Infinity Is My Affinity?!?-Chapter 120: Alright, Let’s Get On With That Quest

/Nico’s 1st Person POV/

Those ten hours of uninterrupted, dreamless sleep were a literal godsend.

After spending the last 24 hours surviving a goblin-infested fever dream, buying that thirty-thousand-credit DLC and paying 10k more to actually use the damn thing, and finding out a doomsday Illuminati cult was probably going to hunt me down, my brain had officially flatlined. Especially since I had been operating on 4 hours of sleep.

But today, waking up at eleven in the morning with a fully restored stamina bar and zero immediate death threats? That felt like peak luxury.

Now, I was sitting at a table in the bustling lobby of the Inn that doubled as a tavern, shoveling warm porridge into my mouth.

The place was absolutely packed. Seasoned adventurers were drinking cheap ale like coffee, knights were grabbing quick lunches between their shifts, and an imposingly tall Demon-folk waitress was navigating the chaotic floor, carrying tall stacks of wooden plates.

The whole place was loud, smelling of roasted meat and ale, and I was currently committing a massive magical felony right in the middle of it.

[This is completely broken...] I thought, taking another massive spoonful of porridge.

As I understand it, a Domain is basically a magical Wi-Fi signal. For a Tier 1 practitioner like me, that signal is exactly a ten-meter spherical radius acting as my definitive casting range.

But projecting a Domain outside of active combat is universally considered an act of hostility. Because everyone inside that ten-meter radius will instantly feel my magic pressing against them.

It is the magical equivalent of walking with a gun in your hand instead of its holster.

But right now? My Domain was fully expanded, pushing outward at a constant upkeep of 1 MP a second that my infinite regen easily swallowed.

And nobody even blinked.

[Phantom Imposition is literally a cheat code,] I grinned, chewing on a piece of dried apple mixed into the porridge.

The Epic-grade passive I bought last night had fundamentally altered my magical footprint, completely removing my Domain from others’ perception.

I was sitting there quietly eating my breakfast, while my invisible sphere of mana acted like a strange omnidirectional sense of touch.

Through my Domain, I could physically feel my mana wrapping around the solid wooden tables, pushing against the dense muscle mass of the two dwarves arguing three tables over, and mapping the exact position of the waitress walking behind me all the while keeping my eyes on the bowl before me.

I possessed total sensory feedback of everything inside my ten-meter bubble, and the heavily armed veterans sitting right next to me were completely oblivious to the fact that they were currently standing inside my kill zone.

Taking a slow sip of water, I let my mind rapidly crunch the tactical applications.

The absolute biggest weakness of my Dominium Radicis, the root magic, was that I could only spawn and manipulate those roots inside my active Domain.

If a higher-tier mage overlapped my field with their own, their domain would normally overpower my casting range down to my three-meter ’Absolute Territory’.

Being restricted to three meters meant I’d basically have to cast my magic at stabbing range.

But with Phantom Imposition, my Domain didn’t clash. It just seamlessly permeated through enemy territory without triggering the contest.

[If an Entropy freak pulls up and expands their Domain, they’ll think they’ve completely suppressed me,] I mused, scraping the bottom of my wooden bowl with the spoon.

[They’ll walk right into my ten-meter radius thinking I’m totally defenseless... only for a dozen thorny neurotoxin-drenched wooden stakes to erupt from the floorboards and instantly turn them into a human pincushion.]

And the best part? I can use this in tandem with Precognition, and I’d know all that’s going to happen in my 10-meter radius.

Couple that with a 3 MP/s cognitive boost from Ice Reinforcement... Yeah.

It wasn’t just an anti-assassination tool; it was the ultimate countermeasure against anyone who relied on their Domain overpowering mine to win the fight.

Pushing the empty wooden bowl away, I let out a satisfied sigh as I leaned back in the creaky chair.

I was still completely broke, but physically and tactically, I had never felt more prepared.

