With his escape plan set, Ryan stopped paying any mind to the hidden assassin keeping watch outside.
Even when Pisces deliberately left him alone in the lab, he didn't take the bait and make a reckless run for it. Besides, with two days left before the trade fair, Ryan still had preparations of his own to make.
...
Deep into the night, he slipped into the dream.
This time, the world the AI Core conjured wasn't the library — it was a perfect, one-to-one reconstruction of Pisces's serum laboratory.
Every piece of equipment sat exactly in place on the workbench, and even the serum materials in the storage cabinets matched the real world down to the smallest detail.
Ryan wasted no time. He walked straight up to the workbench, picked up a test tube and a measuring cup, and began attempting to compound the cure for the Zombie Serum himself.
To an outside observer, an apprentice barely a few days into his training attempting to compound a finished serum product would be an act of sheer, reckless overreach.
Even the most gifted students at the Royal Academy of Serumcraft — the empire's most elite institution — spent months of grueling practice on each basic step, purification, extraction, fusion, before they were even permitted to attempt combining materials into a finished product.
What apprentice, mere days into training, simply jumps straight to compounding finished serums?
But Ryan was the exception.
...
In this world, serum masters held an elevated social standing, and their numbers were vanishingly rare. Not because so few people wanted to learn the craft, but because the barrier to entry was, fundamentally, extraordinarily steep.
Getting started in serumcraft required not just a mountain of dry, tedious theoretical knowledge — the kind a Scholar-type class might specialize in — but, more importantly, it demanded serious money.
For a serum apprentice to advance to a licensed serum master, enormous amounts of hands-on practice were required — and the materials wasted in that process amounted to sums that would leave an ordinary person's jaw on the floor. Even many noble families could go bankrupt trying to raise a single licensed serum master.
And spending all that money still came with no guarantee of success — the second barrier that discouraged the vast majority of hopefuls.
Talent, relentless effort, fortunate opportunity, proper lineage of instruction — these were the third, fourth, and fifth barriers.
Every single one was mandatory.
Because of these towering barriers, "serum master" had always been a profession only nobility and the extraordinarily fortunate could afford to pursue. Their starting point was often the finish line an ordinary person spent an entire lifetime struggling to reach — which naturally placed them a cut above other Transcendent professions in status.
But Ryan didn't have to worry about the "spend a fortune" barrier at all.
With the AI Core, he had an outrageous, game-breaking advantage: unlimited materials to burn through, entirely within his dreams.
Any serum material the AI Core had ever recorded — its potency, its properties, its pharmacology — could all be converted into precise data and perfectly recreated within the dream, one hundred percent accurate.
He could fail an infinite number of times and simply start over, and even a botched procedure carried no risk of, say, an exploding apparatus or actual bodily harm.
This was the single biggest reason Ryan could dive straight into compounding a finished serum himself.
...
In the dream, Ryan set to work.
To his left sat the cure's formula; before him played a projected recording of Pisces's entire compounding process from that day.
He didn't even need to think it through — he simply followed the projection, step by step.
Whatever material Pisces reached for, Ryan reached for the same.
Whatever Pisces did next, Ryan did next.
The exact heating temperature, the number of purification passes, the fusion timing down to the millisecond — the AI Core had recorded every last data point with total precision.
This was, after all, still a relatively basic serum, nothing that demanded the kind of high-difficulty Transcendent-level control needed for more complex reactions. Put simply: as long as someone replicated the projected motions exactly, even an apprentice could successfully compound it.
And yet, even so, Ryan failed more times than he could count.
Just purifying and extracting the dozen-plus raw materials to a usable standard cost him several hundred failed attempts alone. That was simply how compounding worked — one small misstep in any single stage could ruin the entire batch.
Fortunately, the dream's twentyfold time flow, combined with an unlimited supply of virtual materials, gave him all the room he needed for this kind of extravagant trial and error. For anyone else, setting aside the sheer expenditure of effort, simply using high-grade materials as practice fodder like this would be an extravagance even a top noble apprentice wouldn't dare indulge in.
...
By night, Ryan drilled the process over and over in his dreams; by day, whenever Pisces stepped out of the lab, he'd go hands-on with the real thing.
At last, his effort paid off.
