Chapter 20: THE CP THRESHOLD
The Nekker Patriarch watched me from the tree line, its massive form hunched at the boundary it had been maintaining since I arrived.
I stayed fifty meters back — fifteen beyond what the elder Water Hag had taught me about individual variance. Anatomy Read ran full, the Phase 2 overlay painting the creature's internal structure in amber light.
[ANATOMY READ — ACTIVE]
[SPECIES: NEKKER PATRIARCH (VELEN VARIANT) — W2+]
[STATUS: STRESSED — ADRENAL ELEVATED — TERRITORIAL RETREAT ACTIVE]
[BEHAVIORAL FLAG: DISPLACEMENT CORRELATED WITH ANOMALOUS STRUCTURE — DEPTH 40m]
The patriarch wasn't hunting. It wasn't even defending territory in the normal sense. Its behavioral indicators showed something I'd seen in animals before — the specific pattern of a creature being pushed out of its home range by something it couldn't fight.
The gate was driving the ecosystem displacement.
The swamp's monster behavior wasn't a symptom of the settlement's presence. It was a symptom of what was leaking from forty meters below.
I documented everything the overlay showed and retreated without engaging. The patriarch's entry was complete now — a full W2+ file that included the behavioral data the standard bestiary didn't contain.
[WILDS REGISTRY — ENTRY COMPLETE: NEKKER PATRIARCH (VELEN)]
[TOTAL ENTRIES: 12/25]
The next four days were a deliberate push.
Gervin took the Ghoul cluster on the north road with me — three adults, nest near a collapsed traveler's shelter. Beast Tamer's Voice kept them disoriented long enough for surgical strikes. Two more Rotfiend stragglers from a new nest appeared near Henryk's secondary field, and the contract relationship with the village network was proving its value.
The Wyvern sighting required a different approach.
I found it roosting on a collapsed tower two miles east of the manor — outside my regular patrol range, inside territory I'd been avoiding since Pip first tried to lead me toward the margin. Beast Tamer's Voice in passive mode kept the creature from registering me as a threat while Anatomy Read built the entry from forty meters.
[BEAST TAMER'S VOICE — PASSIVE MODE ACTIVE]
[TERRITORIAL PRESENCE MASKED — SUBJECT UNAWARE]
[WILDS REGISTRY — ENTRY IN PROGRESS: WYVERN (VELEN)]
The passive application was new — something I'd discovered by accident while trying to avoid startling the creature into flight. The Voice could project calm without projecting dominance, creating a space where I simply didn't register as noteworthy.
By day six, the Registry showed seventeen entries.
[WILDS REGISTRY — 17/25]
Pip found me at the eastern margin on the seventh day.
She emerged from the reeds with the fluid wrongness I'd learned to recognize as her natural movement, and she didn't wait for me to sit down before gesturing toward the forest.
"More to show?"
She nodded — a gesture she'd picked up from watching the settlement — and led me north.
The territories she revealed were ones I wouldn't have found alone. A Grave Hag lair deep in the swamp's northern reach, where the ground turned from mud to something closer to peat. A Drowner variant in the deep eastern margin — darker coloring, different behavioral patterns, worth a separate entry. An Alghoul nest in the north woods, active enough that I had to use Void Step to escape after the documentation was complete.
And then, the abandoned Barghest territory.
The creatures themselves were gone — moved on or killed years ago — but the entry counted. The Registry tracked documented species, not active threats.
[WILDS REGISTRY — 25 ENTRIES COMPLETE]
[MILESTONE ACHIEVED: +35 CP EARNED]
[TOTAL CP: 185]
Pip paused at a specific stone near the old Barghest den. She scratched at the ground with the deliberate attention of someone who knew exactly what was underneath.
A fragment emerged — metalwork, corroded but recognizable as intentionally shaped. Not natural formation. Not human craftsmanship.
The CDM flagged it immediately:
[ARTIFACT DETECTED — ORIGIN: UNKNOWN]
[COMPOSITION: NON-STANDARD ALLOY — PRE-CONJUNCTION PROBABLE]
[CLASSIFICATION: PENDING — INSUFFICIENT DATA]
Pip offered it to me the way she'd offered the bent compass needle — casually, like a found mushroom rather than an archaeological discovery.
"Thank you."
She made a sound that might have been acknowledgment and retreated toward the margin.
That night, I sat in my quarters with the fragment on my work table, next to the mud diagram and the bent compass needle and all the other evidence I'd accumulated.
[CP STATUS: 185]
[ITHLINNE'S CODEX: 315 CP REMAINING]
[PROJECTED TIMELINE: 10 DAYS WITH HIGH-VALUE TARGETS]
The number was moving. The Yennefer window was open. And the pre-Conjunction fragment sat on my table, classified as unknown by a system that classified everything.
I couldn't decide which of those three things was most interesting.
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