Over the last three days, Velik had managed to eat five stat boosters. He quickly discovered why the general recommendation was to wait a day between each one, though. It turned out that piling on too much too quickly hurt quite a lot. It wasn’t physical pain, either, or at least it wasn’t the kind his regeneration could fix.

It reminded him of being sick as a child. His limbs felt weak and heavy. Everything was difficult, even breathing. There wasn’t a single part of him that wasn’t sore. He wasn’t bedridden, not yet, but it was obvious his body—or his system, or whatever—couldn’t recuperate fast enough to keep up with the rate he was consuming the boosters.

He’d asked what would happen if he just ate all of them at once and then endured. Jensen had looked absolutely horrified and told him that there were less painful ways to die. Velik thought that was probably an exaggeration, but his original plan to eat one every twelve hours had already failed, so he wasn’t willing to push it.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t push harder than he was. It was that it wouldn’t save him any time since he’d planned to run while processing the boosts, and in the condition he was in, he couldn’t move at more than a fraction of his normal speed.

Resigned to waiting and hoping the divine beasts wouldn’t get impatient enough to send someone else in to find him, Velik decided to fill the time by practicing with his new skills. That was when he discovered the other unfortunate side effect of stat boosters: there was some kind of overlap between processing the food and gaining a rank in a skill.

The instant he got [Mana Control] to rank 2, he’d doubled over and vomited up what felt like every scrap of food he’d ever eaten in his entire life. That had gone on for a solid half an hour, his entire body wracked with cramps and pain while he laid in the middle of the floor in an ever-expanding puddle of his own vomit.

When he’d finally been able to drag himself to his feet and trudge to the bathhouse, it had reminded him of the last time he’d taken a serious beating, just limping through the forest and leaving a trail of blood stretching back to the body of the monster he’d just killed. Every step was agonizing, every breath hurt, and his vision swam with black spots and blurred light.

Damn it, Jensen, he mentally cursed the man for the hundredth time.

Velik got cleaned up as best he could, which was mostly to say that he sluiced himself off with a few buckets of cold water, then flopped face-first into the pool. Groaning, he rolled over and settled onto the seat built into the side. His clothing billowed out softly around him, but he was in too much pain to care about taking it off.

He didn’t realize he’d drifted off to sleep until approaching footsteps woke him back up. His eyes remained closed, but his nose told him all he needed to know. Jensen stopped on the other side of the pool, huffed, and said, “One of the maids reported you jumping into the bath fully dressed. Everything alright?”

Velik just grunted.

“I told you not to push so hard with the stat food.”

“Skill rank up,” Velik explained. “Bad mix.”

Jensen paused mid-scolding. “Oh, right. I guess we never discussed that. It’s not usually all that bad, but most people don’t rank up new skills in less than a week. The growth in the system is more gradual for them.”

Then why the hell did making [Awakened Blood] give me close to two hundred points without causing any problems? Was it something Morgus did to smooth out the transition?

Velik didn’t bother to voice the question. Jensen didn’t know how the system worked any better than anyone else. The only reason he knew anything about stat boosters was because it was common for rich people to buy some for their kids, and they’d figured out what it was safe to do through trial and error, then passed that knowledge down through the generations.

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“I know you’re eager to get on the road, but you really can’t rush this,” Jensen said. “By the way, you might want to skip the next meal and give yourself a chance to reset. Something came up, and all the druids are heading to the east edge of the country. That includes Sildra, and she wants you to come along.”

“Corruption?” Velik asked.

“Probably. That’s what her whole circle is about dealing with. Things were… politically complex out that way until that divine beast came through. He tore apart a whole faction camped on the far side of the boundary and upset the whole balance out there. The agents of corruption gained the upper hand and some teams out there figured out they started up a new breeding dungeon.”

One part of Velik wanted to set out immediately to crush it. If it was a new dungeon, he could probably do it by himself with absolutely no effort. Another part reminded him that he had bigger problems to deal with, that there were a thousand other people in the country who could take care of that particular issue without his help.

“Why does Sildra need me there?” he asked. He opened his eyes and stood up, then regarded the cloudy water grimly. Why people thought baths in pools were a good idea, he’d never know. Any stream, no matter how slow it moved, would have carried that whole mess away.

Whatever. It’s not stuck to me anymore. Someone else can clean the water.

That was when he noticed subtle enchantments reaching up from beneath the pool, doing precisely that, and he had to wonder how bad the water would have looked without them. Maybe it wasn’t the fault of the pool; maybe he’d just overloaded it with filth.

His thoughts flashed to his room and the mess in there. Inarguably, it was worse than the bathhouse. He didn’t envy whatever maid got stuck with that. Suddenly, he saw an immediate trip out of the city in a new light.

“I don’t have the specifics,” Jensen said, drawing him back out of his thoughts. “I think she just needs someone with a big stick to threaten and browbeat everyone out there into cooperating so that her druids can purge the corruption.”

“And it’s on my way, anyway. I can waste two weeks there eating these stat boosting foods just as easily as I can spend it here,” Velik said, finishing the line of reasoning.

“More or less.”

“I should pack for a long trip through the desert before we leave the city. There’s no telling what they’ll have available at the boundary.”

“Already done,” Jensen said. “As soon as you told me that you’d gained [Mana Control], I had supplies prepared, enough to last a normal person a month. If you could carry any sort of enchanted gear into the desert…”

Then I’d have enough for a year instead of just a few weeks.

“But I can’t, so it’ll have to do. I’ll ration the water and forage where I can.”

The [Mending] enchantments on Velik’s clothes were already wicking the water out of them. It would only be a few minutes before they returned to pristine condition, another luxury he’d miss where he was going. The way he was with his clothes, he’d have to spend all his time in wolf shape or he’d end up walking around naked.

“Well, let’s get everything packed up,” Velik said. “Where and when am I meeting Sildra?”

“She’s already on a wagon heading east, as of half an hour ago. I don’t imagine you’ll struggle to catch up with her.”

“Normally, no. Today, right now…”

“Skip a meal,” Jensen said again. “You’ll feel better tomorrow. You can resume going through them, then. Keep them in the case until you go to eat one. It’s enchanted to preserve the contents.”

Two duffels full of supplies went into Velik’s Traveler’s Bracelet, along with the stat meal case still housing the majority of the evil food. The golem-core spear joined them. A few changes of clothes and a spare set of boots rounded out his new kit, all of it made of the toughest leather Jensen had been able to source.

When he was ready to go, Velik walked out the front door. Jensen followed him, and said, “I don’t know what you’re walking into. If you were anyone else, I’d say this was a journey guaranteed to result in death. But… just don’t die, okay? More than that, you find that fucker. You tear his guts out and rip his head off. For Torwin.”

Velik nodded once. He fully planned on killing Tesir, and as soon as he was done with that, he was going to find whoever had scattered dungeon seeds across the human countries and do the same to them. If he lived through that, maybe he’d come back home and let everyone know that it was done.

Moving slowly—for him—Velik jogged down the street until the east gate came into view. Soon enough, he was out on the open road, and two hours after that, a familiar wagon came into sight. Sildra was sitting in the back with three other druids, all of them watching his approach.

“You showed,” she said, a note of relief in her voice.

“Jensen said you needed help.”

She slapped the side of the wagon and said, “Hop up. I’ll tell you about it.”