As the first projectile closed in, I sensed the rest a heartbeat later, several of them, fanning out, each one aimed at a different prisoner. The sensation was familiar: the punchy forward momentum of a crossbow bolt, except this thing had a hooked, sharpened serrated edge up front. It was still dripping with something viscous and foul. I couldn’t tell what had fired them, which narrowed things down unpleasantly. Either the shooter was far beyond my usual reach, or they were tucked away behind some spatial sleight of hand.

  And if recent experience had taught me anything, it was that concealment itself had grown ambitious in higher tiers. Disguising abilities had climbed so high up the ladder that they could coax space itself into pretending someone wasn’t there. A stealth-based predator with a red core? Odds were good it could slip past even my senses with some efforts.

  I tilted my head aside. The stinger screamed past and buried itself into the cart behind me, then ruptured, splashing vile green liquid everywhere. I grabbed the girl who’d helped this body earlier and yanked her out of the way. The only ones who didn’t get so lucky were the asshole duo from before.

  They started screaming immediately. The droplets ate into their skin on contact, melting flesh and then spreading. It felt eager and methodical, like the poison was aware about how much of them it wanted. It crawled, dissolved, and consumed with a grotesque enthusiasm.

  I watched without changing my expression. The living poison took them apart piece by piece. They weren’t helpless, either, they struggled, tried to fight it, but whatever this stuff was, they didn’t have enough to counter it. The numbness settling over me felt wrong, even by my standards. Maybe it was bleeding over from the priestess’s body I was currently wearing. Borrowed nerves, thus borrowed apathy.

  They weren’t the only ones dying. Shouts and screams erupted all around the caravan.

  Orders were barked. The wolf riders moved fast. The first I spotted was the arrogant Waryn, sword already in hand, charging straight toward the jungle, aiming for wherever the stingers had come from.

  I could have saved them. All of them. That was the mildly irritating part.

  The real problem was that my mana wasn’t cooperating. When I tried to move it, nothing happened. I glanced down at the chains binding my wrists. They pulsed faintly whenever I pushed, glowing just enough to mock me.

  Interesting. The enchantment more than restrictive, it also felt invasive. It didn’t merely block mana use; it actively siphoned what I had, draining it away. The only reason it wasn’t succeeding was because I regenerated faster than it could feed. Still, I could see how this would utterly cripple a yellow core. Neat trick.

  I could brute-force it. The option was there. But without properly dissecting the enchantment, there was a real chance I’d damage it beyond study. I paused, weighing the pros and cons, running the numbers in my head.

  Then I got bored.

  These people might have been marginally useful for figuring out what my first trial actually was, but I doubted they were thorough enough to double-check every prisoner’s restraints. That was their mistake.

  I broke the chains.

  Violet mana surged outward, flooding the caravan as I hardened it around the incoming projectiles still slicing through the air. Power rushed back into the bindings, this time answering to me. Whatever miserable circuit was etched into the metal didn’t last a second against my willpower layered over raw mana. It snapped apart cleanly.

  The chains fell dead.

  And my mana was free.

  The only snag was the girl from earlier. She turned her face away from the duo’s grotesque demise and then looked at me instead, as if proximity alone might grant her mercy. Poor timing. She caught me right as I snapped my chains.

  Welp.

  I ignored her. My fingers were already moving as I shaped Transfiguration spells, while also using the raw mana to intercept the incoming projectiles. It wasn’t exactly effortless as I had to identify each stinger mid-flight and wrap a stopping barrier around them in the same breath, all while weaving Transfiguration to keep the now-dormant chains from collapsing into scrap. Multitasking under pressure. Annoying, but something I was used to.

  Every projectile froze, their momentum strangled to nothing. I let the magic disperse immediately. To anyone watching, it would’ve looked like less than a blink. Good enough.

  A few seconds later, the transfiguration settled. The chains snapped back around my wrists, pristine and very convincing. The only thing truly ruined was the internal circuitry, those pitiful little enchantment lines were gone for good.

  As for the girl staring at me in mute horror, I smiled and pressed a finger to my lips in a gentle shushing gesture. Apparently, my idea of reassurance and hers differed wildly. She went pale. I was just trying to be polite.

  Three wolf riders— one of them the elegant one— were staring at the spot where the projectiles had inexplicably halted midair. They’d stayed behind to guard the caravan. Sharp lot, too. They deflected the remaining stingers with their swords and raised shields just in time to ward off splashes of living poison.

  Half a dozen deaths hadn’t rattled them much. That alone told me they were accustomed to people dying around them. Credit where it was due, they were competent for low red cores.

  Soon, the assault ended. From the undergrowth, the wolf riders dragged out the attackers: insectoid monsters shaped like oversized wasps. Tier four. A full tier beneath me, but that poison was nasty stuff. I found myself yearning for their venom glands for— uh, purely academic reasons, of course!

