Despite the long list of items they had on their shopping list, they only needed to hit three stores to finish getting everything. The rest of it they had managed to buy before picking up Nate. That had mostly consisted of perishable items.

At home, Nate stored the literal hundreds of bolts they had bought him. The idea was that he would be able to reuse them, however, if it came down to it, he would always have more. Besides, they expected to destroy a fair number of them in the beginning, as he got used to the crossbow. At least fifty of the bolts had been lower grade than the rest, so they could be more disposable during his learning period.

He put all of those in the quiver he had gotten the night before and set it to the side with the rest of his equipment. He had originally thought about giving the quiver to his mother; it was the last item he had gotten after all. But at the last moment, he had changed his mind.

It was silly, but he wanted to give something to both of them at the same time. He wanted to keep everything equal. They had never fought over anything stupid like this that he knew about, so he wasn’t even sure where the concern came from. It was just there, and as a result, the quiver became his, instead of his mother’s.

Not like she really needed it anymore, anyway. She had the storage bracelet and her old quiver. If she needed more arrows, she could just drop them into the quiver and call it good. The only advantage this one had over her normal one was its expanded size, and she had more or less negated that advantage with the storage bracelet.

Packing everything up that night for the expedition was far easier and quicker than normal. Nina made liberal, yet discreet, use of the storage bracelet to ferry everything in and out in large loads. Making sure the car was packed just the way she wanted it for the short trip in the morning.

Once they were in the rig, most of the supplies would go right back into her storage bracelet. Until then, it was important to keep up their illusion of normalcy.

The last thing they did before separating for bed that night was spread a map out across the dining room table.

“This is the path we are going to be taking this weekend, and right here is where we will be making camp,” Niall told his son as his finger traced out the path for him.

It was mostly the same as what they had taken the week before, only a mile or two further in. They also wouldn’t be leaving the rig behind this time outside of the initial hunting expedition. They didn’t have any requests to fetch herbs or other items, so this would be a much more normal expedition for them.

They would go in, park, get a couple of kills, bring them back to the trailer, and then start up the fans and let the beasts come to them.

As long as they weren’t swarmed again, this wouldn’t even be a problem for them.

Nate made note of the location and then wandered up to his room to work on his meditation art and talk to Aura. She needed to know where to meet them in order to be there as early as possible. As for his meditation art, he had been thinking about the map of his meridians that he had started creating for it.

He hadn’t made a lot of progress on it, which was fine. He hadn’t gotten to the part of integrating that section of the meditation art just yet. It was hard to reach a section that you hadn’t worked on after all. He had come to the realization during school that day that basic ties would help him in that area as well.

It might not help him create the map of all his meridians, but it would help him to create the most optimized cycling model. One that used all of them in an efficient manner.

Regardless, he added it to his list of items to do in the future and went back to working his way through the first stanza. He had been far past this point originally, and now he was suddenly going back to work on something he thought he already understood. Only to find, as he was forced to tweak one word after another, that he had actually understood very little of its meaning.

However, that did have an interesting effect on him. Every time he changed a red word in the stanza into a correct one, or a yellow one into something a little more correct, his understanding grew. As it grew, the speed of his cultivation went up along with it. Not a lot. It was only one stanza out of the entire meditation art, but it did set a precedent.

If he could perfect the meditation art for himself, then its overall speed would be far greater than it would have been otherwise.

Of course, that would take time. Time that he wanted to be putting towards learning how to combine his two meditation arts. Instead, it now looked as though he would need to work on perfecting them both before he took that particular step.

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That was fine. No one seemed to expect him or the girls to begin integrating them just yet. There were several steps involved with simply learning a meditation art. Once you got into the process of modifying it to fit you, all timelines went out the window.

There was no pressure from the teachers or the others to finish quickly. They wanted the students to do it properly, and they knew that took time.

Nate sent a few messages back and forth between him and Aura, ensuring that she knew where to meet them. She had gotten lucky the night before and managed to escape when he died. It had been a close thing, but it had worked out in the end. As his death had allowed her the opportunity to hop through the portal and back to the first dungeon.

After he was done talking to her, he spent a few minutes working on the second dungeon. Going through the traps, he made a few more tweaks based on his own personal notes. Items that he had noticed in person the night before.

