Sorin started with the jar. Not only was it the most important soulprint, it was also the most fragile. He broke the seals one after another, then popped off the lid to reveal the red blood and dipped a single finger in. With barely a thought, the blood turned to ash.

  Blood of the Mountain was potent, more so than any other E-rank he’d acquired. Warrior’s Vigilance was probably the closest base, and of course Blind Sense was powerful after combining three separate soulprints together. But Blood of the Mountain made Vigorous Constitution look like a joke. Sorin almost considered ripping the weak F-rank soulprint back out of him now that he had something so much better, but it still had something to offer as a component to another, stronger soulprint.

  He actually had quite a few changes to make, but before that, he had two more soulprints to absorb. The first was Heat Resistance—the very same soulprint he’d given to Nemari. He’d gotten his hands on two copies, just in case he had to fight someone from her family again. Hers was more to protect her from her own attacks since she insisted on continuing down the unbalanced fire mage path.

  Incidentally, there was also the fact that Floor 3 on this tower had a hot, dry scrubland environment. Heat Resistance would help him endure the new environment. It was unfortunate that he hadn’t been able to secure two more copies of the soulprint, but they were always in high demand.

  The other soulprint he did have was a little brass cylinder covered in delicate engraved lines. Unlike most of the soulprints he’d handled in the red tower, this one was human-crafted. It was called Speed Burst, and it gave a very simple ability. It let him move much faster for a short amount of time, in this case about a second. That didn’t seem like a lot, but it would have made a lot of his fights easier if he’d had it earlier.

  Besides, it’s not like I’m going to just leave it at F-rank. By the time I’m done with this thing, I’m going to have a permanent passive speed boost.

  Sorin retreated back into his soulspace, pausing only for a moment to flex his hand one more time. It was good to be able to do that without shooting pain going up his wrist. Then, with a deep breath, he closed his eyes and got back to work.

  Three new paintings hung in his soulspace, one large and two small. Blood of the Mountain was a combat ability, designed to let him take debilitating hits and keep going, with a quick regenerative burst to close up any bleeding and keep him from going into shock. Minor Regeneration could make that even better if he wove it in, so he set about doing just that.

  Now that he had space and anima, it was a much easier task to accomplish. As he worked, the painting representing Minor Regeneration slowly faded, the oils drying up and flaking off. Sorin ignored it to focus on the anima hidden inside that painting. Inserting the pattern into Blood of the Mountain wasn’t as easy as just prying one open and shoving the other inside. It was a delicate process, but it was also one he was familiar with.

  Perfect, he thought to himself as he studied his handiwork. The soulprint retained the regenerative spike in response to physical trauma, and he’d cranked up the healing factor to more than ten times base human. He probably could have achieved the same result just by forcing Minor Regeneration up to E-rank, but this way he got the benefits of both without cluttering up his soulspace with an extra soulprint.

  His next project was to move Vigorous Constitution into Warrior’s Vigilance. That was forming the heart of his offense at the moment, and if he was going to keep fighting climbers at higher ranks than him, he needed to be able to go all out for longer. For this blending, he meant to address that issue.

  The soulprints were harder to stitch together this time, mostly because Warrior’s Vigilance was very well balanced between strength, stamina, and coordination. It strongly resisted being weighted one way or another, and that cost Sorin some of the staying power Vigorous Constitution would have given him on its own.

  That left him with Ice Blade, Warrior’s Vigilance, Blind Sense, and Blood of the Mountain at E-rank, and Iron Body, Speed Burst, and Heat Resistance at F. It was close to a full load out for a rank 3, with maybe enough room to squeeze in another F-rank if he tried. But he wasn’t rank 3. He was rank 4, and not only that, the mosaic that covered the floor of his soulspace seemed to be giving him even more flexibility with his build.

  There wasn’t enough loose anima left to free cast a D-ranked soulprint. There probably wasn’t even enough for an E-rank, at least not any of the complicated ones. But he did have the resources to push Speed Burst up to the peak of F. Another goblin camp or two would let him take that to E, giving him a nice, well-rounded suite of abilities.

  I need more sensory options, and something for traversal. Defensive soulprints can wait a few more floors, but environmental utility is going to be mandatory soon. A real healing soulprint that I can use in combat should be a priority, too. Even if it’s just F-rank, I can build it up.

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  Though he was satisfied with the results of his labors, there was a long way to go before he could officially consider his kit to be well-rounded. Fortunately, there was space for another E-rank or two thanks to his new rank up. Speed Burst and Iron Body were his two top picks to fill those spots, if it came down to it.

  Or I could push something to D-rank if I just wait another few floors. Or not floors. Just grind out the anima now. God, that would have made my first climb up a tower so much easier.

  His last task was something he’d deliberately saved to the end. He walked a circle around the mosaic, studying the additional few feet of tiles the latest rank up had revealed. This upgrade didn’t add a lot to the image, unfortunately. Mostly, it filled out the details of the towers the rest of his original team had gone to, though it did add his original tower to the picture as a kind of hazy outline wrapped around the whole thing.