  As it turned out, that wish nearly came true. The Waryns butchered both the eel and the wasps on the spot, harvesting monster cores and whatever else they deemed valuable. The prisoners were shell-shocked, having lost nearly a fifth of their number to a single ambush by absurdly aggressive wasps. Their jailors didn’t spare them a glance. The dead were unchained, discarded, and the caravan rolled on as if nothing noteworthy had happened.

  The elegant Waryn paused near me, eyes narrowing briefly before he shook his head and returned to his post.

  So far, nothing had truly threatened me. That bothered me more than it should have. I felt exposed, too calm and too untested.

  From what I’d learned studying the recorded trials of past champions, something was always coming. The signs were usually subtle. The question was what.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  The only anomaly so far was that eel monster, far outside its usual habitat. And I doubted the wasps had used its living body to block the path, they’d waited to strike until after the Waryns dealt with it.

  There was a hint buried in all of this. I could feel it. I just didn’t have the context yet to pin it down.

  Oh well.

  At least one thing was confirmed, even if it hadn’t been obvious before: I had inherited my stats from my original body. The sensation of wearing someone else’s flesh wasn’t new to me. I’d already done it once, back when I slipped into Brana after dragging her out of the sewers and away from those elven cultists. This felt the same. Looking inward, I sensed the familiar structure. The girl whose body I currently occupied was a low yellow core as well, tethered to my own core somewhere out there by those same thin, glowing strings.

  The system itself wasn’t behaving any better.

  I summoned it by habit, quietly intoning, “Status.”

  [STATUS INTERFACE — ERROR]

  [Unknown error encountered.]

  [Attempting resol—]

  The attempt was immediately followed by more errors. That… wasn’t normal. My own stat screen had been acting strange ever since my fire gland mutated, with glitches, distortions, half-loaded mess whenever I tried to pry too closely. This felt like the same disease wearing a different mask.

  So, for now, I was locked out of my own screen.

  With Brana, the explanation had been simple, as she didn’t have a system interface at all. But this priestess? She absolutely did. That made it worse. I shook my head, irritated. I’d been looking forward to seeing how humanoid stat screens were structured, what kinds of progression paths the system dangled in front of them.

  Apparently, patience was required. Either the error would resolve itself, or I’d have to acquire that information the old-fashioned way— from a local. Preferably without resorting to violence. Preferably.

  There were a few more skirmishes after that, minor clashes with roaming monsters, but the caravan came through largely intact. The Waryns, however, didn’t loosen up for a second. Not even a little.

  “I don’t think we’ll make it to the valley by nightfall,” the arrogant one muttered to the elegant Waryn. His voice was low and tense. He tried whispering. He failed. I heard every word.

  The elegant one’s expression darkened. “Then we make camp before that.”

  “And wait for the fog to devour us?!” the arrogant Waryn hissed. “You know we can abandon the caravan. If we move carefully, we might still reach the valley.”

  “Will we?”

  “Will we what?”

  “Make it,” he said flatly. “Even if we abandon everything. And if— by some miracle— we do survive, what do you think happens when we return without these supplies?”

  His face went dull and cold. “There’s nothing waiting for us but death. So we risk it. Like we always have.”

  The arrogant one looked like he wanted to argue. His jaw tightened, then loosened. He said nothing and fell back in line, shoulders slumped.

  And slowly, the picture began to come together.

  It didn’t take much longer for the answer to click into place.

  The last scraps of daylight bled out of the sky, and everyone stiffened. Not just the Waryns— there were threads of raw, animal fear crawling through the prisoners as well. Even the beasts hauling the carts and the wolf mounts shifted uneasily, ears pinned, muscles tight. Whatever was coming, it wasn’t picky about who it frightened.

  “I’ll make two altars,” the elegant one said to the other Waryns. Then his gaze slid toward the prisoners, who had been separated from the caravan and bound around a massive boulder in a nearby clearing.

  They carved two circles into the ground. One enclosed the Waryns and the caravan. The other enclosed the prisoners.

  Then the ritual began.

  They laid out blood siphoned from monster corpses, cracked open monster cores, strips of organs arranged with careful symmetry. I watched with a faint frown. Rituals were a blind spot for me. Everything I knew about them came secondhand, from Lotte giving me instructions while I followed steps I didn’t understand. I’d never grasped the underlying mechanics, but repetition I could do. Perfectly.

  So while I had no idea what they were trying to achieve, I memorized every motion, every placement, every pause.

  The elegant Waryn raised his voice.

  “Spirit of the Winter Wolf.

  Guardian of the High Mountains.

  Watcher of the Frozen Pass.

