They’d lost one of the three snail-men. His brothers hunched over his corpse, looking mournful. Hector, the shieldsman from Nadine’s unit, was also among the dead. Nadine looked cold and furious as she watched them load the body onto a makeshift funeral pyre.

She took these things hard.

But Nic had nothing to say. There weren’t words to make this kind of loss better. Even Nic, who kept himself apart from his troops as best he could, knowing they might die… Even he felt it…

They were being whittled down.

A steady trickle of people were arriving in Winterhome, brought in by the crows cawing his praises to the wind. But most of them came precisely because they didn’t want to fight.

Ettrai’s work with the beasts was essentially precisely because, sooner or later, they’d run out of humans who were willing to fight. Some might push through the fire and come out stronger…

But even prodigies had to die sometime.

For large sects and schools the time scale was one of years. They fought rarely, and did so precisely to give their younger generations time to grow. For him, the scale was days, and they could only sustain their losses for a short time.

Either they got ahead of the System’s challenges and emerged into dominance, or they’d go under.

Even Nic couldn’t turn the tide alone. Every time he left on a mission or went into training, they’d be vulnerable.

Until they could stand above the world on their own.

Earth had become a Gu jar. A vessel for insects to scratch and claw at each other within, until only the most dangerous survived.

Nic had to wonder if every Integration was like this…

The emergence of the Aleph, the army of heretical devils…

It seemed like a break in the System’s plans, but for all Nic knew, it was allowed and controlled. A single drop of chaos allowed into the mixture so that interesting things would occur.

Was this all still in the System’s unblinking eye?

“C’mon.” Nic said. Tarquin had applied his flame to the pyres, and the bodies were burning away, the smell seeping outwards. “We have to go.”

Traveling through the portal was a nail-biter. Nic knew from experience that the warps induced by the Aleph’s energy could twist and distort where they ended up. Being thrown in all directions across the wilds was a possibility…

But in the end, they arrived whole and intact with their full party.

Nic breathed a sigh of relief.

Altogether they traveled back to Winterhome, slowly shedding a little of the tension as they walked. Tarquin had taken to chewing a stalk of grass in the edge of his mouth, trying to look like some wasteland drifter, and Nic mocked him mercilessly until he spat it out with a sour expression.

Then it was Nic’s turn, and Tarquin wasted no breath in dressing down the fact that Nic had become a small, scaly midget, with frilly tentacles for hair and eyes that looked like the fake jewels brothel madame’s wore around their chubby fingers.

It felt good. The stress of the day was easing off his back, like a weight being lifted, and Gwungo scrambled around his shoulders eagerly telling and retelling the part of the story where he’d saved the day. The little lizard was again nothing more than a small, blobby-faced axolotl, his terrifying power concealed beneath an ever-present and lipless little smile.

They returned to Winterhome triumphant, and Nic could almost forget the dangerous business of the Ghost-Toll Legion now owning a part of his soul…

Winterhome had continued to grow in his absence. In just two days, new buildings had gone up, and new faces had joined the crowd. Ettrai’s training sessions now drew just over thirty people, making the raised walkways over the water shudder and shake as they stomped their feet and practiced under the array’s unfeeling eye.

Today, they were working to dodge blunt, soft projectiles of clay that hurdled out from the training formation’s core, striking them with brutal bruises if they were less than diligent. He could hear the chorus of yelps and shouts echo through the air…

Most of the party was already splitting up, heading towards the dining tables to break the bad news and celebrate the good…

But Nic had important business to attend to. Making his goodbyes, he dived down to the submerged cultivation chamber in the core of the city, secluding himself from the hustle and motion above in the still, cold water.

Fighting so many battles back to back had given his crystal eyes a wealth of new information, and he needed to process that into his fighting style. To refine and understand what he’d done wrong, what he could have done better…

But first.

He took out the talisman of the Ghost-Toll Legion, marked with his six hundred merit points. He might not like the Legion’s way of doing things, but that didn’t mean he’d turn down free rewards. Pouring his aura into the token, he felt his mind drift within, entering a sea of information.

There were hundreds - if not thousands - of potential rewards.

Spoils and loot from dozens of worlds, stacked up high in the Legion’s coffers. Techniques plundered from destroyed sects or perfected by the demonic legionnaires themselves. Weapon designed as only unfeeling demons could, full of fire and terrible wrath.

