***

Red Fish Pioneering, Gentle Paw.

The Pioneers were an elite dungeoneering organisation from the Ejapipilu coast of Aion Laisije. For NPCs, this was a rather suicidal job. Although Saana granted them bonus HP over players, dungeons often included tricky, unintuitive mechanics that would kill people at random, and they therefore typically required multiple raid wipes to defeat. 'Raid wipe' in the NPC context meant everybody became permanently dead. Nevertheless, The Red Fish Pioneers had embraced these risks and thrived.

Historically, they'd been capable of beating unexplored 500-man dungeons, a feat typically restricted to empires with hordes of disposable soldiers and slaves. The Pioneers' skills suffered, however, when their region was subjugated between 774 and 416 B.P. by the Druk clans. The foreign nomadic rulers, with no respect for the organisation and blinded by the golden glow of dungeon booty, had forced The Pioneers to raid at a dangerous, unsustainable pace until, having lost too many core members, they declined to tiny 6-man teams and fell into obscurity.

Then, very recently, their fate was reversed once again with the dawn of a new age of flourishing and prosperity. The reason? Henry's guild. Another inner circle member, who specialised in PVE and had been impressed with The Pioneer's historic reputation, had sought out the dilapidated organisation to work for them. The Red Fish Pioneers were tasked with training their NPC soldiers. They analysed the dungeons completed by The Company's player-ran dungeon teams and then produced low-risk walkthroughs for the guild's NPC soldiers. The soldiers, in turn, used the structured, repeatable raid environment to safely gain levels and combat experience, and also farm materials. This had been a key part of the war machine.

Anyway, Henry now studied Gentle Paw, one of The Pioneers’ Earthfriend Flora healing styles. Hybrids, Gentle Paws performed a secondary healing role in the backline while also serving as back-up tanks whenever enemies managed to breach frontline defences until a main tank could swoop in and save the day. In terms of their Nature Energy split, Gentle Paws gathered roughly 84% Flora, 12% Fauna, 3% Celestial, and 1% Elemental.

To practice the style's PVE aspects, he challenged several boss encounters while commanding NPC replicas whose HP had been downgraded to player-levels for the extra challenge. After Starhunting, it was a delight to kill a colossus in the intended time frame of a couple hours. With all his Overdream experience and him being a commanding prodigy, he raced through the game's hardest dungeon encounters in half a month, completing several that his guild was still struggling with.

Gentle Paw's PVP aspects, he had to build from scratch.

For this purpose, he drew upon an extensive corpus of Gentle Paw training manuals covering 214 situations. These ranged from substituting for a primary healer who'd been knocked out who'd been a Miracleworker to substituting for a primary healer who'd been knocked out who'd been a Shaman. Henry mostly utilised a subset of 35 of those situations revolving around emergency tanking without additional heal support. By his estimation, these would yield the world's greatest Flora style for duelling. Adapting the techniques from predictable dungeon monster patterns to more volatile PVP was hard. However, he'd been prepared well for this task by the previous art of Starhunting, whose intensive preparations, protracted kiting style, and uncomfortably-deep familiarity with the enemy's anatomy he’d refined and condensed for single, man-on-man combat. That'd become the greatest Celestial duelling style.

With the conclusion of his Gentle Paw study, he’d completed in-depth training in martial arts corresponding to three of the four major Earthfriend styles. Floating Leaf and Tangye Opera covered Fauna; Starhunting, Celestial; and Gentle Paw, Flora. All that remained outstanding was a major style from the Elemental school. The most recent two martial arts had increased his mastery of the 63 Earthfriend styles surveyed briefly in Overdream session two by 4.5% on average, and, overall, he'd obtained a relatively comprehensive understanding of this hippy shapeshifting Class. He'd come to appreciate most of all its hybrid flexibility. If he'd attempted a multi-century study of 84 styles using any other Class, he probably would have gone insane with boredom and frustration.

***

He analysed the carcasses collected during his Starhunting.

They proved an abundant source of potent nutrients, which had concentrated throughout the colossi's organs from the huge quantities of vegetation and other monsters they consumed. Through his anatomical explorations, he discovered many never before seen Alchemicals that'd been generated by specialised organs. Stronger monsters had a greater command of magic and therefore possessed more complex, more advanced bodily processes. These Alchemicals, in turn, often revealed new properties for their constituent elements, new potentials.

And all this was absorbed by the roots of the Nature Energy Grass. A year into Starhunting, he'd managed to raise a Tier-0 specimen until it dropped its seeds. Through regular and careful replenishment of fertilisers, he could continue to sustain two additional generations before reaching a bottleneck, when unrecognised trace minerals stored in the first seeds had been depleted.

The conquest of this Nature Energy Grass had been a titanic effort. Over the decades, Henry'd consumed tens of millions of man-hours worth of Universal Productivity. This expenditure was all the more staggering because he was already a hyper-efficient researcher thanks to his freak information processing skills and infinite digital memory span. In part, the workload reflected the uncharted state of this Overdream world, Henry needing to break ground on fundamentals that in Saana's main world had been resolved during its prehistory. In part, though, the seeds amounted to a supreme Legendary quest. The ability to directly convert a major Energy type into plant matter was over-powered.

