Sorin saw three paths ahead of him. In the first, he claimed the soulprint now and almost certainly delayed fixing his arm until rank 5. Truthfully, he’d probably be stronger with Blood of the Mountain and one and a half arms than with two fully functioning limbs. It definitely warranted consideration.

  In the second, he managed to successfully extract the soulprint from the dead ogre’s blood and stored it for a week or so. Then he’d fix his arm first, add the soulprint after, and get the best of both worlds. It was the most attractive option, but also the most difficult to achieve.

  The final option was that someone else claimed the soulprint, which wouldn’t necessarily be wasted on them, but it would be more of an investment into their future than something they wanted or needed today. That also ran into the problem that the soulprint was E-ranked, meaning Nemari was the only one who had any room left to claim it.

  Sorin mentally reviewed the tools available to him. It was a complete set, but designed for low-ranked climbers. It lacked the specialty tools serious climbers used when they wanted to extract complicated soulprints from monsters that weren’t necessarily flesh and blood. A water elemental, for example, was rather difficult to harvest because the first thing that happened upon it dying was its whole structure collapsing into liquid and seeping into the ground or—worse—diluting into the ocean.

  By comparison, a blood-based soulprint from the ogre was child’s play to remove. It was really more of an issue of the lack of specialized tools than anything. But let’s try it, Sorin reasoned to himself. Worst case, I fail to extract it and have to absorb it immediately. Best case, I can safely store it for a few days, and then use it after I fix my arm.

  “Keep an eye out for any roaming monsters,” Sorin said. “The Stone Skin soulprint won’t be too difficult to remove, but Blood of the Mountain is a different story. This could take me a while.”

  He dug Stone Skin out first. The gauntlet was useful for parting the ogre’s skin and getting access to its chest cavity, but after that, Sorin removed it so that it wouldn’t interfere with the precision work he needed to do. Odric acted as his assistant, helping hold back folds of rock-textured skin while Sorin went to work with a pair of fine, foot-long, thin-bladed scissors and a small knife with a blade about the size of his finger.

  “Here,” he said finally, having successfully cut the lump of tissue out of the body. “Grab a jar for me.”

  Dumping the soulprint into its jar and sealing it only took a moment, then Sorin dove back in. Harvesting a blood-based soulprint was simple in theory, but difficult in practice. Once a monster was dead, its heart stopped pumping. Blood settled, and much like a solid-matter soulprint, all the climber needed to do was go dig open wherever the soulprint was at.

  The part that made it tricky was that the anima pattern was diffused through the blood, and it wasn’t practical to drain a hundred pints of blood out of a corpse. Transport would be difficult at best, and that was assuming he somehow had a container to carry so much liquid, which he didn’t.

  The solution was to isolate the most potent blood. Ninety percent or better would be functionally inert, as far as the soulprint was concerned. That would still be rather easy to do, and even easier for someone like Rue who could sense the difference in aura there, except that, again, blood was diffuse. That remaining ten percent wasn’t a clot in the ogre’s leg. Some of it was also in its chest. There was more in its left hand, and also some in its scalp.

  Finding the hot spots and extracting them successfully was a process. Sorin could afford a few mistakes, but if he failed to get enough blood out, the soulprint would vanish, leaving him with nothing but a jar of ordinary blood. He needed patience and precision if he wanted to do it right. Or just absorb it straight from the body. If only I could take the soulprint in, then push it back out onto a placeholder. That’d be worth a bit of soul tearing.

  Since that was not the case, however, Sorin got to work bleeding the corpse at strategic locations, even going so far as to grab hold of the ogre’s heart and work it like a bellows to manually circulate blood when high-potency spots weren’t in a place that was conveniently accessible. It was tiring work that took him the better part of an hour and left him both sore and filthy by the end, but when he was done, he had a double-sealed jar with about a pint of blood in it.

  “Got it,” he said with no small amount of satisfaction. Considering the harvesting tools he’d been using weren’t designed for this sort of extraction at all, he was pretty damn satisfied with the results of knife-based bloodletting and catching trickles of fluid in a jar.

  There’d been no disturbances while he worked, and now everyone else was fully restored and ready to move on. Sorin took a few minutes to wipe himself as clean as possible with a damp rag that Rue handed him and tried not to think about the fact that it had almost certainly been a goblin’s loincloth not that long ago. Sometimes, being a climber was disgusting.

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  “You’ve got some dried blood on your cheek,” Nemari pointed out.

  Sorin looked down at the rag in his hand. “I’m not touching my face with this thing.”

  “Okay, you know what? That’s fair.”

  At least this lacquering repels blood. The armor wiped clean like it was nothing.

  “I think I’ve got us a heading for another possible camp,” Rue said, joining in the conversation. “When I was scouting around this one, I found some goblin tracks that came near, stopped, and then retreated. If we follow them back, I’m betting we’ll find another camp.”

