The Old Shinkotsu was, as always, a painting preserved in time that spoke more of the old money that the people living in it did.

The streets here were wide and paved in smooth stone that had been laid with enough care that the pavement itself might as well be an art piece.

The buildings on either side were the old traditional kind, heavy timber frames and sloped tiled roofs with carved wooden details along the eaves.

The mana lamps on the posts were not lit yet, the refined monster cores inside them were dark until the sun got lower, but you could see the warm amber tint of the glass even in daylight and know exactly what the street was going to look like in two hours.

Most of the people moving through it were beast-folk, which was the dominant population of Old Shinkotsu, fox-folk, wolf-folk, cat-folk, and the like, all in traditional clothes that fit the district’s general philosophy of everything following the old ways.

The occasional elf or demon-folk or other races moved through the foot traffic without disruption. A dwarf couple was coming out of what looked like a very expensive tea house on our left, and none of this was unusual for a district that had been open to every race for three thousand years and had simply incorporated them into the existing aesthetic without making a fuss about it, so long as they behaved.

And behave they did.

What was unusual, however, was the ten-meter radius of empty space that kept forming around us wherever we walked.

Nom-Nom was not doing anything threatening. She was just walking, with the wheelchair still tucked under one arm, wearing her black shirt and trousers, her black hair loose over her shoulders with that deep violet sheen it caught in direct light, and her violet slit pupils scanning the shop fronts with the same curiosity she directed at everything new in the world.

But the draconic pressure she put out, even when she was actively trying to contain it, the oppressive pressure still bypassed the brain and went straight to the survival instinct.

And what it told everyone in a twenty-meter radius was the same thing it always told them, which was: there is an apex predator here, and you should adjust your position accordingly.

So they did.

The fox-folk mother ahead of us gathered her kid closer without looking.

The two wolf-folk men who had been walking side-by-side split smoothly to opposite sides of the street.

A group of elven merchants who had been standing outside a lacquerware shop turned to look, saw her, looked at each other, and wordlessly went inside.

A cat-folk teenager stared openly from a doorway with his flat back and tail puffed.

Some looked at her face as we passed and went very still in a different way than the fear. It was the stillness of witnessing something that is extremely beautiful, and their brain has stopped cooperating with the rest of their body while it processes this.

Men and women, both equally affected, equally obvious about it.

Nom-Nom noticed all of it and kept walking, eyes slightly higher than when she spoke to me. She is, after all, a Greater Dragon, and to base those instincts, these people will never be anything more than what weeds are in a garden, no matter how hard she tries.

And on the other side, on my left, Peko moved with her hands folded in her white robes and her expression set at its default, which was the one that could probably freeze a volcano with one look.

Her chestnut hair was down, her violet eyes staring straight ahead as though she alone walked the street, and the people who looked at her instead of Nom-Nom looked at her with the same stillness, just for different reasons, and Peko paid them even less attention than Nom-Nom did.

And then there was me, in the middle, a normal dude, albeit a very handsome and badass looking one, with one normal leg leaving a normal footstep on the stone and one made entirely of ice, leaving a frost print with each step.

Usually, people paid as much attention to me as they did to salads next to fried chicken.

But, not today apparently.

My little Ice prosthetic took 30 MP/s to maintain, which for me was nothing, the same as breathing, not even worth tracking.

But for the people watching and then calculating what sustaining that kind of output continuously required from a mana capacity standpoint, the conclusion they arrived at was that the young man with the eye patch and that badass cut running from his eyebrow through to his cheek was running more sustained magical output just to walk than even most War Mages could sustain throughout a fight.

Which put me, for the first time in my life in this world, in the category of people that the residents of Old Shinkotsu looked at and gave space.

And to be honest, I did not hate that.

So, the three of us walked, and the street opened ahead of us, and the afternoon light came down between the rooftops in long even strips, and I thought about the past several days, the mine, the Nexus, the cultist, the transformation, the sword, the six hours of holding the line, the Mage’s Folly, the moment Mitsuki came around the throne and saw me, and all of that sat in my head the way things sit when they’re done and you are far enough from them to look at them straight.

It was bad.

By any reasonable metric, that whole thing was objectively terrible, and I had come out of it with a missing arm, a leg, and an eye, a stab to the stomach that were now somewhat healed, and a situation that had gone from one international organization aware of and after us to two international organizations.

