The Overdream. Riverbank Cabin, the doors and windows of the buildings shuttered up with planks of wood.

The cool winds of autumn had been blowing through his farm for a while now. In their coop, the Four-Eyed Chickens had grown fat and fluffy in preparation for their winter hibernation. In the Spinning Top Berry bushes, the Flying Crabs were moulting their exoskeletons to unveil wider, stronger wings. These would carry them better in their southbound flight towards the warmer weather on the other end of the globe.

When the crabs set off, Henry would be departing with them to follow the path of their migration. In doing so, he would explore this planet a little more and also practise the next martial art.

Floating Leaf, as it was called, was the preferred style of the Earthfriend scouts of Odayaka, an island kingdom south of the Rigan coast of Volefa. The art encompassed both a fighting form and general methods for being a scout: patrolling borders, ranging ahead of armies, surveying unexplored territories and dungeons. In most respects, it was no different from dozens of Earthfriend scouting traditions from elsewhere around Saana. What made the art unique, though, was the philosophy with which it'd been crafted, a concept the Odayakans called 'Alignment'.

Alignment described a state when all aspects of one's life were working harmoniously to assist in the performance of their duties. This covered one's mindset, one's thoughts, one's feelings, but it extended further to one's actions, one's habits, one's beliefs, one's knowledge, one's environment, one's family - every aspect. To have perfect Alignment was to be devoted in the truest sense.

Increasing their Alignment was the prevailing drive of all Odayakans, school teachers and warriors alike. Through their singular pursuit of it, the people of this society had developed a supernatural degree of discipline and focus. Touring any Odayakan nursery, one would see toddlers tinkering with the toy-versions of their parents' jobs in peaceful bliss for hours on end.

It was to acquire some of this discipline for himself that Henry'd chosen Floating Leaf.

Over the decades of training, he had often encountered tasks that were too tedious for him. He was only human after all, and not every step on the climb could be fun. There were thousands of hours of repetitive drills, for example. To escape the monotony, he'd often been forced to adapt or complicate them to be more intellectually stimulating and, consequently, made his training sub-optimal, imperfect.

The full Floating Leaf training program used by Odayakan scouts took two lifetimes to complete. Henry, somewhat pressed for time, had created a compressed version for the 33-month slot he allocated for each martial art.

For the first part, he would follow the migration of the Flying Crabs, going wherever they led him, while habituating himself to the ways of the Floating Leaf, learning to feel the land and be the land, and all that other hippy Earthfriend mumbo-jumbo.

Following that, he would settle down and explore the regions closest to his home island for any resources useful in upgrading his farm. Over the months, he would survey incrementally smaller areas in order to strengthen his focus, his resolve, and the other mental aspects of 'Alignment' - basically, develop his tolerance for boredom. Throughout, he would be like an ascetic monk, abstaining from writing, reading, battling hyper-difficult monsters with randomised combat styles, and any other source of entertainment 'Misaligned' with his scout role. He would shed every extraneous thought and facet to become a leaf floating on the breeze.

But a few weeks remained before the migration began.

With his last days, he finished preparing his farmstead to withstand the years that it'd be untended during his absence.

From the fields and the orchards, he gathered the seeds and placed them into storage.

His livestock, he induced into an early hibernation inside of huge barns with modified light-temperature cycles that would distribute food during the 'summer'. He'd tested this system over the previous winters, and it'd worked out fine enough. In the event of failure, his herds could be restarted from cryogenically frozen eggs. For whatever reason, every animal he'd encountered on this planet thus far gave birth through eggs.

Since his aquatic farming methods were less advanced, he had to block up the waterway feeding his Dragonfish pond and released them into the river running alongside his homestead. They would probably die after being softened by domestication, but he would let them determine that fate for themselves.

To some of the moulting Flying Crabs, he fixed Landworker animal tracers that would help keep track of them throughout the migration. He then moved the flock outside his property by relocating the Spinning Top Berry bushes.

Finally, he constructed a reinforced-earth dome around the entire farmstead to protect it from monsters.

Throughout these preparations, he steadily acclimatised himself to the ways of the Floating Leaf. At a campsite, he spent an increasing proportion of each day roaming about, collecting mushrooms, prospecting ores, sketching the wildlife, and hunting for his meals.

