[Interspecies Review Guide: Mushroom Girls]

[Personal Rating: Four and a half stars.]

[Pros: Greatness needs no explanation. Unburdened by human morality, they can satisfy your every desire.]

[Cons: If pressed, the main drawback is that despite the sheer variety, none quite reaches the absolute peak experience. They also collect a measure of stamina as payment, something the average person almost certainly cannot handle.]

This made mushroom girls one of the very few demi-human races in Banxia's entire reviewing career to earn four and a half stars.

Had he not thoroughly enjoyed Lia's wondrous body right before that visit, the mushroom girls would have walked away with a perfect score.

Their variety alone was staggering. Whether someone leaned toward the young and petite, the mature and statuesque, or tastes considerably more niche, anyone could find their particular bliss here.

But tasting something truly exquisite had, without him noticing, made him harder to please.

Five full stars remained just out of reach.

Still, four and a half was more than enough. In the years ahead, that rating alone would strip the Mushroom Forest of its infamous reputation as a "Forbidden Area" and turn it into the stuff of adventurer legend, a paradise whispered about at every tavern counter, chased by anyone with the stamina to make the trip.

...

The Central Continent. A small village near the southern edge.

The young men of the village were hoisting a massive boar king on their shoulders, grinning like they'd won a war.

The beast had been terrorizing their fields for a long time, trampling seedlings, smashing fences, making life miserable for the whole village. They'd even scraped together a small fortune to hire a fairly well-known Silver-rank adventurer from the nearest town. The adventurer took one look at the charging boar king, dropped everything, and ran faster than anyone there had ever seen a man run.

Everyone had written the thing off as their problem forever.

Then a good-natured young man passing through had killed it with a casual slap.

"Lord Adventurer, you look... not entirely pleased?" the old village chief ventured carefully.

"It's nothing." Banxia shook his head. "I just didn't expect this boar to have absolutely zero demonic bloodline."

The boar king was nearly the size of the serpent-headed monster mounted at the entrance of the Continental Adventurers Guild back in Alterna, and yet it hadn't dropped even a single year of lifespan.

"..."

He stared at the dead boar king, eyes still frozen open, and felt genuinely at a loss for words.

Each land breeds its own pigs, he supposed.

In his previous life, he'd never seen a wild boar that size. Back in his original world, a creature like this would have made national news at minimum.

Pity. Impressive as it looked, it was still just an ordinary beast.

Got his hopes up for nothing.

Nearly a week had passed since he'd quietly slipped away from the tsundere elf. He'd finally crossed from the Southern Continent into the Central Continent.

On the map, this area was near the third location marked as a "Human Forbidden Area." Since it had only appeared recently, its danger level was still unknown when he'd set out.

"By the way — do you know anything about the Lova Labyrinth near here?"

"Is Lord Adventurer here for that rumor as well?" The old village chief looked up at him.

Everyone in the area knew about the Lova Labyrinth.

"What rumor?" Banxia asked.

He didn't recall Kaguya Shinomiya mentioning anything about it. Must have surfaced recently.

"Well. Word is that deep inside the Lova Labyrinth, there are handwritten notes left behind by Sage Ewich — containing research on human lifespan."

"Sage Ewich." Banxia knew the name.

A great sage from the mythological era. Left behind an extraordinary number of accomplishments. One of the genuinely towering figures in all of human history.

Something left behind by someone like that would be worth a fortune, and the research value would be off the charts, that much was obvious just thinking about it.

Even so, he wasn't holding his breath.

An ancient ruin freshly unearthed, no one had cleared it yet, and already there were rumors circulating about world-shaking manuscripts hidden inside.

Stay calm, remove yourself from the hype, think it through, and the odds of this being real were slim at best.

Banxia's best guess: someone with an agenda wanted cannon fodder to scout ahead for them.

Not exactly a sophisticated scheme, as scams went.

---

That night, bonfires blazed across the village. Singing and dancing rose from every corner.

The villagers danced around the flames. The boar king had been carved into roast pieces of every size by a single slash, now sizzling over the fire, fat dripping and crackling, the air thick with the smell of charred meat.

The village chief's youngest daughter carried a fresh plate over to the young man's table, eyes bright with admiration.

"Lord Adventurer, this batch just finished — I brought it over for you first."

"Mm." Banxia gave a small nod and said nothing else.

He could feel the thoughts she was hiding beneath all that attentiveness.

The interest just wasn't there.

Beyond that, she was a decent girl from a good family. Making a move on ordinary people would eat into what little integrity he still had.

So he kept his manner cool on purpose, the simplest distance, enough to quietly extinguish any hope that wouldn't lead anywhere good.

