Chapter 23 (Patreon)

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I had to spend the first couple of weeks after arriving in Arenam in a controlled semi-coma, and I wasn't even particularly sick. I mean, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't the kind of crisis where it wasn't clear whether I'd survive to see the dawn. I even managed to monitor the mirror masking system through my sleep, though without the possibility to interfere in any serious way. Exactly four times, I was awakened for a brief couple of hours to either fix the network or supplement it a bit by replacing lost parts with new ones. That didn't make me feel good either, but I never once got to the point of threatening to deteriorate.

My condition was both easier and more difficult than it had been after the Library because the time frame for my fallout was record-breaking. Yes, I was almost guaranteed to recover and regain full functionality (I wouldn't predict my sanity recovery), but it was going to take a long time. The strongest impact of the loads from the rapid leveling that saved me. I literally too abruptly inflated, making the vessel of my body too tight, not yet having time to adapt to the increased capabilities. And then I went straight into battle without looking back, without mercy for my health, and, to be honest, without hope of surviving the battle.

The final massacre, combined with the final reward for my deeds, only aggravated the situation, creating a precarious equilibrium, which now it is better not to disturb. It will definitely come back to normal, but until that time, it is absolutely contraindicated for me to seriously strain my already battered Isekai essence. All sorts of "trifles," like controlling or even gradually developing a network of mirrors, automatic wrapping up in un-existence, and reflexive control of the information sphere, I can do so. But if I go out of the limits of "easy warm-up," I immediately risk bursting a balloon and being such.

These weeks, the very first and the hardest were marked in my head by the sensations of continuous pain in my whole body and energy, which did not seem to be too painful, but it could not be shut up, could not be relieved, could not be anesthetized by any means. The worst thing was that it was impossible to fall into oblivion. There was no reason, no medical necessity, no possibility. Every second was remembered even too well, as was the flurry of my companions trying to help me. They were in a bad state, too, and could do even less I could, except for the bloodsucker. She was the freshest of the freshest, having taken on most of the possible worries. Giver sat unseen in the darkest corner of the underground base, coming out only for a few minutes and very reluctantly, hiding in the shadow of my defense net. For her, the first flash would be a near-fatal problem. Any trace of the hell nature, no matter where it would be seen, would be reacted to without delay or neglect.

Tia, Hans, Hestia, Losius, and even Taria were so exhausted that they slept eighteen to twenty hours a night, spending as much time as possible in healing sleep to avoid the permanent effects of the kickbacks. Most of my potions were designed to cause catatonic sleepiness, avoiding other, more dangerous effects. However, I couldn't avoid them, so even in my unconscious slumber, the team was emitting irritation and unhappiness, suffering from rashes, allergies, stomach upsets, and other intoxication, seemingly from every group of essences I could name. Well, except for Ygra. However, she suffered too because her breaker stick was taken away from her and hid a legendary artifact in a protective circle, but how could you explain to her the necessity of it?

By the time I was able to stay awake and move relatively freely, even if only briefly and preferably without any use of the reserve, and my companions had stopped vomiting rainbows three times a day, choking on decocts of both my work and mosquito-bought supplies, I had no strength even to show joy. Well, I didn't. While the creature left to manage Arenam was turning itself inside out but found free time, without harming other things, to ride me, who was sitting in a comfortable version of a wheelchair. And yes, it was a wheelchair with wheels made of spell-treated stone, not wood. The creature promised to find a mentally controlled levitating analog, but I preferred not to leave any trace of the search for such an unusual thing, even if she swore in blood that she could pull it off without suspicion.

I couldn't banish the creature rolling my "throne" away because she deserved encouragement for not only following my instructions, taking root in the city, and putting it under her boot but also coming out all of us in the most difficult time. Her most trusted pawns, never leaving the base at all and doted over every escapee from Eternal, providing comfort and favorable conditions for recovery. I didn't forgive her for those depilated Conans, of course, but since I wished to forget that embarrassment as soon as possible, there was no need to remind her. There were no other mistakes on her record... or she hadn't been caught yet, and somehow I believed the latter much more than the former.

The general feeling was like the morning after a very heavy drink and an equally heavy fight with the use of improvised means, in which I managed to win but could not leave unscathed when the hangover had not let go yet, bruises and abrasions were heavy, the whole world seemed gray but underlyingly understood that it was a good party There was no mood to do anything, but I had to sit and choke on some light salad and porridge on milk, just to let my body recover. For the first time, the whole team gathered together. Even Giver took her body out to feed on proteins and carbohydrates, and the mood was as if we were burying our favorite hamster, having bought a coffin for him with the price of three monthly salaries.

"All city services under the Crown have received a new batch of instructions to look for anything suspicious." The ordinarily wine-sipping bloodsucker sitting in the corner of the desk is probably the only one who is functional right now. "I get the impression that these recommendations, orders, and rescripts are sent by different interest groups, albeit under the same seal. Today's demands are even hysterical. The demands for results on the search for Hell cults are so demanding that I'm thinking of organizing and cleaning up one just to get them off my back."

I wonder why some bloodsuckers can easily eat and drink normal food, breaking it down into dust and not even shitting, albeit wasting energy instead of restoring it, while others have to almost manually clean out the stomachs left over from the time of human existence from the slag trapped in them? In this respect, bed bugs are amazingly diverse, as in all others. There are so many varieties in the world that you can break your head, to the point that each nest takes on its characteristics over time. Perhaps it's because they work with essences and are, therefore, very susceptible to mutation. After all, no matter how you work and such a dense substance, a liquefied concept, in fact, will still siphon and seep into the body. Even into my body, which I have noticed and cleaned more than once after working with the Vessel! And in creatures who live only on it, all this is even more vividly expressed, which makes them resemble original people the less, the longer they live and eat.

My subordinate, for example, can drink wine with relative ease, even though she spends a tiny amount of energy on its disintegration, but she can eat any garnish only at the expense of her development. Developed stats allow her not to be greedy for the disintegration of the eaten right inside her own body. She just likes the taste of wine and can enjoy it, and the same milk, especially fresh, especially human, and directly from the source (preferably cute and brainwashed) even gives a weak nutritional effect. Vegetable juices, like most soft drinks, are generally indistinguishable from musty water. It still discerns flavor, but the critter's instincts cause it to be rejected and prevented from being enjoyed. Why wine or, say, aged Zainberg rum retain their flavor and don't tug on her instincts, while beer of any kind goes to waste, she can't understand.

"Don't you dare even think about the layered loop, Sister." While I'm dumbfounded, having gone into the depths of philosophical and scientific reflections, Giver begins to organize her less experienced companion. "Even if you manage by some miracle to pull off the organization unnoticed, you'll attract irreparably much attention, and there's no telling whose will be worse - the ruined Eyes and angry clergy or my kin. At least one of the nineteen cults that had taken root and managed to do real damage to the world of endowed was initially positioned as a fully controlled entity."

Yeah, I agree. It's enough to remember Tavimark (which I'm following because that's where we stopped before jumping to Arenam), where emotions have been raging for the third day already after all three cults there became public. The public was represented by a hastily assembled investigative team, which was crammed with not the coolest and most influential interrogators (those of the influential and experienced who were alive, sane, and functioning were needed in other areas). The interrogators may have been weak, but they were well equipped, the Imperial Treasury had opened its coffers, and the temples, including those serving the Grimmentray, were generous in pouring gold into such endeavors. The Eyes' representative in Tavimark, who had been about to organize a promotion for himself, was now desperately fighting for the right to pay the investigators a fabulous bribe to keep, if not himself, then his family alive.

He'll keep it, I guess. Even though he would be bound with such shackles and oaths, which he would have to weaken for years, because even though he had made a mistake, he was at least a pro, relatively loyal to the Empire of the Ages, and there was a big shortage of such people. And it is still a group of investigators caught clean enough and intimidated by threats of retribution for the probable abuse of power. Many will be too stupid to be seriously frightened or too smart to get caught, starting to make their gesheft, taking advantage of the confusion and opportunities that have opened up.

"I'll believe you on that one." She curled her lips in annoyance. Without off-the-scale Perception and my perk for picking up small details indistinguishable. "Too bad, it would have been an excuse to clamp down on the temples a bit."

I noted the bloodsucker's strong dislike of clerics because brainwashing them was difficult and risky. They have to work with minimal influence and pure psychology, without the games with other people's minds that the creature likes so much. That's why they still retain a certain amount of autonomy, not under her full control, which makes the pale mistress almost furious. And it's also worth checking if the Giver has poked around in the brains of the overconfident bloodsucker because she agreed with her rival very quickly, without even arguing or trying to win back the position. I mean, the devil was right, but it would have been in the bug's character to respond with a couple of counterarguments just to keep up face. And she didn't do that, while the deviless can't help but realize that if for digging into the main team's heads, I'm going to beat the ass (figuratively, but in reality immediately to death), I can miss the influence on the bloodsucker, and when I find it, I won't punish her much.

It wouldn't be hard for someone with her experience to unobtrusively lead a less experienced creature to attack, attempt to apply the ring's gifts to the possessed, and then proceed her with her threads until she was obedient. It's unlikely she'd dare to do that, going against my will and orders, but it's still a possibility. And if she were to try to brainwash anyone in my circle, she'd start with the Arenams creature because she's the perfect candidate.

"Oh, yes, working with temples is always hard. That's true." The deviless picks up, trying either to extinguish even the echoes of discontent in the emotions of "sister" or to move the topic away from the dangerous moment for the disclosure of its probable influence. "But in this, I can give you a certain amount of advice of the kind that no books will describe, not of the kind that can be obtained by ordinary and not-so-ordinary means. Advice that will unlock the full potential in the performance of a deprived being who can give and be gifted with talents like you and me."

There's no arguing about it because you'd look stupid. After all, in the organization of clandestine destructive organizations by creatures with brainwashing abilities Giver, with her experience, is incomparably cooler than all of us put together and multiplied by two. So much cooler, that one can't help but wonder how much she is needed at all and if she can't be made non-existent... or at least sealed like a genie in a bottle and forgotten about for about a hundred years. Sealing devils is considered to be one of the most classic ways of dealing with them, though relatively rare against the background of everyone's favorite banishment. As it happens, it is not easy to kill such creatures permanently, for any serious damage or threats will cause them to try to escape to their Hell, even if at the cost of weakening.

Semi-material bodies woven from the pure flair and energy of the Domain are quite rare; more often, devils incarnate themselves into possessed flesh, which weakens their powers but gives them greater protection and the ability to sacrifice such a shell. The massacre in Eternal is not indicative of that. On the contrary, no one tried to escape there until the very last moment, and even then, I have a feeling they didn't try, even though they wanted to. I quite admit that the archdevil forced his toys not to retreat by direct control because they fought to the last and started to run away only after his death.

In a normal situation, when there's a whiff of danger or at least a serious battle, devils run away without a second thought, grabbing what they can grab, as Giver, Tia, and even the bloodsucker had told me. In fact, the first thing they build into possessed bodies is a mechanism of quick retreat, so they don't just run away like diarrhea but don't lose their pants on the way, i.e. the accumulated sonm. That's why mages, especially Alishan ones, have long ago and firmly mastered the classes of all kinds of sealers. A devil is, in fact, an energy and a fleur that is much more vulnerable than Shadows or Nightmares, and mortals take advantage of it. Not to kill, but to take them out of the game for years... until the artifact fails and starts affecting the environment. In fifty encounters with powerful creatures, only three are irrevocably destroyed, while five are sealed. The remnants are unevenly divided between violent exile with a kick in the ass and a smooth retreat according to a set plan and under cover of little value. Uneven, because you can't tell where one transitions into the other.

In the evil and unkind Empire of Ages, they still prefer to destroy the creatures at once, even if there is a high risk of their escape, but the Alishan cleanup teams like to put the djinn in bottles. Well, that's what I'm saying, by Earth analogy, because on Alurei, there are their own Djinn - endowed and very rare intelligent, possessing extremely plastic energy and etheric body, due to which cause a lot of questions from all sorts of naturalists. How is it so - the form of existence is close to energetic, and there is no affliction with planar scourge, as well as loss of endowment? In general, very interesting, and the purchase of a living genie will cost a huge mountain of gold, in addition to a bunch of obligations and services.

Well, the dissection of endowed djinns and the sale of titsy djinns in harems will be left to the Alishans, as experts on slavemancy, but, I think, to lock Giver in some box Tia and I will be able to because the devil will not resist us. But we still need to recover because now neither I nor the druid can even walk normally. Or rather, we can, we can even fight, but the consequences of it will be such that it would be easier to play seals and not to twitch unnecessarily, straining tired bodies and auric shells.

The conversation at the table was sluggish, kept up solely by the pestering of both creatures by Taria because even though she'd gotten all the potion rebates, she was less exhausted than the others, and she had a stick in the ass that just wouldn't let her keep quiet. But her fervor wore off... and no, it was just the end of breakfast, and the dancer continued to pester the bloodsucker about what her toys were doing with the boots she'd given her for her services to her mistress. I just can't understand one thing: how did she manage to make the creature, who was completely unashamed of her actions and the perversions, to something resembling a mixture of embarrassment and get-off-from-me?

No, I guess I don't want to know that.

"Wait, Tia." When everyone else had dispersed, I called out to the elf who was about to retire back to her room and was also, I'm sure, a little tired from the constant cleansing meditations that were supposed to get rid of the tiniest traces of the malicious fleur. "You've finished the basic purification cycles, right? I mean, you've got some free time, just a little bit, right?"

"Quite right." The stoic reply came after a pause, caused by another muscle spasm as a consequence of taking the physical-enhancing potions. "To continue would be possible, but this carries the risk of throwing the last coin on the already tired of being in a precarious balance. Now all I have to do is check out the quality of the local library... which is, to put it bluntly, far better than expected, but far less than desired."

Yeah. The bloodsucker had a certain affinity with magpies or even hamsters, in addition to its mosquito nature. It dragged everything of little value and not nailed down, which can be appropriated without raising suspicion. And now we're not talking about gold and other wealth, but about books, scrolls, information of any kind, and, to a lesser extent, various near-legal artifacts and amulets. She needs information, and thanks to someone's influence, the lady has specifically turned on self-improvement as an ideal shadow ruler. So let the list of local literature in the ace of Tia's level cause only a condescending smile, but even the fact that this list at all causes her at least something is a recognition of quality.

"Then try, if it's not too much trouble, to put together a training program for me like you suggested before." I control every reaction and facial muscle with the kind of care one uses to drag an unexploded shell farther away. "Well, given our condition, so more emphasis on all that boring theory and other calculations..."

I gradually shut up under the absolutely expressionless gaze of the elfess looking straight into my face, whose right eyebrow twitched a little, however, literally by microscopic amounts, but I noticed. At times like this, Tia is really... not exactly frightening, no, but unnerving, a feeling akin to being near a bare wire or at great depths in some mine. There's no danger unless you go down there yourself, but there's the realization that one wrong move and it will be painful, bad, and ugly.

"Tin." She managed to say my name with too many meanings in it, a reason for pride or jokes, but, to be honest, I'm afraid to make fun of her because I understand everything, the defeat by the flair and all that, but somehow I don't want to pull the tigress by the whiskers (or ears). "For the sake of the eternal Stars and all that is holy beneath the Heavens maimed by our deeds and mistakes, not a single word."

I chuckled, giving the dumbfounded chuckle of a worthy /b/rother of the all-powerful /b/rotherhood, which made Tia's gaze even more expressionless. I tried to pull myself together, but then I imagined Taria's reaction if she found out about the elf's accidental dream, and then I nearly burst my throat trying to swallow my laughter and not laugh like a young unicorn, because my imagination always worked so well.

"Okay, that's it, I'm calm. I'm just, uh. ugh." I can easily withstand the slightly judgmental stare of the seer, who's wrapped up in whatever disguise she has available to her in her current state, but then I picture Taria's face again, to whom the essence of our conversation has been revealed, and I laugh a coughing laugh again.

Smack!

"Ouch." I pretend that I'm really hurt from the slap I received, which I wouldn't have been able to dodge in my current state anyway, and then I go on the offensive. "No, seriously! That would be really funny!"

"You're so hard to talk to." Tia exhaled, as if she'd lost the steel rod and half her backbone at once, and sat back in her chair. "And I hoped to the last minute, like a little child relying on chance, that you were in no condition to cross-check. Then I realized that such hopes are not only insultingly unfounded because it is not for fallen leaves to trust in Fortune, but also completely illogical, simply dangerous, because the check is obligatory, always obligatory, and its presence is a priori better than its absence! All the devils of Hell! Tin, I..."

I clap my hands loudly, interrupting the nervous breakdown of Tia, whose emotions are already jumping from intoxication, not to mention the overall picture of our conversation, and then I put my palms out in a protective gesture, preventing her from continuing.

"Look, let's just agree that fleur is a very insidious thing and then pretend it never happened because it never did," I speak up, drawing a line and issuing a final verdict. "Especially since it's going to take me a long time to recover from all this, and I'm going to have nowhere to spend my free time anyway. In fact, consider me motivated. or demotivated."

At the last phrase, which was clearly prompted by the mocker's property, the elf even gave out something resembling a smile, albeit a somewhat strained one. I'd expected to be teased or even embarrassed, of course, but a couple exchanges of teasing would not be enough for that, not by a long shot.

"I'm infinitely flattered by your trust, Tin, as well as understanding, in that I'm not going to cajole or exaggerate." Apparently, my attempt to dot the Igreks was successful enough, or it was just that Tia had miscalculated me again and calmed down on her own. "That dream was inspired, plucked from the depths of my subconscious thoughts that otherwise had no right or opportunity to germinate, and we both realize that. Such an action, to which I was led by the logic of a lust-infected dream, has the right to exist only in the expanse of such dreams. There is much about you that irritates me, much that I cannot and will not hide, much that I cannot accept, much that I cannot understand, but I will hardly decide to distort the purity of your desires out of a desire to correct what I consider to be a mistake. Especially in such a form. If not because your hands hold my loyalty and eternity, then at least out of a lack of the right skills."

Was she so gently hinting that the very idea of forcing me to study, even against my will, even under hypnosis and with a bunch of eighteen-plus ratings, even though it would remain just an idea, was still somehow appealing? I would have thought I was suffering from paranoia, but the very feeling that allows me to tease those around me as effectively as possible suggests this hint, the ghost of its existence, was left deliberately. My comrade, Tialrianrelia, you are treading on very thin ice trying to play "who's going to outwit whom" with me! You, honorable one, have a great deal of experience, and I admit that you have managed to catch me several times, but now, by treacherously attacking me with my own weapons, you have stepped into my territory, and you no longer have the advantage of surprise.

"I see, got it. Everything is fine," I replied, stretching tiredly in my chair, closing the subject. "To Taria, so be it. I won't say a word... or write or transmit it in any way. Don't look at me like that."

I was completely sincere outwardly, and inwardly, too, but what was needed now was not sincerity, but lies to be passed off as sincerity. We're both not in the best shape, but she has suffered much less and recovered more thoroughly. She, at this very moment, has more available to her. I could go high, but it would cost me days and weeks in partial impotence, and so what little of my abilities I can use unhindered is inferior to what Tia can use unhindered. And that's where I'm starting to run my game.

The string of images, the roundelay of information matrices, and the way I can work have suffered relatively little, requiring much more attention and concentration than the utmost concentration of mind and spirit, which could finish me off. And I manage, though on the verge of coughing up blood (not dangerous, but again to bed and lie flat until morning), to create a kind of deception inside the deception, to pretend that I was trying to hide something, but did not calculate the forces, and therefore part of the hidden thoughts leaked out of unexistence, caught in the field of attention of an experienced seer.

What did I show her?

It was just a carefully concealed regret, even from myself, at what Tia had just said. Not really regret, but a kind of sadness that even though we'd fully disclosed the cards, restoring our trust, there was still something sad about it. I risked the fact that Tia was no simpleton, no ordinary fortune-teller of some trade guild; even in her weakened state, she was still a monster with more experience in such intrigues than I lived, even if I counted only the time spent in the specific battles of several seers.

I took a risk, but I managed, of course. As I said, she was a pro, and that's why she didn't show that she noticed and ate my deception, even to the inquisitive eye or in her clairvoyance. I even began to worry that she didn't really look at my reaction and therefore didn't catch the "truth" that appeared for a short moment. Pieces of images scuffed up and even to myself, as she was obliged to think, not completely clear, as if only just awakened. Images formed into a picture that one summoner liked what she saw in her dream very much and subconsciously, he would be all for it if the strict teacher Tia decided to speed up and motivate the learning process with her hypnotic legs.

To be honest, I just wanted to leave the situation hanging and see how she would react and whether she would try to lead me to believe that she knew about my desire and was ready to make such a sacrifice. And would it be a sacrifice at all? After all, the whole fantasy, the fleur dream, came from her subconscious, not mine! But that would be a bit ugly and even dishonest in some respects, no matter how funny and hilarious it would be afterward. So I only used the network of mirrors to look at the face of the elf who turned and left the room calmly because on that face, despite all the self-control, still flashed several very contradictory emotions. Surprise, shock, amusement, bewilderment, and even a slight anticipation, though the last one was probably just my imagination, and I couldn't be convinced.

The fact that I couldn't take it any longer, no matter how hard I tried, but I'd never admit that out loud. Tia was already in the doorway when she was stopped by a low howl, almost a squeak, which gradually turned into a giggle and then into a full-blown, unrestrained cackle. I laughed like an immortal pony even as Tia slowly and gracefully turned on her heels, conjuring up an association with the turning center gun turret of the battleship Yamato, unable to make myself subside, even if my life, or at least my physical health, depended on it.

When the dream team arrived sometime later, they saw a surreal picture of the summoned Hero lying on the floor, who, without changing the indifferent expression on his face, was impudently thrown out of his chair and then began methodically, as if you were hammering a nail, pounding on anything with a heavy feather pillow, even though each blow made me go from laughter to a short and shrill shriek.

"I!"

Smack!

"Didn't!"

Smack!

"Regret!"

Smack!

"Anything!"

Smack!

"At all!"

Smack!

Smack!

Smack! ripping sound

The bloodsucker's servants had to clean the feathers out of all the corners, and not even Taria dared to ask Tia about the reasons for my treacherous beating because Tia was so nonchalant as she left the room looking as if she were leaving a dinner party at the king's castle, where she'd gotten a mustached cockroach in her dessert. It took a long, long time to fight off Taria, who wanted to know everything and laugh, but I was a flint and didn't say anything to her because the joke was a joke against Tia, between her and me, not public knowledge.

I also feared that next time I'd get the feathers from the pillow in my ass instead of in my mouth since that's what I think about at times.

The silence was tense, sharp as a blade. It seemed that just twitch and you would be cut into ribbons by this silence and then tie a bow from them, sprinkle powdered sugar on top. Why powdered sugar? I don't know. I just thought of an analogy, or else it was cognitive distortions and hot delirium without fever again. Good, at least this nastiness did not go further than the confused diction and marvelous word-thought constructions arising in my head. And that's good because it's scary to imagine the kind of fucked-up shit that someone like me, completely inadequate and with pink ponies in front of my eyes, could do.

But let us return to the silence, which is very nervous. It came strictly after the bloodsucker, who was staring at me in panic, had decided to repent her sins to me. She would have done it a long time ago, but then I was still lying on the ground, spending every crumb of free energy to support the network of mirrors, not giving a damn about everything else. But today, when I was allowed to use relatively high loads on my energy body, I called the council and, first of all, began to analyze what the creature had already done. In beautifying the city, the woeful subordinate acted with as much dedication as a rather violent imagination could give. Under normal circumstances, it would have had no effect. Now, after the massacre, the characteristic signs of the control it had imposed could and would be easily found.

The first reason the city hadn't been flooded with interesting personalities was that it was in the asshole of the world, where there were no cult points of interest at all. Literally, I looked through the slightly revitalized clairvoyance, even redirected some of the mirror resources to help with clairvoyance, and found not a single fucking cultist or related player who had visited Arenam in the last couple of years. And looking for cultists now that they'd been outgunned, the whole disguise ripped off, was really easy, for me for sure. Ordinary seers still risked getting some mental crap, and that's why they were careful, and the authorities of the Empire and the whole world decided not to save money on protection. It was not every day that the capital of the world hegemon was brazenly stolen from reality.

So.

No cultist associated with the fallen archdevil had ever visited Arenam unless they were hiding too well for me in their current state. It makes sense since there was nothing to do, no one to look for, no benefits to be gained, and they had their own great goal to strive for and tactics to follow. But this is about one particular cult, and there were plenty of other minor sins in the city, starting with the memorable bloodsuckers and going on to a whole bunch of other things. The mosquito worked well, subjugating, brainwashing, and framing those who got in the way of its work - what was worth it was the setup of a cheerful trader of live goods who came here for "unnecessary people," who were framed for participation in a dark cult and even provided with a couple of curious artifacts based on Darkness.

The guards and priests then raise their ratings by covering the bad guys, but if they start digging, sooner or later reach their hands (legs, tentacles, other limbs) even to Arenam, and then begin to study every strange event and find traces of the bloodsucker pulling the strings. More likely later than sooner: there were too many cases, too many people who had fallen, died or been compromised by Hell creatures to devote much effort to this area, and the simpler ones could be confused, confounded, subdued, and sent back with a plausible enough report not to arouse suspicion, so that no one would find traces of control on those sent back. Or rather, that " more likely later" existed exactly until the bloodsucker wanted to play with food again, choosing to play a full-fledged inspection straight from the capital, just a week and a half before the start.

That alone was already causing facepalming and ass-burning, making me roughly understand Tia's feelings when I soak up another "do, don't think" style something. Think about it! To fuck the brains of the agentess of Eyes, leaving in the head of the special milfagent quite clear bookmarks for a hex to her distant relative (here vague associations flashed in my head, but I ignored them), and from the head of the inspection to suck out a part of life force with a blowjob! At least she did a really good job with the memory wipe, even if it was offset by the behavioral bombs in the heads of the acting agent and her assistant, but okay. It still might have worked, might have carried through... if it hadn't been for the Eternal Incident.

Now, the question of when they will find the mental algorithms tied to sex and debauchery and start digging is not for weeks but for days or even hours. That's in the not particularly likely event that the bloodsuckers' games haven't already discovered and are not developing grief inspectors right now, preparing to develop the anuses of those who dared to fuck the brains of Crown and Eye agents at once and simultaneously. Because one of them has already been allowed to do it not long ago. Repeating the encore would make the already incompetent specialists look like clowns.

So, having confessed her mistake, the bloodsucker froze waiting for a just punishment, tormented by my probable disappointment in her a thousandfold more than by the prospect of a very painful and demonstrative death. For a while, I simply thought that she wasn't very smart in life and that her fattening up with concentrates of characteristics boosters, mixed with the effects of the Honorable Raymel's Mist, had made her too impulsive, given her a taste of power, and ripped off the carvings, albeit in a very controlled fashion. But after thinking and straining the clairvoyance that is now available to me, I concluded that the cause was also the most banal pride and desire to feel her power over other people's minds, bodies, and passion. She, unlike her late Patriarch, who had given all of his blood supply to Mist and starved to death, simply hadn't managed to get it into her head that there was always someone stronger.

No, not like that.

She had learned that, including through painful lessons from her parent, but she had been weak then, just heaven and earth compared to her current abilities. Having gained strength and lost all competitors in terms of species, she was getting used to the idea that she could do whatever she wanted with the city and its inhabitants as long as she stayed within my very vague orders. She doesn't kill, maim, or break personalities or destinies. She just has a little fun. She lets them appreciate her newfound beauty and desirability and lets them realize the power this beauty has bestowed on a simple bloodsucker.

And she got carried away.

And realizing where her actions had led her, all these days, while I came to my senses, she sat like on a working electric chair, because it was necessary to bring the situation to me, but it did not work. Everyone was busy with their own treatment, measuring the number and color range of rashes, aiming rainbow vomiting at range or, in my case, catching colorful hallucinations in which the Moldavian Empire defeats the united space fleet of the Mexican Conglomerate and the Belorussian Syndicate, and then establishes power over the entire observable galaxy. Now that I was able to listen to her and adequately perceive what she said, I really wanted to laugh and roar with rage at the same time.

Here, Kostik is a crooked mirror for you. You're not the only one who likes to play jokes on other people's brains. Now, you have an example of how such actions can set yourself up. I've also had similar moments, like those traces in Dream, which only by luck and quick mopping up didn't become a clue for the Weaver's searchers, so I can't even properly blame the bloodsucking bastard. I mean, I can, but the slight tinge of Gottentot morality would stink this whole town up to the top of the magistrate's roof. And here they've only just gotten around to cleaning the streets properly and cleaning the filth away, so they're going to make it smell like stink again.

Yeah, it's pretty cool, too.

And judging by the way everyone in the room looked at me, including the creature, who was simply stunned to the core, the deviless, who was inwardly amused to the core, and Tia, who was clutching her hands on the nearest pillow, I said the last thought out loud. Yes, I said it. It's clearly another side effect of the detoxicates I was taking, and I needed to take them because, in this state, trying to help myself through internal essentialism or using a Vessel would be too risky.

"Lift my eyeli... I mean, ugh, bring me a mirror." I exhale tiredly, realizing that instead of the leisurely and gentle development of mirror disguise, I'll have to solve someone else's mistakes just as leisurely, but not so gently. "And you, you pale fool, get ready to transfer the images of the entire inspection team directly into the mirrored cloak so I don't have to assemble them by hand."

Not yet fully believing that it had not only been spared but not even scolded, punished, or disowned to express its disappointment, the bloodsucker burst into a bloody haze that began to ooze from the pores of its skin, eyes, and mouth full of sharp, hollow fangs, accelerating so fast that even I couldn't follow its movements. Before my mind could formulate the classic "what was that all about?", the creature came back, carrying a small, round, copper-rimmed mirror. It seemed to be in the warehouse where the bloodsucker kept all sorts of supplies in case she had to endure a long siege. Whether it was of the entire city or just her base didn't matter.

Wow, that's a lot of enthusiasm.

"I'm afraid I'm not good at conveying psychic images, and please forgive me for that." The gaze is devoted, dashing and dorky, nervous, but still almost squeaking with delight, even if the outward appearance is the very indifference of yes willingness. "I've never studied this practice, and of the skills of the necessary branch, I have only a premonition of danger and combat instinct."

Well, she doesn't know that I easily pull out these images, and it's enough for her just to actively remember and think about the necessary topic. The main team, not counting Ygra, has already mastered my techniques, and this is the first time I've spoken to the bloodsucker seriously and to the point since she was subdued. And it makes her as sick as a cat from Valeriana - unlike the deviless, the bloodsucker has less self-control, even if only in comparison. Giver, though an abomination, controls her feelings devilishly well, whereas the bloodsucker has no feelings except for hunger and other basic instincts. And here was a submission, which brought together from those feelings something new, previously unknown to her, even the pieces of which, coming from human memory, had long since been forgotten.

By the time I'd managed to get everyone out of the room, including Tia, who'd taken the pillow with her, and then started working on my favorite mosquito, she'd put herself into a fighting trance, just for fear of screwing up more. When I touched her cheek with my palm to catch the images and transfer them to the mirror I was touching with my other palm, I almost burned myself. The creature, normally a little warmer than a corpse, was strained to the limit, and its supply of blood essences was bubbling and boiling, on the verge of forming some sort of technique.

I ordered her to calm down, and she immediately lowered her temperature to "slightly warmer than a corpse." And only after that, having removed my palm from the bloodsucker's face, having hardly suppressed the desire to wipe my hand so as not to disrupt my concentration, I begin to search and eliminate traces of not my mistakes, extinguishing the consequences of not my tricks. Indeed, Fate has a very peculiar sense of humor, but it doesn't make me laugh!

The work of identifying and mopping up the traces left by the bloodsucker lasted for a long six days, even if the most important thing was solved in the first two days, simultaneously both reassuring and driving me into a new stage of paranoia. The fact that the foreign algorithms in the minds of the inspectors, as well as mere traces of memory alteration, were not noticed was both quite probable and equally blatantly impossible. The point is that any normal (as for the general commotion after the battle for Eternal) inspection of the agents would have shown the work of the mosquito, highlighting it like a neon sign in the middle of the blackness of night. But all of us, and me too, played into the hands of the same general paranoia, which encouraged us to conduct very high-quality scans left and right. There were enough people to go around, but the highest levels, the most cut talents, and the brightest minds were logically heading for the capital, where they were thinned out.

There were enough smart, loyal, and promising people in the ranks of the Empire of the Ages, but all of them still needed to be gathered together and distributed in different directions. To ensure loyalty or to make sure of its existence, which is not so easy to do even with all the Time of the World. And those who like to stagger the world Law have been recently reduced in number, just drastically. It is still a miracle they found someone strong enough, competent, and close by blood to the ruling branch and managed to keep this decaying construction afloat.

