They walked and Yuan talked.
He'd constructed versions of this conversation before and discarded all of them, so he stopped constructing and just said it plainly, the way he'd found plain language worked better than careful language when the thing being said was already strange enough.
"When I kill a monster," he said, "I can extract its ability. Pull it out of the core and absorb it. Keep it permanently."
Zhang Wei walked beside him and didn't say anything immediately, which was how Yuan knew he was taking it seriously rather than reacting.
"That's what you were doing," Zhang Wei said eventually. "After each fight. Crouching over them."
"Yes."
"The Shadow Stalker in the side passage. The Gargoyle King in the main hall." A pause. "How long have you had it?"
"Since the anomaly hit. It triggered during the Shadow Stalker fight — I was about to die and something activated." Yuan kept his eyes on the corridor ahead, his Sense running continuous sweeps. "I didn't know it existed before that. It wasn't in any of my assessments."
"Hidden talent."
"Something like that."
Zhang Wei processed that for several steps. "Shadow Step is C-rank. The fire abilities are C-rank. The defensive passive you used—" He touched his own shoulder briefly, where the Cauterizing Flame had removed the Blight contamination. "That wasn't C-rank."
"No."
"What rank was that one?"
"The original was B. The one I just extracted is A."
The silence this time was longer. Yuan let it run.
"You've been in this dungeon for—" Zhang Wei checked his own count. "—roughly three hours. And you have an A-rank passive ability."
"And several C-rank actives and two B-rank passives and one D-rank passive."
"In three hours."
"The extraction rate scales with what I can kill. Higher rank gives higher rank abilities, generally." Yuan paused. "There was also a bonus extraction on the original Gargoyle King — a dormant ability the monster was carrying that I got alongside the primary. The system seems to find things the monster itself doesn't know it has."
Zhang Wei stopped walking.
Yuan stopped with him. They were in the lower corridor, the Tremor Sense pulse coming up through the floor in that slow irregular rhythm, the fractured core's heartbeat. Six minutes on the timer. He let Zhang Wei have the moment anyway.
"The system is calling this what rank?" Zhang Wei said carefully.
Yuan had made a decision about this specific question before the conversation started. The full truth — SSS-rank, the notation on his status window, the word hidden that implied the system itself understood the necessity of concealment, was more than he wanted in circulation yet. Not because he didn't trust Zhang Wei. Because information distributed was information that could be observed, and what Zhang Wei didn't know couldn't be read on his face in a situation that required him to be convincingly unaware.
"Unusual rank," Yuan said. "The system doesn't display it the way normal talents display. It classifies as hidden."
Technically true. Every word of it technically true.
Zhang Wei looked at him for a moment with the focused attention of someone checking alignment between what they were hearing and what they were seeing. Yuan held eye contact and kept his expression settled.
"Okay," Zhang Wei said.
"Okay?"
"You're keeping something back. I can tell." He started walking again. "But you're keeping it back for a reason, not just to keep it back, and I know the difference with you. So — okay. Tell me when you're ready."
Yuan looked at the side of his friend's face and felt something loosen in his chest that had been wound tight since the awakening. Not relief exactly. Something more like the recognition that he'd been carrying more weight than he'd been consciously accounting for, and that some portion of it had just been shared without him having to ask.
"The extraction can't be visible," Yuan said. "If anyone knows I can do it — what I can accumulate, how fast it becomes a resource to control or a threat to eliminate. Either way it stops being mine."
"Understood."
"The academy would want to study it. Guilds would want to buy it or broker it. And people who couldn't get access to it might decide the simplest solution is to make sure nobody else does either."
"Also understood." Zhang Wei's tone was flat and serious. "I won't tell anyone. Not about the extraction, not about what you've accumulated, not about any of this. Whatever you decide people need to know, you tell me and I'll match it."
Yuan nodded once.
They walked in silence for a moment, the dungeon's ambient mana pressing against them from all sides, still elevated, still running at C-rank saturation with the B-rank contamination that the evolved Gargoyle King had been adding now dissipated. His Sense was reading the lower corridor as clear ahead, the Tremor Sense pulse louder as they descended.
He opened his status window while walking and looked at the five available points.
