Blake fulfilled his hunting missions about three times over while on the search for echoes. When he applied a certain amount of killing intent to the target, it increased the chances of leaving an echo behind. Or so he hoped. He didn’t have any confirmation of it, but then again, everyone who ever visited a gambling hall had their favourite lucky charms, didn’t they? (Then again, perhaps those were actual luck talismans, and they were actually helping.)

  Regardless, Blake continued searching the mists. He attacked any howler he could find, hoping it left behind an echo.

  The monsters weren’t getting any stronger. Most were still Condensation three to five, and a few slightly higher, but nothing that posed a threat to him. Still, he considered it combat practice. He let his enhanced nerves show their prowess. When he approached the howler, he stood as still as he could until the last moment, when his reflexes finally overwhelmed him.

  In a fraction of a second, he fuelled his arm muscles with Honour, and it snapped up. He swatted away the howler’s claws, breaking its arm with one strike, then slammed his staff down on its head, ending it in a single blow while exerting enough killing intent to flatten the weeds around the beast.

  This had to be the tenth howler he’d killed, and finally, it left behind an echo. He reached out, plunged his hand into it, and absorbed it, socketing it into his own echo. He didn’t care where it went, only that it attached to him somewhere. A faint brown gem appeared on his echo’s hip. It wasn’t nearly as bright as the lightstalker’s echo, nor River’s, but it was still an echo.

  He checked his echo compendium for any information on the howlers’ echo set. It was called the Swamp Prowler set, and with three echoes, it granted an increase in Augmentation effectiveness while the user was in the water. Beyond that, it also gave a slight boost to any bodily enhancements, meaning that Blake’s base enhanced body would function marginally better.

  But this echo set was only temporary. He was going to replace it with something better soon enough.

  Now, it was time to find a few others to add to the set. Shroomclaws, fell-crows, snakes, and more. And better yet, if he could find more howler echoes, he’d use them as advancement material.

  The process continued for a few days. He hadn’t brought nearly enough rations, but he survived by cycling Honour through his Intestine Meridian. It didn’t even feel like he was hungry anymore.

  Of course, it wouldn’t last forever, but it would keep him going until he could return to the pavilion.

  The next echo he found, however, belonged to a howler as well. He tried to socket it, but it wouldn’t absorb, not like the others, and it risked breaking away from his killing intent.

  I already told you, Ethbin said. You cannot socket a duplicate echo. Did you not believe me?

  “I was just trying my luck…” Blake muttered. “Alright, then. How do I consume it for its echo material?”

  Instead of just using the pull you know to socket it, you must cycle it through your body. Let the meridians and your Honour break the echo down into its fundamental components, before drawing the Honour through the siphon and combining it with your own echo.

  “That’s a long process.”

  Yes, and you’ll only get one shot at it. That would be a waste of a perfectly good echo. Go quickly, before your killing intent falters.

  Blake shut his eyes and drew the echo into his body, then immediately closed his siphon before it could pass through. He sat down cross-legged and used the Lightning Crucible to break down and destroy the echo. It ceased to be a howler’s impression on the world, and turned into just a bunch of spiritual matter.

  After a few loops, he opened his siphon again and let the howler’s material fall through it. It didn’t turn into a gem. It just blended with the now shadowy, black impression of himself.

  “What did that do?” Blake asked. “It’s just…gone. It didn’t do anything.”

  You’ll need to do that approximately six and three quarters more times.

  “Approximately?”

  Would you like me to add another decimal point?

  Blake shook his head. “Right then, gramps. But what did it do?”

  You strengthened your own echo with spiritual material. You’re quite literally increasing your physical effect on the world, your impact.

  Blake didn’t necessarily understand, but he pushed his consciousness outside his mind anyway and focused on his surroundings. When he stood up, something did feel slightly different. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was almost as if he had become more dense. It wasn’t that he hadn’t felt real before. Now, though, every step fell slightly harder, pushed away water, left a deeper imprint in the mud.

  But if he used the Cloud Body half of his augmentation, he didn’t even leave a single mark.

  It didn’t just enhance his effect on the world, then. It exaggerated it. It made whatever he was doing more real, it manipulated something fundamental about reality that Blake just couldn’t place.

  “Alright then,” he said. “Let’s find ourselves approximately seven more echoes.”

  More than that, Ethbin interjected.

  “More?”

  Well, make it eight and three quarters. You’ll need to socket two more to complete your echo set.

  “Nine. I can’t just get three quarters of an echo.”

  Call it how you like.

  “I’m going to stop wasting time arguing with a ring.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  You do that.

  ~ ~ ~

  As it turned out, Mingel wasn’t the only assassin that Heron sent after him. As he hunted for more echoes, Ethbin warned him about a new presence following him.

  It was in the middle of the night when the presence finally struck. Blake hadn’t been sleeping too deeply, and Ethbin shouting in his mind alerted him that the presence was closing in.

  He had been sleeping in a tree, but he jumped down and ran out into an open stretch of muddy land, then spun in a circle, looking for any sign of the presence.

  He expected an attack from behind. But instead, a figure emerged from the fog in front of him. It wasn’t entirely dark, and with his enhanced senses, he could make out just as many shapes in the dim light as he could in normal light.

  A man in pitch-black robes emerged from the mists. A mask covered the bottom of his face and a wrap shielded the top of his head, leaving nothing but his eyes. He drew a long, curved sword from his back. Its blade was as wide as the palm of his hand, and three rings hung from the back of the blade.

  “Hey there,” Blake said.

  The man didn’t reply.

  “You’re here to kill me?” Blake tried.

  “What else?”