The inspectors were undoubtedly checked. At least because after they were sent to work in their specialty and with promotion, which, in other circumstances, would have had to wait until death (it is quite likely that just the intentions to go for promotion caused). But they were not checked enough... no, not like that. There was no lack of attention or quality of checks. It simply could not be. Priests, artifacts, seers, complexes of rituals, and a whole bunch of other interconnected ways to enlighten suspicious and non-suspicious, and therefore only more suspicious, shots like X-rays will not lie. Another thing is that they were not looking for what they could find. Treated by the mistress of Arenam, the newcomers were searched for devils, harmful behavioral bombs in the style of "dump information thinking you're writing a report to your boss" or "after the rain on Thursday, kill as many colleagues as you can," traces of the work of intelligence agencies of neighboring countries and the hooks they left behind.

If the creature had been acting smart, preparing the puppets for the future, wanting to create informants or even a center of influence in the capital, she would have been burned within hours of the unwitting puppets' arrival at the place where the Eternal should have been and where those who were trying to save the city had gathered. But she was just having fun, fooling around, messing around, and having fun, just like me, the pale and toothy bitch! And, in the conditions of the fiercest time crunch, the inspectors did not even think to look for an algorithm of suggestion like oral fixation to his assistant or the certainty that to clean a companion in the bath first with a washcloth, and after with blowjob - an absolutely logical act .... well, they just didn't have the time or inclination.

The essence of "success" was that the bloodsucker could not, even in theory, profit from her bookmarks, just as those bookmarks could not harm the Empire and the remnants of the Eyes. And that was the only reason why the checks, enhanced, extremely complicated, but narrowing the list of objects of analytical search, had a chance of not finding something that any competent Mentalist level over thirty would have found even after a drunk and hungover. It was, of course, desperate luck, as if someone up there had given a kick to the freak responsible for pouring bad luck on my person, canceling Murphy's Law for Konstantin Yurievich for a second.

And such luck made me look for a thousand tricks and made me even more nervous, bringing me to the dangerous edge by constant checks, attempts to act in full power again, which stopped only on the verge of beginning to cripple myself. If the affair of my subordinate bloodsucker had been uncovered, documented, and sent to three different folders, with copies to the boss and the boss's boss, I would have been much calmer. I mean, yes, it would have been bad. I would have had to pull off a natural miracle of conspiracy to mop up such a ticking timer bomb or prepare to evacuate myself and any traces of myself from Arenam, but I would have known exactly what to do. Because it would have been a logical extension of the mistake that had been made, but the mistake didn't seem to have had time to happen! And now Kostya is trying to figure out whether his tame creature not only likes to make retarded and risky jokes but is really lucky at that or whether someone has already found all the traces, evaluated them, weighed and is now waiting for me or her actions.

If I were in full strength, I could speak with confidence close to absolute, but in my present position... It's hard to deceive me. Even now, I'd tie a knot and a bow on the brains of even an experienced seer if he decided to compete with me on my field. Even so, I can see a lot, and experience and intuition will help to find at least the traces of what they are trying to hide something. But. But. But! A goddamn goddamn but! It's hard to fool me, but it's possible even at the height of my powers, and it's a lot easier now. All I had to do was check everything that could be checked without exposing myself to a possible trap that would capture the image of anyone too interested in the subject.

The only thing that saved me from a headache or a panic attack was that the inspector, the bloodsucker, and the whole of Arenam were too small-time for such intrigue and preparation. It would be possible to connect the town and me, of course, but it would take too much time or too much power to unravel the thread quickly and unnoticed. So far, I had only two people in mind who could pull it off: good grandpa Weaver and the bastard Jerem, or rather, his most senior boss. If the first one found me, then that's it, and forever. The second one has no reason to help me. He covered for me strictly within the framework of the deal and no more, and if there was a new reason why my ill-wishers could come out on me, the Church of the Just would not interfere or help, just watching. However, I'm not going to judge and calculate Jerem's plans, so I'll leave a note for the future. Before I run away to the wild lands, as soon as I'm fully recovered, I'll arrange such a wiping of traces that even Grimmentray would be tired of unraveling the ball, especially if it's all tied up in a knot and the real thread of the ball was burned out long ago.

Having made such a decision and not finding anything to pick on, I simply cleaned up after the bloodsucker, commenting on my actions for Tia, who had come (in the evening of the first day of work) to back up, as well as for the creature, whose reflection served both as a support for the vision-search and as an external disguise, so that a possible observer would think that she was cleaning up her messes. I didn't kill anyone because that would only add to suspicion, not counting the fact that most of the concentration was eaten up by the anti-Weaver cloak. Grandpa was lucky that he was in no hurry to get into the fray, even though I could see nightmares scurrying around on the edge of my perception, seemingly just attracted by the storm of feelings and events but bearing a familiar echo and handwriting if you will. Fortunately, all my fun with mirrors remained under the isolated dome, and Eternal reeked of Hell, assorted Miracles, and the same Shadow, but not of his colleagues in the Mirrors. He must show some interest, if only out of a desire to know the news, but to look for me.... well, good luck, because I haven't left much of a trace.

The process of "cleaning" came out especially neat, as I tried not to maim myself. If they hadn't found it by now, they would hardly notice anything wrong right this second, and the hurry would put a strain on me. Either I was already too tired, or my brain never came to normal, but only after several hours of work, almost finishing my influences, it came to me that all this time I was smearing behavioral bombs, merging them with the basis of consciousness, turning them from obvious bookmarks into practically a part of the mind, where even frankly unnatural thoughts, distortions of cognitive perception were lost and fell out of the framework of the search of known to me ways of scanning.

So.

Instead of removing the rather crude bookmarks without a trace by slightly correcting the victims' memory, I simply improved the bookmarks, so to speak, adding quality, artistry, stealth, and a little extra from myself to make it fun. For a moment, I thought Tia was going to hit me not with a pillow but with a chair, and she was going to shove the legs of that chair right into the organ I was used to thinking with. Of course, I tried to say that it was much easier to notice the traces of uprooted influences and that they would definitely be searched for because they would definitely fall within the scope of any kind of scanning. I even picked up quite convincing arguments, and believed that I had done the right thing, albeit in my favorite spirit of dumb jokes, and I'm not kidding.

But while I was making all these arguments, I never stopped keeping my distance between me and the elf for a second, riding my chair around a hysterical Taria, who was laughing in hysterics and who had managed to catch onto the situation. I don't believe that Tia would really beat me up. I didn't really get her that far, not to mention her self-control, which I'd broken countless times, and I'd gotten her to the point of beating her with a pillow with a "critical hit." It was also the first time I saw a smile on the bloodsucker's face... No, she'd been able to grin or smile before, and she was pretty good at it, looking like a log only against the Giver's background, but she had a nature for social mimicry, not to mention thousands of years of objective experience. It was just that this time, her smile, a little dumb, just like mine sometimes, which appeared for a moment after I smashed her "tricks" to dust but praised her for the concept of the idea.... she was almost human, though only for a fraction of a second, which I, already floating from the strain, could have just imagined, which disappeared faster than modern video cards disappeared from store shelves during my transfer.

From another session of lying flat for three days, my success did not save me.

The idea of creating a full-fledged control network over Arenam, though nice in words, remained an idea. I checked some of the individuals, like the priests, personally, adjusting their perception a little, ensuring inattention in certain aspects, but I didn't want to set up a real cap, controlling the minds of the entire city, using the same mirrors. There were too many people, too active in Eternal, and to provide camouflage not only for us but also for the presumed control network... No, I'd have to do that when I was healthy, not like this.

That's why I spent all my reasonably available reserves of strength on repairing and supplementing the mirror network under the nervous glances of Tia, who didn't approve of any strain. I couldn't understand exactly what was going on with the probable search for us unless I risked getting hurt myself, and Tia, though she was back to normal much faster, wouldn't be able to do it herself. Her epic concert in the Imperial Park has not yet been forgotten, and her former relatives still remember her (and will always remember her), wanting to rid the world of Tia and Tia of the world. That's why the best way to get information about what's going on in the world was to analyze what the network managed to catch and redirect. There's not even any strain there. The artifact construction has already been created. It's only necessary to use it and doesn't increase the load.

It wasn't clearly us they were looking for. No, I'd even say it was "us." A strange group of mysteriously disappeared adventurers led by a certain Grzegorz, if they tried to see through it, then on a very residual principle. The elven woman who had organized a recital in the name of her lost love was also not forgotten, but the efforts in her search were reduced by orders of magnitude. But very, very, bitch, I can't tell you how very thoroughly they searched for the bastard who had organized the biggest Shadow invasion in the city for the last thousand and fifteen years. That last point is an actual documented and approved thesis that I was not too lazy to check out, but it turned out to be true. At the same time, although Ages and Neitmak acknowledged this statement, a considerable share of scribes, archivists, and other historians of hot Alishan, either in spite of these two states or really rooting for the truth, argued that not for a millennium and a half, but for the whole three and a half years.

I can be proud of myself because the Hungry Sunset, which became a turning point in the fourth phase of the war between Alishan and the Great Kings, who now live, or rather, do not live, in short, inhabit the Great Desert.... so, the Hungry Sunset, which unleashed a whole horde of creatures of various kinds on the elite undead of the ancient people, was prepared by the admittedly most powerful sacrificial ritual for those very fifteen hundred years. After that hecatomb, Alishan's slave market was empty for a while, but they had summoned a lot of things. Five to seven myths, according to various sources. Darkness, Shadow, Abyss, and possibly Hardness - these planes brought their wrath through their inhabitants. My Armada gave out the Shadows alone in obscene numbers, but on the fly and at the recipient's expense.... although, come to think of it, the sacrifice might have been the Archdevil's essence and a huge chunk of his domain, which is almost as cool. Besides, I did without the divine support that half of their pantheon provided to Alishan, sending out their Heralds and being invisibly present so that the summoned creatures would not get cocky and crawl to fulfill the contract-deal-treat towards the undead rather than the tasty endowed ones who had carelessly summoned them.

In general, I rocked the capital, genius, awesome, and insanely brazen, strangling the Light-bearing Army with my Summons and inflicting on it very sensitive losses. Needless to say, those very angels, their Lord, his flock, and most of the observable world wanted to thank me. I admit that quite a few of them wanted to thank me quite seriously, without any other meaning. It's not about the rulers of the Empire of Ages, whom I saved and helped, but still screwed up and remained a person to be destroyed. The same Alishans, I think, would have gladly showered me with gold and gifts, even if I had not agreed to accept Ilkhan's or Great Khan's (or Kagan's, there are too many shades of meaning here, even among Alishans themselves causing disputes) allegiance. Well, until they found out my foreign origin and main quest..... or just until they got to know me better.

Most of the blackening on the net was done by divine search miracles, but here, as with Weaver, it was the vast distance to the capital that saved the day, as well as the thorough mopping up and the lack of any trace of events left behind. All my team, except for Tia, was represented, in fact, by yesterday's noobs, who rose in a very short time while not flashing the process of their rise or throwing all the ends in the water, as in the case of the Slavers or later with the Stone. The one exception, with long ears and an impenetrable character, was adept at hiding and concealment, especially relying on a high-end network. However, according to Tia, most of her department's defenses, under which she hid her images after particularly odious assignments, worked on anything but Dream. There was nowhere but the Empire of Arms with a satisfactorily high caliber of experts in that plane. That is, they were available, but they were good for containing the likely effects of the monkey servants, not for their operations. Life, Hardness, Flame, or even Deep, and in very rare cases Darkness, but she had never had to hide under mirror constructs. I mean, not at that level and not after such high-profile cases because the Eternal Forest had toys of that sort. They were used especially when they were trying to lead those looking for clues to the conclusion that local Asians were involved.

The other players, who (not all of them) could be identified by the black spots on the mirrors, put much less effort into my search, though they didn't forget, of course. The elves also made their mark, though they successfully disguised their attention vectors as the circle of sight of one of Neitmak's Academums, but that's where they got burned. The handwriting of the deception was recognized by Tia, who didn't officially know about this billet, but she recognized the very handwriting of the group of eared seers. Especially noted still very diligent attention in the form of divination practices of shamans of the highest caliber and a whole pleiad of astral spirit-seers, namely spirits, who possessed the abilities of the branch of clairvoyance. Tia sighed tiredly, placed a tall and heavy chair in front of my chair, sat down in it, and gave me an eight-hour lecture on the Nightbird Circle and why you shouldn't mention owls on Alurei, even if you have the title of Honorary Dwachmarin. My jokes about the late Shmielae in the face of the equally late Pypysh suddenly took on new colors, making me feel almost genuinely sorry for the dead cultist who'd gone for the cat roll... just a little bit, just a little bit. Come on, who am I trying to talk my ear off to? I don't feel sorry for her at all.

I thought about spending some effort to check the communication channels and contacts Jerem had left behind, but after a moment's thought, I decided against it. If there was somewhere to hide a tracker of truly divine coolness, it would be there to get caught. Then I will definitely do it, but also in full force and after recovery. The list of things to do after recovery has already grown so much that involuntarily pulls to be sick longer, just like in the good old days of school life, when a D in math seemed like the end of the world, after which it would never get worse.

That was the time!

I didn't even try to look at the Status and quite consciously. I didn't want to deal with the list of problems I had encountered after my fall. Yes, the munchkin part of my dirty soul demanded to evaluate the list of bonuses received and achievements taken, but every time I remembered those moments after the missed blow, a lot of question marks appeared and disappearing symbols, and my mood was rapidly deteriorating. I would have dreamed about those seconds, but even the passive ability to control my sleep would not allow that. I didn't have the slightest idea why I was being plagued by evil delusional visions, which were coming in and out of the dream, and I didn't want to find out.

The worst of the effects had passed, and I was back on my feet, albeit only a couple of hours a day, and my appetite had returned. Taria and Losius were fully recovered from their symptoms, but the former was already in the gentlest of scenarios, and the latter was now spending much, much time with his blade under the watchful eye of Tia and Hans. Synchronization with the essence bound to the artifact was going on slowly, even if this bird did not seek to harm, but its presence alone could push one so deep into Nirvana that one could not crawl back out even with help. Losius had been able to keep himself from falling upward before, but after the massacre, his resistance to the mental effects of the native plane had become even more developed, even stronger. Hans, too, was close to being cured and would have been considered fully healthy, but after a couple of particularly poisonous concoctions taken at the last moment for a teleportation jump halfway across the country, he was on a special diet. You can't go on a diet when half the food list causes severe allergies and swelling of the throat, even if you just sniff them. Otherwise, the man was completely normal, and through the bloodsucker's people, he'd bought some particularly evil herbal tincture, which, as the practice had shown, was the only one from the list of alcohol available in Arenam that didn't cause swelling of the whole body at once.

Tia continues her regulatory purges and sits for hours on end in her rituals, but even she admits it's her favorite reassurance, remembering to pull the rest of the team by the ears if they forget the mandatory checks. The devils are not to be trifled with, and if she were in her native Forest, she would have spent a couple more years under observation, even without active procedures, simply out of unwillingness to risk even the smallest of risks.

Hestia... this was where it got complicated, very complicated and disturbing. Even though she had received a tremendous increase in abilities from the Mist, she retained her mind, at least outwardly and on the layers I could scan now. What saved her, and I will repeat this thesis again and again, was that one could hardly find an offering to the Mist more suitable and less damaging to brains and souls than those decomposed into essences and small fragments of souls. If the souls in that cauldron were whole, if they were complete, then the Mist would have given a part of what was taken from those souls, a part of their memory, a part of their nature. In that case, the meal would no longer be finished by Hestia, even as she was at the time of the battle, but by something new and very, very dangerous.

But pure essence, albeit with fragmented sparks and in such volumes that it was difficult to even imagine the price and quantity of the product, turned out to be an ideal nutrient mixture - give as much as you can, but the taken will not stick to you like to the door-way-transmitter through which the absorption took place. The lottery ticket pulled turned out to be the winning ticket, leaving Hestia with a bunch of Status-expressed bonuses and her marbles intact. Somehow, I bored myself and Tia, and then Giver came in as an expert, trying to give an approximate price if someone decided to pump an Adept of Mist with a powerful planar class by sacrificing a comparable amount of essences. Everyone freaked out, even the deviless, though it was not the realization but black envy that made me freak out.

So, let's do the math.

To begin with, it's worth saying once again that the most serious sacrificial output for rituals of permanent strengthening of the Mglah branch is not just essence (although it is always effective, being "favorite fodder" in any form), but alive essence, which used to be a part of someone's nature. Even just extracting a soul is not such a simple task, decomposing it with essentialism only to my kind might seem simple, while normal sacrificers would have to use cumbersome rituals, stationary artifacts, or very specific alchemical furnaces. Surely, such tools reveal new shades of the phrase "burn black"!

I, for example, could create a comparable nutritious distillate using only the essence of beasts and unintelligent monsters and creatures, but that was me, the owner of a well-pumped mythic class of perfect direction. An ordinary alchemist wouldn't even come close to the Cauldron of Soft Touch. Even an experienced sacrificer, wielder of a strong bundle of the black magic and alchemical classes, approaching half a hundredth level, wouldn't be able to disembowel and boil someone's essence even half as effectively as Touch did almost playfully. If the creature was taking the matter really seriously, however...

"The brew made by the First of the Cook gave him a place beside my dead master, my dear lord." Giver of Caresses cooed, almost defiantly rolling her eyes in a slight fit of pleasure at the fact and direction of our conversation. "Touch became the first of the Beloved, existing, as some suspected, even longer than the flower worm you killed, whose petals the worms ate. And, judging by how obsessively this theory was considered false and discarded even faster than it had time to take hold during the next ass's'shenarits'kamaani'tar.... no equivalent in the common dialect.... feast, celebration, and public execution at the same time, that is the closest thing to it, my lord. Returning to the topic of Cook. We have too often been forced to accept the imposed truth, forgetting other options. It could have been a game of the fallen usurper of my domain hiding lies within more lies. He often wished and did so, but Cook was still old, very old."

Giver spoke calmly, seemingly without using her features at all, but still, there was something alien about her, something involuntarily arousing an underlying desire. She could have mimicked better, though it wasn't her forte; she wasn't one of the Messengers, not like the affected bastard who'd taken over Bane's body from the Eternal Library. She could have, yes, but she preferred to spend all her concentration on patching up her host and getting used to it and masking the chanting of her sonm so it wouldn't jerk me around in her presence.

The deviless did not hesitate to share the most intimate secrets of her native domain, still not intending to return there and not even risking to check whether that domain still existed, in what state it was, and under whose power it had come after the vacuum in leadership positions. Although she made a couple of good suggestions, naming the candidates of a couple of the strongest of the surviving Legends. Or not survivors, but those whose death ecstasies she couldn't hear through the noise of battle

Returning to the topic of the price given by Hestia, it came out really astronomical, even if you cut the sturgeon and consider the work of the maestro of the level of this damn "cook" at the level of the same elite black alchemist, whose third class was either something related to the Mist or another auxiliary specialty, like the Seal Mage or the Locker. The latter would be most effective, as he would be able to create a replacement for the Cauldron of Touch. No, not in all of its terrifying functionality, but purely in terms of being able to store so many resources.

So.

A black alchemist with a focus on gutting living and endowed (or at least sentient) creatures for essence, either with a strong epic or a very narrowly honed legendary class. A classic sacrificer, not primarily focused on the power and effect of the ritual, as army specialists do in turning a couple of dozen captives into blowback with large-scale enchantments, but honed in minimizing parasitic influences. That is, a master of strengthening rituals, and with a minimum of consequences, not with a maximum increase in Status. Here, we need a legend without variants. Without variants, a narrowly sharpened alchemist-sacrificer could still work due to the very narrow but deep specialization, but without sacrificial magic, here certainly can not do so. The final choice is the developed version of Hell, already of legendary grade because no alchemical furnace will provide preservation and bubbling of such amount of essences without additional preservation - the contents of the cauldron devoured by Hestia were assimilated so perfectly because it was constantly bubbling, boiling, living even in the state in which the disemboweled souls were.

Now we take this in all senses outstanding spherical in a vacuum specialist and then multiply it by five, at least. Because a loner, even so pumped up, will extract the stated amount of material for decades, if not centuries. In the same way, we add to each of these five men fifty attendants, who will support and guide, take the load, perform routine and rough work, wipe labor sweat, bring victims, and wash equipment. Likewise, we select the classes they need and assess the need to pay for such specialists. Highly ranked assistants of any kind charge so much for their services that it's easier to bring them up from diapers, but they also give a lot. Five alchemist assistants at the thirty level would make my life easier and give me incredible flexibility, so it would be foolish to underestimate such classes. And they realize that too, so they don't work for free unless they're bound by a bunch of oaths and bondage contracts. But then the holders of those oaths and bondage contracts will demand payment for the rent of such a type, and they will charge even more, if only in money.

Approximately estimate the cost of time for one ritual, assess the requirements for equipment, ritual hall, and renewal of worn-out areas of rituals. We calculate reagents and consumables, take the correction for the fact that mass purchases will increase prices or even shortages of extremely specific things, again take into account the purchase of new equipment, calculate the mandatory percentage of losses and failed rituals, estimate the market for human material, which are also bound to rise in price, add a certain coefficient of corruption (very long argued, especially given that the rate of kickbacks is different in different states) and another to account for the mandatory failures of performers in the field. Tia is very well versed in economics, so the approximate figures slowly accumulated and, in the end, resulted in the result - a stack of written-off paper (by the way, it was not Tia who was taking notes, but the deviless because the elf was sitting at the draft calculations.... But they changed places a couple of times) on the last sheet of which the final figure was indicated.

"Wow." I could only squeeze out of myself for the first time, probably, since the beginning of my misadventures, feeling some greed for despicable money. "Three hundred times three hundred wows."

The rest of the company that had quietly gathered at the noise we were making and the arguments we were having silently agreed, only to be thundered in absolute silence by the whistle of Taria, who could hardly even imagine such numbers. I, to be honest, had no idea how much such a pile of gold and silver would take, nor could I point with certainty to those who might have such a sum on their hands.

"One-eighth of a turn of the term for the minor constellation of the upper palette of the Eternal Forest." It seems even Tia didn't expect the total we got because only after a couple of seconds did she realize that it would be necessary to clarify the term used. "Eleven and a half years of the common calendar in peacetime and with no major conflicts to pour gold into one way or another, but no emergency expansion of major projects. One-eighth round in satiated times, with minimal spending. For the same Zeinberg, that amount would be three-quarters of the treasury, as well as cutting funding for public institutions by at least a third, but preferably half. The Sea Kings, of course, are no longer what they once were, including through the efforts of the Eternal Forest, and they regularly lack free gold flow, but it still comes out very impressive."

That was something no one argued with. The whole team could only make remarks of varying degrees of loudness and censoriousness, and Hestia, who had even gotten out of her room for such a purpose, looked at the line with the total sum with a very strange look, and didn't seem to know whether to be proud or horrified. She was still herself, able to assert her memory and identity again, but some changes had happened, and she wasn't ready to outline them just yet. One thing she knew for sure was that these changes were not good. Even despite the overall enhancement.

"It's also worth considering that we haven't currently considered the possibility of attracting the same divine Miracles, or at least artifacts of various sorts." Trying to cut down Sturgeon Losius while Sturgeon mercilessly slashes common sense back. "Among the artifacts are bound to include those tied to alchemical essences."

Well, he's right about that. For example, the whip of a catgirl, which I used for meatloaf almost literally. It was just working with space and essences that created a legendary weapon. I still think that I could have taken that artifact for myself, but it was already useless then, having almost wasted the stored essences, and just to carry around a notable thing that had been in the hands of the cult for a long time, even for me it was too much. Eh, I don't have a hamster's vein in me. I'm always passing by all sorts of loot. It's just horrible.

"No, it's taken into account." The deviless interrupts Losius with amusement in her voice, leafing through the notes and pointing to several separate sheets. "Miracles aren't free either and are rarely used in conjunction with classic enhancement rituals. The gods, if it comes to the desire to bestow their favor on someone, do a great job themselves, their grace works much better, cleaner, safer, just take it into yourself deeper. Artifacts... here is a list of artifacts of legendary grade known to Hell in the person of me and to the Eternal Forest in the person of my dear companion, which could help in this task. Many such bling are alchemical in nature, but it is the artisanal ones that help in such circumstances that there are a measly handful available, which must either be rented or stolen and paid extra for as well. Mythic artifacts of the right direction either don't exist in the world or are unknown to us. Even the Cauldron of the Great Soup, if we could wrest it from the green-skinned or buy it from them, is not designed to distill split souls and prevent them from cooling down. Yes, this cauldron could help, but it's no stronger than any other legendary or even specialized epic artifact, so we don't take it into account.

Yes, let's not take it into account - this artifact, though darker than ever, though alchemical at its core, is meant for something else entirely. In this cauldron, the Orcs of the Wild Lands, a conglomeration of the Green Wave, the strongest and most civilized of their tribes, boil the most valuable captives. Because the soup from this cauldron can impart a portion of experience, attributes, skills, or even skill points to whoever tastes this dish. However, if you take communion to such cooking too often you will start to change yourself, gradually losing the ability to eat not from the cauldron. And, I will note that at some moment, the output from the soup will become weaker. Then, it will disappear altogether, and you will still need to eat.

Nevertheless, even many of the endowed ones whose souls are blacker than night pay for a one-time opportunity to be at that feast. Free and guaranteed safe reinforcement, and even in the worst cases, just meat will give off a bitter taste for life. So you can go to fish, and the extra stats and skill points you already have, nowhere to run away.

The Green Wave, by the way, serves as a "switch" that prevents colonization of wild lands, just like the Undead Frost I mentioned earlier. They may be weaker, but they are numerous and regularly invade the lands of the Empire of Ages and Neitmak, not to mention the simpler kingdoms, which they have burned to ashes in the history of their existence. The shamans, who had made a lot of contracts with creatures and trained herds of monsters, could fight off even a divine apparition. However, the celestials were held back not so much by summons and monsters as by the stones of the ruins on which the largest camps lived. Something was left there from the competitors destroyed by the Great Desert Kings, whose lands had become wild thousands of years after that war. Something that the green-skinned men had dug into, realized what it was, and now, they could pull the switch they had found if there was nothing left to lose.

Listening to the stories of Tia, who, of course, knew a lot of those who tasted the orc soup, as she knew, thanks to the intelligence of the ears, the results of the tasting, I really wanted to visit this cauldron in the future, if not to privatize it, then to put every single Chief of Chiefs in it and let them swim, and then feed the resulting brew to the pigs from the nearest human village. Mm-hmm, and put my boobie orcs in charge of the Green Wave to officially change the horde's policy to "make love, not war". Just to be safe, I didn't say I was going to dismiss my thought as a delusion. I still haven't started sorting out the secrets of the Eternal Library, so even all the devils of Hell won't tell me exactly where I'll have to go for the Main Quest.

Although, you never know, they might tell you, so it's best not to talk too much.

Last night, Arenam had been hit with a very specialized Miracle whose essence was to search for any trace of the Lust aspect and fleur-de-lis remnants. The used relic arrived in town with a group of Priests and Detectives sent by point teleport, who activated their toy first. None of us had time to be frightened, nor did we need to be. The prayer embedded in the marble statuette of a pilgrim would have easily found ordinary cultists, traces of the simplest rituals, and the foulest of foulness. But my personal deviless would hide easily. Unless, it was near the activation site, literally a dozen meters away. A toy for finding grassroots trails, not evolved critters. As it happens, before you can summon your masters with high levels and big names, you have to work very hard, and it's relatively easy to find traces of that work. It is later when the cult grows to the extreme degrees of penetration into society, they can provide the higher creatures with a call in complete secrecy, and traces of activity do not leave at all. In the very early stages, a cult dedicated to Hell is relatively vulnerable.

Three sources of the disturbing echo were found in the whole town, and they were quick, without panic, but also without the slightest disregard for even the slightest danger, checked by all means. One of the local nobles had a vial of perfume, for which materials were impregnated with filtered fleur. The work of dark elves. It is insanely expensive, not recommended for use without a high level and strong consciousness, as well as definitely smuggled because it fell under the list of prohibited goods, even though they looked at such perfumes through their fingers. Well, earlier they did - such mixtures, capable of giving charm and causing a slight mental effect on others, were certainly condemned, but they were used. This particular kind of underground elves' work was banned solely because of its composition, while their other cosmetic preparations were quietly bought quite officially.

The man looked very pale, and they looked at him as if he were a stupidly greedy moron. He should know to throw out such crap as soon as it became known about what had happened in the capital! I think he was even fined just because such stupidity should be punished. The perfume had a tinge not of Lust but of Pride, making the wearer more majestic and respectful. The bloodsucker, after the fool had been released, promised sincerely that she would explain to him personally what he could and could not keep in his house. It was lucky that she didn't treat this nobleman harshly, and a couple of small compulsions and faded memories could not be noticed without my intervention. But I still helped a little in not noticing, just to be on the safe side.

The second response was false. An artifact based on Astral, a simple protective amulet for one of the dozens of local guards. These amulets had been purchased relatively recently, thanks to the efforts of the burgomaster, who had become thirsty for useful actions for the city, so the guard was actually preparing to go to the scaffold for a while. Apparently, it was not the first case of blank triggering (I checked later - not the first, but the seventh and only in this group, and each time, it reacted falsely strictly to astral charms, not any other) because they reacted calmly. Well, I mean, they dealt with it first instead of chopping the guards into the salad, thinking that the city was already under the creatures. Under creatures, yes, but not the same ones! The man got a slight fright. The amulet was not even confiscated, but judging by the look of the tenser and the look he cast at the amulet, it will be mysteriously lost and never found, and his centurion, who is the head of all the guards of Arenam, will silently support such sabotage.

The last light was a very old stash containing a tattered book and a sacrificial knife. It was a very real attribute of some cultist who had cognized Greed forty years ago. They dug the house upside down, found everything and everyone, and realized, thanks to two detectives, that the hiding place belonged to an old man, now deceased, who had moved to the city forty years ago and died of quite natural causes five winters before. They found his grave, opened it, and even demanded an interrogation of the shadow-spirit-print of the dead man. Though, there were no necromancers or spiritualists of a really serious caliber in the town. And ritualists or other sorcerers who knew a trick or two in that direction wouldn't be able to interrogate such a long-dead corpse.

Saved the situation bandits, whose representative unobtrusively offered not quite legal, but exceptionally voluntarily donated one-time amulet of rare grade, because the good brothers of the night trade in this city also live and, therefore, fear not to check the danger. Since one evil creature in any place did not need this group and its delays because they would be delayed in her city, she gladly passed one of her bling through the controlled bandits. Having imbued, of course, that this bling belonged to them and not from someone else's bounty. After receiving the suggestion and memory correction, the leaders sent the negotiators completely clean from the influence of bloodsucker charms so that the authenticity was absolute. In fact, the night brotherhood, as well as the guards, often used such amulets - and bought them just from bloodsuckers - to interrogate a corpse if it was not clear who had done what to whom and why, but usually, such things were simpler, not of such high quality.

He found out that the dead bastard, who even after his death was shitting on an isekai he had never seen, had been one of the survivors of the purge of a small cult and had decided to move to the other side of the Empire (he was really from the southern regions, where an Alishan raid or dead men who came from the desert were much more feared than a horde of green-skinned because the latter were rarely found there) and start a normal life, not getting involved with devilishness anymore. He didn't know why he kept the regalia instead of destroying them, even if he hadn't taken them out of their hiding places during his whole life since the move.

The investigation took a day and a half, and then the group was pulled away by a portal beacon, making me shake my head respectfully. It would have cost the Emperor, or whoever was in charge, a lot of money to make a bunch of moves like that. But I knew without even looking into it that the guilds and noble houses working almost for nothing, and the Portalists, Shifters, and Spatial Mages were working for next to nothing. In the hour of great need, it was easy to ask for money, and those who asked would hardly dare to refuse. Rather, they would even lend their assets themselves. If they did it right, had a staff of scheming advisors, and could think outside the box. I even respected him, who is now the main boss of the Empire, a little... just a little bit, just a little bit.

What has happened has had an extremely positive effect on the moral climate in our shelter. As long as this test was passed, we can expect no new ones unless something extraordinary happens. They won't spend more force than the forces spent now on Arenam, not even because it was expensive, but only because of the lack of normal people. But to send a bunch of inspectors that will have to take the city by the balls and squeeze all the profitable topics, putting people loyal to the new broom (but not necessarily only people) on the financial flows? That's always welcome, which I wouldn't really want. The bitch will easily drive these people under her heel and make them work three shifts for the right to clean her boots because she has a whole collection of them, and she loved good shoes even before she met me and when she became much prettier than those shoes, so all sorts of perversions blossomed.