The meat smelled incredible. The firelight painted the girl's face red. But Banxia only looked down, bit off a piece, and never let his gaze linger on her for a moment longer than it had to.

The night wind moved through the village. The girl stood there a beat too long, waiting for a second word that never came, then silently stepped back.

"Ah." Banxia shook his head. "This charm of mine, with nowhere to go. Almost a week without a pleasure house in sight, I'm genuinely tempted to turn around and spend a few more days in the Mushroom Forest..."

---

He rested in the village that night.

Sitting on the bed, he pulled up the panel.

[Heaven Rewards Diligence, perseverance brings reward.]

[Current Skills: Return to Fundamentals (Chroma) lv.1, Sacred Spirit Affinity (Chroma) lv.1, Hundred-Forged Body (Chroma) lv.2, Blade Body (Chroma) lv.1, Magic to Show Fond Memories lv.3, Hypnosis Resistance lv.2, Advanced Meditation Method lv.3, Wrath of Finality lv.2, Mana Concealment lv.2...]

[Current Remaining Time: Twenty-six years.]

[Held Monster Time: Nine thousand years (fusible).]

"Plenty of time. Should bring some of the basics up."

Mana Concealment lv.2 couldn't hold down the sheer volume of mana he was carrying anymore, over a thousand years' worth and climbing. The leakage was bad enough that monsters could sense him from a distance and bolt before he got anywhere near them.

Not acceptable.

The skill needed to go up. At minimum, he had to get his mana signature down to within a century's worth of output.

[Year one. You begin working to refine your Mana Concealment techniques.]

[Year one hundred and fifty. You grasp the essence of Mana Concealment. Even if your mana doubles again, you can precisely mask it at the level of roughly a century.]

[Mana Concealment lv.2 → Mana Concealment lv.3]

[Held Monster Time: Eight thousand eight hundred and fifty years.]

Banxia let out a slow breath. "Good. They shouldn't be running the moment they pick up my aura anymore."

Anything involving monsters had to be handled properly. No cutting corners.

"That said, Wrath of Finality is still sitting at lv.2. As a mage's main killing move, it's already struggling to keep pace with my current mana reserves."

"Time to push it higher."

➤ Next: Realm of Clarity (Chroma)

Chapter 74 - Realm of Clarity (Chroma)

[Year 1: You continue to refine Wrath of Finality, the ultimate fire-element magic.]

[Year 800: You have finally honed it to a level where, even by your current discerning eye, you cannot find the slightest flaw.]

"Not bad."

Just as Banxia had expected, Wrath of Finality was far harder to cultivate than ordinary magic.

Reaching lv.2 alone had cost several times the time of any other spell. Not surprising, really, this was military magic modeled after Xiaoyan.

Having trained it this far, he, the "counterfeit," might already be more terrifying than the original.

"Next — time to raise Hypnosis Resistance."

Banxia scanned the skill list in front of him.

He planned to use these nine-thousand-plus years to shore up his weak points and bring them to a serviceable baseline. He adventured alone, after all, no teammates to cover the gaps like a party would.

If he ran into a monster with awkward mechanics out in the wild, something like Xiaoyan, which basically required ice to handle cleanly, he would be at a serious disadvantage.

He had brute-forced his way through last time on raw stats, but he couldn't count on things going that smoothly every time.

With a single thought, time began to flow. New text rose slowly across the panel.

[Year 1: You continue searching for methods of mental conditioning to temper your willpower. Your will is already extraordinary at this point; ordinary means no longer have any effect. You must push harder.]

[Year 500: With the resources at your disposal, you can no longer find anything capable of tempering your willpower further. Hypnosis Resistance has increased substantially, and you have achieved modest success in resisting mental control.]

[Hypnosis Resistance lv.2 → Hypnosis Resistance lv.3.]

[Held Monster Time: 7,550 years.]

Banxia exhaled a long breath and felt thoroughly refreshed.

Mental improvements hit differently. Every time he finished a training cycle, he could feel his understanding of the world deepen by another layer.

He looked back at his skill panel.

[Current Skills: Return to Fundamentals (Chroma) lv.1, Sacred Spirit Affinity (Chroma) lv.1, Hundred-Forged Body (Chroma) lv.2, Blade Body (Chroma) lv.1, Magic to Show Fond Memories lv.3, Hypnosis Resistance lv.3, Advanced Meditation Method lv.3, Wrath of Finality lv.3, Mana Concealment lv.3...]

"Everything's basically at lv.3, Chroma skills aside."

A System-granted lv.3 was no bargain-bin number.

