Jason shrugs, “so we won’t know what will happen till it happens. Better to just avoid turning into an undead if at all possible. Though I guess it is lucky that ghouls depend on a poison to change others instead of a curse or some such. But that does put a focus on being prepared. I am up for spending a week or so distilling the stuff as long as the supply lasts. Though I am not too sure about making any more than that. The oil could be worth a lot, but since it is so basic it might not be.”

Courtney frowns, “we also might not want to have an overabundance of it anyway. The slugs do keep the undead in check, so harvesting too much of the stuff might be frowned on by the people who live near here. Not everyone has high enough adventurers nearby to keep them in check by more aggressive means.”

Rosha nods, “now the question is how do we deal with sleep? Yes Jason, we know you can stay up for half the night with no trouble. However you won’t be able to do any of your other stuff if you constantly have to deal with distilling the oil.”

The group falls into silence as they all consider the problem. Courtney gestures to the campfire, “Jason, do you actually need to be the one tending the fire? I am sure that you have to be the one to set it all up and take it down. Fire tending however seems more like a thing some alchemist would set their disciples to do.”

Jason pulls up the skill again and gives it a once over. “Nothing on it says one way or another. We could probably ask that butler, but I feel we can just test it out. After all, the game tends to reward self-discovery.”

They lapse into silence again until Rosha laughs. “I just realized! If we do this you won’t get the middle watch. In fact, you have to take the last watch now. You will set up the distillation just before the first watch and then have to be there at the end of the second. I volunteer for the first watch tonight.”

Jason sighs, “that does seem to be the case. Wake me up at the start of the second watch so I can check on it though.”

Rosha nods in agreement and Courtney doesn’t have any particular opinions on the matter so just goes along with it. Everything finalized, Jason sets up his improvised distillation equipment and heads off to bed. Courtney stays up for a bit longer to chat with Rosha, but soon enough she hugs her good night and goes to sleep as well.

Time passes for Rosha as she tends the fire while keeping an eye out. She doesn’t even see any undead skulking about, though she hadn’t seen any last night either. Though once she wakes up the other two and tells them they both make an enormous deal about it. Rosha shrugs, “they must be watching the slug zone so now that we are in it they aren’t around.” And she goes to sleep, leaving the two to argue.

Not that they do. Both Jason and Courtney agree with her assumption, though they are still a bit annoyed that she had kept it from them. In the end though nothing can be done about it so Jason checks the distillation and refills the water before heading back to his bedroll while Courtney goes on watch. Jason doesn’t go back to sleep, of course. That would be a waste of time. Instead, he logs off.

Once out of his capsule, Jason stretches and groans in pain. “Right, I need to be more careful with my exercise. While it might have been a full day in NeoRealm, it hasn’t really been all that long out here. Better leave more time between my training sessions or I am going to wreck myself.”

Jason heads out to the living room and walks over to the punching back out of habit. He grabs the bag but the first pull brings him out his rut as his arms scream at him. Eyes scrunched, he rubs the bridge of his nose and sighs. “And I just got through telling myself I wasn’t going to exercise.”

Post VR fog now well and truly chased out of his head, Jason sits down in the center of the room to cultivate. At first things went easily enough. Halfway through Jason notices that it was actually going too easily. The corrupting energies would interrupt previous sessions. This time though they haven’t shown up.

The realization shakes him out of his cultivation. ‘Where has all that corruption gone?’ Cultivation forgotten, Jason settles back in, this time to sense the surrounding area. Nothing. There wasn’t a lot of it to begin with, but he had always sensed at least some around.

Eyes scrunched, he reaches out further and still there is none to be found. Jason moves to the corner of the room and then to the kitchen. In the end he has to leave the house entirely to find any corrupting energies.

Jason sighs and goes back into his house. ‘This is troubling. The corruption is avoiding my house. Good for me because I won’t have to deal with it. Bad because something is causing it to react. The fact it was able to hone in on me is already a problem, but this means some sort of guiding hand. I’m uncertain if it would be worse if that was some literal entity or the energy itself. Though this discovery gives me a chance to figure some things out.’

For the rest of his time out Jason travels around his house, mapping out the corruption’s disruption. From this he discovers that it isn’t a sphere of disruption but rather shaped like the earth’s magnetosphere. The corrupting energy is rebuffed just outside of his home and in the opposite direction of his door a corridor of space is free from it for quite a distance. This would point more towards the energy reacting to him or something about his cultivation disrupting it, but he doesn’t have the time to go deeper into.

With a sigh, Jason lays back down in the capsule and logs back into NeoRealm.