After grabbing my shotgun and khukri’s harness from the adjacent chair, I strapped them on before pushing through the wooden doors of the tavern and stepping right out onto the hard-packed dirt road of the micro-economy.

The midday sun was bright, shining down on the bustling industrial zone carved into the forest. Massive fire pits roared over by the Guild’s processing plant, where appraisers were already loudly haggling with adventuring parties dragging wooden carts full of freshly slaughtered goblin corpses.

[Alright, let’s get on with that quest...] I thought, cracking my neck as I began walking down the street leading out of the little micro-economy.

The original plan was to spend my two buffer days turning that E-Rank goblin dungeon inside out to grind levels and stack my stats.

But courtesy to a lovely gentleman from Entropy named Arlath, I could only grind for a single day.

Which still turned out to be just enough.

So, now, it was time to actually do the job I signed up for.

The Cinder-Hollow Mine out west.

All I had to do was fill an F-Rank quota for a B-Rank party called ’The Iron Vanguard’ while they and a Priestess of Amaterasu held the line during the full moon.

The threat was a horde of ’Outsiders’, monsters Mimi had described as Accursed, a literal curse that comes out to play every full moon, inserted into the world by an Eldritch God.

[An Eldritch God...]

My boots ground to a halt as Peko’s words from last night echoed loudly in my head. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

Entropy, the doomsday Illuminati cult entirely composed of wealthy elites, worshipped an Eldritch God to bring about the end of the world by facilitating the destruction caused by the Night of the Red Moon.

"Hey, System," I muttered, looking up at the bright midday sky. "Are the Outsiders’ Eldritch God and Entropy’s Eldritch God the exact same dude?"

-Ding!

{Unknown. My memory regarding the geopolitical and theological landscape ceased updating following the death of my previous host, Arlen Hale, three thousand years ago.

Since Entropy rose to prominence after his demise, I am lacking three millennia of contextual data. However, I can confirm that there exist multiple Eldritch entities.}

"Great. A whole pantheon of cosmic horrors," I sighed, aggressively rubbing the back of my neck.

Initially, I only took this quest out of morbid curiosity to see an Accursed with my own eyes and net some money while I was at it.

That three-thousand-silver coin reward was basically irrelevant now, especially since Nom-Nom had raked in a massive fortune during her dungeon dives over the last two days.

But after Peko’s lore drop, this quest had become the perfect litmus test.

[I am by myself, leagues away from my overpowered dragon and my... supposed sister...] I mused, staring down the long dirt road cutting through the dense forest.

[... I am the easiest target. Not to mention, if I die, so dies Nom-Nom... If Entropy actually considers us a threat to their plans, they won’t miss this chance to take me out.]

I was essentially strapping a piece of raw meat to my chest and walking into the woods.

Doesn’t matter if they came for me or didn’t, I’d at least know where we stood.

And if they didn’t? That just meant they had something massive in the works that made our existence completely irrelevant.

[Either way, I need to know.]

"Alright, let’s see what these new stats can handle," I muttered, shaking off the creeping dread as I tapped into my mana pool.

I pushed the throttle wide open, shoving a massive 60 MP/s into an evenly spread Ice Reinforcement.

The raw, freezing power instantly locked every muscle fiber into an unbreakable, high-performance state.

Frost violently crystallized across my knuckles, rapidly creeping up my forearms to encase my hands in a sleek, second-skin layer of armored ice.

The same freezing plating erupted over my boots, wrapping tightly up to my shins in a set of greaves, while my eyes flared with a piercing, icy blue glow as the reinforcement flooded my head.

But I wasn’t going to fly blind.

I layered 2 MP/s specifically into extra cognition, along with 1 MP/s into the domain, before finally topping it all off with another 2 MP/s into my Precognition to catch any immediate ambushes.

All of which, my infinite regen swallowed whole without a single stutter.

I bent my knees and-

-BOOM-!