It's not the number of new tongues to clean the shoe collection that worries me, but the fact that the new broomsticks sent, if they happen to show up, will squeeze all the juices out of Arenam in order to pay off their assignment and send a share to those who appointed them. And that seems like a red flag to the creature, who took my order to maintain the well-being of the territory with murderous seriousness. That's why she unobtrusively, with my approval, given with a slight squeak, creates the basis for an internal coalition. So even without her direct orders, the local bigwigs would greet the non-local ones unflatteringly, but in a coherent, united front and without attempts to undermine or negotiate a warm place at the cost of betrayal.

Unnecessary eyes, unnecessary ears, unnecessary people.....

It's an unnecessary risk that someone will notice the bloodsucker's influence, compare the facts, and sound the alarm. I help her, involuntarily imbued with a slight respect for the work she's already done (and her way of "joking" at bad people), even if I'm still sickened by her motivation and disgusted by her nature. That's okay. Compared to the singing of the sonm of the deviless, the unquenchable thirst and the bloody suspension of lives taken inside don't seem so nightmarish anymore. I'll have a pocket and very budgetary Alucard. Why not? I already gathered a really nasty ensemble in the form of a Kunstkammer, and this is not even I said it, but Hestia, who evaluated the composition of my team, which made Giver and Taria very funny and also caused a grumpy resentment at Hans. And yes, circuses of freaks, as well as the show of spirited creatures and mutants simply distorted by planes (especially by Darkness) also have popularity here, being parts of various circus programs or independent shows.

I quoted the winged phrase about "the currency of the soul" and got a thoughtful look from Tia. The bloodsucker just nodded as if I had said something quite obvious, which her bug brethren are taught in kindergartens for young mosquitoes.

I should check if the previously summoned individuals have retold half of the earth's stock of manga and anime, passing them off as their own work. It would also be worthwhile to find out about the repetitions of Comrade Vysotsky, but there's a small problem here - I don't know nearly enough of Vysotsky's songs to check.

Such a pity. He could sing himself, take a bard class, create his own musical group of anarchist rockers, and turn the world upside down with the power of creativity, instead of all this. So to speak, to rock the hell out of this hole. And without rock, you just have to burn.

Surprisingly, the moments of extreme danger have not occurred, nor do they appear, which is starting to seriously worry me. Searching epiphanies based on legendary artifacts or divine Miracles regularly blacken out entire sections of the defense network, but I'm still rebuilding and upgrading it faster than it sags. The most memorable were a couple of extremely insidious Miracles from Warrior adepts, seeking the truth as they found it, removing intermediate details like the search process. If it wasn't possible to catch an image already drawn by the structure of the prayer into the net and replace it with a lie, also by fact, by first making and then letting down the chain of actions, it would be bad. As it is, nothing, reflected the prayer itself, catching a ray of flaming light in a mirror trap and returning not what that ray was looking for.

I also noticed a very amusing effect of either an artifact or something else, maybe even someone's particularly cunning ability - a structure based on clairvoyance and very selective causality control, a curse, for the record. A willing victim is chosen, preferably one with a level over twenty-five, but willing to die to, say, ward off a blow from the family clan or provide the family with a lifetime of security and assistance. And then, after receiving the curse, Fortune turns away from this sacrificial lamb. Or rather, he voluntarily asks her to turn away, giving himself into the hands of Fatum - the concept of luck disappears from the victim's life. He simply cannot be lucky in anything, and the degree of bad luck slowly accumulates from spilled coffee on a new shirt to a ridiculous death from a cherry pit stuck in the throat. But such a victim gets a kind of distortion of his fate, a very specific clairvoyance. With the small jolts and flashes of intuition, it's leading the victim to a predetermined situation. For example, to solve a crime or find a high-ranking cultist who had managed to escape the turmoil.

The curse could even be undone, but it would be even more expensive than casting it, and you'd get a lot of permanent status effects for the rest of your life. I don't know whether this sacrifice was created and directed at me, at Tia, or just coincidentally, but the curse didn't work, having returned back to the ritual and giving a powerful backlash to the whole group of sacrificers. The mirrors also played their role, and though they didn't blacken completely with a single shard, they all shook badly at once, and my un-existence, in which I was wrapped even in my sleep at the level of reflexes, spending almost no energy or concentration. As a result, the only one who wasn't injured was the man who sacrificed (with the class of Detective, by the way) because two of the group of cursers were injured, one died immediately, and that artifact, or holy relic, which was used for this very specific sacrifice, went on a long rollback.

It was particularly funny that neither Tia nor Giver knew anything about this thing. Though I was able to describe it quite accurately, even catching the images with considerable risk of peeking through the reflection in the polished copper jug into which the alchemical oil for the ritual was poured. And that was despite the elf's vast knowledge of most of the existing legendary trinkets, sometimes even more than their owners! Giver, maybe, did not have such deep knowledge. She worked in other directions, not collecting artifacts together with the owners but promoting cults and working with the minds of puppets of the highest echelon. But she had to know about the artifacts that the Empire of Ages had at its disposal - all the higher creatures were informed, and they memorized the manuals, knowing that they could encounter the bearers of such trinkets at any time.

And silence.

Apparently, they dug it up in the storerooms of either the Palace or one of the noble houses that had splurged or just took it as a trophy, not even knowing from whom the devils had taken it. They had managed to plunder many places and kill many people. I could not, for obvious reasons, watch them - I was taking a risk, but here, at least, there was a connection between me and the mirrors and the ritual. The search for the past of the strange artifact through a cloudy and fuzzy image would obviously have a bad effect on my health, so I pressed the unhealthy curiosity with an iron boot.

In the vicinity of Arenam, bored from idleness, legendary swamp ogre. She simply had nothing to do. This, by the way, is an indicator of the growing self-awareness of poor Ygra. If you think about it - the original, only met me monstr-girl, I mean, just deprived of endowment monster, only female, not any perversions with Japanese flavor, the concept of boredom did not know. You want to munch, go kill your prey, you want to sleep, sleep, you want something else, take it. For her, there was no concept of "boring hunting" because hunting for her was not divided into varieties. That is, she preferred to kill strong and high-level prey, instinctively following the desire to become stronger, and simply because high-level animals have more meat, and the meat itself, if not tastier, then more nutritious, excluding only frankly inedible or even poisonous (even for the stomach ogre poisonous!). But if there was no strong prey, such as an isekai who had wandered into a foreign swamp, the ogre could catch small things, such as snakes and marsh birds, or even gnaw on some roots.

Now, when her intelligence, remaining comparable to that of a stool, had jumped up to an unprecedented height, it became obvious to her that killing forest hares and wolves was already boring, useless, worthless. But dangerous, able to fight, pumped up and posing a threat, no matter if they were intelligent or not, they were good, suitable prey, which she wanted to tear into pieces and eat. Well, if it's unintelligent, then eat it. I didn't forbid her from eating intelligent and humanoid meat. Тo, I didn't forbid it. I threatened to deprive her of access to normal cooking, such as kebabs, stew or soup, for the sake of which Ygra was ready to stop eating meat even without my compulsions, though she considered this action sacrilege. She would if she knew such concepts and could put them into words... or even just say "sacrilege."

The city's surroundings were regularly cleaned up by the city's own, if not by guards, then by a bunch of hunters and butchers who had recently received funding from the Magistrate for new accomplishments. Not to mention the fact that we (especially Ygra) had thinned out both beasts and robbers during our last visit, and the new ones had not only not had time to start, but even the surviving remnants had panicked because they realized that most of them had mysteriously disappeared. You'd have to believe that the guards had organized some kind of mop-up or that some nobleman had hired a team of mercenary adventurers to secure the roads. You can't be sure if one of the colleagues, by his own stupidity, slaughtered someone's son or daughter, and the victim turned out to have a long pedigree, a thick purse, wide connections, and deep vindictiveness.

The bloodsucker, by the way, noticed this "cattle decline" through reports, both from her servants and the magistrate's puppets and even from bandits. Especially the bandits, who, by the nature of their activity, cooperated closely with a considerable part of the brigands' gangs, even though the intersection was, let's say, only at the edges of the zones of interest. And not just noted but even took advantage of it, almost cleaning up the remnants of the alarmed romantics of the big road, taking advantage of the fact that they began to dramatically change their campsites, dislocation and just looking for answers to the question "and who did it?" They addressed to their acquaintances from the night brotherhood, and to whom those brothers clean their boots is clear without additional clarifications. In general, the guards, as well as those gathered from hunting brigades, personal fists of local merchants and aristocrats, cheerfully, and most importantly, almost without losses and, what is even funnier, almost without pushing from the shadowy mistress of Arenam, cleaned up all kinds of scum almost to zero. The creature either kept only the most promising ones for fodder (one of the depilated conans was the former leader of a separate brigade) and entertainment or sent them away as agents, wiping their memories and leaving a bunch of behavioral algorithms for the future.

In order for the trophies obtained from the lairs and stashes of robbers to go not into the pockets of the participants but to repair the city's infrastructure, it was necessary to make really noticeable efforts. The same purpose was to allow the sleeping agents to "successfully escape" - let them point at new comrades in bloody trade, and then you can repeat the procedure. There is experience. And the creature was not an idiot and realized that a successful cleanup by the city authorities would attract much less attention and unwanted speculation than the mysterious disappearance of a whole stratum of the population. She didn't know that it was our (mostly Ygra's, but still) handiwork, even though she supposed even that option. The main version in her head was the very situation with the unlucky little man who had been hired by a team of assassins to avenge him.

She would have given such a variant a hundred percent probability, but the check of our group's traces (I should note, carried out before the visit of the whole gang) gave some hints. I had just reported, standing knee-deep in the snow under the gates of Arenam, that a group of wandering adventurers (and I wasn't lying) in the person of our team had slashed some banditry. The creature danced away from this disclaimer and assumed that we, too, could be behind the purge in the forests. That's why she did her best to make sure that the trail would lead to the Magistrate of Arenam, which is commendable, but I'm not going to praise her... or I will, because she helped us from the bottom of her heart.

I had to soothe Ygra by contacting her regularly through dreams, only to realize after almost a month that she was just being pitying, even though she really missed me. While we sat in the fortified shelter shaking my mirror artifacts for fear that the entire network would collapse, the ogre wasn't lazing around either. Having found a small swamp half a leisurely day's walk from the city, the monster began to appropriate it, combining racial affinity, talents acquired with the development of levels and primitive witchcraft, of those charms that are more direct than scrap, but just as reliable and dangerous in skillful hands. Ygra, to draw an analogy, was like Mr. Freeman's sister with this crowbar, capable of stopping the invasion of an alien civilization with a crowbar.

If it wasn't for the fact that I had already trampled not just a path into Ygra's dreams and mind but a decent eight-lane highway with bridges, tunnels, and air defense facilities on the sides of the road, it would have been funny if she hadn't opened the way to me herself, helping me to establish communication from her side. The swamp she had captured hid the ogre with such quality that in my battered state I would not have been able to find her, even using the support of the mirror network. I would have seen the dense bastions of defense created by the swamp, pulling and sucking out any effort, depriving me of the fuse, I would have known she was there, but I wouldn't have been able to find her. If it had been an ogre I didn't know, and with whom I had no strong connection and intertwined images, I could have failed even at my full strength. I would be able to open the defense with my brute strength, but I would not be able to do it quietly and unnoticed, which, you must agree, is impressive.

Ygra, during our acquaintance, gradually turned from a pure physical damager with a tendency to hide into the same damager but with strong magical support and an extremely inconvenient set of talents. Fighting covens of witchcraft adepts was always a challenge, even with total superiority in strength. Even Tia confirmed it to me. According to her, number five on the list of the most dangerous moments of her life was just the elimination of one high-level ogre witch doctor of radical black color. No, not a drow, but a local negro, but a very high-level and scary one. Who liked to eat alive and not so much his enemies and those who just happened to be at hand.

The damned Pagabadanda was tried to kill for a long time, including elves, which he also liked to taste on occasion, but really seriously and without considering the financial losses he was being hunted when he and his tribe of witchcraft-distorted dolls grabbed a large elven expedition, in which there were almost two dozen long-eared alone, not to mention the security of mercenaries and specialists. They decided to excavate an ancient mound with, presumably, paired legendary artifacts. They dug, opened it up, and found two legendary necklaces. And then they were found and taking them with them - the section of Savannah, which the old and fat negro cannibal had made his home, could be opened only by a natural military operation of the Eternal Forest, so much had been done there, so many things had been screwed up. They did not expect to save their captive kin, and their number was decreasing quickly because the cannibal's appetite could be compared only with his power.

Fighting was not an option. He could sit in the spell-saturated terrain for years or decades, sending the warped ones off to guerrilla warfare and working with area curses, imprint attacks, or blood samples, not to mention the ability to summon contract creatures he'd become so familiar with that it was a wonder he'd kept his endowness. So they sent Tia, not just one, but several Sprigs of Fallen Leaves, almost a full fifty - assassins, barriers, spies, mages of various specialties, ritualists - making it the largest operation in that century in terms of the number of ears involved. The number of non-Elves brought in to cover it is not worth mentioning.

For six long years, they opened the defense mechanisms, attracted other witch experts, and even hired three elders of the Goat Coven, forgiving them a couple of their sins against the Eternal Forest (unheard of generosity on the part of very vengeful elves with a very long memory), as well as paying a crazy sum in gold. For less than that, even such thwarted almost creatures, who had long ago lost their human and beastly appearance and had become more goat than beastly, were unwilling to mess with their afro-born counterpart.

Six years to analyze and select the keys. Another five years to map the utterly mangled space of Pagabadanda's inner domain and then the operation itself. It was Tia who struck the final blow with the Crooked Root, the same Crooked Root she was still using. The ogre had lost an arm, an eye, an ear, and half a dozen enchanted arrows oozing poisons and curses, an artifact claw, and a legendary sword that had already begun to rust and fall apart. They finished the bastards but lost three of them, as well as the posthumous curses they had received, and five more of them were written off to civilian positions either for life or for a very long time (most of them still haven't recovered). Tia was barely recovered then as well, but it was with that operation that she slowly began her transition from one of the fallen leaves' representatives, albeit a tough representative, to the very badass glorified Fall Executioner.

She told me this story not for the sake of bragging but for the sake of comparison, to demonstrate what an adept of witchcraft can do on his own territory, especially if his affinity with this territory is so absurdly strong as Ygra's. That cook was not killed in a direct battle, but even attacking suddenly and sharply like diarrhea, chasing a bunch of summons, teams of mercenaries or servants, and a hundred and fifty small (only two and a half meters tall) crystalline golems, which were calmly stored in three legendary artifacts of spatial type, the success was accompanied only by military cunning. This cunning was expressed by an extremely dangerous, for those who would carry it out, a ritual that hit the terrain and, through it, the master of that savannah. It was a kind of virus, a disease based on the energy of Nature, which affected not living organisms but the energy background, the flows of forces from which any territorialists (and territorial magic and witchcraft very often, almost always, go hand in hand in one form or another) draw their power.

And without all this sneaky and expensive preparation, the savage dark lord, who was very literal in his dark lordship, would have simply eaten another batch of long-eared ones. Ygra is still far away from the innocently murdered bearer of unique cultural traditions, and it was entrenched in its swamp for a month and a half, not a century and a half, but the comparison itself is very flattering. It's a kind of a high bar, which one should be equal to, not beating one's ears. Ogra, despite all my complaints about her, has progressed at a "God willing" level. Or, if we take into account her status as an aggressive legendary monster who loves to organize all sorts of fun games in the style of horror, then it would be more accurate to use the expression "God forbid".

I'm so proud of my teammate. She's dumb, but she's strong.

Especially considering what highly intelligent behaviors Kostenka himself was practicing.

I dared to look into my status only at the end of the second month of my imprisonment, when any threats of my condition worsening or of our hideout being discovered by the evil authorities had safely passed. Now, it was only a matter of time before my energy body, mental state, and probably even my very essence fully recovered. Strengthening rituals, breathing exercises - I will specify separately that without external direction through hypnotic trance, - proper nutrition, good sleep, and absence of excessive loads (loads not excessive even recommended), as well as a certain amount of alchemical medicines, both self-made and taken from the magistrate's stocks - it should have been enough for safe recovery. And to fill the local elites' coffers with the same potions, but of better quality, would not be difficult even for a bloodsucker who would strain the local alchemists.

It was time to sort through the pile of stuff that my Status had accumulated since the sky above my head suddenly changed its color. I prepared myself for it both mentally and physically and having prepared myself, I drank a tonic potion with an alchemical additive, put a healing compress on my forehead, lay in bed, and breathed long and diligently, saturating my body with oxygen and energy with freshness. And only when I realized that I couldn't do any more useless bullshit for the sake of postponing the moment of truth, I uttered one single cherished word, even though I could activate the desired effect with a single mental effort:

"Status."

Pause.

Breath in.

Let's start.

I won't pray, just out of principle.

Name: Konstantin
Race: human/??a?e??
Level: 54

Well, the most important thing I saw, the most important thing I learned, as if dropping an invisible weight about the weight of a Himalayan mountain range and a couple more donkeys for change. Still a human being, not a creature, but the human being I had tried so hard all this time to remain, and yet I lost. Not at once, not in an instant, but gradually, step by step, giving more and more, making more and more concessions, until these small steps became too many until the small sacrifices were not made so much that further only the edge of the abyss without a bottom. And the kind devil did not just push me over that edge, but kicked me out in the spirit of Tsar Leonid with the obligatory shout of "THIS IS HEEEEEELLLL!!!". I still can't believe that I managed to get out, and as soon as I think about it a little more, I get panic hysteria mixed with homeric laughter.

Anyway, the mood would have been fine, but... as they used to say on our earthly internets: everything that is said before "but" is absolute shit. In my case, not before "but" but after the dash, which is right after the designation of my race. Yes, Konstantin Yurievich remained a human being, but there was something else standing next to him, unreadable and unclear at all, causing instinctive.... not disgust, but discomfort. Something has clearly changed, and not as usual, tearing off a piece of endowment, but as if making it change its nature, adding something that was not there before, and this something is still too strange.

No less strangely pleased me with further study of Status because I hadn't seen this kind of shit in it before. No, there were no more question marks. No new broken pixels, or some incomprehensible symbols. But the familiar and seemingly inviolable logicality of this system interface suddenly disappeared and opened from a new side. In order to be convinced of the said, it is enough just to look at the lines of free attributes and improvement points to immediately start counting in your mind and go crazy.

Characteristics Points: 33 (Unlimited Potential: 41)

Class points: 17

No, I really like these numbers. They open up a huge range of possible improvements and modifications to my only playable character because the build decides and, in general,// immolate impruvd, if you know what I mean. The question is different. Why an odd number of attributes? I didn't put anything anywhere. I didn't check the Status at all! The answer is obvious, though frightening. At some point, I started to twist so much that some of my free attributes became smeared, smeared between man and creature. When I managed to pull myself together, the inviolable multiplicity of five provided by the System went to the same place where I almost went.

If I'd been met with such surprises since I'd started studying my condition, what would happen next? My heart thudded in my chest, and I kept my body's reactions under control, but I couldn't stop the bad feelings, even if my gut didn't support them. You can't just stop panicking. It's easier to melt my ring in a volcano, honestly. Realizing that I can't get away from myself, I move on to studying my classes. Luckily everything seems to be without scary bedtime stories. I browse through the closed first and second ranks of the shadow branch, check for any changes in the descriptions of Aegis and Form, not finding any differences from what I saw last time, and then the news starts.

Creation of Shadow: 5/9

Allows to use inferior, weak, full-fledged and even Elder Shadows as material, changing their essence with your will in very wide ranges; allows to plant obtained essences in stolen shadows; allows, with considerable difficulty, to merge several essences in one web of shadow theft; allows extremely extensive manipulation of contracts, throwing the summoning loop over material media or the subtle bodies of allies; allows contract modification, intercepting or making adjustments to others' contracts, and stealthily distorting contracted shadow artifacts; allows you to create Shadows from stolen images, lives and souls, endowing them with the essence you desire within wide limits; allows you, with effort, to create Shadows from pure energy or completely change the essence of existing ones; such molding is extremely harmful for Shadows and without constant nourishment and supervision they will, with some probability, disintegrate and disappear; allows, with concentration and serious training, to create alone shadow charms of the highest strategic complexity, using the formed Shadows as key nodes.

Manifestation of Shadow: 8/9

Allows you to recover almost instantly in battle and after it, drawing energy directly from the Shadow; allows you to maximize the influence of the Shadow on reality in a very large controlled area; allows you to link areas of reality with the Shadow, breaking, destroying or predetermining the metrics of space, primarily denying any other influences on the controlled space; allows, with minimal effort, to rapidly and almost inevitably exhaust any extraneous charms, miracles, effects or conceptual influences within the manifestation; allows to use the connection with the Shadow for absolute counteraction to spatial techniques, pockets and distortions up to mythical; with minimal effort, allows to create the most complex constructs from shadow energy, including in the Shadow itself, protecting constructs from decay for a long period of time; each intraplanar construct consumes a part of the maximum reserve, depending on the complexity of the construct and thoroughness of its manifestation; allows to easily create permanent barriers or auras on certain areas of reality or Shadow; created effects require neither rituals, nor preparation, nor materials, only reserve and control, but can be strengthened in the presence of these tools; allows, with the application of a large amount of strength and concentration, to shrink the manifested space into combat techniques of a debilitating-supporting type.

In principle, I won't even bring up the topic of how difficult and risky it was to ensure such a growth in skill points without a single investment of free improvements in one day. It was already clear that I had developed terrifically, in a spurt, without mitigation, with maximum effort and complete disregard for the consequences - it couldn't be otherwise. And if Creation got only one free point, apparently for repeated use of mutilated Shadows as fuel and "microchips" inside my spells, then Manifestation was really scary. It was frightening because I remembered the feelings and consequences of rapid development by investing a lot of points into a single skill, but here it wasn't investing. I was developing directly in battle, exchanging the degree of understanding of the very nature of my techniques, class, skills, and the plan that had become too close to me for pieces of myself. As the local munchkin OP would say, I exchanged these pieces at a surprisingly favorable rate, gaining a lot, but if I heard and seen these theorists, I would have sent them to the ass and spit in their faces. After ripping that face off with my bare hands.

As I remember that battle with Touch, the deadly exchange of blows at a distance even closer than up close, I immediately want to go to the farmers and the rest of my life to grow potatoes while not using my classes. After all, I was partially located naturally inside the devil, colorfully nicknamed by colleagues Cook. Of course, such a desire quickly passes, but the very fact of its occurrence is very eloquent. Power is good. It's great. It gives you power over your destiny, albeit up to a certain limit. But the fee is levied imperceptibly, a little at a time, stealthily, at first pretending to be pennies, rather symbolic. At the moment of realization, as practice shows, it is often too late. This isn't even my story because you can't count the idiots who have been less lucky than the idiot named Kostik.

The sudden development of the Manifestation was surprising, but it seemed understandable. In the fight with the devil, I used it to the fullest. The monochrome grayness of the world that had become mine and, at the same time, nobody's, drinking all the juices, feelings, colors, and memories from reality, just to dilute my Loneliness while bringing the taken under His denominator, turned out to be surprisingly effective against almost everything Sovereign threw at me. As practice proved, he had enough trump cards to make me grit my teeth in envy while simultaneously wrinkling my brain trying to figure out what it was in the first place. These trumps were literally killing me. More than once killing me! Only dancing on the sharp scrap of split mirrors, the constant lottery of trying to keep the blow, to keep fighting and not let the construction created inside me collapse, kept my eternity from an extremely unpleasant fate.

He was stronger.

But for all his variability, for the obscenely large number of elite souls, for all the tricks he could perform through those souls, he was superior to me in power, in the available variants of blows, in the ability to combine them. Of course, we were not equal in the depth of knowledge of our nature and could not be, but the gap was still smaller. If I had half a thousand attributes added to each stat, leaving class skills unchanged, I wouldn't win. There was still no chance, but I'd be able to twitch, and I'd be able to run away from a devil devoid of mobility and the ability to leave the area. Ironic, but if I'd been leveling smart instead of trying to kill myself every now and then, and not having so many undocumented upgrades and titles, I would have been torn. I mean, the same Prince and his Toy also had titles and just free pumping, but I stood out even against their background. I can be sure of that.

Once again checking out the changes in the description of Manifestation, I catch myself with an underlying desire to put in the last missing point and close this skill before the drop, getting the final enhancement, like the ability to share the burden of Aegis with the enemy or the crazy speed and ease of changing the Form, along with its variability, allowing to easily use the natural abilities of almost any kind of Shadow, even those that I can not perform personally. I stammered for a second because I'd never had such suicidal thoughts before, and it made me want to check my brain for a pending suicide-style bookmark. I'm in a precarious equilibrium for now, but if I start distributing the received perks into class skills, I'll burst right here. No, I really can do some things, but attributes and improvements, for now, let them lie in the figurative closet.

After a quick but thorough check of myself for some list of extremely specific memetic attacks (and you can't call such techniques otherwise - the term is different, but the internal translator picked up this analogy), I return my thoughts to the Manifestation, assessing my feelings, and begin to realize that I was wrong again in my initial assumptions about the nature of the ability. It's already a habit. At first, I thought this ability was an analog of portal and territorial abilities, which, of course, is partially true. The ability to work with contracts, the ability to fix influence on the terrain, even something suspiciously similar to the ability to create a lair right in the Shadows - all this should be checked, especially the ability to connect two pieces of space through the Shadows, because mirror portals should not be the only option available and, it's hard to hide them from Weaver. It also wouldn't hurt to figure out the construction of pre-suspended, um, structures. Judging by the description and his intuition, this would allow him to create a ready-made attacking technique, like the same shadow obelisk or a bastion coiled into an invisible point, and carry it around with him, almost inside himself... something smelled of Dungeons and Dragons, and earthly, not local. I'll have to check, test, and try, but it's all work in progress.

The other thing is important.

The essence of all these abilities, the essence of Manifestation in its root function, its original nature, seems to be Aegis turned inside out. No, it is not. It is not true. Though, it is similar. Aegis is the intoxication, painful and self-destructive, with its own hunger, hatred, and inseparable Loneliness, which cannot be exchanged for anything else, cannot be changed for anything else, cannot even want it, only to hate all those who have escaped it. Manifestation is about something else, about how you become a loner even when there is a whole world around you because Loneliness goes with you, treads in your footsteps, takes away all that is around you, leaving only a monochrome picture, a painful image of what was and is no longer. Aegis locks you in with your Loneliness, while Manifestation separates you from the world around you, leaving you alone with yourself and all that you are. This is why any charms go out within the monochrome, any energy is exhausted and conceptual attacks - separation, denial, non-acceptance of everything that prevents you from being alone - perish.

The farther, the less magic resembles magic with all its rules, formulas, calculations, and equations, which Tia tries to put into my head from time to time, and the more this magic has something philosophical or mystical, but definitely scary and disgusting to a normal person. And these idiots are around chasing levels and pumping as if it hides the meaning of life ... and I'm the fucking retarded one. And I've been like this since the beginning because I had to compensate with understanding and improvisation for the lack of even basic knowledge, which not only liquidators of Tia's level, or aristocrats like Losius, but simple recruits of an average adventurer's guild receive from their mentors.

So you build yourself a bike and you end up with a goddamn warp drive.

Made of shit and sticks.

Having finished with the shadow class, I moved on to the mirror class, already more or less ready for possible spectacles. It was also actively used in the most brutal conditions, so the advancement on the ability scale was just a must. Not to mention that right before the second phase of the battle with the giga-boss, while swallowing the shards, I invested some points into the Broken Edge because, at the level it had before the fight, it would have been possible to do what I did in the battle, albeit with huge reservations. And the concentration penalties were such that holding Form, casting killing spells, clairvoyance, and stealth all at the same time while still holding the essential caramel shell would only be possible in my wet fantasies.

How many points did I put in, tearing myself apart and reassembling myself as something else, taking advantage of the insight that had not yet completely disappeared, that had caught up with me, that allowed me to grasp the air and return to the edge of the abyss, having already managed not just to fall, but to fly several hundred meters down? How many divisions were taken by me already in the battle, on my own and without system reinforcements? I have no idea. At that time, I didn't look at the Status. I refused to perceive it. So I could put in a couple or three or the entire available reserve. And now I can't even calculate it. Points, as well as attributes, could either be burned or new ones could be added to the account of the fall. Creaturefication, you know, if there is still something to burn in the furnace, adds a lot of power, although more often not in the pure form of free points, but already automatically distributing. In any case, Overord Konstantine became a little bit stronger... the fact that nowhere Lord Kostya almost ran out, by and large, the System does not care.

Broken Edge: 7/9

Allows selective breaking of edges of reflected reality, reversing even key events that have already occurred or are about to occur, making them unfulfilled, up to and including the undoing of hostile conceptual effects or Fatum effectors if they are tied to the existence of the individual controlling the breaking of an edge; allows the breaking of most complex or key aspects of reflected reality belonging to the existence of other beings, especially if they are directly related to the actions of the individual controlling the breaking of an edge; allows the breaking of most complex or key aspects of reflected reality belonging to the existence of other beings, especially if they are directly related to the actions of the individual controlling the breaking of an adge; allows the breaking of most complex or key aspects of reflected reality belonging to the existence of other beings, especially if they are directly related to the actions of the individual controlling the breaking of an edge; allows, with effort, to prepare in advance the edges to be broken, reducing the reaction time to zero; allows to dramatically increase the effect of Broken Edge when interacting with mirrors processed in the right way; allows, with certain difficulties, to choose the outcome of the broken edge, selecting the most favorable to the initiator of the break; allows, with effort, to break the edge even after the actual death of the initiator of the break, making the unrealistic alternative real.

Reflected Image: 6/9

Enhances clairvoyant abilities, bringing their effectiveness to a state close to absolute, especially when using mirrors, allowing one to see into the past and future of any objects, phenomena, concepts, and destinies that have ever been reflected, up to those of entire organizations and large collectives; allows one to reflect a multitude of physical, magical or mystical effects, for a time getting at the disposal of their copies; reflected effects feel similar to the original and can deceive even the most exotic or unique expertise, including legendary and a small part of mythical scanning skills, skills, titles; allows you to search among the reflections of entire collections and complexes of necessary data and find them not by direct search, but with the help of intuitive flair; allows, with minimal effort, to reflect mirror variants of existence on reality, working with reflection techniques in the absence of direct access to Dream; allows, with considerable effort, to change the reality between oneself and the reflection, blurring or multiplying the concept of existence even for oneself; allows, with great risk, to act effectively in two or even more hypostases of oneself, composing the Image in such a way as to be real simultaneously in all hypostases; allows, with great effort, to reflect and create Images not only of oneself, but also of other individuals, whether they are victims, models, or even allies; the degree of consequences for the reflected depends on the quality of the preparation for the creation of the Image and the effort invested in protection of the reflected.

Mirror Cloak: 3/9

Enables the transformation of mirror particles into magical robes that conceal the user and make it extremely easy to work with Dream matter; makes it much easier to control Dream spawns and stay in the reflected world with the material body; allows you to catch enemy attacks and simple conceptual influences with a minimum of effort, and then seal them in Dream particles, redirecting, distorting, modifying or combining the sealed; allows you to effectively use the Dream cloak as a tool and weapon in a fight, knowing that the Dream cloak can be used as a tool and a weapon in a fight; allows, with effort, to turn portions of the Cloak into direct gaps into Dreams, speeding up the recovery of the reserve or allowing its loss to be offset by direct infusion; allows, at the limit of effort, to provide a power-up of conjured effects or woven nightmares to extremely stressed areas of the Cloak.

Web of Souls: 2/9

It allows working with the very essence of the victim, reinforcing any impact on the mind with profound changes in the essence; it allows, with effort, to exchange the particles of the victim's essence for more dense influence, which affects the mind and body; it allows, with a minimum of effort, to change the Status Effects of the victim within fairly wide limits; it allows, with serious investment of effort and concentration, to merge and mix the essences of separate individuals, creating something unified or dividing the unified into parts; allows, at the limit of concentration, to use separate processed souls as nodal elements of large-scale constructions of the highest power and scope; created webs can perform, both autonomously and supporting the creator, an extremely wide range of actions, up to automation of certain actions without the Creator's participation.

Paradoxically, the mirror class had evolved even more than the shadow class. Each of the skills took at least one division, and Broken Edge was pumped almost completely. Two points left. Apparently, in that state, when I put an unknown number of free points into Broken Edge, I could throw a couple of them into the same Cloak and Web. The Image seemed to be boosting itself even before my encounter with Touch when I set up a mirror attack with three planes in succession, taking advantage of having Losius and Tia at my side, as well as hastily picked victims. I could have done without the latter. The fact that they were, to put it mildly, assholes, murderers, freaks, and a host of other epithets didn't change the fact that I had to get my already bloody hands dirty in the blackness of sacrifices of the worst kind. Yes, I deliberately avoided many suitable sources of material, choosing those who at least deserved to die, but there are too few in the world who deserve such a fate.

