Two weeks of the most intensive training Liu Yun had ever experienced.
Every day began before dawn with physical conditioning, not because his stats required it at this point, since the system's level-up rewards had already elevated his physique far beyond normal human parameters, but because Sera was a twelve-year veteran who believed in physical training as a discipline of the mind rather than purely the body, and because she was right. They ran, they sparred, her ice-type abilities against his void shadow deployments, which produced some spectacular light-in-the-dark effects at five AM in the training space, and they studied.
She taught him everything she knew about the Greek, Norse, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian strata that made up the majority of Veramore's Gate activity. The mythological composition of creatures, their hierarchy structures, their behavioral patterns, the specific weaknesses encoded in their mythological DNA that dungeon variants retained from their source material.
He taught her to read Void Sight.
She already had her own perception ability, ice-sense, a passive that tracked temperature anomalies, but Void Sight was different, operating on soul-substance rather than thermal data. He could not transfer the ability itself, but he could describe what he was seeing in real time and she could map his descriptions against her own readings to build a cross-referenced picture that was more complete than either one alone.
In the dungeons, they were lethal.
Sera's ice-type abilities were brutally practical: precise targeted freezing, area-of-effect cold fields that slowed creatures to fractions of their normal speed, ice barriers that absorbed impact forces up to B-rank-equivalent strikes before shattering. Combined with Liu Yun's shadows, which she coordinated with her ice barriers in an instinctive tactical shorthand that surprised both of them with how quickly it developed, they cleared three Class A Gates in six days with a combined clear time that the Association's records would have flagged as physically impossible.
They did not file the runs under their Association IDs.
By the end of the second week, Liu Yun's Register had grown to two hundred and forty-three shadows. His level had reached 31. His Void Affinity was 1,688.
And then a new quest appeared, not a standard daily objective but a Major Quest, displayed in a different color: a deep pulsing violet that made the overlay text visible even without focusing.
[MAJOR QUEST - VOID SOVEREIGN'S DECREE:][Objective: Build a Shadow Army capable of confronting an Avatar-class entity. Requirement: 300+ shadows, including at least one Mythology-Class unit above B-rank equivalent, and a personal level of 35 or above.][Reward: ABILITY UPGRADE - SHADOW DOMAIN (Advanced). New Ability: SOVEREIGN'S AUTHORITY (Forces shadow soldiers to peak performance; temporary absolute power state). Title: SHADOW SOVEREIGN.]
He showed it to Herald.
The Deity Fragment's masked face regarded the quest notification from the floor-shadow. 'The Chronicle is recognizing your readiness threshold,' it said. 'Three hundred shadows and level thirty-five. You have fifty-seven more to collect and four levels to gain.'
'How long?'
'At your current rate, four days. But the final requirements may necessitate a specific hunt.' Herald was quiet for a moment. 'You need a Mythology-Class unit above B-rank from a complete dungeon specimen, not a Fragment. There is one available within range. The Class S formation in Sector 2.'
'We're not ready for that.'
'No. But there are other sources.' The masked face turned slightly. 'The Underworld.'
He took the Void Portal north, away from the city, into an isolated stretch of Ash Ridge forest well beyond the urban mana field. He had been expanding the Portal's range and duration with practice, it held for twenty minutes now, and could be reopened within six hours rather than twenty-four.
He went through into the First Layer.
The forest of silver trees and amber cloud was familiar now. He had made six scouting trips in the past two weeks, brief, careful, focused on mapping and observation. He knew the terrain of the area within a kilometer of his standard entry point. He knew the creature population, primarily D and C-rank wanderers, easy extraction targets, and he knew where the First Layer's territorial boundaries were.
He also knew where the B-rank pack territory began.
The Einherjar patrol, Norse warrior-dead, B-rank equivalents, organized in groups of twelve, roamed a hunting ground two kilometers east of his entry point. They were organized, intelligent, and capable of communication. He had not approached them yet because approach without sufficient force would have been aggression, and aggression without sufficient force would have been suicide.
Today he brought sufficient force.
He deployed forty shadows, a combination of his best combat units, and walked into Einherjar territory with Shade at his heel and Fenris emerging from his shadow at three-quarter scale, the void-wolf's size communicating its own message about the nature of the approaching party.
The Einherjar leader stepped forward. It was a large shadow, the kind of warrior that the Norse tradition had honored with size and armor, its axe the length of a man. It looked at Liu Yun and at his army and it said something in ancient Norse.
Herald, from the floor-shadow, translated: 'It says you carry the dead and you walk in void-dark. It asks what you want.'
'Tell it I want a contest,' Liu Yun said. 'Best fighter in the patrol against my best unit. If my unit wins, the patrol joins my Register willingly.'
'And if it wins?'
'Then we leave in peace and come back when I'm stronger.'
Herald translated. The Einherjar leader was silent for a very long time.
Then it pointed at Fenris.
The contest lasted eight minutes and ended when the Einherjar champion, battered and exhausted by a Fenrir shadow that simply could not be permanently hurt, sat down on the First Layer earth and said something that did not require translation.
Twelve Einherjar joined the Register willingly.
Shadows 244 through 255. B-rank mythology class, all of them.
He was three levels and forty-five shadows from what the system called the Shadow Sovereign threshold.
He allowed himself exactly one smile.
Then he went back to work.