At ten minutes before three, a monotonous woman's voice echoed throughout the reception area. It came from an azure crystal embedded in the ceiling which Li recognized as a recording crystal. In-game, if you sent a recorded voice message to another player, then the icon they clicked to open was a crystal to keep in tune with the fantasy setting.

It was interesting to see how even little bits of gameplay lore like that managed to find use in a world that lived around the lore as their reality.

Here, the crystal acted like an announcement system, echoing out when various proceedings were starting or calling employees up to offices and whatnot.

"Herbalist's exam is starting in ten minutes. Repeat: herbalist's exam is starting in ten minutes. All prospective test takers, please proceed to room 4A."

Li got up and scrounged his memory for directions. He generally had a good sense of direction, and as he recalled, 4A was past the reception desk, through a long hallway and up four flights of stairs and immediately to the right, where a plaque marked with a golden A signaled the right room.

The fourth floor was where most exams were taken, so it wasn't a surprise. Li had visited the city hall before and looked at the test rooms when he came by to get a copy of past exams to study from. They were wide and spacious, lined with desks in orderly patterns that gave just enough space between them that cheating through eyesight was rather difficult.

Anti-magic wards were lined at the door, enclosing the room with protections against magical cheating, and there would also be a proctor with a magic sensitive wand that would detect any spell casts.

As Li walked up the stairs, he noticed progressively fewer people. What few people he did see were coming down, having taken exams for fields other than herbalism. There were a few people crowding around the fourth floor itself, men sitting around on benches or standing with no seeming purpose, but when Li entered, they all stared at him.

Cocking his head, he made his way to door A and went inside.

The room was completely empty. There must have been over twenty seats, but not a single one of them had been filled. Maybe he was early, who knew.

"Greetings, test taker," came a bored voice. "Please take a seat anywhere you please."

It came from the proctor, a woman seated behind a desk at the front of the room who oozed tiredness from her every being. She was ghostly pale, making her long, wild locks of chestnut red hair and the dark circles under her eyes extremely apparent.

She had a slightly hunched posture, which, combined with her long, brown robes stitched with patterns of leaves, gave her the aura of an old scholar, and yet she couldn't have been past her early twenties.

When Li took a seat at the front, she stood up and reached under her desk for a single test packet. With shuffling steps, she placed the test on Li's desk along with an inkwell and quill and yawned.

"Y'know, I figure you're gonna be the only one here, so when I say time's starting, just go ahead and have at it," she said before she shuffled back to her desk and withdrew a timepiece from her robes.

She stared at the timepiece in her hand, watching as the hands crawled agonizingly slowly towards three.

"Actually, just start now," she said, waving impatiently at Li to start. "You have one hour. If questions arise, inform me. There's one water break in the middle. Um, I think that's it. Good luck."

With that she put the timepiece on the desk and turned it around so Li could check it when he needed to. She then leaned back in her chair and put her hood over her head.

Li took a look at the proctor and calculated that there was a significant chance she was asleep already. He shrugged and took his quill, dipped it in the ink, and began the test.

As expected, the test was a joke. Li thumbed through the pages with incredible speed. His hand never stopped writing and he wrote with inhuman speeds, his superhuman agility letting him blitz through the entire ten-page packet within fifteen minutes.

Honestly, when the questions basically amounted to multiple choice where two out of four options were completely and ridiculously wrong, how could he ever fail? He would feel ashamed to even get one wrong. And the format? Rote memorization? Showing a diagram of a plant and asking what it was or showing the color of an elixir and asking what it did?

Absolutely elementary stuff. He wondered why he had even studied so long, but he understood that Aine's books weren't about passing this exam, they were much, much more. They explained brewing processes, when to best pick herbs, how to tend to them, what to do when they got out of control – basically the entire profession. In contrast, anyone that passed this test would have a paper license, but zero practical knowledge in practicing the trade.

When Li finished, he wiped his ink smeared hand on the last page of the test and took it up to the proctor's desk. He was supposed to wait an entire hour, but the proctor had been right: nobody else had shown up for the test, so he figured he had some leeway to do what he wanted.

He loudly slapped the test down on the desk and the proctor yelped in surprise as she clawed her hood down and blinked her eyes. She looked at the test, then at the timepiece, then at Li.

"You're done already?" she asked as she rubbed her eyes.

Li tapped at his test with his finger. "Yes, and seeing as you're treating the exam's rules a little loosely, am I free to leave early?"

The proctor shrugged. "Certainly."

Li made his way to the door, but as he was opening it, he heard the proctor say, "Wait up."

He turned and saw her thumbing through his test, some semblance of energy restored to her as her eyes scanned the pages up and down.

"This is excellent. Not a single thing wrong."