  “Probably,” Sorin agreed. “It’s all small teams of hobgoblins dominating and subjugating goblin tribes. They’ve claimed territory and probably spy on each other to make sure no one’s making a move.”

  “What do they even eat out here?” Odric asked.

  “Nothing. The caves are where they likely do most of their hunting, except for whichever tribes are closest to the plains. That also means we’re not going to want to forage here, so let’s focus on hunting what we can and leaving as soon as possible.”

  * * *

  The next raid on a goblin camp went a lot better, if only because there were only about twenty of them being ruled over by a single hobgoblin. Sorin engaged it with Rue supporting him while Odric defended Nemari. Ice and fire annihilated the goblins in short order. It was an easy victory, but it provided no substantial gains.

  So they hit another camp and another one after that. Once, while traveling between camps, a massive vulture swooped down to try its luck. Sorin tore its wings apart with ice blades before it even finished its dive, and Rue decapitated it in a single strike after it crashed into the dirt. That was the most excitement they found in the foothills outside the camps.

  “This floor seemed a lot harder when we first got here,” Rue mentioned on the second day.

  “We’re all stronger now,” Nemari said, glancing over at Sorin. “Some of us more so than others.”

  “Speaking of,” Sorin said, “when we set up our own camp tonight, I’m going to try restoring my arm. If it works, I’ll be doing some major upgrades after that.”

  Sorin couldn’t help but grin at the thought. He’d been dealing with partial functionality in his hand, weak arm strength, and constant pain for way longer than he wanted. The thought of regaining full use of his left arm almost made him giddy.

  “But, before that: another goblin camp!” he said with mock seriousness. “The more anima I have built up, the easier this’ll be to do.”

  They did just that. In fact, they did it twice before it got dark enough that they set up their own camp on the leeward side of a hill. There was nothing to burn, but they scavenged wood from the goblins’ own cookfires. Odric got to cooking, even though it was technically Rue’s turn. It had not escaped Sorin’s attention that that happened a lot, nor did he fail to realize that he wasn’t alone in biting his tongue.

  He called Rue over since she wasn’t doing anything. “You’re the only one with the ability to perceive any of this right now,” he said. “I’m going to free cast a restoration spell. At least that’s the plan. You ready?”

  “Whenever you are,” she said, her eyes narrowing as she focused on his aura.

  Once again missing Watcher of Doors, Sorin dipped into his soulspace and seized hold of the loose anima floating in there. Digging up such a weak healing spell from the depths of his memories was a bit of a challenge—he was far more practiced at using Absolute Regeneration than this weak Lesser Restoration—but the pattern wasn’t that complex. He was only trying to mimic a D-Rank soulprint, after all.

  There was a lot of loose anima in his soulspace, but only relative to how much was locked into his soulprints. He’d stopped feeding them, all in preparation for this moment, but he still wasn’t sure it was going to be enough. It should be, he thought to himself. He’d done the estimates over and over again. It was theoretically possible.

  The only variable left was his own skill, and he was confident in that. Admittedly, he was greatly diminished from what he was; he had no soulprints to enhance his intellect or willpower anymore, nothing to protect him from mental strain or psychic attacks. He couldn’t even free cast outside his soulspace anymore! It was objectively a pathetic display, but it was what he had.

  He got to work, pulling the anima one way and then another, his mind holding it in twenty separate strands as he wove the soulprint into existence. The anima in his soulspace vanished, bit by bit, until every last drop was held in the pattern he’d painstakingly woven into existence.

  Just when Sorin feared he’d fail, that the strands weren’t tight enough, that he hadn’t been efficient enough, the spell sprang to life. He couldn’t feel it work, not while he was in his soulspace, but he knew his arm was regenerating. All of the torn muscles and ligaments that had failed to heal properly and the bones that hadn’t quite set straight were repaired over the span of a few seconds. Not having to feel the pain of that was a small mercy, and he made sure to give himself enough time for the spell to run its course before leaving.

  He came back out of his soulspace to see Rue staring wide-eyed at him. With a small smile, he lifted his hand and flexed it open and closed. Then he twisted it at the wrist to confirm he had regained his full range of motion. Finally, he pressed his palm down against the ground and pushed as hard as he could.

  No pain. Full strength. Mission accomplished.

  “You did it,” Rue whispered, her voice reverent. “I don’t know how you pulled it off, but it worked. That’s… Wow. Just… wow.”

  “I guess you won’t need me anymore,” Odric chuckled. “Well, not for healing. Dinner’s a different story.”

  “A smart climber never turns away a good cook,” Sorin agreed. “But I won’t be able to do this again for a while.”

  “What? Why not?” Rue asked.

  “Because I’m about to fill that empty space,” Sorin said. “I’ve got a backlog of soulprints to upgrade and new ones to absorb. By the time I’m done, I’ll be a true rank 4. And then we’ll see just how scary the Black Hellions are if they try to fuck with us again.”