After they returned from the expedition, he would also expand on the variety of traps inside the second dungeon. At the moment, the entire place was operating with five or six basic traps that were modified somewhat for variety's sake in the individual rooms. There needed to be a lot more different traps than that.

Or at least a few less power-hungry ones, if nothing else.

The last item he did before shutting everything down for the night was slot the beginning laser technology into the research field. The Dungeon Core had finished working on the blighted elves’ language sometime during the day and had been sitting idle ever since.

He had a feeling that this particular research project would take it longer to complete. A feeling that was confirmed when a timer appeared above the research slot for two and a half days. That hadn’t been there for the language, he was sure of that. However, maybe the first project had acted as a sort of calibration process.

It wouldn’t be too far outside what he considered normal at the moment for that to be the case.

With a yawn, he closed the screens and brought his blanket over his head.

***

It felt like only a few minutes later when those same blankets were rudely pulled from his grasp by his father.

“Come on, time to get up,” Niall told him with a grin.

Nate rolled over with barely responsive eyes. “Ugh, mom already gave you some of her tea. That’s cheating. I used to wonder why you two were always so chipper in the morning, and now I know. It’s because you both are dirty rotten cheaters,” He grumbled, just loud enough to make sure his father heard.

“Does that mean you don’t want your cup of cheater juice? I’ll tell your mother to throw it down the drain then.”

“Don’t you dare!” Nate roared as he sprang out of bed amidst his father’s cackles.

A minute later he was in the shower with the fifth and last dosage of the core enhancement items he had gotten from the McFadden’s. This time it was a shard of untainted beast core, or rather a beast core, with no elemental affinity. It was something that could work with anyone, and they tended to have special properties as a result.

With a suspicious look at the crystal shard, Nate carefully put it onto his tongue before shifting it to the side and taking an experimental bite.

The shard ground unpleasantly against his molars for a moment before popping like a gusher candy. The shard dissolved into a burst of energy that flooded his mouth and entered the rest of his body from there. That energy was quickly pulled into both of his cores, with the bulk of it going toward the backup core.

With that completed, he finished up his shower and hurried down the stairs with his bag in hand. Everything else had already been loaded or was in his storage. The bag simply contained a few last-minute items he had thought to grab, like his music player, laptop, phone, and notebook.

It was doubtful that he would have a lot of time to do anything on the laptop, but he had many of his notes on it.

His parents were leaning against the counters in the kitchen talking about the expedition when he made his appearance. A travel mug was sitting to the side of them, with a lonely trail of steam coming up from the mouth hole in the lid.

“I hope you made a lot of this and put it in your bracelet,” Nate commented as he picked up the mug and quickly gave his mother a one-armed hug.

“I did. No worries there. Even if it doesn’t stay hot inside the storage area, at least it will save me from having to make it out there.” She replied as they headed for the door. She had a box full of muffins, sausage, bacon, and other breakfast items they could eat in the car.

Nate sipped at the hot tea as he listened to them lock the door. He had never really thought about it much before that moment, but he had really been underutilizing his storage function, hadn’t he? Then again, maybe not. In everyday life, there weren’t exactly a lot of opportunities to use it in discreet ways that really mattered.

He climbed into the back of the SUV with a mental shrug and grabbed the box from his mother. A few moments later, they were off, traveling down the dark, empty streets of the chilly October morning.

“Is Halloween still celebrated here?” He asked, trying to remember when it had become bigger in America than in other places.

There was a distinct lack of decoration that he would have normally associated with the event. Which was odd, considering that it was less than two weeks away.

His mother cursed and pulled out her phone, checking the date. “Is it that time of year already? I can’t believe we missed the notification they sent out.”

She looked back at her son and his questioning gaze. “In answer to your question, yes, we observe Halloween still. Though, I believe the method is different from what you will be familiar with. After the portals appeared, it returned to its Gaelic roots and is once more known as Samhain. The night where the veil between worlds thins.

“The worlds the veil separated were originally that of the living and the dead. Obviously, that is no longer the case. On Samhain, the portals will begin to act differently for a short while. They will become more active, and more interestingly, cultivators can even go through them if they wish. Few have ever returned, and always at great cost to the parties involved.”

Nate bit into the piece of crispy, delicious bacon in his hand while he listened to her speak. That was indeed not what he was expecting. It was completely outside of his expectations, in fact, but it did make a certain amount of twisted sense.

He would need to make sure both dungeons were ready for the coming changes.