'Ah damn! I forgot to put a marker with [Map] on that woman! It wouldn't have been easy since she had to be within five meters of me and we were in a heated battle, but that was such a rookie mistake!'

'Sorry... maybe I should have reminded you...'

'Ah... Don't worry Flora, if you had communicated with me mentally, I probably would've lost concentration and screwed up somehow. Anyway, that Mount Hearth sure is quite a distance away...'

That's right. We had already been travelling, while avoiding human settlements, for over a week. Well, we were already fairly close, since I had already been able to see it since yesterday, and it wasn't exactly Yggdrasyl levels of tall. According to [Olden Knowledge], it was about 6km tall. Impressive, but realistic.

Well, it may not be super tall, but it was wide. As in, 30° slope all the way to the peak kinda wide. There was even a big mining city sprawling all throughout its northern slope.

The trip so far has been mostly uneventful, since I had been mostly training in throwing shurikairs, as I'd taken to calling them. But the training bore fruit, as was evident by the following two screens:

Knowledge Crystallization has reached level 2. It is now more efficient, and you can modify the weight and sharpness of the screens further. Through your own efforts, you have learned the Accurate Throw skill. Any projectiles thrown without the aid of a ranged weapon will benefit from slightly increased accuracy. This Skill will activate automatically when throwing a projectile.

I had had plenty of time to think and discuss things with Flora, but I still couldn't wrap my head around how Skills worked. Some, like [Map] or [Knowledge Crystallization], were easy to understand, but this new one was different.

First, is was extremely hard to learn. As in, I-had-to-throw-almost-10.000-shurikairs-to-get-it levels of hard. It was so hard to get that my accuracy had improved, simply from the training itself, several times more than the correction from the Skill. In fact the Skill was barely more than a small extra reward in terms of improvement with throwing shurikairs.

But the Skill wasn't specialised in throwing shurikairs. I had tested it, and it would offer the same amount of help when throwing rocks, sticks, and even javelins, meaning there were multiple, completely different ways of getting the same Skill.

But that was just the beginning.

Why, of all Skills, did I get [Accurate Throw], and not something like [Shuriken Familiarity]? Or shurikair familiarity? Or screen familiarity? Was it because what I threw didn't count as a proper weapon? Or were the 'familiarity' Skills only aqcuirable as class Skills? I had no clue, and [Olden Knowledge] refused to tell me.

There were also other questions.

Layla, that darned woman, had both [Dagger Mastery], which I assumed to be the first class Skill of her second class and a replacement for [Dagger Familiarity], and [Dagger Throwing]. That made sense, since her class Skill would probably be more centred around using daggers as weapons and the other one for using them as projectiles, but in that case, why didn't she get [Accurate Throw] like me? Or, conversely, why didn't I get [Shuriken Throwing]? Again, unanswered questions.

There was also another thing, which wasn't strictly about Skills, but more about Attributes. From quite a while ago, I had felt my soul steadily getting sturdier. But that didn't make sense, so I chucked it to me being paranoid. But I had undeniable problems now.

A couple of weeks ago, I was only able to summon around 850 shurikairs in a day, before my soul was strained to the max. Whereas, now, I could reach 1200 shurikairs in a day if I pushed myself. That was an improvement of around 30%, or even 50%, depending on where you saw it from. But even without those numbers and ratios, I could feel it too.

My soul itself wasn't getting bigger, or turning into more, like the day The System overturned the world, but it felt like it was getting tougher. It was metaphorically harder, more together. Evidently, this translated into a better performance. And I felt like it was still nowhere near its limit.

'Alright, that's enough futile thinking for one day. Let's get on with the shurikair throwing.'

I summoned a new shurikair, a process that I had already pretty much nailed down already, and immediately threw it at a tree 50 meters to my right. It hit it right in the middle. It didn't sink too deep, since I didn't make the shurikairs sharper than the default to save on soul strain, but the aim was near perfect.

'And that's with the Skill at level 1. Again, makes no sense. It should be at least level 4 already.'

As I complained inwardly, my prodigious ears picked up on a faint sound coming from right ahead. They were barely whispers, and I had no clue what the sound was at all, but I was pretty certain that it didn't come from something native to the forest.

Excited for the prospect of a break from the monotony, I ran towards the sound. Soon, I reached an unused path, merely a dirt trail free of trees. The sound came from down the trail. As I got closer, I identified the sound as a mix of human voices and the sounds of a wagon, which meant it was most likely just a merchant convoy. I hadn't seen any yet ever since reaching the Hearthen Empire, but I had encountered plenty back in Fairland. It was nothing too exciting.

