The altar turned out to be quite a bit larger than it had seemed, the grass having concealed its sizable base alongside an array of nine shorter pedestals around it. Walking right past, Ozmir led them to another door, beyond it a similar chamber to the one they’d entered through, merely possessing a silver gate frame instead of an elevator.

Uttering thanks for the guidance, Jorfr returned to the altar, setting down his pack. While Zel followed along and observed up close, Ozmir hung back a little further away, dividing his attention as he strolled among the boughs of his creation and checked up on them.

From within the pack he retrieved a bulging, bloodsoaked bundle of tawny fur, held together by the still-attached upper portion of its original owner’s skull - a bear. He gingerly placed it on the altar, taking a moment to plant his feet and look around, murmuring about cardinal directions as he turned the bundle so its empty eye sockets faced northward. Zel simply felt the cardinal directions, never thinking of why.

Next from the pack came a bottle with numerous runes crudely scraped into its exterior. Within sloshed about a dark-red, nearly black liquid with a congealed puck floating on top - unmistakably, this was blood.

After carefully setting this down on one of the secondary pedestals, Jorfr’s steely gaze rose to meet Zel’s. “This will take several hours, ones I doubt you can afford to spend watching, so… Bring me about a cupful of your blood before sundown, it will be important. Two, maybe three deciliters will suffice. None of the interesting stuff can happen until the ritual proper is ready, anyhow.”

She remained by his side for a few minutes more, watching the preparations go on before time caught up and she headed back to the surface, using the very Fog Gate Ozmir had revealed. It spat her out in a small room that turned out to be connected to the same basement-floor hub as the lift, only on the other side of the room, its doorway also concealed by a one-way illusory wall.

Considering that next up on her training schedule was running, and she knew Makhus to be at Riverside Remedies, Zelsys decided to handle the blood-drawing task in one go. A prolonged sprint through the city’s many less-used veins served as good variation. Well within the timeframe, the alchemist had helped her perform the exsanguination and she had made her way back to the sect, albeit not without incident. In the midst of the thinning crowds, she failed to predict a heavy-set man’s emergence from a side alley, barreling into him at full velocity.

Despite the fact that he was nearly as tall as her and many times more voluminous, when her velocity and his mass met, it was the first which prevailed. Zel had known that she was denser and thus heavier than even her large frame suggested since before her arrival in Willowdale, but only now did it really sink in just how much heavier she was.

She handspringed to her feet and offered up a hand in aid at a moment’s notice, the man responding with surprising speed for how obviously dazed he was.

“Dear fuckin’ dead ones what are yer bones made of steel woman?!” he howled before he even got his bearings, though his demeanor noticeably changed when he saw who had rammed into him, and possibly felt her iron grip around his own stone-like hand. A quieter countenance overcame him, as if a nonverbal answer to his own question: “I guess you do.”

The amusement which Zelsys derived from the situation aside, this was entirely her fault, and apologies were in order. After she made sure the man could stand - let alone walk - she directed him to Riverside Remedies, telling him to, “Just tell the baldo at the counter that Zelsys rammed into you at full tilt and she owes you a half-liter of DDLV, he’ll sort you out.”

No keyword was needed, as she had never used the designation DDLV in public, and the product’s exact formula wasn’t dialed-in for mass production yet.

With those words she was off once again, not realizing that the man had been among the spectators in the pit, and that this encounter would tip him towards applying to join the sect.

She handed off the sample to Jorfr within her post-run break, took a few minutes to sip some DDLV, then took to that day’s highlight - punching her own silhouette into a target block using her shadow as a guideline.

Saturday would be a day of rest. That is to say, light training by Zel’s standards, mainly technique-polishing.

Despite her continued efforts, she could make no further headway working on Thunderclap Sting. She realized that a safe training environment could not produce the heat necessary to hammer the technique into its true form on such short notice. For lack of time, the intensity of real combat would serve to give life to this killing art.

In the morning, she saw that the concert stage had been expanded and gangly spectator stands had been erected over the street, rows and rows of ascending walkways stretching over onto the rooftops of the buildings across the street. When she decided to get her breakfast from one of the nearby vendors, she also saw that the stands hadn’t been erected in place of the tents that had previously taken up their place, but rather the tents’ own supports had been used as the bases, with mineshaft-like reinforced tunnels left in the tangle of wood and metal so that the vendors would remain accessible.

It was clear the Kargarians had worked this out, and Zel had to wonder - was this just standard operation for the caravan? To find local cultivators and pit their own against them to make a show out of local resources?

None other than Ezaryl approached her that day, making clear that she had two questions to ask.

“Wouldya happen to know Makhus’ location at the moment?” asked the heiress with mischief in her voice.