Where before he had read the domain the way a person read a room, taking in its contents and their positions and their meanings, now he read it the way something read its own territory, the space and the people and the structures and the barrier all registering as extensions of a single connected awareness rather than a collection of separate things.

The environmental awareness that Cynthia had talked about.

He raised his hand slightly and felt the air respond to the gesture with the particular responsiveness of something that was paying attention, the molecules of it not moving visibly but arranging themselves in the way of a material whose relationship with the person asking had changed.

He closed his hand and said nothing about it.

Ileana reached him first.

She walked to him and looked at his face for a long moment with the thorough attention she gave to him when she was checking something important, taking in the full picture of what the evolution had produced.

Then she put her hand against his chest briefly, feeling the energy of it, and the expression that moved through her face was the one that contained a great deal of things she was not going to say all at once.

"Done." She said.

"Done... with this at least" He confirmed.

She looked at him for another moment, something moving through her expression that she managed without difficulty.

She stepped back and he looked at the domain around him, at Bob and Rob who had stopped working and were looking at him with expressions that communicated things they were not going to try to put into words, at Mob near the storage building with the quiet version of something that was still clearly awe regardless of how he held it, at Leon whose professional composure was present but whose eyes were doing the thing they did when he was recalibrating something significant.

At Magnar, who was moving toward him at the controlled pace of a familiar who had been waiting for seven days and was expressing the restraint of that wait in the quality of the approach, and who pushed his large head against Neil’s leg the moment he was within range with the force of a familiar who had also been getting stronger and was not entirely calibrating that yet.

Neil put his hand on Magnar’s head.

"Good." He said.

He looked at Jane, who was standing near the far section of the courtyard with the expression she had when she was holding something in and not entirely managing to.

She met his eyes and whatever she was holding in got somewhat less contained for a moment, and then she composed it and gave him the small genuine version of her smile, the one she kept for moments that had actually earned it.

The 4th Origin Mythic Class creature that had been generating for the past seven days, created from Diamond class blood, was waiting inside.

He had the 4th Origin gene potions from the Wooden Poisoned Realm in his inventory, all four tiers worth, Bronze through Diamond, waiting for consumption at the 4th Origin.

He had the evolution behind him.

He had the lost elven kingdom ahead of him, less than two weeks away now, with everything it contained and everyone it was going to bring together in one place.

He walked toward the core building door and Magnar fell in beside him without being asked, the familiar’s presence steady and certain at his side the way it always was when something important was approaching, the amber eyes carrying the focused and ready quality of a familiar who understood what the Nest door meant.

Neil took out all the gene potions from inventory and lined them up in front of him.

Bronze class first.

He worked through them one after another and the foundations of his body absorbed each one cleanly, the 4th Origin making the integration faster and more thorough than anything below it had been.

The Silver class were noticeably denser in quality and the difference showed in how his body responded, something settling deeper than the Bronze had reached.

He paused before the Gold class ones.

There were a lot of them from fourteen days of hunting.

He consumed them one after another and by the time the last one was gone the change in his body was not subtle at all.

He clenched his fist and felt the energy answer immediately.

’This is a serious difference, but nothing to the difference the diamond class will bring.’ After waiting for the previous gene potions to properly absorb into his body.

Neil finally took out the diamond class gene potions that had taken so much effort to gather.

But with his current strength, if he were to fight those snakes again, he can kill them with a single punch.

GULP

One after another he drank the gene potions, his strength rising explosively, a powerful energy brimming within him.

Before long he had consumed all of the diamond class gene potions, and waited until they were properly absorbed.

The jump in strength was clear, the diamond gene point at a rank as high as 4th contained vast energy.

Neil couldn’t wait to get his hands on the mythic class gene points, only then would he reach the peak.

Magnar was sitting outside the core building when he walked out, watching the door with the amber eyes that had been watching that door since Neil had gone in for the evolution.

Ileana was nearby.

"Going into the Nest now," Neil said.

She stepped forward and hugged him once, then looked at his face.

"Don’t take too long."

"Yes, this will be very easy." he said.

She gave him a look that said she had several things to say about that and was choosing not to say any of them.

He looked at Magnar.

"Ready?"

Magnar stood up and shook himself once and walked to the door.

The Nest opened into its large white space and the creature inside was already standing.

It was tall, around thirty feet, shaped roughly like a human body but with the proportions wrong in every direction.

The arms were too long, reaching down past where the knees would be, and each hand had too many fingers, the extra ones bending at angles that fingers weren’t supposed to bend at.

Its entire body was wrapped in layered grey silk that moved on its own, rippling slowly without any wind to cause it.

Where a face should have been there was just smooth flat skin, and from beneath that skin something was pressing outward from inside, the shape of hands pushing against the surface and stretching it, dozens of tiny hands trying to break through from the inside.

It tilted its head at them.

[The Grey Weaver has appeared.]

Magnar growled, the fur along his spine standing.

The Grey Weaver raised one arm and threads launched from its fingers, dozens of them at once, each one thin as wire and glowing faintly.

Neil drew the Primordial Blades.

He stepped around the threads easily, the trajectories clear to him before they arrived.

One clipped his shoulder and he felt the pull immediately, the thread trying to drag him sideways with surprising force.

He slashed through it with the Inferno blade.

CRACK

It snapped with the sound of a whip and the heat dissolved the section still attached to him.

’They bind and drag. That is the main game here.’

Magnar charged from the right, growing as he ran, the ground cracking under his feet.

More threads shot out and wrapped around the familiar’s legs and body.

Magnar burned through most of them but three held, the threads apparently carrying some resistance against fire.

Neil moved forward.

He drove the Inferno blade into the creature’s side and pushed it deep.

The Grey Weaver didn’t react the way something living reacted to a wound.

It just turned toward him and one of the too-long arms swung in a wide horizontal arc at his neck.

He ducked under it and slashed upward with the Frost blade across the arm.

The arm froze at the elbow and snapped off.

A new arm was already growing from the stump within seconds, pushing out through the silk with a wet tearing sound before the silk sealed back over it.

’So the silk is how it regenerates.’

He produced a high-concentration acid with Aquamorph and coated the Inferno blade.

He slashed across the silk layers covering the torso, the acid eating into the material faster than it could reseal, the Inferno burning what the acid left behind.

The Grey Weaver made a sound for the first time.

Not a scream.

It sounded like a thousand threads snapping simultaneously.

CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK

Every thread in its body launched at once.

Three wrapped around his arms, two around his legs, one around his neck, and they pulled in different directions simultaneously, trying to take him apart at the joints.

His suit held but the strain was real. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

’Alright.’

[Phantom 3rd Phase.]

The fog armor sealed around him and his frame expanded to fifteen feet and the threads snapped immediately, their anchor points unable to grip the fog layer properly.

He looked down at the Grey Weaver.

The shapes pressing against its face from inside were moving faster now, frantic.

He crossed both blades together and drove them simultaneously into the creature’s chest.

Inferno and Frost discharging into the same point at the same time.

The silk couldn’t process two opposing extremes at the same location, the layers shredding from the inside as the heat and the freeze worked against each other, the regeneration failing because it couldn’t decide which damage to address first.

BOOOM

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Thanks for reading... adios