It had been two days since she’d lost that little shit, two days of searching and two days of failing to find a trace of him. She’d used magic to track him. It hadn’t worked. She’d quietly seethed while she repaired her wings, then taken to the air to scour the landscape with eyes so sharp they could see ants crawling through the dirt from a mile up. If there’d been so much as a single bent twig, overturned rock, or scuffed patch of moss, she’d missed it.

Even scent tracking had failed somehow. Admittedly, it wasn’t her specialty, but she knew the magic to compensate for her lack of natural ability. It was like the little wolf pup was a ghost in the essence. Nothing she did provided even the slightest shred of evidence that he’d ever existed. It was so infuriating that she’d started to honestly consider he’d managed to trick her with some sort of illusion.

That wasn’t the case, of course. She’d wrapped an essence shell around a real person inside the sky bridge, and sensors recorded his passage through the facility. And then, after their ten-second scuffle, he’d vanished.

If I’d kept control, maybe that wouldn’t have happened.

The Other had crept out though, had taken over. Her memory of that slice of time was fuzzy, like someone else had told her the quick version while omitting all the pertinent details. It was always like that when the Other was involved. She hated it, but she couldn’t stop it.

It would have been smarter to return immediately so that someone better at sniffing out trouble could have got to work finding the experiment, but she hadn’t expected to actually fail. For that matter, she hadn’t expected him to seriously try to escape. He should have known that it was impossible! Except, obviously it wasn’t impossible, and he’d actually done it.

The humiliation was going to be the worst of it. They’d laugh at the poor little looney lorekeeper, but not too loudly. None of them wanted to risk rousing the Other’s wrath. But behind her back, they’d mock her. In their private conversations and their hidden sanctums, they’d snicker about her incompetence.

Maybe it was for the best that the wolf pup had escaped. At this point, she didn’t think she could contain the Other if she did happen to catch up to him. And killing the experiment was far, far worse than losing track of it.

Cursing him, she gave up the search and turned for home.

* * *

Velik stretched and twisted as he rose from his nap. That hour was the first he’d gotten since leaving Avordin, but it was more than enough to leave him feeling refreshed and invigorated. There’d been no sign of Eslaka, but he was still wary of her magic. At least it was no longer invisible to him—small consolation there, but he’d know it if someone was magically spying on him.

He was at the edge of the pine forest, having descended about two miles and traveled maybe three or four hundred south of the sky bridge. It had taken a bit of work to pick up Tesir’s trail again, but the divine beast had left it deliberately. He’d proven he could hide it from Velik’s nose when he wanted, and he was either too lazy or too confident to do so here.

He’d only stopped to rest because he wanted to be at his best for what came next. The forest ended, and a sea of yellow-green stalks began, hundreds of miles long. The grasses were chest height or higher, and that meant plenty of cover for ambush predators. He’d already massacred a few slithering snake-like monsters in the trees, and the LPS had gorged itself on their essence.

The scale was incredible, too. Yes, they were stronger than any non-divine beast monster he’d ever encountered, but Velik himself was so much more than he’d been a few days ago. His LPS had dutifully recorded in the neighborhood of seven hundred to a thousand essence per kill, meaning that a solid day of hunting could easily double his power.

He’d been tempted to do just that, but ultimately decided it was better to put some more distance between himself and Eslaka first. Now that he’d gone a few days without seeing any sign of her, he was eager to see what he could find to challenge himself with.

The sooner he got started, the better, because the limited personal system ate up a hundred essence or more each day just to sustain itself. When he’d tried to add some of his newly gained essence to [Shadow Striker], he’d only poured a few hundred essence in before he started getting warnings about critically low reserves again.

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Good thing I kept the physical spear, he congratulated himself yet again, as he had after each of the giant snake-things he’d slaughtered. He kind of missed the system telling him what it was he was killing, but it made sense that it couldn’t do that anymore since his victims weren’t connected to it.