  Vague and unhelpful, he thought, scowling as he studied it. After all those cryptic warnings, you could at least give me a clue as to what one of them meant.

  He came back out of his soulspace about ten minutes after he’d started. Everyone was already eating, which he found himself unreasonably annoyed by. Blind Sense was their longest sensory range skill, but it wasn’t available while he was in his soulspace. Rue’s Aura Sense was second place, but that was a few seconds’ warning at most in the case of an ambush. Nobody was paying attention to the world around them, and Sorin could easily envision a goblin chucking one of its pointed sticks into someone’s back.

  His good mood evaporated, but he didn’t let it show on his face. Instead, he stood up and walked over to the cooking fire, where Odric had left him a bowl of some sort of meat stew. He scooped it up and started eating mechanically while his eyes scoured the evening twilight for signs of movement. Blind Sense’s range was good, but not good enough that he was willing to leave it to chance against a quasi-intelligent monster that hunted in packs.

  “How’d it go?” Rue asked around a mouthful of stew.

  “Merged two soulprints and added three more. I would say I should be able to beat your average rank 6 or 7 without getting hurt now. Depending on how they’re built, I could probably take out a rank 10 with some struggle.”

  “He says that so casually,” Nemari said with a snort and a shake of her head.

  “It’s not arrogant if it’s true,” he told her bluntly.

  “Did you really grow that much all at once, though?” Odric asked. “I would not say you struggled necessarily, but you could not have cleared some of these camps by yourself half an hour ago. A rank 10 could do so with the wave of a hand.”

  “If ten hobgoblins attacked our camp right now, you wouldn’t need to get out of your seat,” Sorin told him.

  “What about eleven?” Nemari asked dryly. “Would you lose then?”

  “Nah. I’d win.”

  She just rolled her eyes and went back to eating her stew while Rue snickered in the background. Maybe they thought he was boasting, but Sorin was dead serious. He’d downplayed how bad his injury had slowed him down, and that wasn’t even taking into account the massive upgrade in soulprints he’d just picked up.

  Speed Burst alone was a game changer. With that single soulprint, his body could keep up with his mind, if only for a second here or there. The soulprint didn’t grant any sort of cognitive boost—something that was extremely necessary at the higher ranks—which meant its usefulness as an F-rank ability had a sort of soft limit based on how fast the user would respond to moving at that speed. For Sorin, that was very, very fast.

  He ate mechanically, finishing the stew in just a few minutes. “I’m going to go do the next dead drop swap,” he announced. “Hopefully we’ll have everything we need to take a run at the Floor 2 portal guardian by tomorrow morning.”

  “Good luck,” Rue said.

  “When you go…” Nemari started to say before trailing off. She chewed her lip for a second, then firmed up her shoulders and nodded to herself. “Please ask Bradford if there’s any news about my family. I don’t know what Samael would do to them for failing to bring me to him, and yeah, some of them are a bunch of bastards, but…”

  “But you still want to know. I understand. It’ll be another week before we get a response, though.”

  “That’s fine. I can wait. That’s better than not knowing at all.”

  Sorin took out the paper he’d used as a ledger to keep track of what they’d collected and what they were looking for, then borrowed Odric’s charcoal stick to scribble a quick note asking for information on Nemari’s family. Upon consideration, he added a line requesting anything that could be found on Odric and Rue’s as well.

  Then he took out his knife, the blade looking duller each time he did this, and carved the seven-tower sign into a chunk of rock sticking out of the hill. It wasn’t very deep, and it was sloppy enough that he worried he’d need to make a second attempt, but perhaps the soulprint recognized the intent more than the artistic talent.

  Hoisting their collected reagents, Sorin pulled himself onto the Liminal pathway. It appeared as it always did, but he noted with some curiosity that the gate itself felt strange, almost like it was bigger. I wonder what exactly that means. Could I bring someone else with me now? Or maybe not yet… Maybe at rank 5? It just feels a bit roomier now, not like it’s wide enough for a partner to walk beside me.

  Sorin put that out of his mind for the moment and started walking down the trail. It was only a minute long walk, but the void lurking so close was a nerve-racking experience, so he didn’t want to loiter longer than he had to.

  A sound like something smacking into sand caught his attention. Stiffening, he slowly turned in place to look behind him, where a fat droplet of pure void about three inches wide was falling from above to join another one already nestled into the silver-gray of the path. A third one started falling before the second one hit, and then a miniature rain storm of void drops let loose.

  Hundreds of them hit the path over the next few seconds, all of them wobbling and glomping together to form an ever-growing whole. Within moments, a voidling twice the size of the little ones he’d destroyed on Floor 1 was standing before him.

  Ah, hell, Sorin thought to himself. Well, I knew this was a possibility when that first voidling popped out of the sign back in the cave.

  Then he heard a sound like rain start to fall on the other side of him, too.