The skills, as if in retaliation for a positioning error with their shadow counterparts, were relatively what they seemed. In the shadow class, I managed to guess only with Form, while the rest of the trio was quite... No, not surprising, but it reveals new, very frightening sides. Broken Fringe is precisely the ability to persist, to test certain courses of action, and only then to choose. The highest form of combat foresight allows you not to see a possible variant of events but to create it and then prescribe it as a fait accompli. Gradually revealing the ability to break the fate of not only his own, but also someone else's, to violate causality and predetermination for anyone ... is a direct control of reality, even if expressed by a planar skill, but still powerful.

So, with maximum development and very good training, creating a very special mirror with the right properties, preferably in conjunction not only with Broken Edge but also with all other skills of the class, you can take some enemy and make him never exist. I can imagine that an evil assassin comes to visit you with a level of heroic limit, and you hop to him and just hop, and he disappears in the smoke of logic! Or even cooler! Create not just one attacking artifact that removes someone's existence but a set of weaker ones, affecting gradually but also complexly. And now a heroic assassin has turned into a heroic sucsassin of the same level, but already belonging to you and believing that it has always been so...

No, this is too much even for me, with my mythic classes and badass power!

I mean, I could do it in theory, but I doubt I'd actually do it because what the fuck? I already have a ring, with the victims of which I do not know what to do (no need to vulgarize, not in the sense of do not know!). For a second, I wondered where such thoughts came from - my sick fantasy or a consequence of bathing in the fleur and entrails of an innocently murdered archdevil? Or, perhaps, a distant vision of something that had already come true, caught by a network of mirrors and surfaced when I tried to analyze my skills? Perhaps that's what I won't find out, for even if I can't get the Bords out of my mind saturated with Shadow and Dream. The remnants of my mental health are still dear to me, at least as a memory of the past.

The Image, in my current understanding, gave me two main trumps: the ability to mirror and copy enemy blows, charms, techniques, and anything else, up to psychic imprints or appearance, as well as a surprisingly painful for the brain ability to divide myself like an amoeba, simultaneously being in two (or more, I just didn't dare to test it at that moment) places without being in any of them at the same time. I felt real in both reflections, but in both, I realized myself to be only a deception, an Image caught in a mirror tunnel. As I had already said, the sensation was explosive, and it blew up my brains as if they were not made of gray stuff but at least of TNT or even hexogen.

Having finished with mirrors, I move on to the last class of three, which, as the Status shows, has also grown up a bit due to the constant load far beyond reasonable or at least not too crazy. Alchemy has always lagged somewhat behind in terms of development, which saddens me greatly. Of all the options for leveling is the bias in crafting, if not completely safe for health and roof, then at least the least harmful. The only depressing thing is that all this is exclusive while alchemy remains the least developed before reaching the third rank. I'm afraid if the Mystic Alchemist in me were as developed as the Overlord of Shadows, he would be no less of a problem, opening up from new, frightening, and disturbing sides.

Actually, only one skill was developed, but, finally, to the limit, giving useful bonuses to characteristics, not to mention that the essence vessel was (and is) my favorite at the second rank of the class, allowing me to work not just in a clean field with a minimum of tools, but even without them at all, using the vessel instead of a cauldron, a distilling cube, vials and a license to produce heavy drugs. I am my own cauldron and laboratory - in my case, these are almost literal words that sound a bit uncomfortable. I really don't want to become this cauldron for real, not for the sake of a cool phrase, but obviously I'll have to. The class is gradually taking shape, standing out from the usual alchemists because of its ability to discreetly turn the one who holds the tools into an alchemy tool.

Vessel of the Essence: 7/7

Allows accumulating absurdly huge amounts of the essence in one's own body; allows creating multiple and multi-component compositions from the stored essence; the vessel, almost without exception, cannot be detected even by divine scanning skills; the vessel, almost without exception, cannot be detected even by divine scanning skills; the vessel, almost without exception, cannot be emptied by specialized skills even of divine rank; allows you to easily sort, filter, and combine the essence in the vessel; allows you to encase the stored essence in stasis, preventing it from changing its concepts or mixing them; allows you to create ready-made compositions from pure essence directly inside the vessel without mixing them; allows you to consume the created compositions directly through the vessel, without the necessary material component, which reduces toxicity to zero values; allows the vessel to be filled and emptied with great speed, greatly increasing the efficiency of creating new compositions and giving the ability to use the skill in combat with limited effectiveness; allows the vessel to be used in combination with cleavage, breaking down even hostile enchantments of low and medium ranks into elements; allows, with effort, to decompose materials into essences to the absolute limit, with virtually no loss of individual elements and concepts; increases Inspiration by +10; increases Concentration by +10; increases Perception +5

In addition to the obviously nice attribute bonuses for closing a skill, I was very happy with the final improvements that turned the vessel into a fully usable skill in combat, albeit inferior to the more death-dealing-oriented skills of the shadow branch. Still, it was like bolting a tracked chassis, mounted armor, a large-caliber cannon, and a pair of machine guns onto an electron microscope. Now, with the increased speed, skill, and distillation of the vessel, it wouldn't be hard to use this skill as a full class if I decide to pretend to be some sort of warrior or fire mage. Combined with Shadow Theft or Reflected Image, I can pretend to be almost anyone. Well, I could pretend before, but now I can act within the confines of pretending!

I'll have to ask the bloodsucker a good question, at the same time, starting intensive training in the direction of using combat essentialism. It's practically harmless for me. The load is quite low. It doesn't mess with my brain or doesn't mess with me very much, but I need to explore new horizons. Her species' abilities are actually the same essentialism, so she'll be able to tell me a lot, despite my attitude towards her. I could also invite Tia to the case, but she's not a know-it-all, though she pretends to be, and she wouldn't be able to tell me more than the creature, even if she wanted to.

The funny thing is that the final enhancement, an absolute skill like transferring effects through shadow theft or mirror reflection transitions, doesn't seem to be combat or applicable in combat at all. No, I'm not talking about the ability to decompose enemy enchantments or flesh if I decided to play hand-to-hand without going into Form because that's just about the aforementioned combat application. I'm talking about the ability to decompose any material without any residue, fully and completely, preserving every shade, every concept, every crumb of essence, from garbage slag to the rarest treasures that can be extracted from a whole ton of material.

Let's just say that if I tell a fellow classmate that I have this stuff at only second class rank, they will try to kill me, just out of black envy, because it shouldn't be like that, because it doesn't work like that! The ability to work with essence so accurately opens up such possibilities that I seriously wondered how the development of combat and crafting classes goes. To be honest, taking into account my personal opinion and experience of leveling, such an enhancement would be relevant for the third rank, even if not for the final enhancement, but still the third rank, not the second.

Based on what I've seen, the crafting classes have more potential, a more clearly directed and branched tree of possibilities opened by the things they create. Yes, even the Mystic Alchemist, if he's drunk on his potions up to his eyebrows, will lose to an equally leveled Shadow Overlord - the combination of Form, Aegis, and Manifestation will leave no chance in direct combat, and any chance of victory for the alchemist will have to be an attempt to catch the Shadow user on a lovingly prepared and extremely powerful billet. The Overlord of Dreams and Reflections will also gut this unfortunate alchemist up, most likely working in a weaving style, not showing up at all, not just on the horizon, not even within the same region, if not country.

But.

If the potions of the Mystical Alchemist drunk to intoxication, remove intoxication and once again drunk to intoxication, not some mere alchemist, even if mythical and Mystical, even if able to show something in battle, but the same Overlord... Agree. This is a completely different picture, fundamentally in a different league. What if the alchemist and planarist are the same person? If he doesn't just create perfectly matched complexes of compositions but also brews them for himself, taking advantage of class skills and perks? Here comes the synergy, frantic and merciless, absurd and causing a nervous tic in anyone. Perhaps, after closing this ability, I will have to completely renew the stock of elixirs and potions because now it will come out to make a significantly cooler, a quarter, if not a third. Of course, it will take a lot of effort - such a complete cleavage will require a lot more time than I usually spend on such tasks, but it's worth it.

However, after thinking about it, I decided not to rush, waiting for a full recovery and just creating the most necessary things, the stock of which showed the bottom, even without much emphasis on quality. For one thing, straining all your strength for the sake of creating, say, a legendary lineup doesn't add to your health either, shaking up your shell, your psyche, and your common sense - the flight of Inspiration doesn't seem dangerous against the backdrop of Hunger or Variability, but the consequences of giving in to that concept aren't any less dire. Something, I don't want to become a typical mad scientist... or a walking anomaly, a living alchemical furnace, that consumes and splits not just everything in its path, even the universe itself along with its concepts. Secondly, it's silly to do the job twice - it makes sense to sit down for stock upgrades when I close the concentration of the composition, which has one point left, and maybe throw in a couple of points in the least pumped effect fixing. Ideally, I'd like to take the third rank and reduce the gap because the Overlord will close that third rank soon, but that's a thought for another time - I'll be scattering the free points later, probably after a long Buridan Donkey-style torture.

The transition to the brightest, most emotionally evocative, positive, and negative part of the Status came with a heavy sigh. I was ready both to rejoice at the new reinforcements and to regret all that I had lost in return and to read the not-so-subtle trolling of the System, which never missed an opportunity to troll the ego of a summoned Hero. I'd earned more than one or two titles, so I had to have patience to spare. It's like being trolled on a forum where you've been banned from posting reply comments. I have to read the mockery of the All-Seeing One, and the only counterargument is the ring, whose anti-admin ability should really be considered the last resort, next to which even the nuclear weapons of the old Earth will turn out to be complete bullshit.

Well, what's the point of procrastination? I'll have to do it sooner or later anyway, and I can survive the trolling because Anonymous, who has never taken moral kicks in the name of eternal battle with the wrong ones, is a bad one. The only difference here is that someone is very wrong not on the Internet but directly in the controlling mechanism of the universe, and that's why it won't work to write a dirty comment. Or will it? It is necessary to look for a section in Status for sending complaints or feedback regarding the quality of services rendered.... although, if such a thing existed, the world would probably look very different.

Others Payback (Legendary): Thousands of souls are a small price to pay in exchange for your own. You, more than anyone else, have learned this truth, perfectly able to pay for power, luck, victory, and triumph with other people's lives, other people's pain, other people's despair, and other people's fates. More power at the right moment, less risk where it is inevitable? Or perhaps the heart-wrenching power of someone else's strength to try to make their own? Or even an attempt to save someone else's existence by surrendering the tenacious grip of nothingness to someone else, cheating the inevitable? You can do all of the above and more. You know better than anyone what the price of life, death, or what's in between is. You are perfectly able to repay that debt taken from others. Bonus: +5 to all stats except class stats; +1 class skill point; increased effectiveness of sacrificial rituals and techniques; instinctive understanding of the value of other people's lives and the most effective way to dispose of them, tied to clairvoyance.

Well, it was expected, but if I had the strength and opportunity now, I would cut this title out of me myself, along with the meat, pieces of the shell, and the corresponding part of the soul, using the same essentialism or Grip instead of a scalpel. The role of anesthesia would easily be played by rabid hatred and the same concentrated contempt for myself. I'm used to despising others, not myself. It's easier for me to live that way, and here is such an occasion to fall into self-examination, to feel myself a "trembling creature with a right"! This title literally stank. It's stank of a hundred years of the unventilated slaughterhouse, and any freak who would have such a title in the Status when communicating with me would be waiting for a very funny interrogation and even more funny consequences. And then - here you are, Kostenka, a sweet present, a pie with shit still warm!

And the most frustrating thing here is that I got a legendary fucking title! I got it on the first try, whereas to acquire this particular title, hundreds and thousands of all kinds of slaughterers of innocent virgins on altars work for years, decades. And develop this title gradually, cultivating it from an unusual or rare rank to epic, and only at the top of the career acquire a legendary confirmation of their professionalism. The fact that I had enough of one ritual, albeit a very large-scale, extremely complex one with several hundred small superstructures and an extremely fastidious selection of material, speaks a lot, mostly in profanity.

I had realized before that I was not using my classes to their full potential, that there were areas of the same work with Dream where the material could not be avoided, where it not only made the path easier but also made it more efficient, faster, safer, no matter how strange it sounded. I, however, with a persistence worthy of a better application, as well as with a persistence worthy of the best hookah houses, did not want to heed the hints, working on my own and not descending to the most obvious and, therefore, bloody options. And here I am.

What's more frustrating is how profitable this forced act turned out to be! There's a title with bonus attributes and a skill point and the development of a very specific branch of clairvoyance which will be strengthened in the general plan, and even, damn it, the pumping of class skills if my memory serves me correctly. And I could have gotten even more, if I hadn't been looking for complete scum (or just scum, not quite complete yet) but had chosen the most suitable options. Even the damn System, issuing the title not only did not send in his description of the next jokes but almost praised, saying, well done, Konstantin Yurievich, keep it up, you're on the right track!

I wanted to tear throats or punch faces, but only my own throat and face were within reach, and self-torture would not only look very stupid but would also alarm the team. I wanted terribly to invent a beautiful fairy tale, to calm my long-buried conscience, and to prove to myself that I was still all in white and that the circumstances, the invading devils, the victims of my ritual, the weather, the bad Internet connection and the American society lynching Negroes were to blame for everything. But I'm good, I'm allowed, I have an explanation and need to be understood, I don't have to explain anything to anyone.

But that doesn't seem to me to be the right thing to do. It's not about conscience, honor, or humanity towards those you would kill if you had to, no. It's about the very morality of this world that keeps trying to sprout in me, and it's also about the fact that I've recently seen where deals with one's own conscience can lead. Those whose soul lights were left by Giver also considered themselves right, also had a logical and completely understandable from their point of view justification for their own actions, that they were good, just circumstances were so, and in general, it was not for you to judge. It stimulates, you know, if not humanity, then caution.

I thought to myself that if I had a chance, I would cut this nasty thing out of me if only to avoid seeing every passerby and even my companions as pieces of meat. It's not so noticeable, but even without looking at the Status, I noticed this detail, already suspecting the presence of changes in myself and something similar to this title. That's probably why I met the news relatively calmly, with a ready-made opinion about it. Alas, if I understand anything at all, it is that, before operating on myself, I shall have to experiment at length on suitable subjects.... which will only put me deeper in the hole. It's been complicated for a long time, and it seems like forever.

All right, let's move on.

Supreme Combining (Legendary): Strategic spells have always been the domain of a select few, and activating them requires a great deal of training and expertise, especially if the attack combines several consecutive blasts of energies from different planes. You have managed to strike with a power worthy of crushing armies. And you actually crushed this army, showing not only power, not only the art of weaving the effects of charms together, but also competent tactics, the ability to choose the moment, and, of course, a lot of luck. Quickly, with minimal preparation, in conditions of time and resource scarcity - this is not a smart approach, but it certainly proved to be effective and deserves a reward. Bonus: +5 to all stats except class stats; +2 class skill points; a clear understanding of the degree of conflict between different energies, as well as the weaknesses of complex strategic-level charms; slightly increased control of planar manifestation conflict.

Here, you can see right away that I did a good job. If the System admits my intelligence and the ability to use it, it means I definitely did not do anything similar to what was described in the previous title, even if I almost died and then repeated it for an encore. The most important reward, as usual, is not in the number of attributes or even in the double number of free points, but only and only in the last listed bonus. The reduction of planar energy conflict... is simply beyond words - it's undoubtedly only because of this title that I've been able to work so fully with Broken Edge while still fighting in Form. Yes, it's not a cheater's ability to combine two planes like Jerem, but I'm not a priest with the support of a god behind me and the ability to switch to Avatar mode at any time.

Basically, to give clear examples, now, if I mix Dream and Shadow, it won't explode immediately, but half a second later. Well, maybe even a second later. If I put a whole lot of effort into it. And it's far from leveling conflict because it's impossible to cheat this law of local magic, not with such methods, not with a legendary title. Just a clearer sense of its own energy, combined with a perk for high concentration, giving close to perfect control of its own power. Due to such sensitivity, it is possible to keep the flows of planar forces under control, avoiding the exchange of the smallest particles, because of which the chain reaction begins in a magical way. But this trick really works for a few moments, after which the "reaction of planar conflict," which, in fact, can be equated to the "reaction of nuclear decay" (with the difference that on Alurei, there are other analogs of nuclear power - just as dangerous and destructive, which everyone hopes to subdue), still comes and makes a boom. In the case of trying to apply two plans simultaneously and to one person - the boom comes, as before, instantly because the source of the two plans is right in you, and you are already imbued with these plants as a carrier of the classes tied to them.

This title makes it easier to create combined techniques of the "there was a fortified fortress" level, allowing me to strike more effectively from across the horizon, especially when teaming up with my companions. I think that now, with a stock of mirrors and at least a couple of hours, I'll be able to repeat that attack even without sacrifices, purely on my own power, control, and mirror support. Maybe I could weave a couple of specialized nightmares out of pure Dream, but that would take much longer than a couple of hours, more like a couple of days - no experience in this business, no normal technical specifications, and without them, the result is not very good. I haven't created almost living nightmares, acting not only in someone's dreams but also autonomously. I tried some things during my stay at the Orc's camp, but just some things, without making serious progress, stopping at the very beginning. Not out of fear or unwillingness - I worked with the same Shadows quite consciously, but there were always more promising directions of development. And even now, there are, to be honest.

But it is obviously necessary to practice super long-range combined and sequential strikes on stationary targets. In the wild lands, there is a lot of free space where you can make planar breakthroughs, but no one will bother. Well, unless you call mythical creatures or, say, not to tear the fabric of reality in an area of several tens of kilometers, but this I do not intend to do, as it seems. I guess not. So, it would be a good idea to let Tia check my plan before I put it into action. Or else, if I slightly distort some flow, organize synchronous pulsation of different segments of the structure, and it will turn, blow up, redirect, and it will be funny for all of us, and there will be one less capital of some border kingdom in the world.

Eh, how I would like to pump this branch to the end, to strengthen the defense and just wipe out the fixation points, like the famous Stone, without leaving the embrace of the Green Tits, fortress after fortress, one after another. And to go nowhere! And also the Internet and unlimited access to torrents! And resurrect the old 4chan! I've already got a mouth-rolling machine, thank you. The truth, alas, is that even if you put all the available forces into this tactic, even if you somehow set aside the factor of divine intervention, they'll still crush you.

Tia's story about the black eater ща other's livers colorfully hints that you can only sit in your far corner until the trouble you cause outweighs the loss of smoking the annoying individual out of his hole. Since the trouble I create directly affects and shakes the house of literally all major players of Alurei political life, even from neighboring continents, not only the local population, will come to kick me. And would kick for sure. Even if I can make my first success quite resounding. If I try hard and don't get cocky, changing my position every time and attacking from the farthest points, I'll flounder for a lot longer, and if I'm lucky, I'll also make everyone quarrel so that they fight, and I don't have to go through the trouble.

Yes, perhaps this tactic should be practiced later, at least on the remnants of the megalith I finally broke down seemingly forever ago. Patch it up a bit. Put on some defenses, and then open up those defenses nicely with one attack. We'll improve our teamwork skills and just learn new tactics. Even the oldest of us - the elf and the deviless somehow never took part in such schemes. They knew the theory. They knew the simple magic circles, too. But if they had to work as cannon, it was on a smaller, much smaller scale. Different specializations and different directions of development. It's just silly to put Giver or Tia in such a position. It's like forcing tanks to fight in urban areas without infantry cover. As if they can do something, they have strength, magic, they won't screw up the ritual. But in reality, their element is completely different, and to put specialists like them in such an unnatural position is only to ruin their potential. I'm sure the Star Seer was just as much a first-time participant in such madness as the rest of us, having been given a similar or even the same title as mine.

Ultimate Carnage (mythical): you have already proven to yourself and the world that even Legends die. You have seen many more Legends than is statistically possible, so you are no longer frightened of meeting a Legendary. But this day, you have crossed all boundaries of caution, self-preservation, common sense, and chance theory. In less than one day, you have met and defeated not one Legendary, not two, not even three! You slew them in direct combat, with the support of the Legends' allied forces, and sometimes there was more than one Legend at a time. Even just meeting such a large number of outstanding entities already seemed like a bad dream, an unrealistic fantasy, or drunken bragging. You didn't just meet them. You didn't just fight them, but you defeated everyone and anyone who stood in your way at that hour. A massacre the likes of which will never be repeated, an absolute, erected quintessence of ruthless battle. Ideals, lofty goals, thirst for victory, passion for exaltation - it makes no difference because it was you, who managed to stay alive, stepping over the corpses of the defeated Legends, in whose stories you put fat and bloody point. Bonus: +30 to all stats except class stats; +10 to all class stats; +6 class skill points; noticeable densification of energy body and increased effectiveness of all skills and activated effects of titles and attribute achievements; significantly increased resistance to all negative effects; significantly increased effectiveness of skill development; Slaughter without Hope has no Limit.

Again, a title with a mythical grade and, this time, with rewards that can be calculated in numbers. Of course, I've said many times that the most useful bonuses are not hidden in the pluses of stats and attributes, but it's still nice to the eye. Especially in the amount I see now, and nothing cut up like my Stone reward. I reread it several times and then recalculated some details from memory, finally coming to a logical conclusion. Apparently, the System counted each Legend I killed personally or with my participation, giving five points to each stat and one skill point, while class attributes were counted simply at five per kill... I mean just five, not five to all three class stats. Then, however, I realized that I had messed up somewhere, or the System didn't count the same chaotic man that I killed under the guise of Pypysh "Owl" Reborn, even though he had also passed the fifty mark.

I didn't try to take offense at the lost profits. Still, comparing it to when I, as a Hero, had my Legend Maker reward cut to the bare minimum quickly cooled down my slightly smoldering ass. And so it worked out pretty well, to put it bluntly. Again, numbers are nice, sure, but with the advent of Form and its development into a max, pure numbers didn't exactly stop playing a role but became somewhat secondary to class abilities. I mean, I realize that even if the Form can multiply the same Strength stat, it's one thing if the multiplier becomes a hundred and another if it becomes a hundred and fifty. Again, don't forget about multiples in attributes because Moment of Eternity is just stupid to underestimate, as well as any manipulation of time in general - the late bitch-prince explained very clearly how chronomancy makes you an imba bastard.

It was a bit more difficult to feel and understand how much the title had strengthened me in aspects that could not be expressed in numbers. I was feeling sick and weak. It blurred the overall picture. The strengthening of any charms and influences, such as a canopy of silence from the title or even passive perks is very easy to distinguish in normal conditions. Especially if they increase by increasing the density and saturation of the shells of the thin body... but if you're in a battered and beaten body... But if you are in a battered and under-healed state, it becomes too complicated. There is no way to rely on any indicator. Unless you check purely resistance to influences in some specialized ritual..... but why? It is really easier to wait for recovery and not to torture neither myself, Tia, or my subtle bodies.

What really got me thinking was the very nature of titles as a phenomenon. What is their nature, why do they appear and how are they formed? So, it is quite obvious that each title is a kind of mutation - positive or negative - which seems to create a new organ in your nature that plays the right role. Hence all these pluses to attributes, which are, to put it very simplistically, the muscular framework for the new organ. Skill points come from the same root cause - a new energy node, a soul superstructure, if you like, expands this very soul-essence, and after it the shells also expand, allowing to "hang" something new on the new superstructure. On some superstructures more is hung on, on others less, on others only a part of attributes is strengthened, and some add nothing at all, strengthening qualitatively, but without the possibility of calculation.

This knowledge is not alphabetical, but it is quite accessible to those who study the topic of their own development in depth. So elves, with their cautiousness in leveling and paranoid unwillingness to contaminate themselves with the loss of endowment, willy-nilly delve into these matters. And the noble maiden of the stars, though she beat me with a pillow for a very funny (and I can't be persuaded otherwise, even if there are no whole pillows left in all of Arenam) joke, but she couldn't refuse the opportunity to train Konstantin Yurievich at least in the theoretical part. In general, I never became an academician, but I was not a scholar, just not knowing what exactly he was doing and how he did it.... although, who am I lying to, I didn't stop being such an idiot, I just improved the situation a little.

Back to the subject of titles.

They are mainly the result of your own actions, whereas the All-Seeing System only simplifies its fixation, so to speak, germinating the very superstructure and giving a little wider choice in the use of its fruits. I think, even without this System, without the reading of Status, it is quite realistic to get such superstructures. Sources of local thinkers, ranging from theorists, sages, and natural scientists to warlocks who have cognized the depths of other people's insides and souls, agree on some issues, excluding many nuances (as in that anecdote about Chapaev) and even more issues on which the points of view are diametrically opposed.

T.N. Peter asked Chepayev what a nuance was.

"Turn around and bend over," Chepayev said. And put his dick in Peter's ass. "See. You have a dick in the ass and I have a dick in the ass. But there's the nuance."

According to their opinions, titles-additions received outside the All-Seeing, which is called as such even more often than the System, will not germinate instantly but rather long, gradually, and with some risks of losing a part of themselves. Here, the System gives a plus, considering the result made, spurring the work of your own essence. It's not simplifying, not making the process safer, despite leveling some of the risks but accelerating it. You receive and grow the superstructure, put it on yourself, exclusively by yourself. But it is the System that allows you to distribute the received skill point for some legendary title on your own because without it, this point, or rather, the potential of the improvement granted by the superstructure, will be distributed by itself immediately, obeying subconscious desires and the actions you have taken and which provoked the sprouting of the mental superstructure. It is the same with attribute distribution and class pumping. Without control over Status, such precision cannot be achieved. Some theories even assume that the same stats, five per level, will not appear at once five but gradually, as gradual will be the transition from one step of the Ladder of Elevation to another.

Simpler, but more complicated.

Faster, but more dangerous.

It is just crazy, and it is not a figure of speech. The number of scientific men with classes that aimed at the cognition of the Universe, who went cuckoo precisely because of in-depth study of this topic, is higher than the number of madmen in other directions. It's proven scientific fact by the Neitmak Ministerium of Statistics with the support of many independent researchers from other countries (with access to the archives of these states)!

It would seem that there are clear rules. Here are proofs of the theory, but here we come to the exceptions, which are almost more numerous than the cases subject to the rule. Take, for example, my very first title, which is Silent Assassin. It is not really even a title because its main effect is displayed in the Special tab, i.e. in perks. Incidentally, it's the only one of my titles that gave me a ready-made magic skill and an activatable, "turn the switch and it's done" level without even needing to understand the nature of the trick! How do you justify that? After all, you can't say that I took and mastered everything myself, and the System only organized and accelerated the formation. You can't say that at all. At that moment, I really felt as if I had gotten the mute button, using it as that very button.

That, by the way, is a very rare effect, though reliably documented..... thanks to the summoned in the first place. The point is that anyone can get such "bugs" in Status, but only in theory. In practice, you have to be very, very low-level to make a sharp breakthrough upwards and still get a title, and not an easy one at that. That is, literally the first, in extreme cases, the second level to do some feat that stresses you so much that getting the title becomes inevitable. For obvious reasons, it's easier to pull this kind of thing off than it is for the summoned, who, even at the first level, can perform a great deal of hard work compared to the first-level locals. Well, there are still all sorts of local geniuses, talents, or just children of rich parents who will provide their bread sons and daughters with all the ways for a sharp думудштп.

As a result of the numerous kills I had committed as a second level, as a result of the deed in progress, during which I had slaughtered a small mob of quite equal or superior monsters, I really needed to be quiet. Because if those goblins woke up at the most inconvenient moment, I would be quickly and ignominiously killed. And this desire, reinforced by other deaths, shells disintegrating from the actions of my hands, the echo of the interrupted fates of green freaks, resulted not just in a superstructure-title but in a full-fledged mutation of the energy body. Rigid, devoid of flexibility, tied to a single skill - the creation of silence. And this mutation was directed and created by the System, and it was here that the participation of the All-Seeing Bastard was much more than my own!

As a result, I still have this silence in the hall in my Status, even though I can ensure stealth in many other, more convenient and reliable ways. Yes, I have mastered this, in fact, a talent similar to those of class-deprived creatures or gifted skills. Yes, I had learned to use it with a virtuosity that was not originally calculated and unintended. But this thing still hangs, if not as a dead weight, then as a useless weight, taking space from something else, something that is really mine and not the result of a system fluctuation. Strangely enough, such malfunctions in the "character sheet" do not harm endowment as such.... well, not as often, and not in my case. But I could have added about half a percent to my current energy reserve if I didn't have this shit in my Status, not to mention a slightly slower, five or six percent, level progression.

That's how it is. That's why they try to swing evenly at low levels, not to chase after the opportunity to take a legendary sword and chop fast levels, even if there is such an opportunity. To avoid crippling, if not the souls, then energy. I'm still lucky that absurdly developed stats allowed me to use mutation more flexibly, more correctly, and more naturally. At this rate, if I really work on it - and Tia won't get off my back until I fix my mistakes - I'll be able to turn this shit from a broken title into a normal perk or talent. There are methods, there are statistics, and with my levels, essentialism skills, and abilities like Thedt, Creation, or Web, you can only fail by doing nothing. That's almost a direct quote from the elven executioner-dictator.

She, by the way, did not condemn me for the fact of having a broken gift because I had no choice at all and just quite successfully acted even with such a light handicap. Here's for the fact that all this time, I did not try if not to fix the wrong, then at least to understand why the fuck one of the titles is so different from the rest that became closer to the perk than to the title ... let's just say that if the judgmental stare skill was displayed in the logs, Tia's would have jumped a mythical bar.

And what theories there are about the nature of the origin and realization of some titles! Take, for example, the same Legend Seer - it would seem simple. Catch and bind some stronger creature, then take your soldiers to look at it like a museum, free raising a lot of undocumented levels for the entire army. But here it is, it doesn't work like that - dangerous and evil Legend must be in the wild, initially hostile and wanting to do something bad to you if it catches up with you, find you hiding, or reaches its hands (paws, claws, tentacles, false legs or other outgrowths). There are a lot of assumptions, and the most different. It seems that the most popular among elves, as well as personally with Tia, is the version that, crossing with the Legend, with the pulsation of its destiny, a set of images that make up the imprint of the legendary creature in clairvoyance, your own essence, the destiny of your existence, your Fatum, if you want to say so, gets a part of the pulse of this Legend, which makes it possible to adjust.

Indirectly this version is proved by the fact that it is the adepts of the Law of Fate, followers of the indifferent Fatum, the father of Fortune (the only two supreme and ancient deities that girdle at least all the neighboring worlds of Alurei, which embody only the Law and have no planar source of power), can work with titles, leveling and gaining classes, albeit limitedly. In theory, such a fate-weaver can almost directly control Status, adding titles and classes for those feats that are yet to come. There are also rumors that Heroes have their initial advantages, like three or even five classes at the first level, just by working with the Law of Destiny. And it's also the Heroes, and to a lesser extent the Legends, who are best suited to counteract the lawmen who work with Fate... well, in the sense that they're still... well, in the sense that they're even more effective than usual. It's hard, you know, to find anyone that a Hero is useless against.

Alas, it is simply impossible to normally explore the workings of the Law of Fate as well as the priestly Miracles of the servants of Fatum. If there are owners of such skills, then no one knows about them, not even hints, and if there were, they floated up together with those who searched for something according to these hints. There are individual titles, skills, abilities, or even granted talents for this sharpening, but full-fledged classes are somehow almost non-existent. Tia, for example, does not know of a single confirmed case of receiving such a class, nor did the archives available to her know about it. There were only unverified rumors and those very "shards" in the form of separate abilities or especially rare artifacts. Psychics, again, with proper development, especially if you go into the branch of prophecies rather than classical clairvoyance or precognition, also learn to shake this Law. Well, stagger it a little bit. A little bit. And, of course, the Gods, a priori working with any Laws, including Fate, simply due to divinity, but there it is approximately at the same level, at which I can use, let's say, the stopping of time by pure idiocy. If I have time to react in time.

Geez, all I did was think about testing the limits of my new title while being somewhat out of shape.

You start thinking about anything but logs, honestly!

