"I never thought it would be like this out here," Alifren said, her voice a whisper. She sat on a corner of her neatly tucked-in bed, legs still shaking from Stamina training. "We're all fodder, thrown away so that the chief and his lieutenants can get their chance at an E-Grade ascension."

  Axl sat next to her, unsure of what to say, but not coming up with any way to extricate himself from the conversation without coming across as incredibly rude. His brother told him once that if women ever cried around him, it was time to shut up and listen, so he did just that. Axl was sure Bryson's intentions were very different, given how those nights usually ended up for him, but the advice still felt relevant.

  "So much is obvious now, how they went from village to village, picking up all the F-Grades they could with promises of advancement. Why didn't I notice that barely any were from the major clans or the Permic Ravine? That their stories of an F-Grade sanctuary were too good to be true?"

  "I take it this isn’t a permanent settlement then?" Axl asked, also keeping his voice low.

  Alifren shook her head, the mess of her short, grey hair flitting about her. "No, we built this place around the blacksmith's claim, partially to easily access to that monster's work and partially for the high ground. We used to fill this longhouse, you know, some even two to a bed. Now look at all the empty space!"

  Axl looked around more carefully, a frown burrowing into his face as he realized they didn't build more than their capacity to recruit others, the orcs actually lost a third of their numbers, maybe more, depending on how many guests like him were around. Guests that were here to make up for losses, not complement an already robust force.

  "Are the enemies outside that hard to fight? Is that what's going on with all these casualties?"

  "Yeah, in large part. But we're also short on everything, and chief Woyfret keeps going missing for long stretches of time with a huge chunk of the other high-leveled F-Grades we brought. And his group even comes back with casualties more often than most, so who knows what risks he's taking out there. If they're barely able to protect us from the worst of this cursed valley, what hope do we early F-Grades have?"

  Axl remembered the dead orc a shockingly short distance from the longhouse and thought of another explanation why the chief's party kept coming back with an unusually high number of missing members. He made a note to discreetly figure out later what weapon the chief preferred to use, but he'd bet every rock in his rig it was a halberd that matched the dead orc's back wound.

  "When is the chief coming back?" Axl asked, trying not to sound too concerned.

  "Who knows, he's been gone three days, and he's never back earlier than a full month, usually more. And we bleed more and more with him and our best gone."

  Axl stifled his relief. Hopefully, he'd be able to get back on track with his Attributes well before that and head out before this chieftain came back. It'd be a shame not to get more training and have a stable base anymore, but he'd not want to offer the guy his head on a silver platter. It's not like he had any hope fighting him anytime soon, since he was Suliana's boss, and going up against her was already certain death.

  "Well, if things start looking very bad, you can just leave. This isn't a closed trial, right? You can just walk out of this sanctuary, as far as I'm told. You lose out on the benefits, but better to be alive."

  She nodded quietly for a moment, calming down for a bit. "I have some people who might join me, if it comes to that. But it's still too risky, we're several days away from the nearest exit that I've heard of, but I also don't know if that one is real, it might just be a rumor. Chieftain Woyfret destroyed the entrance we used to come in, to make sure nobody was tempted to escape."

  She looked up at Axl, eyes wide and desperate. "Do you know of a way out?"

  Axl shook his head. "No, I got here with a token, appearing in the middle of the woods not far from here."

  He felt bad for the lie, but he realized that knowing a verified way out might actually put a further target on his back. At the very least, he'd help to drain this encampment of its people, pissing off the last person he wanted to antagonize right now. The fewer reasons chieftain Woyfret had to go after him, the better.

  "Ah, a pity, but I'm not surprised, with how powerful you are. You're the actual kind of person this place is built for, not wastrels like me."

  He'd heard that kind of talk before back in Ost, and here it felt even more baffling than it ever did. This place was a paradise of opportunity, with natural treasures literally popping out of the ground and ambient Mana so thick that he felt he could choke on it. You could literally cast spells by drawing cartoons with your venting finger—what more could these people possibly ask for?