That was a level reached only by a handful of exceptional figures across the entirety of human history.

At this point, Banxia had virtually no obvious weak spots.

If he had to name one, his mental side was still a bit behind his physical body.

Even that was only relative. By any normal human standard, his mental resistance was already at an utterly inconceivable, genius-tier level.

But his physical body had three Chroma skills propping it up, while the mental side, at full stretch, had a single ordinary Hypnosis Resistance skill holding the door.

For an ordinary person, being able to tank most mental attacks was more than enough.

For Banxia right now, it fell way short. His goal was to bulldoze straight through the Human Forbidden Area, and no one knew what kinds of mental-type monsters or traps might be waiting along the way.

Stumbling because of a weak mental defense would be a disaster.

"In that case — let's try fusing another Chroma skill."

He shifted his gaze back to the skill list.

Same-tier lv.3 skills were definitely easier to fuse successfully. His previous two successes had already confirmed that.

But that raised a question.

What should Hypnosis Resistance be fused with?

He currently had four ordinary lv.3 skills on the magic side: [Magic to Show Fond Memories], [Mana Concealment], [Advanced Meditation Method], and [Wrath of Finality].

The Chroma skill [Sacred Spirit Affinity] was off the table for now, he still wasn't sure what would happen if an ordinary skill got fused with a Chroma one.

[Magic to Show Fond Memories] was eliminated first.

Even a cursory thought made it obvious. The two had almost nothing in common. Fusion odds: pitifully low.

[Wrath of Finality] was pure offensive magic. It had nothing to do with resistance-type skills either.

That left [Mana Concealment] and [Advanced Meditation Method].

"I've got plenty of time. I'll run through them one by one."

Banxia was flush with time the way a nouveau riche was flush with cash. Having the wealth and not spending it would be doing himself a disservice.

[Consume 1,000 years of Monster Time. Obtained: Fusion Pill x1.]

[Year 1: You receive a flash of insight and attempt to fuse Mana Concealment with Hypnosis Resistance. However, Mana Concealment centers on the control of internal mana flow, it has very little to do with the mental-side Hypnosis Resistance.]

[Year 500: You remain unconvinced, certain that some common ground between the two must exist.]

[Year 1,000: In the end, you fail to find that path. Even so, the failed attempt grants you deeper comprehension of the way of fusion. Success rate of your next fusion will increase.]

[Fusion failed.]

"Failed, huh." Banxia wasn't surprised.

One failure out of three Fusion Pills was an absurdly good record.

And the best part, failure still stacked the odds for next time.

Not a bad deal at all.

"Continue."

[Consume 1,000 years of Monster Time. Obtained: Fusion Pill x1.]

[Year 1: You receive a flash of insight and begin attempting to merge Hypnosis Resistance with Advanced Meditation Method. One is a bulwark that passively wards off mental corrosion. The other is a wellspring that actively cleanses soul and body.]

[Year 350: You gradually come to understand that the soul's strength is not found in blind resistance. It lies in letting the mind become like still water, reflecting all things, yet stirring no ripples.]

[Year 800: You no longer need to "resist" any mental attack. Ten thousand thoughts pass like wind over a lake surface, neither avoided when they arrive, nor held when they leave. Your soul itself has become an undisturbed mirror of still water.]

[Year 1,000: You finally glimpse that realm: limpid as water, reflecting the true self.]

[Fusion complete. Acquired skill: Realm of Clarity (Chroma) lv.1.]

[Realm of Clarity (Chroma) lv.1: Mind like a mirror, impervious to all arts.]

"..."

Banxia slowly opened his eyes.

He looked down at his hands.

Calm. Quiet. Just like this night, rinsed clean by moonlight.

But he knew. From this moment on, anything that tried to corrode him from within would first have its true face laid bare by that clarity.

[Held Monster Time: 5,550 years (Fusion available)]

"System — max out Realm of Clarity," the young man said, unhurried.

[Year 1: You sit in a quiet room and contemplate how to take the next step. Mental resistance is already near its peak, and mana circulation flows without the slightest stagnation. To climb higher, you must look elsewhere.]

[Year 1,200: You stop cultivating in isolation. You step into the mortal world and wander among ordinary people.]

[Year 5,200: You traverse mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas. You witness the joys and sorrows of countless lives. At the end of it all, you understand everything you need to understand.]

[Realm of Clarity (Chroma) lv.1 → Realm of Clarity (Chroma) lv.2.]

[Held Monster Time: 350 years.]

"...Not bad."

➤ Next: Preparations Before Tackling the Labyrinth (Bonus)