  “Silverbeard sent you?”

  “Who else?”

  Blake was looking for a rank seal, but he found nothing. Just black robes. “Ethbin,” he whispered. “How strong is this guy?”

  Foundation One, Ethbin replied.

  Blake raised his eyebrows. “He’s not sending his best, I suppose. Well, I’ll give you a chance.” He pointed his staff at the assassin. “Wanna leave? It’s the last chance you’ll get.”

  Leaping forward, his feet gliding over the surface of the water, the man charged. He whirled his sword, slashing upward, and Blake leaned to the side. The tip whistled past his nose and the rings jingled on the back of the sword.

  He jabbed the man in the stomach. There was no sense in holding back, not out here. Only one of them was going to make it out of this alive, so he used all the different strategies he could muster.

  The fight didn’t last long. As he was realizing, most real fights didn’t. A few swipes, a few techniques, and then one of them would slip up. Even in a half-asleep haze, Blake overwhelmed the assassin. His Augmentation made him faster than whatever this cultivator was using. His black lightning was nearly invisible in the night, and the man took a few hits to the leg.

  And then finally, when Blake was in the right position, he struck the man hard enough in the ribs to crack them and cave in his chest. His bones snapped, ribs piercing lung, and he coughed blood through his mask.

  Blake kicked the man’s sword away, then searched his body for any sign of a storage ring. There was nothing.

  The man was awfully silent as he choked on his own blood. Blake was about to leave him, run off into the mists and leave the assassin behind, when the man gurgled, “Silverbeard will take drastic measures.”

  Blake stopped in his tracks. “What, like trying to kill me wasn’t enough?”

  “When I don’t return…he won’t be so gentle.”

  Blake chuckled. “I’ll take my chances.”

  “You’ll regret…it.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Blake spent nearly a week in the mists before finally finding all the echoes he needed. It ended up being slightly longer than intended, because he wasn’t going back to the pavilion without completing the set, but the shroomclaw’s echo was proving uniquely difficult to find a single copy of.

  He had a fell-crow echo socketed beside his howler echo, and he’d consumed the material of nearly ten other echoes—well more than Ethbin thought he should have.

  He should have advanced, whether he completed the set or not, but Ethbin said, You’ve given yourself a minor bottleneck in your cultivation.

  “What’s that?”

  All you need to know is that it prevents you from advancing. The miraculous thing is that you’ve done it to yourself. Somehow. You’ve convinced your mind and body that it cannot be satisfied until you finish that echo set, and so your body is refusing to finish Tempering nine until you find that last echo.

  Blake gulped. “Whoops,” he said. “I, uh…is that a bad thing?”

  For you, at the moment, it works out. It is allowing you to harvest and integrate many more echoes into your own Honour echo than you should be able to.

  None of the other consumption of fell-crows or howlers felt as impactful as the first one he integrated, but it didn’t particularly matter. His realness, his potency, was steadily climbing. When he used the Lightning Fists portion of the technique, instead of sinking into the mud or turning himself into an immovable, dense weight, it further improved his strength. The air quivered around him, recognizing the power, and a faint shockwave cracked behind him when he leapt off.

  In a bout of experimentation, he managed to stun a Condensation stage four howler with his leap.

  It was in the evening on the last day when he found a trio of shroomclaws. Two were fighting over a mate, but Blake interrupted the party with a few heavy staff swipes. He used everything he knew. His movement techniques from the Serpent’s Cloak allowed him to bolt around the shroomclaws, outmaneuvering them, and his killing intent froze them in place.

  With each staff swipe, he broke through their fungal coats, cracking bone and shatting fungal flesh. All three howlers died in less than a minute.

  Only one left behind an echo, but it was enough. He absorbed and socketed it, leaving a little red gem around his echo’s knee.

  Once the gem was in place, it shot a channel of brown light over to the fell-crow’s socketed gem, and that linked with the howler’s echo, which launched another line down to the shroomclaw’s. With a burst of resonance, they linked together, and the echo twitched and quivered.

  His eyes flared brighter for a moment as the Swamp Prowler set took effect. Clenching his teeth, he weathered the effect. A tingling sensation ran through his body—not uncomfortable, but not pleasant, either—and, gasping, he fell to his knees in the swamp.

  When the sensation abated, the set was complete.

  He looked down at his badge, and he realized that most of that wasn’t the echo set coming together at all. It was his body advancing.

  Now, the badge displayed an etching that looked like a pillar. A single pillar. Foundation one. He said, “Hey Ethbin? About that bottleneck? I think I broke through!”

  That you did, young Blake, Ethbin said, his voice warm. A sensation of warmth settled on Blake’s shoulders, like someone had put his hands there approvingly.

  Blake grinned and said, “Wonderful, then. Okay. Now, how should I explain this to the hunters?”

  Tell them you found a wandering adventurer from across the mists, and you exchanged food for a cheap elixir.

  “I…” Blake nodded. “I can do that.” A prideful part of him wanted to tell everyone that it wasn’t just cheap elixirs, that he was just advancing to where he should have been, but he held his tongue and resisted. That would be way too much explanation, and it’d probably put too many targets on his back.

  You will find Foundation much more difficult, I suspect. It will take you much longer to cross this stage.

  “Why’s that?”

  Because it deals with the spiritual, not the physical. You are excellent at the physical. Spiritual? You can’t just recklessly brute force your way through that.

  “But—”

  Don’t worry. You have Grandpa Ethbin with you to help out.

  “Did you just refer to yourself as—”

  Yes. Now get back to the pavilion and exchange everything you’ve earned before they get more suspicious than they probably already are.