There was also time to handle a few outstanding matters with the real-world.

The short of Loki's scheme was that the spy would soon fake being kicked out of his guild for blowing his mission due to his arrogance, try to convince Henry to hire him, then backstab him later. The main path didn't have a high chance of success. There were, however, dozens of more probable variations, including lootjacking the hyper-challenging Legendary quest Henry was training to complete. But, of course, no such Legendary quest existed. Henry, in designing a counter plan, exploited this false assumption of the spy's by integrating an actual Legendary quest he'd been planning to give Ramiro for bait.

For reverting Alfgrim back to a human, the methods he brainstormed were too expensive to justify the benefit. He decided to just get Karnon to make the reversion whenever the God next showed his mischievous face. Or he'd leave the wolf as a human. It wasn't really his problem.

The replacement vector food for the poison, he didn't bother starting. Although the insight into Suchi's cuisine he'd gathered from developing the cookie would speed up the process, it would still require three dedicated weeks at least.

The migration began when the Flying Crabs from the interior of his island passed over head in one massive flock.

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As the crabs from his farm joined them, he sailed down the river in pursuit. Hitting the sea, they crossed a 1 kilometre strait separating his island and an adjacent continent. On the other shore, he shapeshifted into a stallion and continued after them by hoof.

This region was a Tier-3 marshland zone. Its apex predators were amphibious crocodilians and acid-squirting dragonflies. Practising the movement techniques of Floating Leaf, he snuck quietly through the terrain, avoiding conflicts and disturbing nature.

When he was attacked, he fought back while equipped with a stat Spelltome to compensate for his abysmal Tier-0 stats. The martial component of Floating Leaf, also following the philosophy Alignment, preferred a slow, calculated style of Fauna-combat while into the local monsters. In this way, one would come to better learn the habits of the native animals. The only issue with this for Henry was that these monsters were a higher-Tier than him and therefore immune to the necessary to obtain their forms. As such, he used his tournament's forms instead, the Savannah Cheetah, Silverback, and Chameleon Monkey.

By noon, the marshland well behind him, he'd entered a Tier-4 hemiboreal forest with bear-sized terrestrial lobsters and scorpions that hunted in packs like wolves.

With each passing hour, the Flying Crab flock had been expanding by accepting new flocks and fusing into even larger ones. Since the tracers linking him with them had a range of about 40 kilometres, he frequently meandered off path to perform Floating Leaf's scouting duties. He picked sample herbs and fruits, dipped into monster dens, and mapped arable land for farming, navigable rivers, and any hills that might house valuable minerals.

The tasks were quite dull relative to his daily battles with duelling and the written word. His natural impulse, since Floating Leaf forbade reading non-approved material, was to entertain himself with fantasies about this or that conquest. However, daydreaming was considered Misaligned, too. Thus, while forcing his brain to stay focused on the boring tasks, he had to stimulate it via a different method, an Odayakan technique called Stretching.

Stretching, not to be mistaken with stretching, involved performing one's duties at differing lengths of time, exercising varying degrees of fastidiousness and attention. Take collecting a single berry, for example. With one second, the forager would simply rip the fruit from the bush. With twenty, cut the stem and catch it in a basket to avoid bruising. A minute, select the most average looking berry so that it'd provide a more representative example for analysis. An hour, collect additional soil samples and leaf cuttings, bag the birds and bugs that'd been nibbling on the fruit, test the atmospheric conditions. And so on.

By Stretching, he was able to take all the neurons once employed in conquering the battlefield and force them to tyrannise the land. Not only did he detect differences in the species of trees, but the differences within species as the terrain transitioned from the wetter coast to the drier inland. In the manoeuvring of the Scorpion-Wolves pursuing him, he saw how the members specialised their roles based on their level, age, social rank, and distinct metamorphic evolutions.

He had to admit, as he picked a berry for an hour, it wasn't too bad.

At sunset, the migrating flock settled in the trees of a Tier-1 zone for the night to recuperate. While they rested, he trekked to a nearby lake and established a camp.

Digging a pit, he diverted water into it and created a soup of wet clay. This, he sculpted with Artist magic into a Reincarnation Monument, which he activated using skills from other classes.

