The cultivation compression was real.
He felt it as a physical quality in his framework, the way a sharpened blade feels different in the hand from an unsharpened one, not louder or heavier but more precise, the system's processing of each kill running at the enhanced rate the fifth entity's reward had granted him. He did not have to open his panel to confirm it. The first monster he encountered after the compression activated produced a notification that was visibly different from the baseline.
He had moved through the deep zone's inner section for an hour after the fifth encounter before the sixth entity found him.