Two hundred feet into the grasslands, Velik felt the vibrations through his feet coming at him from every direction. Something burrowing, or several somethings. Maybe… four of them? They’re big, whatever they are. Fast, too.

He waited until he saw the earth split about five feet away, then launched himself straight into the air with a flip that left his spear pointed straight down. Something with short, coarse fur, huge digging claws, and a face that was covered in scars burst out of the ground. Velik locked onto a round scar on the monster’s thick, squat snout, and thrust the spear down.

Its head was angled up toward the sky, but it didn’t seem to notice him there. It might have been a sensory issue for a predator that was used to ambushing its prey from underground, but whatever the cause, it meant that it didn’t react until the metal tip of Velik’s spear was halfway through its mouth and heading for its brain.

Satisfied that he’d already killed the monster, he was already turning his attention to the next one. So his surprise was complete when the spear came out the back side of its skull without seeming to bother the monster. It reared back, dragging Velik and his spear along for the ride, tore its mouth open with the spear still punched through the roof of its snout, and spit out some sort of thick black saliva.

It splattered across Velik’s head, chest, and shoulders with an acidic hiss, then quickly started eating through the rags that used to be his clothes. His hair took a split-second longer to go up, and his skin resisted the longest. By the time both feet hit the ground, the pain had started.

It hurt. It hurt worse than anything he’d felt since leaving the Garden, maybe worse than anything before that, too. It burned him raw and ate away at his flesh, faster than his regeneration could restore him. The monster had more drool leaking out of its mouth, dripping out from between jagged sharp teeth. Smoke rolled away from his spear where the acid etched its surface, a fact that Velik only dimly noticed outside of his awareness that his skull was melting.

He didn’t have an answer in his catalog of essence configurations, but he figured the monster wasn’t melting from its own acid, so if nothing else, its fur could be used to wipe it away. Velik shoved the spear deeper, leveraging his strength to knock the monster on its side. It was bigger than he was, eight feet all and three feet around at the stomach, narrowing somewhat the higher it went.

Using his spear to keep it under control, he slammed his head into its fur and dragged it back and forth. Like he’d hoped, the saliva scraped against bristly fur sharp enough to score steel and pulled free.

Like snuggling a giant stuffed animal—one that was doing its best to kill him at the time—Velik scraped the majority of the acidic spit away. Then he summoned [Shadow Striker] and decapitated the monster. The whole process took less than three seconds, but it turned out that was time he didn’t have.

[Air Walk] let him get up out of the way, and now that he knew about their burning spittle, it was easy enough to avoid it. He spent the rest of the fight and the next hour after it was over wincing in pain as he walked, but he culled the rest of the monsters without issue.

It was a sobering reminder that he wasn’t invincible, that out here in this world, monsters got way more powerful than anything back home, and that he couldn’t afford to be sloppy if he wanted to live. All that having been said, those six acid-spitting gargantuan mole-looking things netted him a cool three thousand essence, all of which got immediately split between [Air Walk], [Mana Drinker] and [Shadow Striker].

He also noticed that every other category had passively gone up anywhere from thirty to two hundred points, with what he guessed was a rough correlation to how much he used it. His best guess was that automatic essence allotment to skills was exactly how they grew in the original system, and the LPS was just mimicking that behavior.

This is too damn complicated. I wonder if there’s a way to make it display like how I’m used to. I don’t need to track every individual essence point that comes into this thing. On the other hand, not being limited by skill slots is nice. I wonder if I can merge these configurations, too.

Velik kept fiddling with it while he ran. He kept on the lookout for more monsters, of which there were plenty. The grasslands teemed with all sorts of predators, and even the prey species were vicious and territorial. Just because they didn’t want to eat him didn’t mean they wouldn’t try to kick him to death with hooves that could shatter stone.

But the essence gains were phenomenal. By the time the sun came up, his status read over forty thousand total essence. He hadn’t even bothered to spend it yet, not when he was sure he’d need it for skill mergers. Once he hunkered down to rest, he started a small fire to cook a haunch of monster meat, then said, “Alright, let’s make some changes to this system.”