The Myth Killer (mythical): the embodiment of Lust, the limit of Vice, the embodiment of the essence of a whole domain, of a separate world with its own laws and rules, which has no other name but the recognition of its Sovereign, lasted for ages, to the joy of itself and to the woe of those who fell into the cycle of its endless Chorus. How long was the song of Vice? How long was the agony of an orgy in the timelessness of passionate Lust, which seemed to have no beginning and no destined end? The answer to this question could not be given even by the being who led, created, and imposed this torture, restraining the victims with their personal and common Hell. But by your efforts, the exact date, place, and circumstances became clear when it seemed the eternal torture had come to an end, forever. The Sovereign of souls of his own and others remained in the memory of the world an ancient nightmare, a legend of deep antiquity, a Myth horrifying in its truthfulness about those he had once taken for himself. And that Myth has been struck down, destroyed, disembodied, and devoured, and it is to you, the Last of the Four, that the dubious honor of delivering the decisive blow has been given. We can call it neither foolishness nor luck, for these words will not convey a hundredth of the truth, but this reward is yours by right. Bonus: (reduced by a quarter): +38 to all stats except class stats, +8 free class ability points; noticeable increase in the efficiency of free class development; Alien Melodies - The Last Note.

Again the mythical title. Again doubts in the intellectual capacity of poor me by the mouth of the System, and also again, as once with Legend, the reduction of part of the reward due to the fact that the enemy was eaten by the Shadows. Only this time, it took away not half, but only a quarter - whether the factor of Armada was taken into account and not accidentally opened on the bare nativities of the breach. Where, by the same accident, something very strong was crawling nearby, or whether the fact that there were four of us fighting there at once, and not just me alone, played a role. But, having thought it over, I decided on Armada because my blows were strong, my wounds were painful, and everything, but the summoned creatures were still eating the creeper.

Not particularly tricky math shows that the full reward would be fifty attribute points and a full ten class enhancements, but even taking away a quarter leaves this title as perhaps the fattest in terms of numerical gains, surpassing even the previous one. But given the lack of pluses to Shadows, Dreams, and Inspiration, I wouldn't call the Myth Killer so fucking awesome. I mean, I'm certainly picky to get a huge amount of pure attributes,... there are no buts about it. It's just that ordinary people have to work their whole lives for such a thing and still won't get a third of it - thirty-eight, let's round up to thirty-five, points in each attribute, damn it! A total of six items, each of which got the analog of seven levels of investment, which gives an output of forty-two levels. Just imagining such a situation and trying to say "it's not enough" is already much harder morally - even my impudence has limits, it turns out.

Once again, the most important thing is hidden in plain sight, pretending to be just a low-value bonus to what you already have. I'm talking about the simplification of class advancement. The first time I've encountered such an effect, I've never received anything like it before and never even heard of it. It makes sense because any artifact that has such an effect without comparable damage would be a model-esque fight. Alurei made his children internalize a simple truth almost at the level of an innate reflex: it was stupid and dangerous to pump a class without investing points. Yes, talented people still now and then develop themselves in this way. Yes, a lot of heirs of rich families all over the world try to close at least half of the first rank of the class, and even the second class is generally accepted to develop their own efforts at first. Yes, all the prominent personalities of this world are just famous, in one way or another, for being badass when pumping.

But all this has a limit, and after it, free development happens either as a result of long years of labor, when years of research, training, exhausting exercises, and constant practice will give a cherished point in the ability of the second or even third rank, or the case of an infinitely risky force majeure, when you were put in front of the need to step above your head, just not to die. We will not take into account individual individuals who live in such a rhythm constantly. They spoil the statistics.

And here I am presented with an increased output from training, which, in theory, will allow me to make a small but relatively safe step forward not for decades of labor but for a year or two. Or, given my shitty life, I will have to not step, figuratively speaking, under a train, using a tea bag instead of protection, but, at the very least, jump under a paver and use a real shovel for self-defense! I mean that the bar of risk followed by a reward will be lowered - I won't risk less but I will develop faster with the same inputs.

There's not much more to say, other than I'm surprised I didn't get blown to hell. So many suddenly increased characteristics can make you repeat the fate of a hamster fed a drop of nicotine. Let's keep going, the ending is getting closer.
Капля никотина.

Myth Creator: Salvation of Eternity (mythical): the river of time mercilessly erases the memory of the few legends worth remembering, manuscripts burn, and legends are forgotten, whole peoples that remembered those legends pass into oblivion. But among these stories, there are those that cannot be forgotten even after millennia, traces of which will remain in memory, imprinted in stones, carried away by the winds and rise even from the ashes, stories that, no longer being only Legends, will go into the infinity of the future as ancient Myths, shining glory and shame on those who were once there, on one side or the other. The fall of the City of Eternal, a city doomed to a terrible fate, was predetermined, and there seemed to be no chance of avoiding it. But some believed, some hoped, and some simply denied even the obvious, imposing their will on Hell itself. Was it stupidity, naivety, simple lack of understanding of the situation, lack of choice, or something else that pushed you into this battle? We don't know the answer, but you were there too, even if you didn't want to. You also fought, saving those you hated. You also refused to accept what was prepared, renouncing yourself and rediscovering the renounced. You are rightfully given this reward. Bonus: +5 to all stats, including class stats; +1 class ability point; significantly reduces wear and tear on the subtle body and accelerates the rate of recovery of energetic, mental, and spiritual injuries; Killing to Perish - Falling to Rise. Note: your reward as a Hero is significantly reduced.

I lay silent for a few minutes, just staring at the ceiling, unable to make myself stop smiling. That was the reason for such a smooth and painless recovery, such a good feeling, and almost no problems with self-control, which were bound to appear in the background of withdrawal after my adventures. After such a gift, no amount of cutting the reward could spoil my mood or take the grin off my face. The only thing I recognize as more useful than this foolproof is the Price of Humanity, but I wouldn't trade it for even fifty skill points and two hundred attributes. Honestly, I can't say, and never will, that it was worth it to stay in Eternal for a couple of hours and end up in a bind, but this reward cools my rocket-powered ass a little. I don't know how I can make this smile go away and ruin my mood. I don't know at all.

Inhale, focus on the mirror network, find the signature, make the connection, and exhale.

Losius, sitting in the living room, who had just returned from a workout, turned his head lazily, tucking his hair into a ponytail as the small tray of light food rippled, reflecting not the fruit, pastries, and sweets on the tray, but my tired face. He even brazenly saluted me with a cupcake, although the vase with them was right on the forehead and eyes of my image-reflection. At the training session, he, who did not use the sword abilities, was slightly but respectfully kicked by a bloodsucker, though inferior in many ways, but too dangerous in close combat of any kind,

"Greetings, Tin." A little tired but contentedly gives out this sweet-toothed. "Did you know that blood suspension, when used properly, destabilizes heavenly techniques, even initially rigid ones like monolithic barriers or peace domes?"

I blinked. The question was asked so suddenly as if the teacher was in an exam, and you didn't even know the teacher's name, let alone the name of the subject, and then I thought seriously, considering the facts I knew, as well as the information I had learned from Tia. We didn't discuss the subject directly, but if we generalize some aspects and add to them an instinctive understanding of many nuances due to the developed essentialism and the leveled class, it's not so difficult to answer. It's just like an exam. You don't know shit, but when you're in a hurry, you'll remember even things you've never heard of.

"Well, actually, yes, it can." He thought about it so much that if it weren't for the mirror's algorithm, the image would have begun to flicker and flake, but even if the network covers against such lapses, that's no reason to relax when working with Dream. "That is. The essence, the blood techniques almost all work on it, is based on the process of redecay, of bubbling. And the bloodsuckers, as a part, even a very small part, of dead creatures, blood is in a stable state in a state of rest and satiety, but it is worth them to disperse the body for a fight, as they boil the blood. That is why Heaven wounds them. Its peace dampens the fluctuations, calms the boiling, traumatizing the bodies and shells of creatures whose part of the stock has frozen and part has not. It can tear them to pieces, but more often, it just burns them when they reflexively draw in the remnants of the frozen power, crippling themselves. And Heaven itself hits, too, even without that effect."

Losius even stopped eating, listening intently to the unexpected lecture I wasn't going to give. The quietly entered bloodsucker, by the way, is also listening, not in a hurry to show herself to the duelist's eyes. I'm going to get to the heart of the matter, but so far, it's all introductory and doesn't really answer the original question.

"But where there is power, there is a way to counteract it." I give out, feeling like an oriental sage, forcing young talents to learn the unearthly wisdom and the benefits of washing floors for the development of dyantan. "In the sense that if you charge the blood with enough potential and boil it to the limit, literally vaporizing it, and from this distillate, which can't be drawn back and absorbed even by a creature sharpened to absorb essences, then with such a projectile you can shatter the celestial monolith in such a way that would be great, my respect."

I turned to the attentively listening creature, simply clarifying a detail important from my point of view, completing the picture of the training duel. It was so vivid that it took me a few seconds to realize that it was me using clairvoyance and Dream, looking into the reflections that had captured the sparring.

"You used a single spit, then the same single projectile, but several at the same time, and only gave off a full-fledged cloud towards the end, right?" I clarify, waiting for confirmation as well as some explanation. "There, you see for yourself. You should use not monoliths against such techniques but layered barriers or simply press with the depth of the technique, stopping and calming not the energy itself, not even a section of space, but the very process of formation of the essence. You're good at that, I know you are, but you're going to have to fight in close combat, right?"

Short and very full of back-and-forth banter argument, lasted for about five minutes, during which Losius was forced to admit that he had been wrong to think that he could out-fencing the creature in a clinch. She did not fence but fought the way it was used to, simply crushing the nobleman who had not expected such a pace. Then she had to eat a little, but she still had a lot of bad guys in her cellars, not to mention the fact that she could not drink to the bottom. But in a straightforward, albeit training, fight, this girl tore Losius apart, and, most offensively for him, quite deservedly so. He could have won even with the initial inputs. But he had to rely not on Heaven but on his dueling skills, and he had to go into a deep defense at the expense of Missed Touch and constant blinking with the support of Absolute Presence. The creature would have thrown him around, kicked him around, and then her battery would have died. Bloodsuckers are very dangerous, but they are dangerous for a very short time, deflating quickly if they don't have a chance to fill the gas tank.

"Okay, that's it, I get it." Losius, whether he had learned his lesson or just wanted to rest properly, but he closed the topic. "Why did you make the connection in the first place?"

He doesn't ask why he didn't walk, thank the tits. He's seen me in the chair, and he knows how hard it is to stay on my feet for long periods, even now. Damn, it would be much easier for me to create shadow tentacles out of my bare power and crawl here like Dr. Octopus on them than walk here on my feet.

"Аh?" The question didn't reach me right away, but when it did, I barely restrained the urge to slap myself on the forehead. "Exactly! The question! You got the Myth Creator, right? I deliberately tried to filter myself from everything related to development so as not to hurt my wounds and my super-sensitive heart."

"Yeah, got it." If there had been a bucket of lemons nearby, I would have teleported it right onto the tray, but as it was, I only had to exhale a little essence, drag it through the mirror (given my network, it wasn't hard at all, and the disguise was already maximized), and drop it on the brownies and muffins, making them taste very lemony. "This day has given me a lot. And it's taken a lot away..."

At the last phrase, the contentment left the face of the joyful aristocrat, replaced by a grimace extremely incomprehensible but certainly not light, and his hand involuntarily reached to his chest, where under the training clothes was hidden a heart pierced by a shard of the Golden Needle. It was not easier for him, and he gave too much, no matter how much benefit he could get in return. And he realized it himself, trying his best to master the change and not let it change him too much... and also to stop trolling Taria, who regularly gave him a nervous tic, knocking him out of the unhealthy calm he'd fallen into at first when distracted and out of combat mode. The poor guy had stopped falling into the Heavens long ago. His hardened will have subdued the changes in himself, putting them to work instead of the other way around. Only Taria did not stop her jokes, continuing to grind the skill of annoyance, even though it was not in the Status.... seemingly.

"Can you please state the extent of the reward you received?" Carefully I ask a rather cavalier question in Alurei's morality, to which I already guess the answer. "I only want the numerical increases, not the entire bonus, if anything."

"Like I'd send you to the devils for asking such questions, Tin." Losius almost laughed, but then he did. Even the mosquito in the far chair, who had decided not to leave and listen to the argument, especially since she had room to insert a comment or two, and I had asked for an answer about her tactics a couple of times, covered her face with a book, hiding a chuckle. "Tin, your attempts to keep to the rules of politeness and tact are like the rummaging of a duke who's drunk a hundred different poisons, afraid to eat poorly washed fruit lest he get an upset stomach."

I make an indignant look, which I can't see from under the vases covering the mirror, and then I can't stand it and laugh too. I remembered about modesty and good manners. In the meantime, Losii, having laughed off, glanced at the bloodsucker, who had already risen and intended to leave the room because he didn't want to reveal to her the details of such an intimate thing as the titles he had received. He shook his head and waved his hand, indicating his permission to stay, which caused complex emotions in her. She was pissed off by the very fact that she, in her lair-house, dared to be allowed something by some strange guy, not me, but the opportunity to get closer to our company, to reduce the degree of dislike, could not be underestimated, and so she shoved her discontent deep down. She had already sweetened her pride by beating Losia with a technique that even her dead patriarch knew about only in theory, and she didn't have the strength to use.

Losius, on the other hand, simply replied, detailed and thorough.

I listened, thanked, and left the chat.

Then I checked on Taria. I questioned Tia, who was up to her ears in blueprints and ritual schemes, pestered Hestia, distracting her from another meditation on self-discovery, and congratulated Hans on finding a map of alcohol making that didn't make him allergic (three hours before the side-effect-inducing stuff let him go). He even had a word or two with Ygra, receiving a surprisingly coherent answer and another question about the fate of the "big club."

They answered my question as well. They answered quickly, in detail, honestly, and without any aversion. Even Ygra understood almost immediately what I wanted from her.

I listened to them, too.

Then, already in his room, I stood on trembling legs, waddled to the nearest wall, covered myself with a dome of silence, and cracked my head against the wall several times.

Now it's okay. Now, I'm pissed off again at the systemic injustice and the reward that flew by, which was cut back more than the underpouring of alcohol by clever bartenders on Earth. I can get back to my interrupted activity.

T.N. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Tyd5FbBd1Vk?feature=share

Bastards.

Hell's Perdition (mythical): When announcing another hunt, raid, invasion, or other means of visiting reality, the inhabitants of Hell are never restrained in the means they use, seeking to deliver to their Vice as many souls as they can take, regardless of any attempts at resistance. And, it must be said, they sometimes feel a childish surprise when, in return, guests with bad intentions come to their domains, take their treasures, take their souls, and extinguish their eternal lives. You did not just come as a return visit, no. Your visit left only the walls of the place you visited, and not all of them. This deed cannot be called a raid on Hell simply because it was a full-fledged defeat for centuries to come, knocking the domain marked by your attention out of any possible intrigue, if the domain itself still survives, rather than being destroyed by the neighbors who saw its near-death state. To declare a real war on Hell, even on a tiny part of it, is an act worthy of a mad suicide, wishing for the most terrible death that his mind cannot even think of. The only surprising thing is that you managed to stay alive and even quite reasonably claim victory. And this extremely unlikely outcome has no right to remain unrewarded. Bonus: General reinforcement of the branch of clairvoyant skills and abilities; significant reinforcement of the branch of clairvoyant skills and abilities related to searching for and analyzing any manifestations of fleur, devilish intrigue, conspiracy cults, or other Hell influence; due to an in-depth understanding of the mechanics and laws of flare techniques and soul magic, the effectiveness of any energy attacks against devils and those affected by them is greatly improved; an instinctive understanding of the weaknesses of individual devils, the composition of their sonm, and the most effective battle tactics; greatly improved handling of spatial rifts of any kind; the ability to understand and effectively counter Hell's passageways, breaches, or altar anchors regardless of the type of planar or non-planar power sources used; Unmourned Pain - Tears of the Devil.

I'm starting to get, or rather continue to get, creeped out by these weird additions after mythical titles, because there's clearly something wrong, something wrong, like a clue to something you don't even want to know. I mean, I've been wary of these pithy expressions ever since I got Laugh of Destiny, but now it's a real trend, man. And neither legendary, epic, nor even unique-personal titles showed such bullshit, and there's no one to ask, and not even the mighty elven encyclopedia knows anything. I asked after the Library. Mythical titles are not often received, even less often published, even among elves, and those extremely retouched and devoid of unnecessary details records, which were available on the Fall Executioner level admission, indicate only a certain individuality in the description of each achievement, already starting from the epic rank.

In my case, most likely, a very high level of clairvoyance and affinity with the class, one of the main powers of which is considered to be clairvoyance, plays a role. It's not the System that's weird, giving out strange phrases, but I myself, through the System, look through a piece of closed to visit "code", but, since I don't understand a damn thing what exactly I see, I get a clue in such a streamlined and meaningful form. It's a reason to be proud, but it doesn't make the experience any less strange and unpleasant.

For the rest, I really like this title, both the very moderate trolling from the System and the very yearly rewards. Increased clairvoyance is always nice, and after Eternal, I'm already paranoid about the likelihood of sudden devils, so the increased sensitivity is a good thing here. I already appreciated it, even if I didn't immediately notice the trend - even using the resource of the mirror network rather than my own power. Even if I was completely beaten up, I could find any imprints of devil's prints so easily it wasn't even funny. And not only in Arenam, as it was then, with the investigators who came, but in the whole district, having inadvertently a couple of times created a prophetic hint for those metropolitan and not-so-metropolitan inspectors who missed a couple of weeds.

Even with Giver of Caresses, this reinforcement is very noticeable. She was still being read by me very, very well, though she was trying, trying hard, to hide her essence and not bother my eyes. I even wondered how she felt about my attention and, even more interestingly, her responses were very revealing. If I am not trying to hide my presence, using deceptions or un-existence, then my imprint, the echo of attention, which is present, in one form or another, in all seers in general, seems to her to be very specific.

"Such a thing is commonly referred to, though the wording is superficial in general, as 'happiness soothing' or 'anti-ecstasy flooding'; these are perhaps the most accurate translations from the vicious dialect, lord of mine." Giver, already nearly acclimated to her cultist's weaned body, swooped in on my request to chatter so quickly that it was clearly not without the use of a blink or acceleration. "My memory doesn't have too much related to the questioned topic, but it is acceptable to think I was ordered to forget. The essence of this manifestation is that your presence, not enchantments, not energy, but your presence, and spirit has become less malleable to the fleur, effectively extinguishing its influence and weakening the effects of the abilities it feeds. This makes those like you dangerous, but it also allows you to recognize when you meet almost immediately if it comes to a duel."

In the course of a long and detailed questioning, from which the devil was getting high just beyond the limits of logic and common sense, it became clear that such a title is not entirely unique. However, usually, the effects are weaker or acquired by several consecutive titles at once. Most often, specific classes are tied to the confrontation or even control of Hell. The latter also exist and are very much loved in every sense by the devils because fighting for the souls of such guys and gals is something of a high art, much more valuable than another seduced holy companion. The title does not carry any special danger of being recognized. As long as I am in stealth. As long as I do not go out to fight face to face (even if this face-to-face will be expressed by a duel of seers), it will not be possible to recognize such an anomaly. Well, or Giver is unaware of such tactics, which is not ruled out by her or me. Again, my favorite disguise under someone else's guise or wiping out traces and images also works, but if I fight with one of the devils seriously, without hiding, it's better not to leave any witnesses.

In short, nothing has changed.

Giver joyfully and hoppingly left the place of my grief, once again making me think that she had some effect on me. Not in the sense of direct control of any kind or hypnotic induction (though I'm not sure about that), but her very presence left an uncomfortable feeling, a consequence of conversation and communication. No, not a rock-hard boner, though she could induce that with a few words and gestures. She's so good at plasticity even when possessed, but something else. It was as if I had been scanned and analyzed, understood, and understood, gradually selecting the image and manner of action that would elicit the most noticeable response.

In fact, she had said so from the beginning, and she had not lied about the fact that this process was natural and irrevocable for her on the level of an unconditional reflex if not a heartbeat. But hearing and trying it on for yourself are different things. Completely different. A great excuse to make sure she wasn't lying about getting inside my head if she had enough time. Should I make up some sort of anti-Devil protective amulet designed specifically to level out that infamous "rapprochement setting" of theirs?

Hm.

Hm?

Hm!

I could really try because both Dream and Shadow were good at it, but I'd have to work in different ways. If the shadow amulet will have to be tied to a contract with some Shadow, at the same time fixing in it the effect of theft, to actually steal the sensory mold of the Shadow. Then the devil will read the signature and personality of the Shadow, and it will be very difficult for him. On the other hand, I, too, am more like a Shadow, unfortunate as it may seem, but Giver still senses me and recognizes me by taste, if you will, and that's even more unfortunate. It would be necessary to work seriously with Manifestation, literally shielding myself from the world and almost at the conceptual level preventing me from understanding the amulet bearer. And there will still be pure psychology, but it is much more difficult.

Yeah, I guess Dream has to work here, actually putting on someone else's personality and changing it all the time while using a defense mechanism so as not to go crazy from such metamorphoses. Is a separate reflection equal to a separate personality? And the user gets control over his own body as if it were a puppet, giving the superimposed personalities only point instructions and general direction. This will really work, at least very much complicating the work of the devil's cognition, but it will be very difficult to wear such a thing all the time, fraught with the chance to fuse his thoughts with one of the faces, or vice versa to lose the only true one among a bunch of pretend ones.

On the other hand, why not go the opposite way, distorting not your own self but the devil's perception of it? Create either an amulet or a superimposed effect that makes the devil see and feel something other than what it really is, clogging up the encryption with false information and white noise! And, if anything, the prototype could be used on Giver, though she might find such a thing a bit of torture and/or she might really like it. I don't know which one would be worse for my psyche.

I couldn't withstand the onslaught of curiosity, calling Giver once more, giving her my idea, partly in words and partly in pure images. I received in return a thoughtful nod and a three-hour lecture in a deliberately dry and lecturing tone - It seems she put on the guise of one of the souls of the sonm - about such and similar methods. It is used, by the way, by dark elves, who are drow, forcing even devils to treat them with a share of, no, not fear, that you, recognition of danger. The society of dark-skinned-eared ones is such that it is much easier for them to work with entities that a priori want to fuck you up and fuck you over than even very strong people. Being determines consciousness, and these social Darwinists are often more afraid of their kin, allies and companions than of the devil summoned by the ritual, and funny enough, they are often right!

They do not use Dreams but rather banal sacrifices, and the practice of the Masquerade of the Six Foundations, which is considered the most reliable and reliable, though difficult to perform, method of negotiation, has been honed not for centuries but for thousands of years, if not longer. Roughly speaking, you do not speak yourself, but through a mold of a slaughtered slave, and you get for yourself not only a memory or a part of reflexes but a personality. The dead archdevil did something similar with our cheerful four, or rather at that moment three, suicides, shifting the self-consciousness, no matter how wild it sounded.

It was a big bang then, and if it hadn't been for the Broken Edge, that's where the three of us would have laid down without waiting for the Infernal's help, but I got the gist of it. For a moment, I was someone else, not me. The memory is the same, the body is the same, and the classes are the same, but the thinking, the way I used to think, make decisions and react is someone else's, someone else's. Drow does the same, only of course rougher by orders of magnitude, putting on a new victim every few minutes or hours. This method requires very good self-control and an ironclad psyche, but it allows you not to be too afraid that the devil will be able to get into the brain of the summoner within a dozen or so contacts. If the ritualist's strength and skill are not just a lot, but up to the top of his head and a hill on top, it is possible to change masks so quickly that the creatures begin to have either a wild migraine or an epileptic seizure and instability of the sonm. Someone weaker, an unlucky strongman, or just the owner of a very unfortunate configuration of the sonm and talents, such Round Dance of Crystal Faces can kill.

In turn, the devils, not wishing to foolishly damage the thing that replaces their brains and, after a few hours of existence cut out of memory, have learned to fight madness through Madness. They could not drive those souls insane. They were already so crazy that it was hard to drive them into the sonm. Giver had worked with the Drow only a few times, and each time, it was a classic deal where everyone wanted to deceive but failed to outsmart the opponent. In the end, they parted ways, having made a favorable exchange, and then the communication ended. The Drow, if they did not want to spend a lot of resources and sacrifices for the Masquerade, simply summoned a new creature each time, trying even to choose different domains and aspects.

The fact that I wasn't the smartest person to have come up with such a trick for the first time didn't flatter me, but I needed not a ritual summoning circle but an amulet, if not permanent, then much more flexible than a stationary ritual. Giver, who really liked the idea of torturing herself by playing on the uncontrollable reflexes of the devil's nature, didn't mind working as a guinea pig, but she couldn't give me as much advice as she and I would have liked. The subject was almost unexplored, and on the surface of Alurei, they preferred to make protective amulets against fleur combat amulets as reliable and monolithic as possible. For someone to think of protecting themselves from dealing with devils permanently, as if you were going to live side by side with them, without trying to kill them and without fearing their attack... well, no inventors or artifactors could even dream up such a technical task in a nightmare or a drunken stupor.

I shook myself as if shaking off something nasty and suppressed the urge to go to the bathroom. I can't stay in the same room with her. It just keeps bugging me every time. Once again, I reminded myself not to get distracted, knowing that this reminder was useless, and then I went back to sorting out the titles I'd received.

There's only a little bit left anyway.

The Laughter of War (mythical): there are, were, and will be entities at whose will and word wars between great Empires were started. And the armies of mortals came together in battle, and those who had reached the Ascension fought, and the former died in glory like the latter, and the latter died ignominiously like the former. There were, are, and will be those who can say such a word, who can give impetus to the slaughter, in which states and civilizations will perish, continents will go underwater and oceans will dry up. The problem is that you do not belong to such personalities in any way! What creates even more problems is the result of your actions, not even your words, but only a mocking image, a barely perceptible hint, the most skillful lie, without a single drop of that very lie! Because it was your actions that caused the Blade Warriors to fight the free and unchecked Armada of Twilight, killing and dying where things could and should have gone very differently. And the Servants fell, and the Heralds cried out in pain, and the Warrior's blood spilled to the ground. And the Shadows cackled, and the Highs hissed in pain, and the mighty Ancients burned in the wrath of the Incarnation. And you were beside it, looking at the carnage, at the immense massacre, which neither side needed, and smiled. You laughed at the War, your laughter pushed the two forces together, and your will wove the threads of their fates into one web that burned in the fierce fire. We will not discuss the reasonableness of this act and speculate on its consequences, just give you a well-deserved reward. Bonus: the skills of the Un-existence branch are much more powerful, the bonuses of all titles of the individual Mocker branch are much more powerful; intuitive understanding of the points on which pressure can provoke large-scale conflicts is extremely enhanced; exposure to the weak points of large organizations, up to the state or interstate level, is extremely facilitated; Mocked War - Impaired Victory.

It was practically a twin brother of the past of the same branch but noticeably more powerful, which was understandable. Back then, I somewhat ruined the Lust Cult's plans, forcing them to open up and start working a bit earlier, as it became clear after receiving information from Giver, and then, having tricked a trio of Ancients and sicced them on the Ascended Warrior's boys, little boy Kostya started a real war. If you think about it, often even full-fledged wars by local standards cost much less pathos and with fewer losses than the Warriorhood took. Well, and my summoned creatures, too.

The award is also very similar. The first two items on the list are identical in general, and the next two make me look like a terrorist's dream..... or revolution. It will be silly to guess before the full-fledged checks, but apparently, doing bad things to all sorts of guilds, orders, dynasties, and temples will be a little easier for me now. There's no explicit instruction to say that now you, Kostya, will be fifteen percent faster in analyzing the defense mechanisms against the Seers, who are hiding all sorts of Eyes Eternal, and twenty percent less effort and concentration. Alurei, though subject to the System, is not under the power of numbers. You can't get a plus percent to a critical hit or plus five hit points. But it still works, and it'll work even better once I get the hang of it and learn to redistribute my attention.

This time, I almost managed to understand the meaning of the last phrase, as if it was ready to come right off my tongue, but... but it didn't. The feeling of almost catching the thought passed too quickly. It didn't upset me much, just because there were a lot of other important things to think about or get upset about. Hanging phrases in Status, as if this status wasn't systemic but completely earthbound, only the phrase, thank tits, wasn't "it's complicated."

Well, I guess that's it for the titles, and I still haven't been torn apart. After everything I've seen in the system tray, this option seems to be not a beautiful phrase but quite a probable outcome, which I managed to miss.

I've reached level 50. If I were a local, I'd be a Hero right now. And absolutely nothing, complete silence, not a single, even symbolic greeting from the System. Let's say the title of some Achiever of Greatness would be appropriate, but no, nothing has changed. If anything, it's annoying, but not much, rather the opposite. I was given heroic potential from the start, on credit, and now I've just paid it off. Maybe it's funny, even naive, but I'd be a little upset if I got some sort of title for level fifty, even if it wasn't decorative. Just another milestone on the way, the last coin of debt that no one has ever stopped me from paying at all.

I could have just stayed in the wild lands or even not come out to people in the beginning, learning snu-snu techniques in the company of Ygra. I could have stayed in Kraj, where I had, for the first time on Alurei, an established life, and some prospects. Or I could hang around in Tavimark for a couple of years before getting into the bottle of Eternal for the sake of, undoubtedly, carefully protected information. There were plenty of choices when no one would have judged me if I had decided to turn back, not to seek my death, but just to settle down and start making a life for myself and those who followed me. Dig up some gold and find some normal weapons and defense. Otherwise, I'm still wearing the most common rags, just processed by alchemy, from which the grade was raised sharply. Maybe even establish my kingdom, small but very cute and toothy, like a herd of piranhas. It was a dream then. And now I can capture not quite a small kingdom, even without revealing my incognito. It will be more difficult to create a new one, but the path of a green-skinned leader is always open, and the launching pad is ready.

All of this was possible.

Before, yes.

It's too late now. There's the altar room of the Library that spots me, and there's Jerem and his Patron, who can't be punched in the face, or wiped out, or intimidated half to death. The only thing left is to continue this fucking circus with a sad clown at the head and try to last longer, making the whole world worse. It's a delightful way to face old age, honestly.

Not a single mention of my Status and the moment when I managed to reverse part of my self, to become human again, though not completely. But here, I suspect, systemic perception and its descriptions are useless at all. Everything is too individual, overly complicated, and extremely simple. Everyone must come to this outcome by himself, only by himself, and only by his own will can one step further or go back. My choice has been made, and it is pointless to talk further, let alone seek answers from the faceless and heartless Status, which is just a description of what we do to ourselves.

So what will my Status show me now?

Characteristics (standard):
Strength: 258
Dexterity: 343
Endurance: 288
Perception: 332
Concentration: 453
Energy: 492 (1to2)

Characteristics (class):
Shadow: 272
Dreams: 217
Inspiration: 164

Again and again, I look at these numbers, recall the last time I checked the attributes, and I can't stop giggling nervously. No, I could really burst! Not with his body, like a balloon, but with his aura, falling to the ground absolutely unharmed piece of dead meat, from which even a dead man could not be raised. Even a pumped individual could be crippled if the same alchemical boosters were poured into him in large quantities. Let them be even three hundred times high-class and personally created for him, but there is a banal limit of saturation of the body and soul. You can't make such leaps by leaps and bounds. You just can't because you will damage everything that you can and even that you can't. I have grabbed awards in considerable amounts before, but there is a difference between twenty points in each stat and almost a hundred!

Perhaps if I hadn't been in a state of creature/man, if I hadn't gone so far, I would have been... no, not killed, I'm exaggerating. Kostik wasn't so pumped up for nothing. My attributes were big enough not to bend at a spurt in development, especially considering that the attributes were added quickly but in several portions, not all at once. But it would have taken me longer to regain my fighting ability than it would have taken the archdevil to complete his little war of victory.

I survived.

I ran away.

And now, here I am, choosing rewards for achieving the right stats. On a separate note, the perks offered are extremely individual. The very first, given for fifty in some attribute, are considered almost standard, known widely enough to know about them even ordinary people who are getting to the tenth level and therefore have a chance to pay for private lessons from a mentor or a book of some kind. Yes, the tenth level doesn't give you an automatic perk - very few people will risk investing almost all of their attribute points for ten levels into a single characteristic, but around that level, they start to get interested in the topic. Among those who even at the tenth level or earlier, have earned several titles that increase stats, there are few a priori random and illiterate individuals, so they get even more information. Some from their parents, some from fellow guildmates or mentors of the Order, some simply by getting it in some other way.

Another thing perks developed, not common, uncommon, or even rare, but starting from epic and higher. From the rare rank, clear classification slowly disappears, often giving out very individual offers. Even an ordinary perk for fifty strength can be tied, if not to personal qualities, then to racial characteristics or ancestral heritage. Epic rewards, which, sometimes, by themselves can provide the basis for a fighting style or a profession that allows you to earn a living, are guaranteed to have individuality.