"Great," said Li. "Then when can I get my physical license?"

"Oh, that I can have delivered to you tomorrow on the address you put on your test, but that's not the problem." She glanced up at Li and at the open door in his hands. "Um, could you close the door? I'd like to speak with a little privacy."

Li closed the door behind him and came up to the desk. He raised a brow. More bureaucratic slog to struggle through? "What is it?"

The proctor stood and looked up at Li, her brows furrowed in worry. "To be honest, I thought you just a foolhardy two-bit apprentice willing to risk his hide for a license, but this level of preparation exceeds industry standards. You are most certainly young talent, and I don't want to see it wasted."

"You don't look a day older than me, and you're talking about young talent?" said Li.

The proctor shrugged. "Bad habit. Long hours of study make me feel old, I suppose, yes. But that's beside the point. I meant to ask you, have you not heard of the contract?"

"I have. What about it?"

"Then you should know that even with this license, you cannot practice in Riviera. I can recommend you to several villages and towns outside the contract's range."

"No. I am not moving. This is where my farm is, and I intend to stay on it."

"For your safety, too."

Li let out a laugh. "Are you suggesting the crown will intervene? Sic knights on a random farmer? If that happens, I assure you I should not be the one whose safety you worry about."

The proctor looked back at the door to make sure it was closed. "Not the crown. The crown is reasonable. They would probably try and pay you off the land or give you work elsewhere. But Black Vine isn't so kind, no."

"Black Vine? What was that again…the pharmacy?"

The proctor nodded in small, quick bursts. "Yes, yes, that's the one. Biggest pharmacy in Riviera, has branches in all four cardinal cities, too. They're the frontrunners for getting that contract, and they'll stop at nothing to get it. Those men outside? Thugs they hired. Made sure nobody would ever want to take the exam. I'm sure they might even be able to bribe out your address too."

"And the crown can afford to try and pay me off my land but not deal with criminals?"

The proctor made an expression like she tasted something bitter, something nasty, and said, "Black Vine is far too powerful. Own all the drugs from the cold north down to the blazing south, and they've invested everywhere like a disease, in banks, in businesses, even orphanages. If the crown takes down Black Vine, the entire market here, not just the herbs, might just go belly up.

They've turned the sacred art of tending to nature into a pure business. Heresy and sacrilege to the forest goddess, I say, but what's my opinion against mountains of coin and hordes of armed muscle?"

Li sighed. "Look, I understand your concern, but you do not have to worry about my safety." He turned to the door. "I'll be looking forward to getting that license."

When Li left, he could see the group of men waiting in the fourth-floor hallway staring at him. He waved them a casual greeting before he made his way down the stairs and exited the city hall. He had a feeling he was going to see them soon, so might as well get the greetings out of the way beforehand.

Li was right. When he entered the chaos of the marketplace, several men in hoods crowded around him. Here, where so many people thronged and so many vendors shouted, the guards noticed little.

"Follow us if you know what's best for you, little laddie," said one of the men.

"We'll take you somewhere nice'n'quiet. Teach you a right proper lesson, taking that exam and having the straight gall to wave at us like we was your friends."

Li shrugged. "Please, by all means, lead the way. The quieter the better."

----

Within a few minutes, the men had corralled Li into an alleyway. It was dark and dank, wedged between two seedy taverns. A brick wall sealed off the end, making escape impossible. The cobblestone path underneath was slick with mud and grime, ignored by the city's cleaning crews. Amidst the brown and black muck, there stood out the occasional bloodstain.

Li nodded. Looked like this was the routine place for these thugs to do their business. He turned to the men. There were four.

"Is this the best place in town? For, you know, your 'business'," said Li.

The men walked forwards like hyenas, their gloved hands withdrawing crude daggers. They even spoke one after the other, their cruelty feeding upon each other in a vicious loop that gave them more and more confidence.

"Aye, here's where we clean the streets of foreign bastards like you."

"No use screaming here. Taverns here won't call for the guard. Made sure of that with a little coin."

"Look at him. Prettier and paler than a tavern wench, he is."

"Carve him up with a couple scars, would make him even prettier."

Li let the men draw near him. They came slowly, not just to intimidate, but because they were unsure. They saw that Li had no fear in his eyes, that he stood tall and even bored.

"Before we begin," said Li. "I just have one thing to ask. Do you all have families?"

One of the men chuckled and spat on the ground. "Family? You think to beg us mercy, telling us you have family? Is that it?"

"What a fool he is. Don't you know who we are?"

Li shrugged. "No, and I don't really care. Just answer my question."

The thug continued anyways. "We're the Hundred Faces. In the very streets our families abandoned us, we became lords of terror."

"Got it. So, no family then. Just a ragtag group of orphans wanting to feel tough." Li waved them forward. "That'll make this easy."