  Hunter who stalks the dark when the sun has fled.

  We offer blood taken in your name.

  We offer the cores of fallen beasts.

  We offer remembrance and obedience.

  Stand watch through this night of devouring dark,

  And if judgment must fall,

  Let it not fall blind.”

  Definitely a protective ritual. He’d even invoked a sort of deity— Spirit of the Winter Wolf.

  That part made sense.

  What didn’t was why they’d duplicated it. Two identical circles. One around the Waryns and the caravan. The other around the prisoners tied to the stone.

  When the ritual ended, the elegant Waryn looked at the prisoners again. That same look of pity crossed his face, and for reasons I didn’t care to unpack, it irritated me more than the chains ever had.

  “May you survive the night by His grace,” he said calmly. “Close your eyes if you see something lurking within fog, no matter what you hear. Do not open them. Do not make a sound. Do not try to light anything.”

  He gestured at the circle around them. “If you feel something within the black fog cross the boundary… repeat the invocation. If you are worthy, you may live through the night.”

  Then he turned away.

  Ah.

  That was when it clicked.

  The second circle wasn’t mercy. It was containment.

  For some reason, these Waryns simply did not value the prisoners’ lives. I lifted my head and fixed the elegant one with a flat stare. If that was the case, then what, exactly, was that pity meant to accomplish?

  And yet— annoyingly— I could see the logic in his eyes.

  The prisoners were half-starved, dehydrated, their mana sealed tight in the dead of winter. Bare feet. Rags for clothing. Faces hollowed out by exhaustion and resignation. They didn’t look like people clinging to life. They looked like people already done with it.

  If surviving the night required restraint, silence, and a will to endure… then those who carried malice, despair, or nothing at all inside them were more dangerous than anything creeping in from outside.

  I tilted my head, studying the prisoners one by one.

  That was when I realized the real threat might already be inside the circle.

  And then it came.

  The moment it arrived, my instincts detonated. My heart kicked hard against my ribs, blood surging, senses screaming.

  From beyond the treeline, it advanced slowly. It felt vast and inevitable. A wall of pitch-black fog rolled forward without sound, swallowing the ground as it moved. It didn’t feel like mist.

  It felt like absence.

  My eyes widened despite myself as the darkness crept closer, devouring the world inch by inch.

  It was the same sensation I’d felt whenever I stood before something far outside my weight class. The pressure, the instinctive certainty that I did not belong in the same food chain. I’d felt it against gold cores before.

  This was that, multiplied a hundredfold.

  Its presence pressed against my own, vast and indifferent, and I understood immediately how hopelessly outmatched I was.

  A platinum core?!

  I wasn’t wrong. Whatever this fog was, it was alive. The realization settled heavily in my gut as it coiled around the two camps, one enclosing the Waryns and the caravan, the other trapping the prisoners against bare stone with no route of escape. The fog never crossed the ritual boundaries, but everything beyond them was devoured by darkness. The world simply… ceased for my senses.

  No one made a sound.

  The only movement came from within the black fog itself.

  There were monsters in there. I knew it. But the fog smothered my senses entirely. I couldn’t perceive anything through it, not motion, not intent, not mana. It was cold in a way that didn’t touch skin, like my very ability to sense was being iced over and locked in place. I couldn’t even properly describe the sensation. And if this truly was a platinum-core entity, then trying to analyze its abilities was a fool’s exercise to begin with.

  The last time I’d faced something on that level, I’d done so wearing power I barely understood myself, acting as something closer to a god than a creature.

  This time, I had no such luxury.

  The absurdity nearly made me laugh.

  I’d been bracing myself for a first trial that involved a gold core at worst. Something tricky. Something survivable. A situation where I could scrape out a moral victory with clever positioning and a bit of underhanded nonsense, like before.

  Instead, this.

  I swallowed. My mouth was dry. No saliva came.

  Wasn’t this a little unfair for little old me?

  I forced my attention away from the fog and onto the other prisoners. Watching them suddenly mattered more than anything else. One bad idea. One crack in restraint. One idiot giving in to fear, despair, or curiosity, and the thing outside wouldn’t need to break the boundary at all.

  As the real threat wasn’t the fog pressing against the circle.

  It was someone inside inviting it in.

  Jade (Helpless, Shackled Priestess)

  Currently chained, starving, surrounded by mortals with catastrophic survival instincts, and staring down a platinum-core fog god.

  “If anyone does something stupid, I am going to eat the concept of patience.”

  Unknown Black Core Girl

  And her smile! Why was it so wrong? It felt like someone who’s never smiled before trying it for the first time.”

  The Elegant Waryn

  Something stopped those stingers. He had felt an obscene surge of mana there and it was gone in a blink.

  No.

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