  "I'm sure something will work out." He said, the words feeling limp as he said them, but he didn't know what more to say. "You should rest, you'll feel better in the morning. And who knows? Maybe your next time out, you'll stumble on natural treasures well aligned to your path."

  She snorted and lay down, her head buried on her pillow, which Axl took as his cue that he could leave.

  "Thank you," she muttered. "For your kindness."

  "It's nothing," he said, feeling drained by the talk and more than eager to get some sleep as well.

  Still, he didn't feel comfortable sleeping so next to others in such an exposed area, so he made his way to his alchemy hut, as planned. Moxlin had set up a discrete perimeter of detection and warning talismans in the room so he could at least get advanced warning if he was attacked, a precaution only made more pressing from what he'd learned today. If Alifren thought he couldn't help her escape, maybe she'd start to think killing him would help instead, maybe not alone, but helped by a few of those buddies she mentioned.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Desperate people did desperate things, after all.

  The next morning, he started his Bilesong training with Folom, the rotund elf apparently quite the early digger, from his eagerness to start the day at the crack of dawn.

  "Where is Bilesong listed in your Attributes?" he started, getting to the point as Axl walked in the door, which he appreciated.

  "Between Vitality and Mentality."

  "Huh, both of those, ey? That's quite unusual. And that Bilesong is between them and not between Endurance and Vitality suggests it's an inward-facing Attribute, like how your body has resources to survive harm and recover from Vitality and redouble your inner Mana pools with Mentality, Bilesong, I would guess, is to let you foster poisons within, growing them as a part of your body. And since you got your poison-absorbing glands at the same time, it likely can be used that way, much like using your eyes is the easiest way to start using Perception, even if not the only way to go about it."

  Axl listened carefully, glad for the information that the order his Attributes were listed meant something too, which he'd not realized before. From that, the inference on what the Attribute did was almost obvious, and this would be incredibly useful information if he got more of them.

  "So I prepared a diluted poison in a barrel, it's at the back of the clinic. Dunk your head in there and breathe it in through your gills. I'll monitor your body and see how it goes, in case you can't fight it back or something unexpected happens. It’s a very different one than what you got from the centipedes, so your body should take some time to adapt to it so you can work your gills properly."

  Nothing else to say, they got to it, and Axl immediately recoiled as he submerged his head in the unusually clear liquid. Slitting cut of the Pit, does this sting!

  Just when he thought he'd exhausted the ways he could inflict suffering on his body, here was the universe eagerly ready to prove him wrong. Still, he forced himself to breath in the liquid through his gills, focusing on the base of their flaps forming a thin film between the liquid and his circulatory system, pulling the poison out from his bloodstream just as it was let in, pooling it into a gland at the base of his neck, right behind the hollow of where his throat met his neckline.

  Each breath was an interminable aeon of suffering, his skin feeling like it was being pierced by a million hot needles. But breath by breath, the gland got slightly filled up, and the pain decreased slightly, even as he got more of the liquid into his gland. A miserable eternity later, the liquid stopped pooling in his gland, and he could breathe in the liquid reasonably well. Not comfortably, by any stretch of the imagination, but with only stabbing pain as opposed to mind-blanking suffering.

  The healer tapped his shoulder, so Axl lifted his head from the barrel.

  "Is our training session done?" he asked, toweling off his face with a piece of fabric that would certainly never be used again.

  "Done? You've been down there for barely twenty minutes."

  Axl closed his eyes, the universe once more showing its sense of humor at giving him not only an extra helping of pain, but being extra generous with its duration as well. He was half tempted to start cursing the Deep System's mother, if only to earn his bad luck.

  "Anyhow," Axl took a deep breath, re-centering his attention. "Why did you ask me to stop then? Something happened?"

  "You seriously didn't notice?" Folom stared at him with a furrowed brow. "Just how good was the reward of that rift you finished? Wait, don't tell me, it will just ruin my own cultivation out of sheer envy.

