It was for this exact purpose that they had brought healing potions for almost all power levels. Three more injuries were more or less completely fixed by the miraculous liquid, and it changed something in the eyes of the onlookers.

Eik could see the exact moment when it hit them just how differently these strangers were living compared to them. Medicine, relative safety from monsters, a daily life above ground, and a large local community.

"You are all very welcome to come with us," Olivia said in English. Whether her words were translated by the ability was difficult to know. They weren't for Eik, so presumably his proficiency in English was considered adequate even if it wasn't his native tongue. Although most Danes were proficient speakers, he didn't know where the line was drawn.

As it turned out, most of the residents of the burrow weren't related by blood. Kasper was Harald's biological son while the girl they had initially followed back to the hideout, named Katrine, was actually the daughter of Harald's sister who had died along with the father during the initial shift of Earth into the Unified Mass. She had barely been six years old at the time, so now they were as good as parent and child, having gone through the toughest of times together.

Eik couldn't help but think of little Bin whom he had left behind when he left on the expedition. She was hurting and grieving and he had promised to protect her for the time being, and yet here he was, running off on an adventure. An important adventure certainly, yes, but he had left nonetheless. He just hoped she would forgive him when he returned home to her. He almost couldn't bear the thought. How quickly he had come to feel attached and responsible for this little girl.

"Are you guys coming as well, Harald?" Eik asked the bearded man.

He looked completely lost. The people he had tried to protect for the past ten years had now suddenly decided to leave and go elsewhere. His adopted daughter Katrine nudged him quietly in the side and his eyes snapped up to look at Eik. "I, uuh… Uh, yeah. Yeah, I think we will," he mumbled.

Kasper looked at his father with worry and he pulled him aside. Eik could hear him whisper to Harald that this was what they had always hoped for and that this was what was best for them all. The way they were living wasn't sustainable.

The bearded man nodded but that crestfallen expression persisted albeit lightened slightly. He pulled both of his children into an embrace and took a deep breath. "Alright, I think we will all be coming along with you. You said you're going up through Sweden to look for your parents and the group they were traveling with, Eik?"

Eik nodded. "Yeah, that's the plan."

"It's going to be dangerous."

"Yeah… I know."

"I think we will all need to get a good night's sleep before we can set out on a journey like that. I hope you understand."

Olivia nodded. "That is no problem at all. We could use some rest as well anyway."

***

Olivia and Eik offered to take turns on watch for the night, but Harald insisted that he too would stand vigil for their last night in the burrow. As it turned out, he had been responsible for that duty for a long time, only reluctantly sharing the task with others from time to time. The man must have spent every single day exhausted to the bones.

Olivia managed to convince him to get some sleep halfway through the night so when Eik got up to take over, he spent a lone watch in silence, absorbed in thought. He also took the opportunity to polish his aura technique.

From his rucksack of holding he retrieved the small cauldron that Atla had gifted him to use for alchemy and prepared the ingredients for the Potion of Mighty Strength class 3 that he had created successfully for the first time earlier that day.

Just to get used to the new process, he made another three batches which came out to a little over twenty vials full. Then he dove into himself to establish a deeper contact with his two powers — Profound Toxin and the internal Ak'ki that made up his aura. It was time to create another masterpiece.

Eik's Legendary Mystery Medicine 2.0.

He hadn't attempted to fuse the two forces since hitting C-rank recently. They both came to him almost instantly when he reached out for them. Barely any of the seemingly senseless aggression they had shown toward each other back when he had first tried to make them behave was anywhere to be seen now. Well, that was a good sign at least.

The moment the two energies began to rotate around each other, he knew he could do it again. They built up momentum and what had almost killed him before now came almost naturally as the blue of Profound Toxin and the transparent white of the Ak'ki slowly drifted toward the middle to meet.

Like paint mixing together into a new color, they fused into a little orb of muddled blue. Even just that glob of it exuded power that was something completely different from either of the forces on their own. And it just continued to grow.

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Even as the fused substance was cultivated further, Eik somehow knew he could keep going.

Once the roiling sphere of power reached a size more than five times the size he had been able to create at D-rank, he let Profound Toxin and the Ak'ki drift slowly apart until they stopped feeding the coalescence. Both of them were being so docile and obedient.

… Why? What where those sneaky little shits plotting?

Logically, it was obviously because he had hit a new power level and gained better control over them but… well, the paranoia was real.

Maybe C-rank — or Apostle of Toxin, as it was called in his case — would be the era of control for him. Only now, as he took hold of the swirling substance and almost effortlessly kept in a kind of motionless limbo until he was ready to inject it into the alchemical mixture he had prepared, he realized that he had achieved all of this while staying vigilance of his surroundings.

Before, he had basically been forced to put himself in a trance in order to reach the depths of concentration necessary to pull off even a sliver of the fused matter.