Starting with legendary perks, records and cataloging either do not exist, or they are flagrantly incomplete, or they keep them behind a hundred locks and will be read only by the most trusted, bound by oaths and contracts, or those who will be killed after reading. The latter, however, is already about those lists where not only a dry description but also an approximate method of development allows you to reach the specified attribute awards. Perhaps someday I'll try such interesting "scrolls of boundless wisdom" to look for or even write, but for now, I'd like to understand my rewards - Strength, Dexterity, and Perception from the standard characteristics and Dream and Inspiration from the class characteristics have been promoted.

Characteristic Strength has reached 200 units! Choose a perk!

- The Great Ram (legendary; active);

- Crushing Presence (legendary; passive-active);

The next perk will be available when you gain 300 units of Strength.

Both options were good and useful, which was expected from legendary perks, but the choice was still surprisingly clear, even without the eternal and annoying regret of a missed opportunity, which didn't happen often. The Great Ram was specifically a ram and a great one, and I was accordingly trying on a captain's uniform. Analogous to my Moment of Eternity, only tied to strength, but devastating in no small measure. This thing would allow me to wrap myself in my power, unfolding the parts of my shell responsible for this attribute and then shoot me like a projectile from a cannon.

The result was not just an armor-piercing blow with his ass, no, because the main, pardon the pun, striking force becomes that very shell, creating a real tornado and a shaft of destruction, which simply destroys everything in its path. At the same time, as I understand, although I can not judge with complete certainty, during the dash the user of the Ram becomes if not invulnerable then so hard to kill, which is almost the same thing. As a result, the Ram, at the current level of me and my Strength, creates a wide circle, six or seven meters in diameter, which rushes forward and kicks everything in its path for almost a kilometer. Both the radius of the circle and the range of the ram can be easily reduced by conscious effort but they increase only with the growth of the attribute responsible for the perk - Strength.

His imagination vividly drew the consequences of using a battering ram, which could be used to break the formation and the defenses of fortresses and cities. The picture of a long clearing, a huge furrow, broken walls and buildings, fallen ancient trees, and torn to shreds once living creatures who failed to get out of the way of the Great Ram. To be honest, I'd love to have one of these things, but the Form can again start a conflict with an ability that is primarily tied to the material body, which becomes the basis of the energy "puncher." Yes, at the moment of attack, the physical body either disappears altogether, dissipating inside the created whirlpool or goes very deep inside this whirlpool. Still, the basis of the attack is concentrated in the physical body. The Shadow Form, which is constantly changing and only has the right to be constant, does not fit with this tactic in any way, maybe even a little worse.

Again, even without the Great Ram, I can make the same shit out of the already mentioned Form by inflating it more and hitting it harder with the shadow shaft and the Manifestation on top of it. The result will probably be even more revealing because it's still pretty easy to get away from the ram for anyone who has a pumped hunch and blink or even just intuition enough. Weapons against fortifications, low-ranked infantry without elite support, or slow-moving things like siege towers, huge corpse monsters, or dwarven heavy machinery. Though I'm sure the latter machines will find something to counter such an attack - barriers, counterstrike, rune stabilizers, or short-range teleport too. After a flying fucking tank, I wouldn't be surprised by a teleporting tank.

I chose the second option without a second thought or regret, simply because it interacted perfectly with both the Form and any other techniques except afterburner Aegis, but that doesn't interact with anything and shouldn't. Crushing Presence passively allowed me to use my power to push through and level barriers, defenses, blocks, and other things designed to keep my grasp on someone's throat. The constant passive reinforcement of any blows, or rather, not the blows themselves, but their consequences, when, as if barely touched, but the damage caused noticeably more than expected.

If I put that passive on top of the Shadow Form's ultimate effects it would be even more fun. Piercing through even very good defenses is already pretty good, as every creature I've killed recently would attest if it were alive and present, but adding it to an already high score won't do any harm. It won't do me any harm. We're not talking about likely opponents here. This perk does not add a strictly calculable percentage of power but synergizes, supplementing what is already there, and therefore, its effect is much higher than it would be for someone who can't turn into a multi-meter tall scarecrow. If you don't try to concentrate the Shattering on yourself and release it outward, the effect is different. The active form of the perk lowers the defense over a certain area and allows me to apply a not-too-strong but annoying debuff, which cannot be removed because its source is me. Either to put a permanent neutralizer of the hostile aura or to remove its effects (unfortunately, although accumulated, the accumulative effect is ridiculously slow, taking almost hours) every couple of seconds.

Alas, it is necessary to use the ability in this way with caution because it has no selectivity and cannot be selective. It affects both its own and strangers. The essence of this aura is to break the balance of energies in the shells of the entities around me. It is impossible to direct such an effect strictly on a certain group even with my control, there is no such effect. Of course, if you make a mess of it, reflecting part of the effects at the expense of Dream, directing a double wreck on the enemies, half of which is removed from my companions, then, of course, you can. But to fight effectively, supporting this construction will be possible only against some goblins, villagers, or robbers, but not against any dangerous individuals.

This just means that next to the team, it's better to use the Crushing Presence in a self-directed mode, increasing strikes and penetration, and only when surrounded by the enemy, without the support of their own, to crush the deployed aura. It's two modes for diametrically opposite situations. You also need to be patient and create and test the necessary amulets (mirror or material anchors of specifically processed Shadows) or potions, and individual, strictly for companions, which will level the effect of the crash if you have to work in close connection.

Useful thing. I'm glad I got it. I just have to test it in combat, but something tells me I'll have plenty of opportunities to test it. Why can't I get stupid enemies suffering from terminal cretinism? So that some kings with Down syndrome, dementia, and chronic gastritis had a big button "cut off Yoke forever without registration and SMS," which he regularly forgot to put in the safe, and his guards were full of low-level idiots with a Perception of minus one hundred thousand five hundred units!

Is that so much to ask?

Okay, if we don't achieve what we want, we'll pretend we wanted what we managed to achieve. In my case, a few more perks have been achieved. So I need to get them over with as soon as possible. Choosing a "gift" skill for characteristics, here's an amazing thing does not strain the battered essence of the isekai almost in any way... Or rather, there is tension, but it goes on those parts of the soul that have not suffered before. Perk effector formation in subtle bodies, of course, does not add to the good mood, feeling dozens of needles jabbed into the bones, but that's why I'm choosing them now, that it's already possible (I'm not a fool to do such things without preliminary checks, so as not to get killed on the spot) to choose. This is not an increase in attributes or class skills. The most important part of the leap has already been made, the potential for formation has been acquired, and, if it were not for the System that gives you the choice, it would have already formed or started forming on its own.

In fact, the seeds of modification attribute superstructures (the official name adopted in scientific circles of Neitmak Academies), which I call perks, were slowing down the recovery. The smart decision would have been to start slowly selecting and mastering them a week ago, but I was scared to look at Status, and I'm not even going to hide that, not from myself for sure. And the rest of the company couldn't advise or help. They couldn't sense my condition any more subtly than I could anyway, which is why they thought I knew what I was doing. It's a serious matter, and it's not something to be trifled with in this world.

After choosing the reward of two hundred units of Strength, I lay there for several hours, breathing slowly and meditatively and mastering the new property of my essence, as if I had grown a new limb. As a user of shadow transformation and a fan of growing extra limbs, while mirroring the distortion of my own body, I can responsibly say that the sensation is really quite similar. In a moment, my comrades almost rushed to me when I accidentally hit them with a new aura, and they did not make assumptions, immediately rushing to check the place where the pulse of the crashing field came from. I was particularly pleased to see Taria wrapped in a towel (I was protected from the effects of hypnotic boobs by my shadowy gaze), a completely naked bloodsucker, and Hans dressed in a fluffy terry Alishan robe, with a Trail Generator in one hand and a smoking hookah in the other.

"I won't comment on anything." That's all Tia said, with a tired wave of her hand. "Just swear by the names, good and damned. Next time, give me a warning, okay?"

No one had given me a symbolic slap. Apparently, they didn't think it was ethically acceptable to hit a sick person, but when the sweetly and innocently smiling Taria handed Tia a large and soft pillow that the barely restrained dancer had pulled out of nowhere, the elfess had a hard time suppressing the reflex to take it. I consoled myself with the thought that she was going to hit the bandit who was bothering her, not her immediate superior, in my confused face at such a betrayal.

After a good ten hours of rest and sleep, I gave everyone a fair warning before I started selecting the next perk, at the same time summoning Taria with the stimulant alchemy kit. Then I kicked Taria out, leaving the stimulant alchemy kit behind with the assurance that I wouldn't let her into my chambers until she was wearing normal clothes, not the few silk ribbons (I don't want to know where the bloodsucker got them, but I do!) she'd tied herself in the "idle knot" they use to tie presents. Because then I definitely will be busy not with leveling. However, I was happy that my body was returning to normal, and there were other desires besides sleeping, eating, sleeping, resting, sleeping, washing my face, sleeping.

Taria, back in her normal outfit, was so fast that even without clairvoyance I realized she'd just calculated me, as well as my order for a change of clothes, and had poked and trolled me, which I wouldn't admit out loud. With a groan that Darth Vader himself would have envied, I got to my feet and started beating the poor, defenseless girl... with a pillow, of course, which I could barely hold and lift for a swing. But this traitorous bastard brought the very pillow that Tia had offered earlier and began to fight back!

I'm the strongest!

I pumped myself to the heavens and drilled them with my unstoppable energy!

I have no equal under the sky.... well, maybe there is someone (the Warrior appearance comes to mind), but then I'm in second place!

I will teach her to respect my authority!

By the time the rest of my companions came running to my cries, instead of helping me, they were laughing. (Giver and the bloodsucker, of course, were eager to help, to "help" and even to help, but under the stern gaze of Tia and Losius, they too were watching with interest.) Hans was betting on how long I'd last in this duel, and he wasn't betting on me, the gray-haired bastard!

"Ready to accept your surrender." I make a broad and noble gesture toward the dancer sitting on my chest, who would very much like - thank you, clairvoyance - to move a little higher. "For victory will be mine."

If it weren't for the moral support of the rest of the traitor team, I would have long ago deprived Taria of her pillow and then established my absolute dominance. And anyone who claims that she took away my feather weapon and just sat on my face, I'll feed them tonic potions with a laxative effect just to improve their general health.

It was hard morally and physically to escort everyone back, and I just didn't want to be alone.... but I didn't need the company. Rather, it would even prevent me from studying my options. And in general, seriously, this pillow fight lifted my spirits perfectly, bringing back the taste of life and just shaking me out of the stupor that came over me after the choice of gift property. Now I'm breathing like a hunted horse and barely managed to crawl onto the bed, but that's just physical fatigue. I deliberately built the alchemical map to maximize the recovery of my mind and energy, even at the cost of some physical oppression. If I started to fight seriously now, I would be able to overcome the weakness, but the price would be a setback in healing to almost the starting position.

But repeating the pillow battle will definitely be necessary when I can fight normally.

And they will all know my wrath. I had a school life, after all. Not all the time I was anonymizing on the boards, especially when I didn't have a PC. I had to throw pillows. True, then it ended with a broken nose because someone was smart enough to hide a can of condensed milk in a pillow..... Shuddering at the extremely vivid memory of home and the memory of almost childhood, not adult life, I drive away the ghosts of the past and return to the present. Because there's nothing to find in the past, not for me, that's for sure.

Nothing more.

Dexterity characteristic has reached 300 units! Choose a perk!

- The Endlessness of the Moment (mythical; active; limited);

- Burning of Life (mythical; active);

The next perk will be available when you gain 500 Dexterity units.

This time, the choice didn't seem easy. Both awards suited me and my fighting style, making me think seriously about the options. I listened to the team's advice but didn't do much good. The doubts did not become less, only their number increased. The most frustrating thing was the fact that it almost perfectly fit both, absolutely both options! According to numerous notes of scholarly husbands and maidens, the more you rely on a certain characteristic in battle, the harder and sweeter the rewards offered for exceeding its limit. It makes sense because if you're a pure tank warrior and you've raised your Perception through titles, your choices will be as standard and minimally useful as possible. You didn't rely on this Perception, didn't use it to the limit, and didn't squeeze everything possible out of it, and a little bit more, so aura modifications will be maximally impersonal and therefore not particularly useful against the background of what could be.

In my case, even though I had raised my dexterity with titles, it was too far from ordinary, and I relied on mobility in combat very, very heavily, in many ways even more than magic. This became especially clear in the fight with the archdevil, where I desperately did not want to get under his kicks, and the power to tank them with the flesh of the Form or a multilayer barrier was enough one time out of three. So I got a choice for all the choices! To be fair, I didn't meet any useless mythical or at least legendary perks, but often, they were just unnecessary, not interfering but not fitting into the combat style, and that's why I was able to make a choice quickly and without regrets.

Not now.

Endlessness seemed to me a logical continuation of the previous perk, which was indirectly confirmed by the prefix "limited." Unlike unique or personal titles, such perks could be obtained only if you had the right basis for them and a certain affinity not only in characteristics but also in general development. Quite a rare thing, I note, as well as the situation in general. All the perks associated with classes are quite understandably concentrated in the class attributes, so the main users of limited bonuses of the system are all sorts of families with thick blood or guilds and orders that keep the secrets of special types of development. Honestly, it smells like shitty Harry Potter-Black-Slytherin-Peverell fanfics or the secrets of cultivating drills to pierce the heavens (or even the Heavens!) in Chinese novelization.

And to which of them do I belong? I have the most unlocal origin. I am not fond of polishing the inner jade rod. I do not meditate on my navel. I have cultivated only cucumbers at my parents' dacha and cactus in a bowl. Getting into the ridiculously small number of those who can unlock limited system bonuses on my own is nice. It's silly to argue here, but I still feel like I'm missing something. Not something dangerous. Otherwise, my intuition would have alerted me, and I was already looking for the source of danger to smack him in the face, but just something I didn't understand, even though it was almost obvious.

The limited perk reacted with Moment of Eternity, not just enhancing its numerical effect but also doing something else not fully understood in the context of limited abilities, including clairvoyance. A Moment doubles Dexterity and adds something like seventy percent Perception and Concentration. This is what I knew from the beginning. But later, more than once, when testing this extremely useful perk in battle, I always noticed that it's not just about increasing attributes for a short time, which gives an explosive charge of vigor for which you can crush even a very dangerous opponent. This perk does something to the Law of Time itself, giving you the edge of the wand to poke at it, just barely, but giving it to you. It became obvious during my forced cooperation with the bitch-prince of I-really-don't-care-what-your-name-was because I could clearly and distinctly feel how the lawkeeper's techniques entered into symbiosis with the Moment, qualitatively strengthening it.

Could it be that it was this battle that gave rise to the emergence of the Endlessness option? The battle... the battle and that strange attack that almost turned me and that couple inside out, changing something, adding something... And it's still just conjecture, speculation, and other speculation that hasn't led to anything so far. But the Endlessness is there, here it is, right now I can get it. This reward does not just increase the bonus to Dexterity from two to four times, does not just accelerate to the same state of Perception, giving not yet clarified bonus to Concentration. Endlessness does exactly what it says on the wrapper - it stretches, prolongs, and multiplies the effect of the Moment, drastically reducing the damage it deals, which is often more dangerous than the enemy you're using it against.

It's always hard to go against the flow of the River of Time - for some reason, this association with the river comes to my tongue as if it were rising from my very gut - even in the Shadow Form, it literally tears chunks from me. I was able to understand the nature of the Moment only because the Form allowed me to keep it active for much longer than even a very strong body could withstand. Without a class skill, it's just a brief enhancement by increasing Dexterity. You just don't realize it anymore. By using Endlessness, you can delay the moment when you start tearing to pieces or flush the hell out like water in a toilet bowl when the vise of Time wants to return the lawbreaker to his rightful place. It was the violator, the one who approached the work with the Law without having the right to do so, without fully understanding the nature of what the hell he was doing. Another association, after the battle for Eternal, where I had seen enough of the work of a top-class lawman.

In that case, if we take the assumption as a basis, the Endlessness gives a hint of that permission, removing resistance and allowing you to use the Moment more flexibly, more deeply, if you wish. You can speed up the current even more for everyone around you while weakening it only for yourself, at the cost of reducing the duration of acceleration control, or weaken it but keep the acceleration noticeably longer. Combined with Form regeneration, the effect is great, and all my tactical awareness is screaming "take it" in big letters.

Why haven't I taken it yet?

So the answer is given in the second choice, Burning of Life. Despite the name of the perk, which is more suitable for the Energy, Concentration, or even Endurance branches, it is tied to Dexterity. When activated, Burning begins to do quite a bit of damage to the user's body, which is apparently also due to the crippling nature of Momentum, which lasts for the entire duration of the ability. The rollback is something like a few hours, but the amount of time you can keep Burning active depends only on your pain threshold and ability to regenerate not so much your body as your aura. Needless to say, Form handles this with a ten-plus? Yes, every second, it does more and more damage, and every next burn cycle hurts more, but with my parameters, I can keep the perk active for quite a long time. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe my clairvoyance is failing me, and this whole self-immolation thing is more dangerous than it looks, but so far, it's looking pretty decent.

What does Burning of Life give, and what does it bestow? At first, when I started to learn what the System allowed me to see, I assumed a gradual increase of the same Dexterity in the style of "the more you mutilate yourself, the greater the gain," but I was wrong. Burning itself only cripples you, nothing more. But when you start killing in that mode... There's an obvious parallel with the same Shadow's Grip, but Burning doesn't have such a bad effect on humanity, as it shouldn't add question marks to Status, nor should it give permanent stat boosts.

Each kill gives you a certain increase in Dexterity depending on how advanced the attributes of the killed person were and how high their level was. It's not particularly significant, especially since you have to kill in close combat, ideally with your own hands, not magic or arrows. But. But! Each increase is summed up, so plus two or three points for a standard guardian or soldier will be imposed again and again as long as there is someone to kill and tear. And each death also allows you to skip a certain number of Burning cycles because it's not your life that burns, but the life of the one you killed, while its ashes, the ash left from someone else's shell, perhaps even the soul itself, temporarily feeds the killer's Dexterity.

As it seems to me, and as Giver is sure, as a great expert in any sacrifices, and Tia supports her in this, tricks like Burning of Life can be tied to absolutely any attribute just I was lucky to get such a variant of it, which enhances Dexterity. Personally, I'm pretty sure, and Tia supports me in this belief, that the most cheater option would be to tie Burning to Endurance. With that, it would be possible to hold Burning for almost times longer than with Dexterity or Strength. I'll have to think of a way to give Ygra this or a similar reward for her Endurance when she hits another milestone... Though, knowing that green fool, she could have already pumped up the next milestone, and now she'd have to wait a long time.

Actually, the main reason not to take Burning was precisely the sacrificial nature of it. Yes, it is far from the blackness of blackness. The effects are extremely temporary and relatively non-dangerous, much more likely to simply cripple than to get question marks in the Status and a change of race as a gift. But it's still a sacrificial boon, albeit a combat one, not a ritual one. You could say that pumping within the System (and, it seems, not only within the System, which only digitizes natural processes) and in itself is a sacrifice, but this is sophistry. The reality and facts tell me not to bite a tastier piece if, for the sake of it, I have to swallow blood and eat still-warm flesh, breathing, and screaming meat.

Such a power!

But so dirty.

Slightly dirty, but so useful.

But after all, falls often start out small.

But, but, but, but, but, dozens of "buts," arguments for and against, which did not add up to a good mood either. In the end, Hans and Taria, who had brought Losius along, helped to solve the problem, though he resisted and yelled something about "letting people choose their own paths because it's unseemly to get involved in such things," but they didn't really listen to him.

"Understand, Tin." Says a slightly drunken Dancer, pointing a finger at the offended looking at her Losius. "Me and this guy here, who's just shy to chat with you, but he's a normal guy, I'll give you that... so that's what I was saying. Oh, yeah, that's right! Take that gift that will strengthen you in a one-to-one fight if you meet some horrible thing that you can't spit over, you can't cover with snot, you can't expel with farting."

I smiled, making a face like that of a parent whose child had made his first independent trip to the potty and who was now announcing it to the world (young parents like that poison the office, I'm telling you), so focused was Taria's face. And Hans, who is laughing quietly behind her back, has his face screwed up into a grin because he's obviously afraid to laugh out loud.

"What I'll say is that I'll agree with Taria." Before the said Taria turns around and notices the fun of the Tracker, he decides to protect himself with an argument. "I didn't really go into it, but you can't choose because one gift is pratically stronger but stinks of witchcraft, and the other is cleaner, but it's not clear and murky, which can be both a force and a flop, right?"

I thought about it, not even correcting Hans' mistake in the word "potential" (it was done by Losius, whom I didn't doubt), realizing that those two had indeed described my thoughts very accurately. Endlessness promises a lot. But there everything depends too much on extremely ephemeral things and, therefore, the result can both develop the Moment of Eternity by orders of magnitude worthy of mythic perk and just add the minimum possible enhancement, which, of course, will be useful and mythic perk worthy, but only if not compared to the second option. And to understand what exactly I will be able to squeeze out of the Endlessness, you can only choose it, master and accept, and this way, you can guess for a long time, even until the end of time.

Burning guarantees the power, even if it's a wide range, even if a lot of things may mislead me, but if I simplify it to the point of being vulgarized, then Konstantin Yurievich's minimum presumed enhancement from having Burning is much higher than the minimum enhancement from Endlessness. At the maximum bar, both of these perks are practically equal. Maybe even Endlessness is stronger. So take it, risk or not risk, decide or not decide. It's useless to torture the System and its help. It won't give more than the necessary minimum, a basic description without any clarifications, while clairvoyance gives more but may be wrong. And still, it will not cross a certain line, behind which the System hides everything that simple clairvoyance cannot see in any way.

"Well, yeah?" I answer in a way that's more like asking a question. "I mean, I guess so."

"A very precise vorhding." Serious and heartfelt nods Taria.

"I'm willing to bet my daggers right now that you know how to pronounce it correctly - the wording." Equally serious and equally heartfelt, I reply.

"Whatever, that's not the point." The girl waved me off, continuing immediately, not even letting me get a word in edgewise. "You've always said yourself that weak shithead can be kicked around. Sacrificial shit is good, just the right kind of shit to throw at anyone, but it takes a bunch of little assholes. And they won't always be around, just like you won't always have time to run after the little shit. That's it."

Well, she didn't say anything new, but she outlined my own thoughts quite well. Even in a fight with a very strong Legend, like Touch, Burning will be useful and it will be just to the head, but in such cases, the first blow should be to hit the strongest, to bind him in a fight, and to knock out the masses when necessary and as luck would have it. Endlessness is useful from the beginning and does not depend on conditions, which makes it preferable to Burning. I realized this a long time ago, just from my greed and unwillingness to miss a chance for a big payoff.

The choice has been made, there's nothing to delay.

Damn, I had to make sure that Taria didn't realize that I'd been hesitating all this time, or it would be a whole series of jokes, and she was good at them. I wonder if she has the skill of provocation, and if so, what level. I feel that at this rate, she will even catch up with me because in order to troll Gods, Supreme Rulers of Hell, mythical Shadows, and other bitches of such caliber, she lacks only the levels to survive trolling, but has everything perfect with attitude, badassery, and arrogance, I declare.

"Okay, I get it, thanks. It's really time to call it a day." I recognize her clue, as well as her ability to nudge one summoned dimwit into a solution at the right moment. "Question: why did you bring Losius?"

I pointed at the still silent lad, who at that moment had pumped up the sad look skill by a couple of points, and the tragic sigh skill had obviously taken the master rank minimum. Tarija and Hans turned to the companion, looked at him for a second, still silent (obviously, they told him to keep silent until asked, and he brought the request to the absurdity, and there is no need for clairvoyance), and again turned their gaze back to me.

"He was just, uh, well, he needed to be presentable, that's all." Taria, blushing slightly, pulled both Losius and Hans back into the parlor where they'd come from.

The wild roar of the Tracker and the comparatively quiet laughter of the Duelist I couldn't help but hear, not with my perception. But perception couldn't explain the reason why the guys laughed, and Taria, on the contrary, got embarrassed. Taria! Embarrassed! Ta-ri-a! There's clearly some story hidden here, but I'm not going to research it. The chosen perk echoed throughout my body and went right to the core, just like the last one, but now, instead of needles in my bones, I felt a different sensation. I felt like I was being pulled underwater. The pressure was building up around me, and it was hard to breathe, think, move, and in general, I almost fainted.

I practically crawled to the bed, pouring into myself anti-stress tonics, which only allowed me to take the compositions or the remaining slags, and falling on the bed, I passed out for a moment before I touched the soft fabric of the pillow. In those seconds, it seemed as if time around me had slowed down, though I and the world around me began to move only faster, which caused a kind of cognitive dissonance. If it was a consequence of the river surface affected by the Endlessness, or if I was glitching again, I didn't even want to think about it.

Go to sleep, all your problems tomorrow.

Tomorrow greeted me with a cheerful state of mind, and Tia came with a tray and crept cautiously into my room as soon as I stirred. Alas, instead of a shortened maid's outfit and breakfast in bed, she'd brought a set of tablets made of various materials, mostly wood, which she'd covered with a bunch of symbols and turned into portable ritual analyzers. In my opinion, they were of little use since she understood more with her clairvoyance, but the elf used them to compensate for some of the strain. I have a reserve of concentration and endurance of the organism, and for dessert, there is an opportunity to throw off fatigue, exhaustion, and load on mirrors, and Tia does not want to disturb her Stars unnecessarily.

I spent the next few hours tidying myself up, as I felt better than yesterday after the illness I had experienced. I went to breakfast. I walked on my own feet and almost without leaning on the walls. We didn't have the tradition of a common meal, but the bloodsucker's servants still cooked at a certain time, so if you want to catch a delicious meal, hurry up. Of course, no one would leave the guests hungry, but there was a difference between cold appetizers or relatively simple dishes and freshly prepared culinary creations. The creature's servants cooked on the level of the local nobility, as the mosquito, with her perfectionism, hired the best of those she could discreetly pluck from the city's society. Then, when we're gone, she'll clean their memories and let them go because there's no reason to kill them, and there's no need to keep those who cook human food, as long as her diet is strictly liquid. And I'll probably even help to make normal false memories so as not to cripple people's psyche.

I won't even talk about the fact that most of the servants, mostly female, are very nice and ready for anything. Especially funny was the fact that for the sake of the latter, the bloodsucker had to wash the brains of only two girls. The others knew well that a beautiful girl, working as a maid, often works in a dog position not only for the sake of wiping the dust, and a raise in wages remains a raise in wages. I made a special note to the creature of the undesirability of inducing maidens to entertain our company with eighteen plus content unless they desired to do so.

Taria, however, still used her tits as much as she could, in my opinion, simply out of a love of art and a desire to play with other people's wills. Even if the spherical in vacuum maid agrees to everything and does not have disgust for persons of her sex in bed with her, then to make her cum at the snap of her fingers or sincerely believe that she is, in fact, a bedside table, money can not force. And just role-playing with pretenses does not turn her on as much as real hypnosis.

Giver, I would like to note separately, observes celibacy, not risking to leave probable traces on the servants, although I am sure she could have done everything cleanly. But for her, sex without corruption, though pleasant, is comparable to onanism - a different psyche and physiology, experiencing true pleasure mainly from the process of re-shaping, changing, and inclining to a different point of view. As the devil herself once explained to Taria (and I overheard through the mirrors, and really by accident), a devil of Lust can and will enjoy it, even if, say, he turns a complete lecher into an innocent and modest nun, albeit tormented by restrained urges. Distorting the essence, changing the personality, and building a new one play no small part in the song of their pleasure, though, of course, they prefer all-out classic orgies and all that.

Breakfast, or rather lunch because I slept through it, was a warm and friendly atmosphere with a touch of boredom. Everyone understood the necessity of staying here, staying out of the sun, while at the same time being wildly jealous of the bloodsucker who had to control the city and, therefore, wandered quietly outside if necessary. So far, only Hestia and Losius have not fully recovered, but they have problems with too much contact with Heaven and Mist, which only time and hard work can compensate for. The Duelist is aided by a bird sitting in his blade, prompting a proper and not too-dangerous understanding of Heaven through a strikingly tight connection. Raimel is held together by the nature of the monster and a very lucky, proper form of sharp reinforcement. And all I have to do is lay back, and I'll be a pickle, just like Mr. Sanchez.

After breakfast, I began to evaluate the new perk, trying to activate it, even if only for a fraction of a second and under minimal stress. In its current state, the Form was very undesirable for use, and without it, I would cripple myself at such speeds if I didn't kill myself immediately. The results were quite unexpected and, importantly, the surprise was extremely pleasant. Whether I misunderstood something, or simply underestimated the importance of almost a hundred added attributes in each characteristic, or whether the impact of the battle shoulder to shoulder with the Eternal was more useful than expected, but Endlessness was manipulated with a suspicious ease.

Time after time, slowing down the world around me using the Moment of Eternity, it was as if I could really feel the peculiar vibration of the waves, the direction of the currents, understanding very clearly why Time is associated with the river. And when I, walking between these currents, bypassing dangerous areas that could tear my body and shell to shreds, managed to pass from one corner of the room to another, still limping and barely keeping on my feet, but still instantly.... let's just say it wasn't just my companions who were surprised, it was me who was the most stunned. Yes, I felt sick. My heart was beating fast, threatening to jump out of my chest, my eyes were dark, and Tia, in response to such a violation of the regime and reckless behavior, was clearly trying to take in her hand not a pillow but a chair, if not a jade dildo from the mosquito's collection, but the result was obvious.

Being a barely moving paralytic, without using the Shadow Form, only due to the new perk, I managed to pass where before the Form in full saturation under the concentrated in a step from the afterburner Aegis tore off my arms, legs, and tentacles. And all this at the cost of a relatively minor ailment! I smiled genuinely, though I asked to drag me to Hans's room, and asked Taria to keep the elven assassins away from me. My red-haired girl answered that she wouldn't move a step away from her, and she wasn't lying. When Tia came to visit me, Taria really stood one step away from her for the three hours that I couldn't move from fatigue, and the druid methodically and melancholically listed the cases she personally knew when the use of costly abilities during the recreational period with unrecovered injuries resulted in death, injury, mental disorders, impotence, and demotion to paperwork for the next century and a half.

In the end, I sincerely regretted that my conscience incarnate had not decided to use the tactics from her dream because even that would have been better than listening to the justified criticism of my actions with the wildest migraine and without the possibility of shutting down. And with my perception, it was impossible to even let what was said pass over my ears. A desperate attempt to activate the dome of silence around my ears ended with a slight smile, affecting only my eyes, and activation of the symbols on the plates, which made the sound suppression unstable. I had to turn it off myself. The words were indistinguishable, but the sound was very unpleasant, like chalk scraping on a chalkboard.

I have a feeling that my main concern shouldn't be the possibility of my temporary weakness being exploited by enemy evil-doers, but the same probability, only exploited by my family companions. At this rate, not only will Taria be able to outwit me, but also - oh, what a horror - the ruthless liquidator will start teaching me to respect safety! I have to recover soon, or this is not going to go well!

But seriously, poor Tia was really scared for me. I was giving all my friends and comrades the Endlessness calculations, and they were already making their assumptions based on those calculations. And since even I did not expect such efficiency from the previously unused perk, the others did not expect it either. When I fell off my feet because of the onset of nausea and began to cough, the elf clearly expected not to overstrain and tremors and damage to internal organs with the transformation of the lungs into a colander. That's why, probably, I tolerated this lecture stoically, because I perfectly understood both my fault and her excitement. However, the temptation to infuse the dome of silence with an increased amount of power and overcome the interference from the ritual was fantastically strong.

But I'm a hero. That's why I stood my ground.

Heroically.

Perception characteristic has reached 300 units! Choose a perk!

- Great Cognition (mythical; active);

- Epiphany Eternal (mythical; limited edition);

The next perk will be available when you gain 500 Perception units.

Once again, there's a limited title to choose from, allowing to mess with Time. It's probably the one to pick from these two since I decided to pair Endlessness with Instantaneous. Epiphany is great for enhancing clairvoyance, allowing you to see more clearly and vividly not only into the past and present of objects, persons, places, and events but also into their future. The enhancement is passive, but it is significant and useful. It is only a side effect of the main bonus - simplification of work with movement in the flow of the River of Time.

In fact, one legendary and two mythic titles work for a single purpose, creating a separate weapon for the toughest battles. I think if I had all three of these perks in a fight with Touch, I wouldn't have had to sacrifice my essence for victory and survival. Not without difficulty, but I would have defeated the small cook just by throwing a lot of punches due to the overwhelming superiority in speed, to which he could not do anything because of being in shock from the fleur explosion provoked by the Ring and Giver. In a normal state of mind, he'd have wrecked me in the center of his power either, alone, with a team, with or without three synergistic perks. Time, you know, doesn't help where you can override any Law but your own, and the ritual hall of Touch was just such a place. The Prince who was killed by a mega-beast would have defended his Law, but I have only those very perks - strong, powerful, complementing each other, but not the whole class, and a lot of experience in its application.