The men wavered; their hands sweaty as they gripped their daggers. They could feel their instincts telling them to turn back, that to rush in now was to face death.

Li sighed and shook his head. "You think that slinking around in the shadows makes you strong? Lords of terror?" Li laughed. "Lords of being terrified, maybe. But don't worry. None of you have family. Nobody will miss you."

The thugs took a step back as Li disappeared from their sights.

"Where'd the filthy cur go!?" said one of the men.

"Right here." Li stood behind them, blocking their exit. He grabbed the man by the back of his cloak and raised him straight overhead with one arm. He flailed around madly, stabbing at Li's arm, but the dagger chipped and clanked as it struck flesh harder than any known metal.

The other men shrunk backwards, away from Li, forgetting that they had chosen this alleyway for its deadend. They had chosen their own death trap.

Li took a look up at the man he was holding.

"What in the hells are you!?" shouted the man as he found his dagger increasingly chipped and lined with cracks.

"Quiet," said Li as he put his arm back like he was readying a baseball pitch, drumming up his inhuman strength before he threw the man straight at the brick wall. He intentionally missed the other men, wanting them to witness the folly of their actions, of the great sin they had committed in defying an existence so very much beyond them.

The man sailed into the wall like a bullet, and when he collided, his body exploded like a ripe tomato, bursting apart at every single seam. Splatters of blood and chunks of internal organs showered everywhere, and the rest of the men, doused in the lifeblood of their companion, started screaming.

"Stop screaming. You said it yourselves, nobody will hear you. And trust me, comparatively speaking, all of you will end up far worse than him," said Li as he stuck his arm out to the side. He had not cast the eldritch part of his eldritch Druidry yet, so he was curious to see how it felt. "[Shapeshift: Aspect of the Shoggoth]."

His arm swelled as it grew, the sleeves of the linen shirt tearing. His arm became a giant chunk of bubbling flesh as large as a horse, the skin tearing as it struggled to contain the ever expanding, tumorous mass.

The men had stopped screaming, instead blanching as they witnessed the arm slough off its pale skin, revealing bare muscle and blood. Then even that became tainted, turning various shades of black, purple, and sickly green – all the colors of decay. The blackened and fleshy mass started shaping into tendrils, hundreds of them, and dozens upon dozens of eyes opened all across the arm, glowing with a yellow radiance reminiscent of gold.

The eyes rolled around, leaking ocular fluid, before they focused on the men.

The men froze.

Through those eyes, they could feel the hunger of that arm. It was an unending, ravenous hunger. A hunger cosmic in scale, the primordial hunger of decay that was responsible for the death of all things past and future, the hunger that would eventually render the entire universe into an infinite expanse of cold wasteland.

And when they felt that hunger, that terribly cosmic and horrible desire, latch onto them-

The men started laughing as they tore at their hoods and then at their hair, ripping off chunks that fluttered to the ground. They clawed at their flesh, scratching out deep and bloody marks. They gnashed their teeth on their tongues, and blood spewed from their mouths, spittling as they laughed harder than ever, their eyes growing so wide as to almost bulge out of their sockets.

Sheer insanity.

Li shook his head as he walked forwards, aiming his arm forwards. The human mind was so fragile.

The Shoggoth's tendrils reached forwards and eagerly grasped the men, absorbing them into its tumorous, tentacled mass until no trace of them was found. The men laughed as they willingly let the Shoggoth slowly draw them in. But of course, they would not find peace in insanity much longer.

They would be added to the vast expanse of the Shoggoth's stomach, a hellscape where creatures beyond comprehension would play with their minds, restoring and breaking their sanity in a torment that would last eternities unbound by the laws of space and time.

Li didn't feel much different from using eldritch shifting. It was the same as when he had used the [Fist of Ymir]. It all felt like an expression of his natural abilities. It actually felt more right, more comfortable, using this magic, as if he were stretching muscles he was supposed to exercise but had neglected.

He stared down at his boots. They were bloody. So were his trousers and the rest of his shirt. He sighed and considered whether he should have made such a dramatic show throwing that man at the wall. He would have to clean that body up too. Limit suspicion and all.

He looked at the Shoggoth. The eyes stared at him, eager to obey.

"Would you mind cleaning the blood off my clothes?" Li pointed to the mangled corpse of the man on the brick wall. "And that mess too, while you're at it."

The Shoggoth rumbled in understanding as it extended its body forwards, expanding as its tendrils reached out to absorb the corpse.

"That's a good boy." With a smile, Li pet the Shoggoth's body, his hands gliding over countless bulbous masses that felt like tumors – physical manifestations of the minds of past victims all locked in a symphony of eternal suffering within the creature.