With a tendril of non-fused, white Ak'ki he snatched up the energy of the mixture and held it fast, as he had found to be the best way to handle this particular recipe, and infused the ingredients with the powerful coalescence. About half of the fused quantity was drained.

Just like the first time he had done it, rather than simply settling into a stable potion, the mixture flowed together almost as if it was being pulled together and drained through the narrow passage of a sluice. For almost twenty seconds it swirled and swirled, a blue glow which, at first, was faint to the point of being imperceptible gradually growing brighter.

Finally it slowly rose into the air, seized by an invisible power. Whether the coalescence that Eik had created which dwelled within was listening to his wish he couldn't say, but rather than a single, solid ball of elixir, the potion split itself into four bite-sized orbs.

For a moment, they hung there, suspended freely in the air, only to suddenly come back under the control of gravity and plummet toward the bottom of the metal cauldron. With his C-rank equivalent reaction speed, Eik easily nabbed them out of the air.

He had been using the luminescent glow of Profound Toxin for light until then but the little orbs of power didn't need that to be visible. Each of them shone with a hazy glimmer that gave them the appearance of priceless treasures. Which, to him, they most certainly were. Not only were they incredibly useful in that they acted as permanent power ups, but they were also direct symbols of the sort of capability he had reached.

And now that he actually had some product to show, he could finally talk to Mikla, or perhaps Andihar Dayarunar about what kind of price he could ask for such a product. Considering the fact that he needed a specialized substance that came partly from his Unique Worldbreaker ability, an elixir such as Eik's Legendary Mystery Medicine couldn't be something just any idiot could make, could it?

Surely, without Profound Toxin — an unquestionable shortcut — it would take an expert to pull off something like this. This stuff was going to sell like crazy!

He whipped up another batch of ingredients and used the second half of the coalescence, netting him an impressive eight orbs of Eik's Legendary Mystery Medicine.

With a deep breath, he popped one in his mouth.

Just like Heath had described when he had been fed the first and only existing sample of the elixir, the taste was nothing to write home about. Like dirt and plant sap, in fact. He made a face as it practically melted into his tongue, a warmth spreading throughout his body that was much like the sensation of a regular Potion of Mighty Strength.

But as Heath had also described, the boost itself was only just enough to be noticeable but it was definitely there. And this time, Eik had seven more of the lovely little fellas.

Another went into his mouth and to his delight, the effect seemed to stack without any feeling of diminishing returns. He went for a third and that too seemed to simply pile onto the effects of the two others, tripling the strength of the original.

The five remaining pills he folded carefully into a piece of cloth and tucked away in the rucksack of holding. How long these could stay good he didn't know, but inside the dimensional space of a bag of holding, it should be more or less indefinite if he had understood it correctly.

Even without attempting it, he could feel that he couldn't create more of the coalescence right now. There was a sort of spiritual exhaustion that would only go away with time. But maybe practice could shorten the recovery time.

Packing away the ingredients and his cauldron, he spent the next hour practicing with his aura, spreading it out as far as he could make it reach. At the edge of its range it was stretched so thin that it was barely even there. But even during that single hour, he managed to increase the range by almost a whole meter, bringing it to something like three body lengths.

That was actually about what he could do before evolving to Apostle of Toxin, so the evolution hadn't directly increased his range so much as expanded the upper limit and speed of improvement that he was now seeing. What it had definitely done as well was enhance his control. It felt much more natural to manipulate now.

A noise drew his attention. Actually, several noises did. A swarm of furry hexapods rushed out from the underbrush a couple of dozen paces away, heading straight for him. Judging by their speed alone, they were mostly E-rank with a few D-rankers mixed in here and there. There were at least forty of them, with probably six or seven D-rankers.

Brave to come for the Apostle of Toxin.

***

Harald pushed the door boulder aside and stepped out into the morning sun.

"You're up," the guy named Eik called. Harald was too busy gaping to offer a response.

The man who was his junior by many years was sitting at the summit of a mountain made up of the corpses of monsters that seemed to have evolved from wolves or dogs. There were so many. And he was completely unscathed.

Harald would have come out of a fight like that with severe injuries. Or not come out at all.

Eik hopped down. "You hungry?"

"Yes... And with this we have more meat to roast than we can eat."

Eik made a face. "Just have some of this," he said and pulled a variety of food out of his seemingly mysteriously bottomless rucksack. There were also sealed containers with vibrant drinks.

"Just how much can you fit in there?" Harald gasped as the rest of them filed out into the open air behind him, Olivia making up the tail end.

"Plenty. And there's more back at Forest," Eik grinned. He caught Olivia's eye. "Speaking of Forest, we talked a bit last night. We're going to have our friends come pick you up today and continue on alone."

"Alone? But…" Harald trailed off.

"We'll be safer and faster on our own," Eik said. Harald looked almost guilt-ridden by the prospect of safety. "It will be to the benefit of us all."

And if he called Mikla here now, he could get an estimate on the value and rarity of Eik's Legendary Mystery Medicine 2.0.

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