Still, by the beginning of Gentle Paw, when he'd nurtured a Tier-1 grass to seven generations, he could only be said to be scratching the tip of the iceberg's tip.

Beyond growing these grasses, if one studied further, they should eventually learn how to engineer a similar process into other plant species, bolstering their growth, too. That step, however, would consume multiple millennia. It would require him to delve into a whole new system of botany, far beyond his present understanding. The system he currently tinkered with was analogous to classical physics - although it yielded useful, accurate predictions, it was a simplification nested within the more profound theory of quantum physics. In Saana, every subject had multiple such layers, quantum physicses behind quantum physicses. Theoretically, by digging deep enough, taking millions of years to swim to the very bottom of this universe's bowels, one would be able to take the Nature Energy Grasses produced in The Overdream and recreate them in the game world outside.

But Henry had no intention of penetrating even the first layer. His goal with The Cap had never been to play the world's longest, most convoluted single-player videogame. His main climbs all yielded products that could be shipped back to real-life, whether that be avant-garde literature or avant-garde fanny packs. The investigation of these seeds, a fun leisure activity to relax after his real daily labour, had to have an expiration date.

Thus, finally, he was cresting the summit, and the event that'd set him upon this labyrinthine tangent was coming back to sight below. Soon, his seeds would fuel his swift Elementosaur forms for zooming past the deadly giant Nature Energy Grasses of the Bamboo Jungle that had blocked his attempts to continue chasing the Flying Crab migration to its end.

Each higher-tier of grass had produced more potent seeds that sustained the Elementosaur cheetah-speed sprint for longer. An inventory full of the nine-generation Tier-2 grasses that he could grow by the end of Gentle Paw allowed him to sprint for 147 kilometres without stopping. That figure wasn't quite adequate for crossing the Bamboo Jungle. Based on a statistical analysis of several factors, the region was estimated to be between 1.7 and 2.2 thousand kilometres wide. Feeling a tad impatient, Henry would be content with a seed capable of fuelling a one-way trip. For the return, he could travel back with the land-animals that migrated around the continent to skip the Bamboo Jungle, taking the 'long' path.

***

The No'Are Code of Vigilance.

Saana's Illuminati were a people called the No'Are.

Following The Redeemer's suicide in 6600 B.P., two major human powers had arisen during a crusade to purge the planet of the last of his monster generals. The first faction had been the Volefans, who'd spearheaded the effort from the region that bore their name today. Faction number two had been the No'Are.

The No'Are, native to southern Yamalai, had been one of the first peoples liberated by the Volefans. While the idealistic scholars of Volefa had been motivated by a sense of easing universal human suffering, the No'Are, ruthless pragmatists, used the crusade to install colonies wherever they ousted the monsters, creating a global thalassocracy or sea-empire. Reluctantly, the Volefans mirrored the tactic in order to thwart the No'Are's goal of world domination. What followed was a series of naval wars that littered the world's oceans with the planks of broken vessels. After over a millennium of conflict, the No'Are's final port was set to flame. The Deathless One, who'd controlled Kanaru from 6334 to 5148 B.P., had been the last major ruler of this faction to exist in the public light.

But the No'Are hadn't gone extinct. One could find them today dispersed throughout Saana, a tiny but powerful minority in their former colonies. They were easily recognisable due to unusual white-coloured eyes that made them appear to lack irises. Although still viewed with suspicion and hostility, they were often favoured for advisor roles by nobility due to their proficiency in trade, seamanship, and realpolitik. These privileged roles had compounded the hatred towards them.

The Code of Vigilance was a formalisation of the methods developed by the No'Are across five thousand years of avoiding eradication. Its martial component centred around evasive manoeuvres when outnumbered, fending off assassins, and vigilantly assessing one's environment for threats. Beyond that, The Code offered a Machiavellian guide on navigating upper-class political circles. One had correct and incorrect methods for identifying what foods were easiest to hide poison inside of, selecting and training a loyal guard retinue, managing one's body language to seem optimally fangless, orchestrating coups to install a more pliable king, etc.

The No'Are kept their Code hidden by sharing its manuals exclusively in person with other members of their race. Henry'd acquired copies for himself by pretending to be a No'Are child using The Ring of a Thousand Souls. In disguise, he'd attended a transmission ceremony in their secret stronghold of Asile, an isolated island off the coast of The Black Desert.

For the development of A Thousand Tools, he stole The Code's environmental assessment techniques, especially those about judging risks from people. Winning a fight wasn't simply about being the superior combatant. One always needed to handle the external situation, be wary of interference from outside parties, of the opponent's irate fanboys. One could claim the moral victory after being ganked, but would that resonate truthfully in the heart that was unguarded because one had dropped their chest-plate? No, like Legendaries, no matter how much one whinged about them, fanboys were also tools.