With the AI Core as his ultimate cheat, after countless failed attempts, Ryan finally succeeded in compounding the very cure that, by rights, only a licensed serum master should have been able to produce!
So then — had Ryan's serumcraft skill actually reached the level of a licensed serum master?
Not even close. In truth, his foundations were still weaker than an ordinary serum apprentice's.
For a typical academy-trained apprentice, the road from the basics of serumcraft to successfully compounding a finished cure like this one would take roughly one to two years of accumulated foundational study.
But with the AI Core's help, Ryan had skipped that entire process. Becoming a licensed serum master was, in a sense, like a comprehensive exam covering every subject — and Ryan was a severely lopsided savant who'd only mastered one single type of question.
He didn't need to understand the massive body of theory underlying the whole process — what properties a given material had, the principles behind how potencies fused together, how temperature fluctuations affected efficacy. None of it needed to pass through his brain at all.
All Ryan had to do was replicate, start to finish, the recorded footage the AI Core had captured — essentially copying Pisces's every move, wholesale.
Two full nights — equivalent to over a month of another person's relentless practice — spent entirely on mastering this one serum.
And with that, he'd finally succeeded in compounding a finished product theoretically reserved for One-Star Serum Masters.
...
Of course, the sharp-eyed Pisces noticed the workbench had been disturbed, and that the storage cabinet was missing a few materials clearly tied to the Zombie Serum cure.
As far as the old man was concerned, this was simply Ryan overreaching, foolishly attempting to compound serums of his own.
Heh — can't even crawl yet, and already trying to fly? What a foolish thing to do.
At most, it cost him a bit of wasted material — Pisces didn't think much of it, choosing to look the other way and let the boy tire himself out.
And so, uneventfully, two days passed.
At last, they arrived at their destination.
...
Banditry across southern Ormar had been a decades-long, stubborn affliction. Imperial forces had launched countless campaigns against it, and still these slippery bandit gangs endured. Between them, the combined strength of these hundred-odd gangs was enough to overrun even some sizable territories.
And true to form, the location chosen for this large-scale black market trade fair was, as ever, carefully picked. The open terrain around Storm Lake meant that if imperial forces were ever spotted, the gangs could scatter in every direction — making a full encirclement essentially impossible.
Today, the weather was rare and fine. A thin haze hung over the land, visibility unusually good.
By the time the Weasel Bandit Gang arrived at the shores of Storm Lake, more than a hundred bandit gangs of every size had already gathered.
Campfires stretched for miles, the noise and bustle of the crowd almost deafening.
Mechanical cities of every scale and the strangest shapes had made camp along the lakeshore — like a herd of wild buffalo gathered to drink at some watering hole on the plains. Smokestacks rose in clusters, black smoke pouring straight up into the sky. Hyenas, crabs, iron drums, octopuses, hedgehogs — the mechanical cities came in every bizarre shape imaginable, all steeped in a thick, dark industrial aesthetic.
Among the sea of steam-powered mechanical cities, three "War Elephant-tier" fortress-cities stood head and shoulders above the rest.
Their black-lacquered armor plating bore, unmistakably, the same emblem: a snarling one-eyed wolf's head, unmissable against the dark metal.
This was, evidently, the host of the fair — one of Ormar's three great bandit gangs, known as the White Wolf Bandit Gang.
And their leader was none other than one of the former Ten Legendary Demon Hunters, a towering figure at the very pinnacle of banditry, a top-tier Transcendent who had broken through the fifth stage of the Gene Lock, jointly bountied by both the Ormar and Sid Empires for one hundred eighty million liras — the White Wolf, Basil Gustav!
At a bustling black market gathering like this, wanted criminals with bounties in the tens of millions were nothing unusual. Even a gang as notorious as the Weasel Bandit Gang arriving barely stirred a ripple.
This was the peak gathering of the bandit world — a carnival for outlaws.
...
"Now this really is something..."
Ryan murmured to himself, eyes gleaming as he took in the bustling market before him.
In this moment, he finally caught sight of the first glimmer of "freedom" on the horizon.
Hearing him, Pisces, walking ahead, let a faint, barely perceptible smirk tug at the corner of his mouth, not bothering to turn around. "Come along — let me introduce you to some fellow practitioners in the serum world..."
"Yes, Teacher."
At that, Ryan fell obediently into step behind Pisces, descending the mechanical city one step at a time.