The Gargoyle King fight had shown him the problem with low Intelligence clearly — his MP pool recovery was the bottleneck, not his output. Twelve points per minute at Intelligence ten had nearly gotten Zhang Wei killed because Yuan had run empty at the critical moment. The mana pool itself was a function of Intelligence as well, which meant the Investment compounded: more pool, faster recovery, more ability uses per engagement.
Sense was the other consideration. His Mana Sense was the foundation of everything — threat detection, weakness identification, the structural analysis that turned his C-rank movement skill into a genuine combat system. At Sense twelve it was already doing more work than the F-rank assessment had suggested the ability could do. At Sense fourteen it might do more still.
He allocated three to Intelligence, two to Sense.
[Ding!]
[5 Stat Points allocated.]
[Intelligence: 13 (+3) | Sense: 14 (+2)]
The change in his Mana Sense was immediate and specific sharpening of resolution, the dungeon's ambient mana resolving into finer detail, the Tremor Sense layering more cleanly with the mana input rather than running as a separate channel. And beneath it, quieter but real, his MP recovery ticking up as the pool ceiling rose.
Better, he thought. Much better.
Upstairs, in the main hall, Li Meilin was asking questions.
He knew this the way he knew where his own hands were — by inference and pattern rather than direct observation, but with sufficient confidence to treat it as fact. She had been filing things all evening. She had filed his name. She had filed the fire-affinity girl's witness account. She had filed the empty stone where the Gargoyle King had been.
She was also, he suspected, talking to anyone who'd been near the Sentinel corridor junction, or the side passages above the third level, or any of the positions where his interventions had left physical evidence — rubble thrown from unpopulated angles, monsters dispatched from behind, students who'd been pulled clear by something they hadn't been able to identify.
Zhang Wei had said, earlier: she'll listen. She's already knows something is wrong. Give her the information and she'll use it correctly.
Which was true, and also a double-edged assessment, because a person who used information correctly was also a person who followed its implications until they resolved.
He pushed the thought aside. Present problem first.
"The core is one level below us," he told Zhang Wei. "The fragment I touched showed me its location. There's a central chamber, the dungeon's structural foundation, the point where all the mana cycling converges. The fracture is in the core itself."
"And you're going to extract it."
Yuan hadn't framed it quite that way until Zhang Wei said it. He turned the framing over and found it fit. "That's the working theory. The quest notification says neutralize. My talent says reach the core and find out what neutralize actually means in practice."
"What if it means destroy?"
"Then I'll need to be able to destroy a dungeon core."
"What rank is a dungeon core."
"Unknown."
Zhang Wei made a sound that conveyed an entire emotional response in a single syllable. "Wonderful. And if it's not extractable?"
"Then we find out what else stabilize might mean and work from that."
"Reassuring as always." He paused. "The students in the main hall — you want me to go back up and keep them calm. Keep Li Meilin from following you down."
Yuan looked at him.
"She's investigating," Zhang Wei said simply. "You know she is. If she traces it back to you and decides to follow, you'll have an S-rank talent in the core chamber with you, which is either very useful or very complicated depending on how that conversation goes."
"Very complicated," Yuan said. "I need that conversation to happen on my terms, not mid-dungeon-core confrontation."
"Then I'll—"
The sound came from below.
This was higher, a sharp, sustained frequency that hit the upper range of audible sound and kept going, the kind of noise that registered as wrongness before it registered as threat. His Mana Sense spiked with a signature that moved in the way very few things moved — not fast in a straight line but fast in multiple directions simultaneously, occupying space in a way that implied either multiple bodies or a single body that didn't commit to singular positions.
Zhang Wei had gone very still beside him. "What is that?"
Yuan's Sense was parsing it, the new Sense-fourteen resolution helping him separate the signal from the ambient noise.
One creature. One mana signature. But it was flickering, present, absent, present in a different location, absent again, like a strobe of existence, the monster cycling between states faster than his Sense could track in real time.
[Ding!]
[Monster Detected: Void Wraith]
[Rank: B−]
[Note: Highly agile. Phase-shifting capability detected.]
Yuan looked at Zhang Wei.
Zhang Wei looked at Yuan.
"Go back up," Yuan said.
"Yuan—"
"I need you in the main hall. Not here." He kept his voice level. "This one is mine."