A number of eyes fell upon her, and though she felt some curiosity as to her appearance, Zelsys could tell that most of the onlookers were more curious about how much the weird-looking foreigner could lift. It was a gut feeling, but she also overheard an exchange along those lines between two strongfat men with bulging mead guts.

She started with a boulder of roughly half a meter in diameter, finding that it was no heavier than she would expect any other boulder of this size to be. Lifting it took some effort with one hand due to the fact it had two off-center handles, but it barely even challenged Zel’s baseline strength without any special techniques. She proceeded to curl it a few times with both hands, then set it down.

It was in this way that she moved up through the boulders one by one, inevitably reaching the largest boulder in the gymnasium and finding it a satisfactory, if not challenging lifting experience. By her estimate it had to be maybe two or three tons. More than anything, the challenge came from handling its size and not-quite-even weight distribution.

She found cold-iron target blocks analogous to those found in Ikesia, but also ones wrought of enchanted ice that sprayed fragments when struck in a supremely satisfying manner and reformed in moments. All in all Zelsys found the gymnasium to be wanting, but not extremely so.

Upon her return to the longhouse around two hours later, she found Victor waiting for her in the great hall, having apparently watched her at some point without her noticing.

“How have your knees not exploded yet?” the redhead asked.

Her face instantaneously twisted into an excited beartrap grin. The reason Zelsys had brought up the target block lifting incident in the first place was the hope that Victor would question this exact thing.

“Oh, they did,” she said. “That one time I lifted the target block, remember? Even with all sorts of elixirs it took me two weeks before I could do anything other than very light training. I made them stronger after that.”

“...What?”

“I made my knees stronger,” she said. In one motion, she pulled her leg out of her boot and pulled the pant leg up over her knee, bending and unbending her leg. His eyes went wide as she gave voice to the realization that had come over him:

“Look at this - no kneecap. It’s a solid interlocked joint, like a tank suit leg. This bit? The kneecap? That’s solid, extending from my femur. Look at that shit, it’s built for punishment. I can knee a target block for hours and not get hurt, and I’m more likely to tear up my muscles than ever rip the tendon, it’s metalized. Had Ozmir and Makhus cook up the mutagen, turns out the guy that relies on them in combat happens to know a great deal about the things. He jumped at the opportunity to… Paint on an untearable canvas, I think he said. It seems the reason I haven’t had significant issues with mutagens is that my body was already an amalgam of many different things to begin with, so my rejection threshold is much higher.”

The rest of the day passed somewhat uneventfully, with Victor finalizing his recovery. Zel finally decided that it was time: She allowed him to read the Ivory scroll, under her supervision of course. She had already gone over sections of the Book of Three Archons with him beforehand, this being the very tome she herself read after developing her Core of Earthly Iron. It was one of the texts which she always kept on her person and she fully believed that the mystic wisdom within it would aid Victor in cultivation overall, but especially with this breakthrough.

Going by the manner in which his eyes lit up and how he questioned if it was all really so simple, she wagered he’d gotten the gist of it. Truly, the method was fundamentally simple - as simple as lifting a seventeen-ton target block. Easily understood in theory, but a truly monumental achievement in practice.

“If you intend to go through with trying to make contact, let me know. We’ll have to split you from the Stone for the day to ensure Koschei doesn’t interfere. Once the time comes, re-read the scroll before sleep and keep it in hand, its magic will help you enter your mental landscape,” Zel said to him.

“I’m thinking tomorrow, or the day after that,” he nodded.

Zelsys woke, as usual, before anyone else - or so she thought.

There, in the great hall, Fryg waited for her, gazing up at the unfinished mural. She felt it, and the crone made no secret of her intent in the way she turned her gaze to Zelsys the moment she came within sight.

“You are awake. Do you truly only sleep four hours, as Jorfr claimed?”

“Usually. Sometimes more. What do you want from me?”

“I would speak with you… About him. Know you, why we demanded that you come to our lands to prove that you are who you claim you are? It was not disbelief in your feats, Zelsys Newman - tales of the Blue Moon War, albeit fragmentary, have spread even to us.”

Zel looked into the crone’s cold gaze and pulled a half-guessed answer out of her gut: “You didn’t trust him that he was the Borean who had joined my sect and thought he may be impersonating that Borean for personal benefit?”

A bitter chuckle of affirmation came: “Spot on.”

Fryg turned, staring daggers through Zelsys.

“The truth is, he is the black sheep of the clan, a runaway, even if his siblings agree with him. From his childhood, we had thrown all we could behind trying to ensure his success in holmgang. He was… Mediocre in every conceivable discipline, somehow. Certainly stronger than any average Borean, but nothing like the champions of any Great Clan. He refused berserker training in favor of trying to learn ancestor-summoning! A Hulson, ancestor-summoning! A notion as absurd as Kyriak Bjorn lifting quietly. Then one day, when that great big War of Fog down south started up, he just up and left to get himself killed! Had it been any other war, had he decided to honor our clan by becoming a pirate, I would’ve turned a blind eye, but that war, the sheer scale of it… I was surprised to learn he was even still alive. That he claimed what he did was all the more unbelievable.”