The No'Are techniques were valuable for any type of fighting, Henry received an increase in the mastery percentage of his previous styles by 0.34% on average. Not bad.

***

The research invested in the Nature Energy Grass also upgraded his farmstead. Through mineralogy, his smithy came to liquify tougher metals, his microscopes to zoom in further, his incubators to hatch monster eggs quicker. From botany, he adapted crops from other zones to his island's climate, and, in turn, he was able to support foreign livestock. A Tier-3 Nature Energy Grass seed that bumped his Elementosaur mileage to 396 kilometres per inventory enabled him to cover more ground each day. Thus, he expanded the size of his cultivated domain, stretching his fields to the horizons and seeding several forests in the marshland on the continent adjacent to his island. And the soils churned up by his plough were made fertile by the colossi's remains.

***

Possum Pygmy Envenoming.

The Possum Pygmies had been a tribe of Maranyans residing in the centre of Yamalai's jungle, at the crossroads between Maranya, Abhaya, and Kolonia. During The Redeemer's era, they'd been ruled by a possum deity. Through their worship of him, they'd developed a grotesque custom of undergoing magical surgery to resemble their leader, extending their noses into snouts and relocating their ears on top of their head. They continued this self-mutilation long after the possum croaked. Then, when the Old Rangbitans invaded, the pygmies were genocided for refusing to switch loyalties to The All-Mother - most of them perished in her Death Training.

Before the campaign of extermination would be concluded, however, many Rangbitans who invaded the Possum Pygmies' jungle would be swallowed in its depths, their lives reaped by the Envenomers. These were Cutthroat assassins who'd utilised blowdarts impregnated with the toxins extracted from the region's venomous fauna and flora. When concealed in the dense foliage, the Envenomers' short stature had made them almost impossible to detect. Not a small number of Rangbitan captains expired by vomiting out their guts after being shot by a knee-height bush.

The Envenomers' Class specialisation had been the same as Henry's in Saana II, the Back Alley-Chef. It primarily was for this reason that he studied the art, as part of maintaining the false narrative of The Cripple's Return. Blowdarts were useless without that spec and therefore unusable in his 1v1 tournament. Nevertheless, The Cripple, if he'd been plotting his return years and not two weeks, would have revisited poisons, his former weapon of choice.

***

Styles like Possum Pygmy Envenoming that weren't designed for Earthfriends always drew Henry's attention to the incompleteness of The Syncretist's Armament.

So far, he'd collected 6 of 13 pieces. One of the missing items, an unnamed book, seemed to enable abilities from other classes. That would have been mighty convenient for his survey of Saana's arts. Alas, mention of this piece in the historical record was rarer than The Cap, with only one vague reference existing from Saana II, none from Saana III, so it would likely prove the hardest piece of all to locate.

Before acquiring The Cap, that'd seemed absurd to him. What could possibly surpass mastery of time? Now, though, he was sure that the book provided extra functions relating to NPC souls, a type of magic transcending time-expansion. It should unlock proper sentient beings in The Overdream and, maybe, revive the souls that'd been absorbed by The Ring - like those of King Torc and The Wolf Empress. For some, that could be worth far more.

624 kilometres.

***

Togavian Tulipsinging.

A simplified version of this art was the prevailing style amongst the top Accompanists in Henry's tournament.

The original Tulipsingers were revered Accompanist-Performer bards in Karnon's homeland of Togavi. When the Maalundi Maelstrom had appeared, its freezing winds had brought ruin upon the region's agriculture, causing the cities to shrink to towns to villages and the roads connecting what remained to disintegrate. Back then, there'd been no Communication Stones, the technology not being re-introduced until after players reappeared in Saana. Thus, all contact between the scattered settlements was severed, furthering the collapse. Amidst this tragedy, a few romantic-minded bards rose to save their civilisation. They braved the weather to travel the fractured land, spreading news through their heroic songs. In payment for risking their lives against the elements, monsters, and bandits, they demanded only from each village a single flower. The story went that Karnon had developed his teleportation abilities for a similar reason, to reconnect his sundered home.

Typical Accompanist styles catered to a supportive role in group combat. The Tulipsingers, travelling solo, evolved a form that mirrored a Qi Master's, the Accompanist coordinating to fight with their instrument. They exploited the fact that their instruments could be used as an alternative cast point for spells like . Tulipsingers would deck themselves in heavy armour, focus on protecting themselves, and try to position their instrument at odd angles for shooting the foe from the side or behind.

Unable to summon and command Accompanist instruments, Henry made do with a combination of pretending his Flying Weapons could fire spells and commanding replicas to stand on adjustable stilts.

Tulipsinging's combat may have been a tough test of one's ability to read corners, angles, and positioning, and improvise Class shortcomings. As challenging, however, was the Performer side. This tested the live poetry composing skills that Henry'd picked up through his even more epic conquest of ancient liter—