  "Anyhow, the potency of the poison dropped substantially, to a level where it can no longer damage your body. Your gills not only let you filter out the poison from your body, but also concentrate it into your central gland. Lucky for me, I started with a cheap poison, I'd be a huge loss if you ruined such a large stock of some of my rarer fare. I designed this training to also help with your Vitality, you need to focus on that Attribute as well to deal with the residual damage your Bilesong couldn't contend with, but your passive regeneration already dealt with it."

  Pointedly avoiding asking why a healer would have such an extensive stock of poison, Axl turned to his poison-absorbing gland, finding he was effortlessly able to bring it to [Gastric Cauldron], and even bring it back to the gland.

  "Doesn't seem like you have any means to spit out the poison or add it to your fingertips that I could see," the healer continued. "Maybe the gland will simply breakdown the poison in time?"

  Axl shrugged, in a way glad that Folom didn't detect [Gastric Cauldron] at all, perhaps just because he wasn't looking for it? Regardless, he didn't quite want to expose that secret just yet.

  "Maybe we can switch to making poisons for a while?" Axl asked. "I do want to see what my gland does with this poison over time."

  The healer nodded, and they went back inside, the rest of the two hours spent going over the details of a glyphic talismanic refinement of the bark at the intersection of when it became a certain kind of rock in the vale, forming a fine grey powder that consumed calcium. The [ Selsin Clan Glyphic Compendium] quickly adopted the recipe, adding it to its extensive collection, some suggested improvements already being listed by the book. By his rig did Axl love that book, to the point he was wondering why Nox was even willing to part with it at all.

  Still, Axl failed to appreciate what use the new poison would have, but then Folom told him that bones were mostly made of calcium. He even started describing a kind of boar that had multiple fangs growing from its face, which they could throw as projectiles, empowered by a Bone-air hybrid Mana. Axl smiled at the coincidence of being given just the kind of poison to target the creature who so utterly countered him before. He almost kissed the man on his large nose, but restrained himself. Moxlin would get jealous, after all.

  Next was Charisma training with Soffal, which was an utter mess.

  The orc took him to one of the largest artisan shacks, which turned out to be a bar. The place was oddly full for early morning, and he was barely through the door when he told Axl to start talking to people, even pointing out an orc he should approach first after hesitating at the vague command. No explanation of what to do regarding the Attribute allegedly being trained, no actual instructions. "Just go up to them and talk, really pay attention."

  With a resigned sigh, Axl trudged up to the large orc drinking from a tankard of brown liquid, easily the biggest Orc he'd seen so far, her bulging muscles straining against armor underclothing. He guessed she was a heavy armor user from the indentations where metal plate edges imprinted hard kinks on the cloth.

  "Hail," he said, mimicking the common Orc greeting. "I'm new here, so I don't know what kind of drinks to order. Do you have any recommendations?"

  He focused on the subtle link formed between them as her attention swung from the bar to him. The details of her facial expressions were clearer, not because he could see them better, but somehow because he could feel them more. His body and its position also felt more fluid and salient in his mind, where she was paying attention to and somehow inferring a mix of curiosity and amusement.

  "Soffal suckered you into some Charisma training, did he," she chuckled, her low laughter deep and booming. "Very well, little elf. I recommend either the brewer's ale, korian whiskey, or the limpet, if you want to stay sharp."

  He felt the slight inflection at the second option, a set of movements in her face and body that somehow made him feel she was lying.

  "Why do you suggest the whiskey?" he asked, wanting to probe that feeling some more.

  She nodded. "Good, you got the obvious. I'm a terrible liar. Now order your drink, and my next one for good measure, since I also don't train for free, and we can chat some more."

  Axl grimaced, since she really wasn't lying about wanting him to pay for her drink. She also somehow managed to convince him that having the limpet would insult her, so he got the ale, his Charisma training suddenly doubling up as Bilesong training as well.