continued to grumble.

It seemed that proper manners would have to be beaten into them.