Installing these Monuments was one of the main responsibilities of Player scouts. It'd taken years of research into the unique mineral properties of this world before he'd been able to construct a functioning one himself. One benefit of following the Flying Crab migration was that they should prefer safe, lower-Tier zones, whose materials he knew how to handle. (Technically, his character could respawn anywhere he desired, but he didn't want to play God and lose his mind, so he acted like an ordinary pleb bound to the game rules.)

There were restrictions against erecting Reincarnation Monuments too close to each other. However, the distance the flock had travelled in this single day far exceeded the minimum separation from his home base. They'd led him 140 kilometres from his island, further away than he'd ever been in the four decades of him dwelling on this planet.

Feeling a tad unsettled, he prepared dinner from a 30-metre-long python-cockroach that'd squirmed out of the lake to attack him while he'd been sculpting.

Even for meals, Floating Leaf offered an Aligned method. The pieces were to be eaten both raw and cooked, every organ sampled. Any unusual physical reactions were to be noted in enough detail that, in the case of fatal poisoning, the scout who discovered one's death-site might be saved from the same fate.

After a three-hour-long dinner, Henry Stretching it because he had nothing better to do, he dug an underground chamber.

Laying on a sleeping bag and pillow stuffed with the winter down of his chickens, he found himself too restless to sleep. When his mind began to wander, he pulled out some herbs gathered over the day and stared at them intensely.

By day twelve of their inland journey, they'd advanced to a cold, wind-swept steppe.

Without much scenery except the flocks of Flying Crabs now congesting the sky, he Stretched out his observations of the strange aerial crustaceans.

Behaviour-wise, they were similar birds, although most were more docile, more sociable.

Each species had its own song, and these he learned to recreate with wind-magic.

They had welcoming dances for greeting friendly flocks joining the migration, along with petty, rude dances for rivals, and these he sketched into a notebook.

Soon, they reached a mountain range blocking the entire southern horizon. Nothing seemed to live on the slopes, and the peaks were discharging clouds of noxious fumes.

Here was a potential answer to a long-standing mystery of his. Despite the temperate climate of his island, it sat an unusually northern latitude of 62 degrees, similar to Alaska. This suggested that the planet was much warmer than Earth. If the fumes were a greenhouse gas, they might be the source of the heat.

The crabs, refusing to pass over the mountains, took a hard turn west.

No matter how far they travelled in this direction, the mountains continued on, endless as the sky.

Just when Henry thought he might die of boredom, the flying migration crossed paths with a ground-based one heading in the opposite direction. At once, an extensive smorgasbord of beasts materialised for him to study.

There were turtle behemoths that waved around noodly appendages hundreds of metres tall for plucking fruits from impossibly-high branches. Prides of carnivorous meercats coordinated laser beam to deflesh their megafauna adversaries in seconds. Solitary reindeer sweated a pungent aroma that caused every other creature to give them a wide birth.

And there was more, tens of thousands more. The herds showed no sign of dwindling after days of travel.

A general pattern he observed was that the monsters of this planet showed drastic morphological changes with age. Juveniles and adolescents were often agile, light-weight bipeds. Adults, in contrast, tended to be gargantuan quadrupeds hundreds of times more massive, with multiple eyes distributed around their bulky bodies.

Most of the animals steered clear of his Stallion form because of its distressingly odd appearance from their perspective. Every now and then, though, a predator tested their luck, and their carcasses were devoured by scavengers.

The Flying Crabs, meanwhile, faced constant assault. During the daylight hours, bigger and faster predatory crabs flew amongst them like sharks through a school of fish. At night, the Flying Crabs settled upon the plains in skyscraper-sized piles. The members on the surface would interlock their exoskeletons to create a wall against the land monsters attempting to devour them. When a section of wall was breached, the Flying Crabs inside threw their bodies forward to patch it up. Casualties were plenty, but, with the sheer quantity of crabs, no significant dent was made in their numbers.

For his own meals, he sprinted down the slower members of the herds in his Cheetah form. Most species had an exoskeleton or similar bony armour to shield the conventional mammalian weak points of the neck and belly. Locating their vulnerabilities, though, was no issue as he'd been employing Floating Leaf's intense, vigilant observations on the hunting methods used by the predators.

It was pretty fun.