I also have something to counter the lawmen, even without taking into account my newfound ability to control the flow of the River, starting with a trivial attack from a great distance through Dream, continuing with Manifestation, which will dry up the hostile influence, ending with the ability to drink a bunch of specific potions, after which the techniques of the Eternals against me will fail more than a compass in a magnet factory. The Law does not give an absolute victory anywhere and in any place, but it is very, very good in support, which was only confirmed by the fight I went through. And now I can arrange this support for my beloved self: a little bit, but myself, adding acceleration to the already available indicators and getting more than both sums separately.

On this background, the second perk, although it does not seem superfluous, but frankly loses to the first one. Another reason why I chose Endlessness is that I will now choose Insight. Great Cognition allows you to analyze other people's Statuses in an area that depends on the perception index and with a rather sensitive rollback. The strength and depth of the effect depends on your clairvoyance skills or interrogator classes, if you have them, but even without such a highly specialized tool, I could cover an area of about half a kilometer in radius. And within that radius, I'd get full or nearly full Statuses of all but those protected by cloaking or blocking similar abilities with a rank as high as that of the perk.

For an employee of the Secret Service, the technique is invaluable. I would find a use for it, not to mention that such a clairvoyant-type square attack would reveal not only Statuses, levels, lists of titles, classes, and skills but also a lot of other side information, immediately loading it into easy-to-cognize blocks of images. The thing is situational, roughly comparable to the same Eye of the Watcher, which I used only once seriously, but it came in handy... I wish I hadn't noticed it then and left the Eternals to save their fucking empire.

It didn't matter, anyway. Cognition was too inferior to Insight, so the choice was made in less than twenty minutes, and only because I wanted to finish the fruit cake, which the cooks had done very well. And only after finishing I made my choice, immediately making myself comfortable and preparing to experience all sorts of different sensations absurd. They were indeed, this time psychedelic, without physical pain, reminiscent of glitches in overstimulation of clairvoyance when you lose the sense of reality. Some movements I saw a couple of seconds earlier or later, answering a question before it was asked, or even walking face-first into a door because I saw it open a couple of seconds later and forgot to open it in reality (after that I preferred not to get out of bed until I adjusted). I didn't make a joke about the high ping of reality. No one would laugh anyway, but I smiled myself.

The next night, though I'd chosen it early in the morning when I started to check the new passive, I was able to activate the Moment without any strain at all, as if there were no strain on my body. In consultation with Tia, who looked at me with a strange look, I even moved a little under the effect of acceleration, maneuvering among the swirls and barely perceptible glare, which made me stagger like a drunk. And this time, I was limited only to shortness of breath and tremors, which passed after a few minutes of sitting in a soft chair.

"It shouldn't be like this." In the end, Tia said, sinking into a "file system" trance in which it was very easy to recall any known information and even information that she had never known before if she had a class of seers. "I need to think about it, Tin, but for now, I will only advise you not to be too diligent in mastering the new gifts of the All-Seeing. I understand roughly what you have managed to acquire, and it should not work like this, not with such efficiency. And everything that seems to be a gift of fate has a tendency, recognized by all sages, to contain hundreds of tricks of various kinds."

Yeah, just like that meme from 4chan.

Damn, she's got a catch!

But it is so big!

Even better!

The sincere bewilderment on Tia's face, with all her experience and encyclopedic knowledge, made me take her words very seriously, so I stopped experimenting. Of course, I wanted to consider such a sudden success as a consequence of luck, my awesome heroism, or something harmless, but why not be careful if no time was running out. Instead of working on the two mythical rewards of the Moment, I started to upgrade and modify the individual mirror parts, even if they were mostly either cosmetic or just multiplying the number of shard blanks. Soon, there will be even too many of them if the new search wave doesn't black out half of them, so I'm thinking of organizing a new mirror server.

And there were also artifacts - a chain link and a box from the Infernal, a blade lying peacefully in its place, and the equally peaceful trophy hammer of Ygra, who was not lazy to ask about its fate every time it was necessary to organize a shared dream. The weapon was the easiest - yes, there was a bind and tracker, but the twin circle of mirror shards simply ate up any search impulses, better than Ygra eating a boar or a wolf. Her favorite club turned out to be a very tricky thing, powerful and, obviously, requiring either a walking manned golem or a surprisingly strong body and extreme Endurance. We don't have a golem, and even if we could find one, even if I could somehow convince Hestia to remember the human past, to carry it around with us.... the thought is ridiculous. But a constantly regenerating ogre has plenty of durability and power to overwhelm everyone around it.

The hammer worked with vibrant strikes, but most of his special skills required a very decent weapon skill, characteristically not just hammers but also clubs - either of the two options. Something tells me that if the green one gets this pick, it's the bludgeoning skill that's going to be pumping, even if that bludgeon is a hammer. Auric Disintegration, Shattering, Breaking Impulse: the names of artifact attacks inspired respect, the description also pleased, and just so hammer could do a lot. Alas, I won't risk removing the binding for now - I just don't know how.

I have ideas and ways of realization too, but no experience, and it's a bit ghastly to ruin a legend by trying to burn out a controlling scheme or an imprint of a binding by manifesting a shadow. Or they'll give me the truly public title of Fucked up Legendary if I break it. I also had ideas for using Dream, but they also required a competent approach and long calculations. It puzzled Tia, but she didn't know much about it simply because of her specialty. She had already delivered the spoils of the legendary grade back to their native forests, but they were handled by specialists. Once, she had even participated in an operation to unfriendly seize a mythical relic from an ancient Alishan family.

They seized it, but the mythical artifact of a beneficent type that could create an oasis even in the middle of dead earth turned out to be a mythical fake, and the group of seizers was beaconed by Alishan Storks, and these guys would kick even the Fallen Leaves, especially in a direct fight. The elves were wounded, having managed by heroic efforts of the mage who had received permanent status damage to break through the gap in the defense against teleportation, and sailed away through the waters of the Deep. The planar portal brought them out in the Eternal Forest, wet to the skin and nearly shitting themselves in terror - the Alishans had sent some kind of creature after the fugitives, but the spawn of the Abyss hadn't caught up with them. Tia was willing to bet her dagger that her cloak, torn to shreds, was still intact when she jumped, but it had been torn by the claws of the thing that had followed her and the rest of the company.

But where the elves survived, albeit forced to swim in planar water, the considerable escort force that had helped take the ancient family's remote oasis to the sword was left to face a pair of full khulmas of the damned Storks, and other reinforcements were rushing to their aid. Agent work in the northern part of Alishan had been set back decades, and Tia had picked up a strict antipathy to foreign high-grade artifacts for a long time. She was willing to help me, but mostly with advice because she didn't see any other way. She wasn't a ritualist pro, though with her life as it was now, she was making significant progress in developing the skill.

The Chain and the Box I was wary of even examining. At least not without a full recovery and an increasing degree of paranoia. Even now, I had to regularly replace the shards that made up the circles around those two objects. Because those mirrors were starting to show things that even for Dream isn't good, not to mention the fact that those images, that message, that intent in the purely informational sense of the word, was trying to take root, to stick to the mind and sprout in it. One of the maids was saved only by the appearance of a kind devil, who noticed the girl standing somnambulistically near the circle, subdued her strings, and scrupulously cut out all the memories of the last days (she accidentally looked into that hall on the third night of our stay in Arenam, and then the Chain and the Box gradually lured and called her), almost killing a couple of souls from the sonm in the process, as well as giving her a wild passion for anal sex and complete indifference to any other kind of intimacy, bordering on frigidity.

She absolutely refused to remove her gift without my order and only said that this fool needed something to seal the damaged parts of her mind and that she couldn't remove the bookmarks for the next couple of years. Otherwise, she would go crazy and run with triple force to look at demonic relics, giving herself to them to the end. It's not that Giver doesn't know any other way to do a personality patch, but it's worked out much more efficiently this way. By the time I came to my senses to change anything, even with my support and help, Giver was only to more trauma and guaranteed psychosis in the patient. We agreed that the bloodsucker had given the maid part of her toy collection, and she had... I even remember sitting in Tavimark, looking through the mirror to see where she'd gotten them from. Or was that already in Eternal? Giver had tweaked something in her perversion bookmarks and had set them to gradually weaken, but so far, the girl had a definite nymphomania, and if it weren't for the bloodsucker's bookmarks already making her work hard, she would be playing with her backdoor day and night.

After that story, the remote hall where these artifacts were kept was not visited by anyone but me, Tia, and Giver (Losius was relatively safe too, but he had nothing to do there because he could only help by disintegrating these things, and that wasn't a sure thing), Taria encouraged me to take pity on a fool and make a potion to make one particular body part more elastic, stronger, and more erotic sensual. It was the second potion I'd brewed since the crisis passed, just so you know! It was the second potion I'd brewed since the crisis had passed, so you'd understand! Well, she'll be happy, and Taria will get a plus in her karma because I didn't expect such humanity from her.

Well, maybe the fact that the maid's passion is quite often helped to quench by her also played a role.

When the time came to choose the perk for a hundred and fifty units of Inspiration, I had time to strengthen my defenses, fix the sagging areas, and suspect that the Box (I'm not sure about the Chain) is somehow adapting to the mirror prison, because every next time it sits the barriers faster and releases more poison into the mirrors. Or the stuff stored in the Box simply curses the area itself, and then I'll be embarrassed in front of the bloodsucker who took us in, which is nonsense in itself, but don't turn her home into a cursed old one, forcing her to find and set up a new one?

Anyway, about Inspiration.

The characteristic Inspiration has reached 150 units! Choose a perk!

- Essence Self-gathering (mythical: passive);

- Essential Impulse (mythical; active);

Again, the obvious choice, though I have to admit Essence Self-gathering sounded very tempting, just yum yum, top it off with a glaze and give it two. This perk turned my Essence Vessel into a real pump, or rather, augmented it with a working pump that can pull essences in passive mode directly from the air, etheric currents, scraps of used plans, my energy that can be slowly remade into essences, or even from things like the kinetic energy of body movement, the metric of space, particularly vivid emotions, the sky, Allah, and the exchange rate. Well, I'm not completely sure about the last one, so I won't state it. In the passive mode, this essence is filtered, distilled, and enters the Vessel in extreme concentration. At maximum voltage, if you consciously accelerate Essence Self-gathering to the limit and thereby harm the organism and the Vessel, you can literally dry up the energy background, making life obscenely difficult even for those who have a direct energy channel to other planes and relatively simple mages or exotic users of non-planar energy flows, like the same Ygra with her swamp stuff, will become infernally plush.

The ability to collect, without the stress and trouble of wasting tons of time, the purest essence, constantly developing the skill to control it... is hard to overstate. Give me fifty years, and I'll stamp out so many resources with this Self-Gathering that it'll be enough to build a huge mega house hidden in subspace and populate it with hapless victims of my experiment. And there will be a real Gigahrusch on Alurei because here, you know, there is so little of all kinds of chthonic creepiness, it is necessary to add the one created by me. Otherwise, it's just not interesting. Of course, no one will give me fifty years to polish the jade rod and master the basics of the technique of cultivating the inner hamster, but I refused this award for a completely different reason.
T.N. Gigahrusch
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1034060/Samosbor/?l=russian&curator_clanid=28776273

It's not that the Self-Gathering isn't deactivatable, no, it can be damped, weakened, or even completely deactivated, but requires a conscious effort, like raising your eyebrows or wrinkling your forehead. It would seem to be a small thing, easy to do but very difficult to maintain for a long time. You just get tired and can not continue. And after all, a long blockage of Samosbor could, there is only speculation, but I know too well the sneaky nature of this world not to believe in a possible trickery to begin to collect and disassemble the body of the hapless collector. This is Self-Gathering, where the prefix "self" is not in vain, a priori making it well beyond the control of conscious efforts.

Is it worth saying that even in a very weak form the absorption of essence from the surrounding space will affect the disguise? It's not easy to notice the gradual and weak decrease of essence from such thin and unnecessary matter, if only because no one in their right mind would look in such a direction, but it's possible! And if the presumed ill-wishers, which I don't have at all presumably all over this whole ugly world, will know exactly what to look for, then the fingerprint will be just exemplary.

Against this background, Impulse was not an ideal choice, but definitely preferable to the previous one. Far from useless or even harmful. This active perk had an insignificant rollback of a few minutes and could be used even more often, albeit at the expense of health and life. If you don't let the rollback end, some of the momentum will come back. This trick allows you to pass through the matter a kind of intangible wave, a pulse, just as the name says, which will shake and shift the essence that is compared to the matter.

In the work of an alchemist, such a trick allows the splitting of a reagent to be done almost instantaneously, without wasting the effort of sifting out slag or overcoming the natural strength of matter. Where a reagent of legendary value even I would have to carefully decompose into gold dust for about twenty minutes, using the impulse would atomize it instantly. Then I'll have to very quickly take control of the bubbling and flying essence to avoid parasitic losses, as well as discard all the slag, but that will be much easier than usual. The main work has already been done by the Impulse, the gold of the essence has been freed from the strong clutches of matter, the only thing left is, figuratively speaking, to separate the grains from the chaff.

As with Instant Purification, this perk has a dual nature, being useful not only in the craft of alchemical arts but also in hardcore combat. Because if you direct Impulse at a living, not-so-living, or even completely undead opponent, you'll disintegrate him in a way that is directly my honor. No shit! The same archdevil, if I could strike him with such a blow, would receive serious damage, a considerable part of which he would not even be able to transfer to the souls because the attack would affect the essences of his pseudo-body! It wouldn't have killed him, and it wouldn't have crippled him because that burned-to-the-bone summoner had done more damage, especially with her last attack, but it would have hurt.

Alas, the Impulse is not an ideal doomsday weapon for several reasons. First of all, if I concentrate hard enough, I can use it at a maximum distance of three meters, or even five meters if I'm fully engaged. But hardly any of my opponents will give me the time and concentration for such an attack unless it's from the un-existence and in the back, but then it's easier to hit with a shadow battering ram or share Aegis with the enemy. Sadly, sadly, and frustratingly, Impulse's full, one hundred percent effectiveness is only achieved in a classic brawl, when you can tickle someone's face with your fist. I also can't understand how much a human body is needed for such an attack, but I know for a fact that using the Form would make it difficult to use the Impulse.

As a result, it is a very specific ability, close to the ultimatum if used correctly and in time, picking a vulnerable victim, but it requires very special conditions. Both the conditions of use and the conditions when it would be reasonable to use it rather than something simpler and more reliable. Again, Impulse is more than dangerous to many types of opponents, from humans and other meat bags to planar creatures or stone golems, but there is a whole list of entities that are invulnerable to it. The same Guiding Spiral, being more of a phenomenon than an entity, simply does not exist for Impulse.

I have a vague idea that it is actually possible to touch such an abomination with essentialism, for Self-gathering can suck essence out of such things, which I cannot yet control in this sense. In the future, I want to believe that my crazy Inspiration will allow me to extract golden sparks even from the conscience of an official, from last year's laughter, or platinum threads of 4chan. Or on the contrary, I don't want to believe in such a crazy Inspiration, for which it is not long to go mad.

The choice was made, and next came the turn of testing the new perk and adapting to its work. By the way, the germination of the reward in the shell was somehow suspiciously easy, especially when compared to the limited examples. So, a slight malaise and nausea associated with a phantom sensation of movement somewhere deep inside, as if you had swallowed an iron ball and now you were walking near magnets. The impulse felt not like some OP activation button or a new organ. No. It was as if my alchemical perception had expanded. A new point of view had been added, a direction from which to look in order to understand the now obvious truth. To realize how natural the natural movement of essence is, how much it is constrained by the immobility of matter, how much this whole world resembles one huge cauldron, how easy it is to take one of the sections of such a bland, infinitely dull world that has chained the gold of creation, and just give it a nudge.

For the sake of experimentation, I atomized several sets of cutlery, and by the end of it, I was getting cheaper sets instead of silver ones, a piece of table, a chair, a couple of cockroaches, a live chicken brought in by the Shadow, Taria's panties stolen using my personal technique, an iron nail, a horseshoe, a plate of fried potatoes with fries, a jug of wine (the wine was rescued by concerned do-gooders), a wooden log and, before it came to the point of atomizing my common sense, I was sent to rest. I was either overtaken by an unhealthy Inspiration, or I just got carried away, but it was very cool, almost like in my childhood, when I used to light dry grass and leaves with matches and then run away from angry men, whose smoke was blowing through the windows.

It's hard to say which option is worse.

Dream's characteristic has reached 200 units! Choose a perk!

- Dormant Fate (mythical);

- Sand of Mirrors (mythical);

The next skill will be available when you gain 300 Dream units.

I deliberately left this choice for last, if only because both of the rewards on offer were analogs of the Shadow Armada. Not in the sense that they did the same thing, but in terms of the value and power of these two perks. They were both, even though of a different nature, values of comparable scale, and that was not as good as one might think. Frankly speaking, I was wary of making such a choice because the adaptation period would obviously be complicated due to my exhaustion and ongoing treatment, but it was impossible not to choose either. An unformed perk is almost more dangerous than the process of its formation.

Add to that the fact that the award was given for two hundred units in Dream and was just a sample of the treacherous scum of the plane, so these awards were not good. Powerful, damn useful, terrifyingly powerful, capable of being valued at the level of national treasures, but nowhere near good, there was nothing good about them, and there couldn't be. As in the case with Armada, I had to choose the lesser of two evils, although I was tempted to do like a real witcher and not choose at all. But to be fair, the choice was easier than between Shadow's Grip and Stolen Heart because there was only one really shitty option.

Dormant Fate enhances clairvoyance skills related to concealment, makes you virtually undetectable to all sorts of prophecies, and makes it extremely difficult for all sorts of bad luck curses to affect you in dangerous situations. Fate is asleep, so it can't affect you too much. And this is only a side effect, while the basis of the perk reminds me of the once-denied reward for a hundred and fifty units in the same characteristic. Even though there were even more differences than similarities. But still, I could still feel the kinship that had once made me give up Infinite Sleep.

Thriple fucking, damned, Dormant Fate allowed making "saves" to protect me from death at the expense of other people's lives by a method reminiscent, unpleasantly reminiscent, of rewriting Giver into new bodies. In fact, with this perk, you can put some unlucky person to sleep forever while leaving him to live an ordinary life without noticing that his real essence is being eaten and pulled out, and for some time, gradually preparing him for resettlement. And resettle your own soul, as if its reflection, as in the case of the Image. At the same time, all my souls will be real, but just as all of them will turn out to be false. As far as I understand, such a created double will be entirely you. It will fully retain the mirror class and will acquire up to two other classes of the recipient because your soul is one for all. In case of my death, it will be possible to merge two reflections, two dreams into one and resurrect, losing part of the shadow and alchemical class but fully preserving and strengthening the Overlord of Dreams and Reflections.

Make an army of clones?

Using these clones as beacons to attract souls, sacrificing themselves time after time in suicidal attacks?

Create a network of agents with old identities but souls literally identical to yours.

All this and much more will be revealed to the one who will master the Dormant Fate! It is difficult to overestimate such a thing and much more difficult to perceive it without nausea, but I somehow managed to cope with these difficult tasks. And then I clearly realized I wouldn't choose this thing, even if I had to rip out a piece of my soul for the sake of it and throw myself back in development for several dozen points of Dream because it's a complete and utter fuck-up. I was just wondering how quickly the active use of such doppelgangers, living other people's lives and destinies to replace them with my own, would shoot me in the foot. How long will it take before I start to get confused about which of the lived bodies is real? How long can I share one essence with the whole crowd before it starts to fray and burst at the seams?

This perk would bring my favorite tactic of "let's do everything we need without being seen and without getting off the couch" (the fact that the tactic is a favorite does not cancel the sad reality in which it can rarely be used) to a whole new level. Literally arrange an MMORPG, pumping other characters, creating a bunch of twinks, completely living in their role, while simultaneously squeezing green girls in the wild lands. I wonder if Weaver started the same way, albeit with different perks, titles, and classes. There was a very favorable offer, around which was built quite normal and reasonable tactics of pumping, and a slight immorality is not difficult to tolerate a little, and who cares about that morality?

I chose the Sand of Mirrors with a firm hand and almost without trembling, except for a grim premonition that it would be bad and painful, but this premonition concerned the choice of reward in general, not just this particular perk. It was really not very good, I was immediately knocked out and for a long day and a half suffered from not childish hallucinations, and the energy went in waves. When I woke up and realized that I had finally let go, I promised myself to come up with a powder that would cause similar feelings in those who took it and feed it to those who caused my displeasure. A very strong displeasure, because the rest of them would probably be enough to die.

The new perk, in its base, allowed to reduce the volume of the mirror shard to a minimum while increasing the number of effects and designs that can be "hinged" on the mirror so much that the average grain of sand, after receiving the perk, becomes, if not more effective than a palm-sized shard, before its acquisition, then inferior not much. The second strong factor in the reward was the ability to interact between individual mirror elements multiple times better. These two aspects don't seem to sound very cool in comparison to the previous one, which is, of course, partially true - in terms of naked benefit, the sand cast abomination is inferior and noticeable, but this superiority is by no means as all-encompassing as it would seem at first glance.

Now, looking at my mirror network, I realize how much I can improve it, how much easier it is for me to work with such things, and how much more dangerous my Dream has become in a direct fight, whether it will be in person or through a proxy. I have a strange association with the Sandman of Earth Mythology, and I suspect that the System gave me the name of the perk using that association. I have a feeling that the very essence of the sandy stuff will be revealed when I pump up to high levels of Mirror Cloak, but even now, it is quite pulling on its mythical status, albeit inferior to Armada. On the other hand, should I have chosen an option that's stronger but that I'll never really use? Or worse, use it?

Instead of thinking and regrets, I preferred to update and modernize the defense network since I was feeling better. I won't be able to deliver the full load. Nothing has changed here, but I can deliver a third, or even half, if I'm careful, of my capacity from the time before the little incident in Eternal. And just lying down would not work anyway - at least I'd be busy with useful work, but if I didn't do my work, I might get into entertainment, and any kind of leisure with my participation developed an unpleasant tendency to grow into some unhealthy mess.

Complemented the shard structure with a scattering of essence-treated sand that took on a mirror-like sheen and reflective capabilities, proving to be more than satisfying. A really qualitative leap had taken place. Not straight "This is the next level of reatsu whitening, and now you'll know the true power of my bankai," but noticeable, especially when contrasted. It's a very responsible approach to strengthening protective circles on demonic relics, practically recreating them anew under the supervision of Tia, who corrected my actions with additional ritual tablets and then also with a small jewelry chisel knocked out around these objects with ominousness of incredible full-fledged second layer of protection. And then she thought, nodded, changed into miner's clothes, promptly delivered by the bloodsucker (the question is, where did she get this set so quickly in Arenam, where there were no mines at all?), and with a real pickaxe began to beat out the contours of the rituals on the ceiling and walls, and not only inside, but also outside.

The ritual signs were not like the usual elven ligature, but I was not surprised by Tia's knowledge of dwarven ritual tradition, nor was I surprised by the fact that the use of such unusual clothes was part of the ritual (insignificant, almost cosmetic, but the effect existed and was documented). Still, I declare all responsibility. An elf miner is a mind blast to see such a thing with your own eyes. Hans, with a slight hangover, who came out to the noise of clattering pickaxes (the druid forbade to cover everything with a dome of silence because it could interfere with the main construction), bulged his eyes as if I was just pretending to be an owl, and he was a natural owl. He would have promised to quit drinking, I can tell you that.

Losius, who had been brought by his companion to the marvelous spectacle, only raised an eyebrow, said hello, listened to an explanation of the reasons for this sudden change of style, said goodbye politely, and left, but we could hear his resounding laughter from the living room. Taria simply and uncomplicatedly came to us in exactly the same outfit, bringing a natural dwarven harmonica borrowed from the Burgomaster for the return rent of the stockings stolen from the bloodsucker. Characteristically, it was the bloodsucker who went to exchange her own stolen lingerie, indicating either a criminal conspiracy between the two, Taria's highly developed persuasion skills, or she was just showing the mosquito her tits. The moment she started playing, Tia adjusted her inhibitions a bit and allowed me to cover the small area around the musician with silence. She didn't seem to take offense.

Hestia and Giver appeared merely decorous and went back to their chambers, but a couple of the servants who'd dropped in because of their curiosity, not even brainwashed by the gifts, had been surprised. Then, however, they had to look pale in front of their superior, who somehow managed to notice their visit to the forbidden area and gave them a good kick in the remnants of their brains. I didn't even interfere. The danger for them is quite real, and if their brains were not enough not to get involved, then let them have those brains corrected. The young lady who'd been fixed up by Giver wasn't sad at all and didn't visit dangerous rooms, spending all her free time in the arms of either Taria or Hans. Hans, of course, for obvious anatomical reasons.

We were done by breakfast, which I managed to show up to in the company of two miners with a normal, almost dancing gait. Taria managed to pump up her musical skill, which I was quite surprised about - it was the last thing she expected from her jokes. Tia sincerely promised to make her a professional bard, she continued in the same vein. Whether to play in the same spirit, developing the skill, or in the same spirit of joking the wise liquidator strangely did not specify.

From that moment on, my recovery was finally on a positive course, and it was nice to look at the Status.... while you don't look at the race line, even there, you can see quite clear improvements.

Name: Konstantin
Race: human/??o?e?
Level: 54

Titles: Hero; Inaudible Assassin; Night Master; Knocked by Thunder; Seer of the Legend; Killer of the Legend; Withstood; Sighted Mentor; Persistent Guy; Seasoned; Soul of the Mocker; Marathoner; Unseen Mentor; Walking Through Enemy Formation; Giver of Fear; Clinging to Shadows; Beyond the Existence; Step Beyond the Edge (Shadow); One Against Many; Anti-Hero; Embracing the Shadow; The Price of Humanity; Right to Power; Size Doesn't Matter; Face Taker; Step Beyond the Edge (Dream); Killer of Heroes; Creator of Legend (Fall of Stone); The Great Mocker; Kidnapper of Kings; Rejector of Hell; Deceiver of Hell; Hell Raider; Lord of the Wildlands; Great Free Alchemist; Destroyer of Monsters; Shackler a Legend: The Higher Shadow; The Genius Mentor; The World on Your Palm; The Invisible Puppeteer; Room Nostradamus; Self-Star; Deceiving the Great Ones; The One Who Is Not; Cursing the Legends; Weaving Together; Creator of Labyrinths; Laughter of Fate; Stranger's Reckoning; The Supreme Combination; The Ultimate Slaughterhouse; The Myth Killer; Mythmaker: Salvation of Eternity; Perdition of Hell; Laughter of War;

Characteristics Points: 33 (Unlimited Potential: 41 )
Class Points: 17

Limit of Excellence (from the title Hero): Hero's Will; Hero's Gaze;
Mythic; Silence in the Hall (rare; from the title Inaudible Assassin); Improved Coordination (common); Improved Hearing (common); Increase Energy Quality (common); Bone Strengthening (common); Combat Concentration (common); Perfect Coordination (rare); Active Reinforcement (common); Thickening of Magic (rare); Shadow Awakening (epic); Natural Control (rare); Inquisitive gaze (rare; active/passive); Leaf on the wind (epic); Magic Pulse (epic); Right of the Shadowborn (legendary); Dream Weave (epic); Metabolic overdrive (rare); Shadow's Grip (mythical; active); Breath of Magic (legendary; active) Chilled Blood (epic); Inspired Trance (epic; active); Impact Amplification (rare); Moment of Eternity (legendary; active); Vulnerability highlighting (epic); Hiding in Mirrors (Legendary); Iron Body (epic); Jewelry Control (Legendary); Reflection of the Sleeper (mythical; active-passive); Explosive Power (epic; active); Eye of the Observer (legendary; active); Own Magic (Mythical); Unlimited Potential (mythical); Instant Cleansing (legendary; active); Armada of Overlord (mythical; active); Body of Steel (legendary); Crushing Presence (legendary; passive-active); Endless Moment (mythic; active; limited); Eternal Epiphany (mythic; limited); Essential Impulse (mythic; active); Sand of Mirrors (mythic);

Skills:
Provocation: 84 (legend)
Running: 33 (journeyman)
Stealth: 79 (legend)
Swimming: 15 (apprentice)
Alchemy: 73 (legend)
Herbalism: 56 (great master)
Gathering: 51 (great master)
Fishing: 13 (journeyman)
Spear Mastery: 9 (apprentice)
Infiltration: 72 (legend)
Danger sense:81 (legend)
Deathstroke: 71 (legend)
Dagger Mastery: 72 (legend)
Hand-to-hand combat: 49 (master)
Energy Flow Management: 76 (legend)
Two-Handed Combat: 53 (master)
Throwing Weapon: 38 (master)
Clairvoyance: 86 (legend)
Disarming traps: 40 (master)
Pickpocketing: 31 (master)
Trap Making: 22 (journeyman)
Poisoner: 33 (master)
Essentialism: 76 (legend)
Unexistence: 72 (legend)
Riding: 7 (apprentice)
Reading footprints: 33 (master)

Chronofixation: 12 (journeyman)

Ritualistic: 19 (journeyman)

Agent training: 14 (journeyman)

When I'd agreed to be tutored by Tia, I'd thought I'd get a whole bunch of different skills, but I'd only gotten one and a half - Ritualistic because I'd had a lot of it in my life lately, even though I'd discovered it during the battle in the Eternal, and a very fancy Agent Training, which was considered a scarce and hard-to-find skill. Not at the level of Stealth, Clairvoyance, or even Unexistence, but better than the standard ones, which are taught even in recruitment camps, where meat for armies is trained. However, just the high rank of the acquired skill is not surprising, considering who I received my education from - it's easy to forget about Tia's reputation, experience, and biography when I'm in constant communication with an emphatically, friendly and pleasant elven woman. We're not much worse, though, and if things continue at this pace, we'll catch up with her notoriety very soon.

With the skills in this world in general are strange to the point of impossible, because I, for example, I have learned to cook quite well, especially in the absence of normal kitchen utensils, but the ordinary general cooking skill was not unlocked to me. And there are a lot of such examples, and boast hundreds of items in the list of skills only elves able to, and it is their Light branch, while the Drow in this regard is a little leaner. The thing is that the more skills you have, the harder it is to acquire new ones, and it's not about a limit, not at all. It's just that with the same Cooking, I unconsciously helped myself with Alchemy, which will easily help me cook something that would make even Gordon Ramsay weep (if he didn't kill me for serving it). And so it is with many other skills. The higher the score of a skill, the more it can emulate the skills of others, especially simpler ones. The same Clairvoyance overlaps me the rest of the branch of intuitive directions, and the sense of danger, too, some of the paths are eaten away. And I have many, many legendary skills, even the most modest person recognizes it, and I am not modest anywhere if only a little!

Another new skill was obtained during the fight with the mega creature and, apparently, was one of the reasons why I had so many perks connected, in one sense or another, with Time. Judging by my understanding of myself, this skill not only allowed me to better control all sorts of acceleration and not cripple myself in the process. The main trump card was the ability to see other people's attempts to distort the currents of this river, to see and prevent, if you can handle it. And if you can't handle it, just bypass, retreat, and run away. A perfect defense against the tricks the late prince impressed me with, and not only a defense but also an attack. Something tells me that the potential of this skill is not lower than that of the many times proven to be Unexistence.

It was the one responsible for the ease with which I was able to learn and expand new perks, I realized. It was possible to get to the truth earlier, but until the moment when Tia forbade me to experiment with Endlessness, I didn't see it as strange at all. Yes, it was a skill, but it was clear how I got it and developed it, so why be surprised? And when I thought about it and properly analyzed all the available data, almost bit by bit analyzing my feelings, trying to identify the interconnections and the reason for the unexpected boost, the answer was found relatively quickly. It took me longer to be convinced and reassured that I had not seen what I wanted, having mistaken it for reality, as happens when you want to frame the problem with a ready-made answer.

Actually, I voiced my conclusions at dinner. I confess that I wanted to be the first to give a clear answer because this all-knowing encyclopedia pressed me with intellect, and I needed to show that I was not a fool, just an ignoramus. Only Tia, having listened to me, froze with a spoon not brought to her mouth, slowly put it down, looked at the crystal wine flute with a slight suspicion, and then meditated defiantly for almost a minute. In general, even a total Konstantin would have realized that the situation was somewhat unusual.