But standing here between these two, walking down a quiet street in the afternoon sun, with Nom-Nom stealing glances at a bakery window and Peko staring straight ahead, the weight of all of it was different from it had been when I was alone.

I was not certain things would be fine solely because I was back with them.

The certainty came from looking at the full picture.

Most of it came from Ferrum Knight and what it had become in my hands.

The knight I had built over three minutes had nine thousand MP behind it, and the math that followed was obvious.

With my regen and enough time, I could build a knight that held more mana than some Tier 9 entities carried in their entire pool.

And unlike a timed summon, a Ferrum Knight ran until its MP ran dry, which meant the limiting factor was not a countdown but a resource count, and my resource count was, for all intents and purposes, infinite.

Nobody was going to be capturing us, at least not without me nuking the entire battlefield. That much I knew.

Not to mention Trace.

The atomic blueprint of every material I decided to understand sitting permanently in my long-term memory, accessible at the speed of thought, creatable through Metal or Nature Manifestation... Yeah, well, there is frankly nothing stopping me from tracing highly enriched Uranium and Plutonium, and, let’s say, experimenting.

Not even the System can stop me if I really wanna.

The question was how far I was willing to be pushed before I stop playing nice and clever and go ’fuck this shit’.

And attacks on Peko or Nom are as far as it is going to get.

Anyway...

As things stand now, the future, as I was currently looking at it, looked just fine.

Which, in hindsight, was probably a terrible sign.

"So," Nom-Nom said from beside me, with me a side eye so pronounced it could have been detected from the end of the block. "I love eating monsters, huh."

"Come on," I laughed out loud. "How else was I supposed to explain away that seventy percent?" 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

"Now people are going to think I’m some kind of savage," Nom-Nom said with a massive pout.

"Nobody is going to think that. We’ll put a clause in the agreement... No disclosure of dietary preferences."

"Humph!"

I reached into my inventory as I walked, found the cinnamon roll I had been saving, and held it out toward her.

She looked at it with the side eye.

"It’s a cinnamon roll," I said. "Basically, you. Sweet, a little complicated, and impossible to get enough of~"

The side eye held for another two seconds and ate it straight out of my hand, putting the whole thing in her mouth in a single bite, and she looked forward again.

"Not bad," she said.

Her eyes, however, told a different story.

While I filed this information away with a chuckle.

"What you did back there..." Peko said from my right, her voice carrying its usual evenness, but it was slightly warmer underneath. "It was brilliantly structured. You solved multiple problems simultaneously and gave away almost nothing of actual value in exchange."

"Yeah," I said, feeling good about this and not pretending otherwise. "Selling deep floor creatures into the System is going to net us way more per unit than what Nom was pulling from F-rank dives. We should be able to buy Heart of the False Martyr considerably ahead of the original timeline."

"Indeed," Peko said, adjusting the fall of her sleeve with one hand. "... Depending on the floor depth and the dungeon response rate, we may even be able to afford the Grade 1 Cleansing Potion and address the curse on your wounds and Nom-Nom’s wing."

"Oh, for that," I instinctively cackled, "I have a plan."

Both of them looked at me.

Nom-Nom’s eyes had gone wide and attentive.

Peko had turned her head just slightly toward me, which for Peko indicated her complete and undivided attention.

[System,] I said internally, [Nab us in a Party module conference call.]

-Ding!

{Done.}

The interface bloomed in my peripheral vision, and I saw both of them glance slightly to the side as it appeared. System interface was visible only to us, so we didn’t have to worry about anyone seeing it pop up in front of them out of thin air.

"I’ve already told you about Trace, yeah?" I said, the words going out through the telepathic connection now so that the street around us heard nothing, just three people walking with their eyes slightly unfocused. "I’m gonna run an experiment, and if it pans out... we should have an unlimited supply of just about every potion we could need, regardless of its grade."

Both Chimeras simultaneously let out a sharp gasp.

After all, Grade 1 potions were the second-highest in existence, sitting just below divine-grade.

They were so rare and so expensive that they were basically the stuff of legends.

And me claiming that if the experiment worked, they would have an unlimited supply of them, plus everything below, was a sentence that took more than a moment to fully process, even knowing what I was capable of.

"How?" Peko asked, the cold poise she maintained completely leaving her voice.

She didn’t even sound like herself, which was to say she sounded genuinely, directly, unguardedly curious, and I had learned over the past weeks that this was the rarest version of Peko and the one I loved the most.

While I cackled like a cartoon villain and said-

"We’re gonna buy recipes."