The remaining trace was more resistant than the Gold class venom had been at comparable accumulation levels, requiring the modified clearance protocol rather than the standard one.

He ran the full clearance, thorough and slow, every system addressed in the correct sequence, and when the clearance was complete he checked again and then checked a third time before he was satisfied.

He did not have a specific sense of how long the engagement had lasted.

Long.

He stayed crouched in the Diamond territory for a while, breathing and letting the recovery work and looking at the dead Snake and thinking about the four more he needed to find and engage with the same seriousness.

The gene material had gone into inventory automatically.

Along with it, something else had gone into inventory that he felt as an additional weight in the inventory’s sense, something beyond the gene material, something that carried the particular density of an object rather than biological material.

A reward, commensurate with the power difference between his tier and the Diamond class Snake’s tier.

He did not check what it was.

There would be time for that when he was home.

He stood up.

Four more.

He had learned how to kill one.

He went looking for the next one.

The remaining four Diamond class kills came over the following days, each one its own complete and total engagement, each one requiring everything he had brought into the realm and the things he found during the engagement itself that he had not known he had before the engagement demanded them.

He died three more times across the four kills.

The second Diamond Snake had been coordinating with a Gold class one in a way he had not anticipated at the Diamond tier, the Gold class not fighting alongside the Diamond class as an equal but functioning as an extension of the Diamond class’s tactical framework, a tool rather than a partner, the Gold class handling the secondary angles while the Diamond class managed the primary engagement.

He dealt with the Gold class one first once he understood the relationship, which was the kind of understanding that came from dying once and continuing and coming back with that specific piece of knowledge in hand.

The third Diamond Snake’s venom profile was different from the first’s, the mental component of it more developed, not the subtle threat-assessment distortion of the Gold class but something with more structure, a more direct interference with the soul space that required him to use the Phantom’s Imprint defensively in a way he had not used it before, as an anchor for his own soul space against the incoming interference rather than as an attack on the target’s.

The fourth and fifth Diamond class kills were cleaner, not because the snakes were less dangerous but because he had accumulated enough knowledge of the tier’s specific fighting principles that he was making fewer wrong assumptions going into each engagement and more right ones, the learning from every previous encounter applying to the current one in ways that shortened the gap between what he had expected and what he was facing.

The fifth Diamond class Wood Snake died on what Neil calculated was the fourteenth day in the realm.

He stood in the black-green territory in the stillness after it and let the full weight of the fourteen days settle around him for a moment.

The third phase released as he stopped sustaining it and his frame returned to its ordinary height and the fog armor dissolved and the realm was quiet around him in the way it was always quiet, everything listening.

He checked his inventory without accessing any specific items.

The gene material from fourteen days of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Diamond class kills was all there, stored and intact, none of it absorbed, all of it waiting for the evolution that would make absorption possible.

The Diamond class rewards, four sets of them, were in the inventory as well, the weight of them distinct from the gene material, objects rather than biological material, each one sitting in the inventory with the particular density of something that had come from a creature of that tier.

He had not checked any of them.

He would check them when he was home.

He was tired in the total and genuine way that fourteen days of this kind of sustained effort produced, the tiredness sitting in everything at once rather than in any specific place, the kind of tiredness that was honest about what it had cost.

He was also complete. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

Everything he had come in to collect was collected.

"How far to the boundary marker." He said internally, not directing it at Nemo in the formal way but just sending the question into the connection they maintained.

"East of your current position." Nemo replied. "Approximately four kilometres. And the domain has news when you are ready for it."

He started walking east through the black-green territory, through the still root formations and the red luminescent growth and the sourceless compressed light of the sealed canopy above, the environment that had spent fourteen days trying to kill him in a variety of ways and had succeeded several times and had not in the end succeeded enough times.

The boundary marker appeared ahead through the trees after thirty minutes of walking.

He stepped across it and the Wooden Poisoned Realm was behind him and the ordinary atmosphere of the outside pressed in from every direction with the specific quality of air that was simply air rather than something that had a purpose.

He stood there for a moment.

Then he started toward home.

The boundary marker was behind him and the walk toward his domain carried the particular quality that returns always carried after a long absence, the familiar shapes of the settlement visible ahead and the distance between where he was and where he needed to be getting smaller with each step.

Fourteen days in the Wooden Poisoned Realm, and the first thing he wanted was to see what had changed.

He could feel it before he saw it.

The domain’s energy was different, not in a subtle way but in the fundamental way of something that had undergone a category shift rather than a gradual improvement, the signature of it reaching him while the domain itself was still several hundred metres away and growing clearer and more present as he closed the distance.

Then he saw it.

He stopped walking.

The wooden walls were gone.

What stood where the wooden walls of the Graveyard had been was not wood at all, a solid and dense black material that caught the light differently from anything he had seen the domain made of before, the surface of it carrying a faint texture that was not rough but was not smooth either, something between the two that communicated density rather than just hardness.

The black rock walls rose higher than the wooden ones had, and the gate at the front was no longer the familiar wooden construction but something made of the same black material, solid and fitted together with a precision that the old gate had not had.

The barrier running along the perimeter was different in quality too, not the luminescent-at-the-edges version he had left behind but something deeper and more present, the barrier energy sitting closer to the surface of the walls rather than running along them from a distance.

Neil stood outside his own domain and looked at it for a long moment.

Then he looked further, past the walls at what was visible above them, and the buildings he could see above the wall line were also different, also taller, also made of the same dense black material, and the energy coming off the domain in general was the energy of something that had evolved not once but twice since he had left.

He started walking again.

The gate opened before he reached it, which was either Nemo’s awareness or the domain’s own recognition system at this new tier, and he walked through into a space that was genuinely different from the one he had left fourteen days ago.

The courtyard was larger.

Not slightly larger, meaningfully larger, the interior space of the domain having expanded with the evolutions in the way that higher tier domains always expanded, and the additional space was already in use, Bob and Rob visible in the far section doing something with a structure that had not existed when Neil left, their combined voices carrying across the courtyard in the familiar configuration of Rob’s precision and Bob’s volume.

The buildings that had been wood were now the same black material as the walls, solid and permanent-looking in a way the earlier version had not been, and there were more of them, new structures that had been added in the time he had been gone.

The watch towers were taller and better made.

The electro towers at the perimeter had been replaced with something taller, structures of the same black material with energy running along their surfaces in a pattern that suggested a different and more developed mechanism from the original design.

The elven archers on the rotation were in better armor, visibly better, and their movements had the quality of people who had been at their current tier long enough to have fully integrated it rather than people who had just stepped up.

Leon was at his position near the inner barrier.

He straightened when Neil came through the gate and the quality of the energy coming off him was different, the same Leon but at a tier that was not the same as the Leon who had seen Neil off fourteen days ago, the 4th Origin standing out clearly even without checking specifically.

❖❖❖

Thanks for reading... adios