Nic had hit the jackpot. Six hundred merits wasn’t an awe-inspiring amount, but it was wealth, and here was the chance to spend it…

He moved to the techniques recorded within the seal first.

There was the Ghost-Walk Eye, a scouting technique that created an illusionary wisp of energy and sent it forth, allowing you to see through the all-but-invisible wisp. Advanced users could maintain dozens across the whole of a world, becoming an all-seeing god.

But that was, intriguingly, just a fragment of a larger technique created by the founder of the Ghost-Toll Legion. The full technique allowed for the creation of true clones, consuming expensive reagents and materials to strengthen them until they reached the level of the original body.

Other pieces included the Ghost-Deva Mantle, which granted up to four additional arms. Nic could attest himself how useful that was.

The Ghost-Shadow Icon, a technique for creating illusionary doubles, the precursor to creating doppelgangers out of flesh…

And the Ghost-Mirror Waterveil, a technique that allowed an illusion to capture the force of an attack and return it, making striking one of the ghostly doubles a deadly mistake…

Nic lingered on that one for a moment.

He had promised himself he would focus on progressing the powers and techniques he already had. Several of them were lagging behind, and he hadn’t maximized the potential of any of his techniques yet, leaving him in a poor position to take on more…

A technique that wasn’t fully fed on Essence and developed was really on showing a fraction of its ability, after all…

But.

This technique suited his Mistwater Step so perfectly. It truly was a match made in heaven, turning his misty apparitions from mere distractions into deadly traps. The technique promised to actually fuel itself from the power of the incoming attack, not his own, making it only a light strain on his aura…

It was too good, and being an ancillary technique to the Ghost-Shadow Icon, it only cost two hundred merits.

Nic selected it with a thrum of greed in his heart.

Next he turned his attention to the goods available for sale. There were huge amounts of weapons, talismans, and raw materials posted within the information-seal…

The materials were all mouth-watering, the treasures of the natural world awaiting craftsmen to refine them. Sadly, his own crafting technique required fresh remains in order to capture the spirit, but there were still useful things here for him…

Things such as marrow-paste to strengthen bone, rough talisman paper made from cursed trees that granted lingering and terrible power to offensive runes inscribed upon it…

Poisonous stone for arrowheads…

Nic had never had the resources of a large sect presented to him before. To be allowed to pillage the Legion’s storehouses was a dream, and he knew it was an opportunity they gave him precisely so his resolve would be shaken, so that he’d start to consider working for them more and more happily in exchange for greater rewards.

He hadn’t even allowed himself to look at the cultivation pills yet…

Nevermind the fact they’d probably have treasures on offer that were on par with the Mistflower Cordial…

Nic shook his head, dispelling the phantasms of greed. Staying focused, he made his selections from the raw materials section, choosing things he could refine to multiply their value. That was the best way to use this boon - not jumping for expensive cultivation pills.

Another one hundred fifty of his points were spent that way…

And as for the final two hundred and fifty, Nic had already spotted where to spend them.

Guns.

The Ghost-Toll Legion had access to a vast array of siege weapons and cannons, but it also made something called a banefire flintlock. The actual rifle was extremely crude compared to what Earthlings had designed, only capable of firing a single shot before reloading…

But that payload was infused with a hellish power born from lost souls refined into flame.

Put simply, they were weapons that would let an F-Class contend with an E-Class. In massed volleys, they were probably superior, able to rain down a sheer brute force that was difficult to resist.

Nic could only afford twenty of them, but that was twenty more Winterhome soldiers who could fight the sand devils.

“Sofia?”

“Excellent suggestions, Nicolas. I might have encouraged you to look more into the techniques and select some that were useful for enhancing speed and agility, but other than that, I have no objections. Your strategy of selecting raw materials to refine is almost certainly correct; it’s even possible we could sell some of the finished products back, if you are ever given the free time.”

It always made Nic smile to see he and Sofia were thinking along the same lines. But sadly, that couldn’t last…

His next topic was one they were sure to disagree on.

He took out the bronze disk containing the map.

“And what do we do about this?”

“Nicolas… The best thing to do would be to throw it away. But I already know you won’t.”

He nodded.

That was damn right.