'Usually, merchants travel through the plains, since monsters are generally less common and weaker, and it is harder to set up ambushes, but they must be taking a shortcut. Haaah, it would be bad if they saw me... I'll get a bit closer to see what they're carrying, and unless it's something exceptional, I'll just pass them and keep going forward.'

I soon caught up with them, but stayed far enough that I would probably not be detected. But what I saw was... unsettling.

There were ten men, five of them were [Bandit]s, one was a [Ranger], three were [Black Merchant]s and the last one a [Slavermaster], a rare Class. They were all between levels 25 and 35, and were walking alongside three wagons, each pulled by two horses, except the [Black Merchant]s who were each driving a wagon. One of the wagons looked fairly normal, and only seemed to be carrying the food and other supplies for their journey and to set up camp...

...but the other two were completely square, and covered almost entirely by a dirty, greyish-white sheet. Underneath it, I could make our the vague shape of iron bars.

I already had an idea of what they were carrying, but to confirm it, I decided to try something I had never tried before. I had never done it, but somehow... I felt like it should work. I cut off my senses, which was easy when all I had to do was stop supplying mana to them, and focused on my soul.

Then, I concentrated my soul's power at the edges, and when it was saturated...

I let it burst out into the surroundings, instantly reaching everything within 50 meters, including the carriages.

I felt... slightly overwhelmed. As my 'soul sonar' washed through my surroundings, several things around me started to light up.

There were countless hazy outlines, tall and cylindrical, which seemed to be the souls of the trees. There were small dots everywhere, most likely the souls of insects. There were a few slightly bigger souls too, either inside the trees or on top of them. They painted a white, hazy picture over the black backdrop of nothingness.

That's right, they were all white. Many were dim and unfocused, to the point of being almost transparent, but the little color they did have was pure, unadulterated white.

Then my 'sonar' wave reached the carriages.

Immediately, I recognised the souls of the ten men. They were incomparably more opaque in comparison to those of the animals and plants. But they were black.

Not pitch black, admittedly, and some of them could only be considered dark grey, but it was undeniable that they were evil. Souls don't lie.

And they weren't the only human souls I detected.

The rest were bundled up in two groups, which I assumed correlated to two of the carriages. One of them was filled with moderately potent souls, despite being quite weakened. The colours mostly differed from a pale grey to a slightly darkish one. Of course, even the slaves weren't all good people.

In the other one, the souls were quite a bit weaker, and even more affected by the bad conditions. They were quivering, and some were waning out. There were also some exceptionally weak souls, which I assumed belonged to children. Truly scornful, to trade with child slaves. The weak ones were all white or pale gray too, showing that they had done no wrong to the world.

The rest of the souls from that carriage were... in general, slightly less dark than the first one, except for a single one that was quite a potent dark gray. I made a mental note of that one.

Also, all of the slaves had a small, almost pitch-black lump, akin to a leech, stuck onto them, which was probably a mark of slavery or something along those lines.

In total, I counted 24 people with that mark, which was everyone except the 10 that were not in the cages. And just as I finished doing that, the lights fizzled out, since it had already been about 5 seconds since the original pulse. I could think very fast if I wanted to.

I once again opened up my senses, and was going to get ready to punish those scummy slavers, when I saw the screens in front of me.

Through your own efforts, you have unlocked the Soul Detection skill. You can use your soul to scan all the souls in your surroundings, with a maximum range of 10 meters. The color of the soul is dependant on alignment. The range can be decreased to cause less soul strain. Congratulations! Due to using Soul Detection without The System's help and reaching a range of 50 meters, the Skill has been upgraded to level 5. The maximum range has increased to 50 meters and the efficiency has been improved significantly.

'Again, another example of how the Skill system is a mess. If I do something over the Skill's capabilities, the level immediately increases to match what I can do with my own skill, but then why is [Accurate Throw] still at level 1? Also, all these vague terms like 'significantly' or 'slightly' ar really annoying. Was it so hard to get some gauges and some numbers for God's sake? Maybe HP would be hard to measure, but at least mana and soul strain should be fairly easy right? Right!? Haaaah...'

Shaking unnecessary thoughts away, I once again focused on the mission at hand.

'I'll take them out one by one. Ninja style.'