"Tin, please forgive me for some absurd questions, but are you sure that your Tablet contains the skill of Chronofixation, not Reading Time Stream, not Chronostasis, not Acceleration of Currents, but exactly Chronofixation?" Judging by the way the elfess pulled herself together and completely threw away any attempts to hide the murderous seriousness of the "I want to fight now" level, something I and the rest of my young team, who were just as surprised, did not understand. "My request may seem indelicate, but I would like to see this section of the Tablet as soon as possible."

"Yes, exactly Chronofixation. I'll send a copy now." Excitement and a slight tinge of not even panic, but a very serious nervous tension made me throw away the jokes and antics, funny only for me phrases and other methods of trolling. "Is something wrong?"

Tia didn't answer, reading the dropped line of the Status, and she was getting darker and darker, even though she tried to shield herself from my feelings, not to mention the barely audible swearing in native Elvish, which I could rather lip-read. I'd learned Elvish swear words first, without Tia's help, just by wandering through other people's dreams, which I wasn't embarrassed about. She leaned back in her chair and pushed all the dishes away, massaging her temples as if she had a headache, which might well be true if she'd suddenly changed the direction of her psychic trance from passive rest to something else.

"Really Сhronofixation, grow weeds on the ruins of my home." The disbelief, shock, and incomprehension in the druid's voice made me feel like a natural slowpoke because I didn't understand a thing, and I didn't like it.

"Can you elaborate on that, like for dumbasses?" Taria was the first, even ahead of me, to ask the question, though I noticed Giver had realized something as well, just choosing to remain silent for now and... watching Tia as if about to attack or intercept an attack.

"Chronofixation is a skill that cannot physically be represented in the Tablet of Tin, for according to the sources of the Eternal Forest and all other major nations, for all of foreseeable history, this skill has only been accessed and revealed by those who carried Eternal blood no lower than the second line of inheritance, though the first is still preferable." This explanation she pronounces as grimly as she had once announced the working sabbath. "I'm not going to attack, creature. You can calm your intent."

Giver smiled sweetly, slightly lowering her readiness for an immediate rush but clearly signaling she wouldn't stop preparing for Tia's betrayal, which finally drove me to the edge. I clapped my hands so loudly that the glass shook, and Hans, who was rocking in his chair, almost fell over to draw attention and start a dialog before they actually started a fight.

"I'm definitely not an Eternal. Unless their Emperors went to Earth to go clubbing without protection, and I look like my parents," I answered honestly, thinking frantically.

Tia hates the whole dynasty pretty much, except for the fact that she might suspect that I'm a changeling - hardly the latter since there's no point in showing a generic skill - but she certainly doesn't hate them enough to attack them. Giver is just being paranoid, or maybe she's trying to provoke the elf to attack and me to ring her. Her hatred and anger are cold and logical, and she won't transfer it to me, even if I manage to get a part of their heritage in a way unknown to science and logic. Even if I suddenly turn out to be a distant descendant of one of the Emperors who decided to travel between the worlds, which, in itself, is delirious nonsense, reminiscent of a tabloid.

"The Empire of Ages is now ruled by a new Empress, named Walzea the Eternal." The elven girl changes the subject and really suddenly looks at me intensely with all her powers. "How do you feel about cutting her life short shortly?"

If I'd thought I was fucked up before because I was seriously fucked up at that moment. It's good I hadn't eaten or drank anything at that moment, or I would have choked. At least I'd learned the name of the new ruler of the land since Tia had said it - she was trying to keep up with the news and correspondence that reached Arenam from the larger hubs of the Empire.

"As adventurous even by my standards?" I hesitantly answer, but under the extremely demanding gaze, I continue. Though, Soul if the Mocker just begs to say that killing the new empress is unnecessary and inhumane, which raises a lot of questions for me. "I mean, I don't have anything against it. If it's so important to you, but with Jerem bastard, the Warrior's even bigger bastard, and a bunch of smaller bastards, it's better not to get into the capital this year."

"Take off the clairvoyance protection, please." Tia visibly calmed down, unlike the deviless who tensed even more, having to make a calming gesture like the rest of the team. "I'm using image coupling, don't try to block or resist, it's really important."

For some reason, I believed her because she'd revealed almost all of her essence to me, broadcasting her excitement about me and the necessity of this procedure, actually a very rough interrogation, as well as the impossibility of revealing the reason for such bullshit. She could have killed or harmed me before, so what was there to fear? If I trusted no one, then why the fuck did I get involved in this story in the first place and not become king of the greenskins?

I nodded silently, removing my defenses and letting Tia take almost complete control of my image, albeit gently. In a situation like this, it's almost impossible not to respond to a request unless you block it hard. You can still try lying, but I wouldn't risk betting on myself not yet recovered in this contest. So I met Tia's question stoically, letting her view the images of my imprint reflexively issued in response to her images. A bunch of people I didn't know, their looks, their faces, and their fates, bound by only one thing - the doom I bring them or at my command. And no, not by one thing. They are also bound by blood, Eternal blood.

I don't like to kill anyone, but it doesn't apply to local rulers who have long and persistently used the method of summoning (un)Heroes for their lofty and good (for them personally) purposes. And so, although I don't foam berserker, I respond positively to these images, saying, yes, we should nail the assholes. The only time I got a little twitchy was when I was conveying the image of a tall, graceful, beautiful even, but strikingly flat girl, which could be confused with a very feminine guy - the Empress. No, I could have killed her too, but something strange seemed to cloud that desire, to repel it, to make me look for other options, even if I used the same ring or sent her to a distant monastery on the edge of the world for life.

The pressure was not strong, though it was annoying and insidious, but not insurmountable. I was in no hurry to give in to it, but I didn't like the fact that something had gotten into my head.

No. It's not like this.

I fucking hated what was going on.

"Thank the Stars, but the blood connection is only with the first line, and it's only fragmentary and manageable with simple willpower." It was as if all the bones had been pulled out of Tia at once as she sprawled in her chair, either from relief or from sheer fatigue. "I dare say that we would all do well to hear a more detailed description of your battle with the powerful creature, especially the portions of that battle that resulted in you partially adopting the ancestral characteristics of a pure-blooded Eternal."

Okay, that's fine.

But there's a strange thought that's been on my mind.

Am I a fucking international terrorist in a dark fantasy world born out of the nightmarish delusions of a sick bastard with an even sicker fantasy, or a character in an Indian movie? Because in a little more time I'll have to check moles on hard-to-reach places, and learn to dance, and for everyone, not just me.

Examination, research, and deep psychoanalysis continued for almost three days, during which only Taria slept, and only because Hestia personally threatened to force wet dreams on her if she didn't stop disturbing and didn't go to rest. Then the misty maiden realized exactly what she had said and to whom she had said it and threatened never to force such dreams on Taria if she didn't stop interfering right now, and the threat actually worked! In any case, it was fun and wicked, but without porn - I was all in favor of getting to the bottom of the matter and, preferably, getting out of myself what was whispering not to kill and, preferably, not to do bad things to the current Empress.

The last one was the easiest to deal with. Now, knowing where to look, it wasn't difficult to find someone else's influence in my dreams. It was not possible to cut it out, it turned out to be tightly bound to the received skill, perks and almost not the laws of reality, as if Time itself, as an immutable Law received an "amendment to the Constitution", which indicated the impossibility of conflict between the bearers of this strange, but very strong blood. I even created a couple of dreams in which I colorfully and with considerable pleasure disassembled the rest of the dynasty into components and soup sets.

Judging by the trend, the strange law intimidation was gradually weakening, though it would never completely disappear but would not have a serious effect. To be honest, considering the situation, the result of the defense against a backstab was the exact opposite. In a normal situation, I would definitely not engage in the targeted elimination of the Empire's rulers, but now, I am seriously considering various plans. Especially, related to the Empress herself, as the only one on whom I am at least a little bit but wedged. If it weren't for that mighty cap of all kinds of protection, which covers this infestation, it would be almost tolerable - I have a feeling that even just thinking of seriously harming her, you can stir up this protection. Then, however, I remembered the list of known artifacts of the mythic grade and realized that I didn't think so. It's just that the Palace had one of such artifacts at its disposal, previously kept by the sluggish but still existing opposition.

The Opposition had been put in position during the invasion, and the Palace had foolishly appropriated what it had long wanted to appropriate. Given that the remnants of the Ducal House of Shaig were happy to at least just survive and be rescued by the Imperial Army, they parted with the long-held artifact almost gladly. In the sense that they did not take away everything else, along with their lives, limiting themselves to very modest "gifts" and almost directly offering patronage and protection to the weakened in exchange for their voice in the ranks of the discontented. And so the Scroll of Slaughter passed into the power of the Eternals.

No, it's not the Death Notebook. I asked Tia a few times. On the contrary, an interrogator's artifact is a great way to keep yourself protected because any plan to eliminate those on the list becomes known at the stage of elaboration. Up to the complete and itemized instructions for each executor, the list of cover groups bribed servants and names of customers. No wonder the Eternals were reluctant to hand it over - with such a cover, they had every chance of becoming untouchable.

The protection is not absolute, and the worthy owner of this artifact was not found, leaving some of the most powerful effects undiscovered, but still a cool thing. Its "non-absoluteness" was proved by me because I managed to confuse the formed image in the mirrors and repel the counter-scanning. After that, I thought bad things about this family only after having protected myself and under the un-existence. Tia, too, wasn't happy about the mythics these guys had received, calling all the Shaigs a bunch of useless compost. She knew a lot about this lady purely from her work, and what she knew was not impressive, showing her to be almost the weakest in her generation.

Next came a long tambourine dance, during which Tia tried to understand why and how I had acquired such an unusual affinity, during which I learned a few new words, and Tia learned nothing. But she almost picked up a new fleur when she got too deep into studying the images of my battle. Her dreams tonight, if she goes to bed at all tonight, are going to be very colorful. I remembered a past dream she'd unwittingly had, after which I experienced very mixed feelings but didn't seem to blush. He would have said: "Thank tits," but it was more like: "Thank legs," so even here, he stammered, albeit mentally.
Танцы с бубном

Toward the end, when the situation was recognized as stable and non-threatening, and Tia no longer looked like she was auditioning for a position as an elven mad scientist, and Taria, who was awake and yawning at the top of her lungs, prepared to drive everyone within range of her presence again, Hestia, who had been silent until now and occasionally helped to influence certain parts of the ritual, asked only one question of the highest degree of armor-piercing.

"I'm probably not very strong on this subject, but there is one single thought that keeps me going." The words flowed measuredly and thoughtfully from the bright scarlet lipstickless lips on the marble-white face of the mist that had taken on human form. "But am I correct in understanding that Tin's bond with the rulers of the Empire of Ages, forbidding the shedding of their blood, is weak to the point of insignificance?"

"That's obvious." Tia was even somewhat taken aback by such a strange question since it was to confirm this 'nothingness' to which we had devoted a whole bunch of time. "What's your interest?"

"To the extent that this bond works in reverse." Tilting her head slightly to the side asks Hestia, who every day more and more often prefers to take on the appearance of being motionless, like a full-length doll, and of the kind sold in intimate goods stores, no matter earthly or local.

"There's no response, Tin checked it himself, in your presence.'" Already frankly perplexed, the elfess, for a moment, very much beginning to fear that the remaining Eternals would come out to me through a search by native blood because there are few things better suited for a beacon, which I once already had unpleasantly convinced. "The affinity share and access to the attributes of the dynasty is there, but the response is zero, which is perfect for us. I still don't understand the inner petal of the message hidden in the shimmering words of your question."

"No, I don't mean the possibility of tracking Tin through the bloodline that's clear, and I trust your opinion as well as his." Of course, you trust her. I have the power to see such a connection, and Tia has the experience to tell me where to look. "That's not what I mean. Could the Empress Eternal wish evil upon Tin?"

Pause.

A very.

Long.

Pause.

Everyone looks at each other. Even Hans's face takes on a completely stupid expression, and the look on the elf's face is almost comical in the way she just froze in mid-motion, putting herself in such a deep trance that she's almost out of reality. You could cut her alive right now. She might not notice. The meaning of the question that I've been pondering and pondering, trying to find a flaw in the logic of a very likely but too crazy answer, is slowly starting to make sense to me, too. No, not the only right answer. There could be other answers, but this one comes to mind as the most accurate, the one with the most right to exist and the most tendency to come true.

And then Tialrianrelia's face, which even Taria wouldn't suddenly dare to call "Tia" now, blossomed into a smile so cheerful and wicked that some smaller Shadow might have been frightened or mistaken for a relative. Okay, that was a lie. A simple smile doesn't seem to scare a Shadow, but it still looked funny and creepy and, strangely enough, quite cute, almost poetic. That's exactly how one should draw Valkyries in the middle of a bloody battle with such a face. It's a very precise hit to the image.

"Huh." Not even a laugh, but the denotation of it, dry and dead, as if it was the laugh of the undead or my not-bad necromancer acquaintance who Cassie Friendship of Peoples Deceased, gradually shifting into an increasingly inanimate form. "Haha. Ha ha ha. I need to..."

"To drink?" Hans says.

"To think?" It's already Hestia.

"Go make out with someone prettier, relieving the tension?" You can recognize the person from the text of the question because only one creature could have voiced such a suggestion.

"Should you perform another ritual?" Giver did not keep silent, since the others had joined the game.

"Get some sleep." As if she hadn't heard all the jokes, Tia finished her thought. "I need to get some sleep and then take the next steps. To check your guess, my honorable companion will not come out soon. I will not read the images of the new Empress in the next couple of years, and I do not recommend even Tin to do it.... he won't listen, but at least let him rebuild his crown if he kept his roots intact. But now I need to get some sleep."

No one ever risked stopping the druid which walking determinedly toward her bedroom.

And who would risk it?

It took me a while to remember about my mythical ring. I checked all the trophies, analyzed Ygra's hammer, poked with the wand at the demonist's relics, and admired the trophy blade (postponing the mastery of the two-handed skill for later), but I remembered about the Ring only now. Admittedly, I would not have checked it, if not for the look on poor Tia's face, which reminded me of her reaction to my ignoring her artifact. It was that thought that got me thinking about the ring. To be honest, it's not that I forget about it, because it's hard to forget about something when your Concentration and Perception are over a third of a hundred. No System will not add intelligence to you, but it is possible to improve your reaction, memory, and ability to concentrate mental efforts on a specific goal due to attributes, it's just not so obvious. Plus, you won't become smarter anyway, continuing to create all kinds of shit, just faster and more technical than you did before.

No, it's not about memory. It's just my dislike of the artifact despite all its usefulness. First of all, it is simply immoral and on the same level of immorality as Yoke, I'm fighting against. Secondly, several times I was already going to subdue someone who is not sorry and then get rid of the outdated tool with tits (in the case of Taria, so tits are not a tool), but the result was that my team turned into a kunstkamera. All in all, I wasn't very fond of that Ring, especially having gotten my hands on a real mythical artifact for combat purposes.

If, instead of the Ring, I had gotten some battle-worthy shit of about the same quality (and the Ring goes on the very top even for mythic, I remind you), then my whole story would have been completely different, more pleasant, and not so traumatic. I certainly wouldn't have run from those goblins. They would have run from me, but they wouldn't have been able to escape. But I got my Perverted Mentalist Ring to subdue beautiful women. Or ugly women who would then become beautiful. And all this in the middle of a wilderness where there are no women at all in the foreseeable future. Any kind, beautiful or ugly, as ugly as my life! With modest points in attributes and undeveloped classes, I note.

When I think back, I wonder again and again how I survived.

I decided to watch the new effects of the ring with a kind of fatalism, expecting another shotgun blast of surrealism in the face, but instead of lead, it was concentrated surrealism spiced with Spanish shame. Why did some mentalist pervert with a bunch of unhealthy fetishes do this shit, and why am I ashamed of it? I opened the system tray with full readiness for anything forged in hundreds of battles, soldered by unbreakable will, fixed by hard character and cold heart. I had enough composure to read the changed description of the artifact and reread it, but then... then I, frankly speaking, fell into a precipitate, to put it simply, once again stunned.

The Ring of the Perverted Mentalist (mythical)

This ring belonged to one of the greatest mentalist mages in the universe, absorbing some of his experience and skills. He was known for his power, but he was remembered more for having a huge harem of women no less powerful than him, completely loyal and obedient to him.

Properties:

Indestructible: the object cannot be broken.

Nonexchangeable: the item cannot be lost, sold, or stolen.

Mythic: this is a very cool artifact, be proud of it.

Granted Abilities:

Female Subjugation (active): By pointing your finger at any female of equal or lower level, you permanently transform her into your most loyal servant and slave. Does not affect those of a higher class than you. Activation is instantaneous and takes 24 hours to recharge.

Beauty Investment (passive): any individual subjected to this ring gains a relatively pleasant and desirable appearance (depending on the victim's original race, appearance, and mass), no matter what that appearance was before. Even goblins and trolls. Activation is automatic, along with Pokorny. The effect takes from a few minutes to a day, depending on the external parameters of the target.

Corrupting Female (passive): adds a variable set of permanent status effects to the artifact's subordinate female, aimed at corrupting the subordinate individual.

Admin, bitch! (active): when this skill is activated, all system administrators within a radius of a kilometer experience a sharp stomach upset. In the case of the absence of representatives of the specified profession, the skill finds one independently within the entire universe. Activation phrase: [shit yourself there], recharge one minute.

False Coolness (active): increases the hero's level by 15 for a few minutes without adding any other bonuses. If the ring is used under this enhancement, subjugation is applied normally. When reinforced, obedience does not affect legendary and mythical individuals and heroes and can be blocked by a defense skill. Activation with the phrase: [I am cooler than I look], recharge one month.

True Coolness (cosmetic): you've reached the fifty-level milestone by unlocking the artifact's new abilities, so there's no point in appearing cooler anymore because you're already obviously cool. Deactivates the ability to use the false awesomeness effect.

Repeated Corruption (active): Repeatedly adds a variable set of permanent status effects to an already subjugated female, aimed at corrupting the subordinate. All new effects are, in one way or another, related to those already gained, broadening and deepening their capabilities. The application of an effect puts random permanent perversions into the mind of the subjugated female or reinforces those already present. Permanent perversions have a variable power to affect the personality but, by a greater measure, do not interfere with full functioning. Charges: one per twenty levels, rounded down (currently: two). Activation is by laying hands on them. Replenishing the spent charge takes four months minus one month for every twenty levels, but not less than one month.

Panopticon of Debauchery (active): a direct effect on Reality, minds, and threads of Destiny, altering probabilities, minds, and realities in an area of space at the will of the creator and owner of the Ring. Within an area of one hundred meters plus ten meters for each level, any individuals in the affected area will, one way or another, make unbridled love to the nearest suitable partner or partners. The effects are inescapable and unstoppable by any shields other than the highest mythical and divine. Activation by the phrase: [I've seen porn that started the same way], recharge one month.

Praise (active): repeatedly induces sensations, experiences, and emotions similar to those at the moment of submission (or repeated debauchery). The wave of ecstasy burns out extraneous mental influences and attempts to subjugate your subjugated women by other personalities or means. Activation with the phrase: [good girl], recharge one hour.

Final Corruption (active): for the third time, adds a variable set of permanent status effects to the already subjugated woman, aimed at corrupting the subordinate. All new effects, in one way or another, are connected with the already received ones, considerably expanding, deepening, and combining their possibilities, achieving the effect of synergy. The application of the effect puts new random permanent perversions into the mind of the subjugated female or reinforces those already present. Permanent perversions have a variable power to affect the personality but, by a larger measure, do not interfere with full functioning. Completely and irrevocably removes all effects of submission to the Ring, returning free will and partially rolling the mind back to its original state before submission, except for those aspects of the mind that are not related to submission to the Ring and exist solely within the framework of natural personality change. Charges: one per twenty levels, rounded down (currently: two). Activation is by laying hands on it. Replenishing the spent charge takes four months minus one month for every twenty levels, but no less than one month.

Perverted Mentalist Shield (active): Causes the female target to have gradually increasing orgasms, inevitably rising to the point where the mind and personality completely disintegrate and degenerate to a vegetative state. Following this, the personality is instantly restored to its original form and condition. For the next three weeks, the target remains in a state of complete deprivation of will, obeying whatever orders it receives while retaining its personality. During the stated three weeks, the target acquires a supreme aura of desirability, causing anyone who happens to be around to take advantage of the victim's willlessness for depraved purposes. The three-week helplessness timer only takes effect if there are at least three other sentient beings nearby that can take advantage of the victim's helplessness for lecherous purposes. The effect of the aura of desirability is absolute and unstoppable by any shield except the highest mythical and divine ones. Upon expiration of the period of willlessness, the target gains absolute immunity to all forms of subjugation, seduction, fetishization, whoring, and bimbofication, as well as other similar influences, excluding other effects of the Ring. The defense is invincible and resistant to any piercing or subtle influences other than higher mythic and divine ones. Activation with the phrase: [ahegaum], takes a week to recharge.

[undisclosed]

So, as a result of the inspection, the Ring blocked the already dubious ability to temporarily create the illusion of level increase because this increase drops the power of impact, and somewhere from the fortieth level is not so difficult to find a way to protect the mind from such an impact. Titles, perks, and artifacts that give protection of legendary grade, albeit of different kinds, are not rare at such levels. The Ring is very strong, but its impact is amazing in its complexity. It's enough to knock one element out of hundreds of thousands, and the entire structure of the subjugating effect will simply sprinkle harmless confetti.

That's why there is such a strange, at first glance, restriction on level and class. How can a legendary or mythical class protect you from brainwashing by the very fact of its presence if you don't have mental protection? It's ridiculous, honestly! No, it's not ridiculous. The Кing perceives the complexity of the entity being subjugated but relies on my own. False Awesomeness reduced the potential of the effect, and therefore, I didn't need it. The risk was too high. Tia, though with epic classes, has a bunch of legendary stuff in Status and could overpower the effect of subjugation while I was below her in level. The other thing is that she wasn't willing to fight back then, but that doesn't negate the possibility.

And in the basic version, all sorts of resistances, titles, and perks are not important - only level and class, nothing else. And if you don't have a cooler class than the mythical one, then you'll have no fun.... in theory. Now, having been to higher levels and seen what lives there (or doesn't live there) and the ways it can hurt you, I do not doubt that even at my current level, there may be those who won't be afraid of the ring. With extremely specific pumping and a lot of reservations, but there may be such, there can't be any.

The power of the Ring is not in its ability to subdue a Heroine, Chosen One, or Legend, though it can do so with a high probability - the fact that a lady with resistance can be found somewhere means that she is one in a hundred if not two. One in a hundred equal to me in level, I note! So, the likelihood of resistance is extremely slim. But that's not the true power of the Ring, no. The power is hidden in the ability to make a simple girl for bed into a second Taria with a gift similar to the skill of the legendary class and not the first rank. Then, you strengthen this simple peasant girl by Repeated Corruption, turning her already strong gifts into a set of talents that can replace an entire class. Then you polish it with a gifted defense so that no one gets into the peasant's head but you, and repeat this until you make yourself a goddamn army.

The mental defense is also good, though its side effects make one wonder about the creator's imagination, but it's almost a reflex. I read the description of the Ring and quietly mentioned with unprintable words the one who created it. That is, the thing is fabulously useful, but the side effects make it very difficult to use, although Taria will appreciate it with a guarantee. But she will also appreciate the "Praise" (also not useless due to the effect of removing other people's brainwashing attempts) and, knowing her, will appreciate it even more. And I am frankly afraid to talk about Praise to Giver because I have no idea what she would do if she found out about the possibility of experiencing the bliss experienced in the ritual hall of Touch just once more. And not just once, but as much as you can bear and beg for, and she knew how to beg. It is enough to remember her strings.

It's all bullshit.

It's all insignificant.

Even coffee.

Except for the Final Corruption, which, by the fact of its appearance, hit me on the head with a force that even Sovereign would not have been able to hit in full force. Because it's an opportunity to free those I enslaved, even if it's not clear yet what kind of fetishes and perversions there will be after three submissives in a row. I wouldn't even think of freeing a devil or bloodsucker in a drunken delirium. Taria was by no means a flower and was the first to try to kill me, and Hestia was generally an enemy in a combat situation. But damn it, it all got complicated in an instant.

And it will have to be resolved somehow.

Because the option of doing nothing and pretending that this particular ability doesn't exist at all..... is too tempting, simple, logical, and correct in the true Alurean sense of rightness.

Didn't I already tell you that Alurei's truth makes poor Kostenka sick?

* * *

Author's Note:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mEnataSMyK2qL3z5nvuVEIUWvNsjYA7p/view?usp=sharing - Giver, thanks to Random Reader version 2.0 for the link with the art.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hS4EXnIUJlXLnfeJlcHJy2Y2utWqwk2h/view?usp=sharing - The skin is the wrong color, but you get the concept. Thanks to the same reader.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bn3JhQww6hnKIWzDqF2Cqvwt2d2qgNRm/view?usp=sharing - Hardly likely to happen.

For those who know English: not a bad Seduction-Hypnomancer of the elven school, pretending to be a maid, at work, you can even finish the picture with long ears. Thank you to those who send in pictures, even the dirty ones. Especially dirty ones, because this is PWP!

1. https://hypnohub.net//images/ca/e3/cae348bd5fd460a1a20576cba62cc4db.jpg

2. https://hypnohub.net//images/13/c3/13c38bbfd8e7ddff45af3f9ffe2bf719.jpg

3. https://hypnohub.net//images/1b/8f/1b8f5d66e50dd904998dad81bd683172.jpg

4. https://hypnohub.net//images/3b/3e/3b3e1807f243fec713b04338dbfa0f10.png

5. https://hypnohub.net//images/92/8b/928bb9945cbc39ed925dce753932a816.png - If working in tandem.

6. https://hypnohub.net//images/c9/0f/c90f17d8c45c91ab0645ad1bab5dec29.png - And here you don't even need to draw ears... but the elf has a very hentai body.

*

Well, I'm done with that horror, though there's still a distinct feeling that there's a lot I didn't add. The same upgrades of the team. This case will be filed gradually, already in the next chapters, but for now, I can only say that the half-hundredth, except MC, was taken by Ygra alone.

Hestia, Losius, and Tia are close enough, as is Giver. The latter already has a sonm like no Legend would have, and that sonm is boosting her up a lot. If she hadn't thrown away so many souls that belonged to those not too guilty of her current situation, then I'd clearly say that she's a guaranteed beat 50-55 level "standard" Legend. She's not a gift now either, but there's no guarantee. She's leveled up but still hasn't crossed the half-hundred mark, and she's still a bit squishy. If she fights, it will be at the expense of burning souls with the support of "threads", but in terms of pure reserve and fleur control, she is still an elite, but not a Legend, and certainly not a Beloved, like Touch or Elder.

The Dice was rolled mostly on perk choices, titles obtained, and the actions of the guys behind the scenes. Basically, I only had to get into the stash a couple of times, and I spent little, cosmetically almost. Brinar's omake helped a lot, which ensured no problems due to the bloodsucker mess, but there's not so much danger there as a BUNCH of other rolls that would have made the chapter and life difficult for me.

The most critically successful were, as can be understood, Hestia's reactions to the reinforcement and subsequent restoration of comparative adequacy. Yes, the cuckoo wobbled a little at the misty young lady, but it was just that, a little, a little, not said goodbye. She threw a series of throws in which there was only one under 50 (41 to be exact). That was bad, but one clean crit (100, 37) and two more almost crawling toward it (94, 91) took the situation out. All in all, Hestia is still with us.

Losius had to help by adding bonuses, but there, strangely enough, it's much calmer. Blade's actions give pluses to stability, even if they themselves undermine that stability. Simplifying - he and his iron with wings get used to each other, hence the problems.

100 (added literally five points) was rolled by Ygra back in the interlude to the drop of new talents. Bonuses for titles, plus for achieving legendary, and all this together - the result slowly reclassified her as a melee witch. There is no need to wait for special sophistication. Everything is very straightforward, but a lot of pure power, both in the physical and magical sense. We'll see, but my personal opinion is that she will still be a fighter, not a mage, using magic only for support in battle. Actually, it can't be otherwise, different mindset and nature.

Tin roll out a pure crit and then another dirty crit due to bonuses (100, 79+21). It was on that +21 that I spent the largest single chunk of bonuses invested per chapter, but it was beyond me to hold back. Yes, it was a roll for joke about Tia's dreams that made me lose his pillow with the "against Kostik" method. The only cooler way to piss her off was with that ring thing he just forgot to look at.

And the Ring.

I think it's already obvious which of the revealed ring effects is the most "roasting." I'm proud to say the Final Corruption was planned from the very beginning of the first volume and hasn't changed since. Instead of Praise or Ahegao, it could have fallen to other things. There are a lot of options there, but all the stages of Corruption - First, Repeat, Final, and spoiler, were all thought out from the get-go.

This is almost the main meanness of the Ring. On the third corruption, there are guaranteed to be mythic-grade abilities like Hestia's Mist at a minimum. And if you are initially lucky with the very first use, there are a couple or even three synergistic mythic gifts possible, but this is from the category of triple crit.

And here's the tricky part - if you bring your subordinate slave to that level, you lose the slave. And you'll have to deal with a woman who has been pumped up by you, and who obviously has a lot of reasons to want to do you harm.

And, I'll note, the finale opens only on the heroic stage, which means you can't prepare in advance because you don't know what to prepare for. And it's one thing if you behaved with your subordinates like MC, and another thing if you behaved like an asshole, which is easy to slip into because power corrupts.

Some of his subordinates shouldn't even be released unless it's for a suicide attempt (bloodsucker, devil), but not all of them. And now you sit there, Tin, thinking, making another deal with your conscience, and constantly reminding yourself that you own your own mini-Yoke and can take it off at any second. Yeah, you didn't put it on innocent babes either, but it's too easy to make excuses for yourself, isn't it?

The coolest perks were the options for Dream, which is understandable since they are the only mythic+ of those offered. But Kostya rejected the option to reproduce by splitting, and the chosen option loses the lion's share of its usefulness without a Cloak pumped close to the top. However, the hero was not too upset.

Also, you will undoubtedly notice some discrepancies in the number of free points - it's not a bug. It's a feature. To be fair, I will note that I would have been happy to use it myself - counting everything accurately has never been my strong point. As a result, I had to count first and then make the "creaturness correction." The roll was not very good (44 in total, but at the expense of high minuses), and therefore the points did not add but decreased a little. If the hero had not rolled himself back into a human, it would have been increased almost guaranteed, and so it's still good that he gave the minimum.

The hero's race - no spoilers. There's still a lot that could change there, both from MC's actions and my rewriting, but Tin has come a long way, and it's going to lead to something.

Also, came up with the connection between MC and Sis. Reading the comments, I just couldn't ignore this roll. I'll be honest, if the Dice had indicated a strong connection or even a full-fledged Eternal, I would probably have thrown them over or even just put in the desired result. Such a throw would have changed the situation for the entire work, up to and including radically rewriting the backbone of the plot.

Lucky for me, first of all, that it is so weakly expressed.

And the MC is lucky in that the connection is not so much by blood but by Law. They can't find him by blood, but, spoiler alert, Walzea has ways to find out about her unexpected brother. Luckily, she doesn't even dream of using these methods - there's no reason. She knows all her relatives, even bastards, by name and by a lot of dossiers. There's no need to look for new ones and personally perform a ritual.... there's no reason.

But the roll for Hestia's question, or rather, for the answer to it, I will not tell you. Guess for yourself now. MC and Walzea's connection is minimal. It won't prevent him from killing her (but it'll bore him to the non-lethal option). But what is the situation with Walzea? That's another question. :)

Giver also required a lot of rolls because she has her own desires and would not mind making love to Kostya in bed. Re-read the scene when MC visited Taria's dreams only after submission. There are hints there. She may subdue MC, fuck him, try to erase his memory and pretend that nothing happened.

The other thing is that she is smarter than Taria at the beginning of their acquaintance and sensible about the prospects. It's one thing to "innocently joke," subjugating for a couple of weeks and removing the effects when you've played with it. Contacts with the fleur is too dangerous for MC, which the creature can not but understand. The desire to play with a favorite toy in every sense does not mean that it will risk this toy not only breaking but even scratching it a little bit.

That alone doesn't cancel out thoughts, desires, and perhaps plans for the future.

The search for the team is quite exhilarating, but the distance, as well as the complete mess of planning, saves and helps. Suffice it to say that the most dangerous moment was the one where MC almost ran into the Scroll while imagining how he would kill the Empress. That is when he almost made a mistake himself. And after so many titles with the effects of increased clairvoyance and un-existence, he's got a pretty good grip on other people's influences. If they were all still in the city, or at least in the suburbs, then yes, it would be difficult, almost impossible given their injuries, but they're in Arenam, and that total shithole, so no one looks in it.

I'd write a lot more, but I specifically want to take a break from the chapter already, so I guess that's the end of this tale before I get lynched for chapter delays.