I didn’t get nearly as much sleep as I’d hoped that night, nor the night after that, but at least I got a touch of variety, as the coyotes gave way to a handful of large, crab-shaped ice elementals.

I wasn’t sure why exactly ice elementals were shaped like crabs, but who was I to question the will of their domains?

As I was tracking on through the eighth day, trying not to think about the fact that the power of the salt would wear off tomorrow, and leave my blisters unprotected, I noticed something.

I was descending from a glacier, into the valley that would serve as a breaking point before I began heading up the next mountain, and in the valley, there was a huge lake. It was frozen over on top, but the lake wasn’t what caught my eye.

What caught my eye was the absolutely massive toad sitting atop the lake, cycling in power from the environment.

I’d sensed a handful of boreal toads moving around the winter wilderness before, but this one was… Different.

It was fourth gate, and well into it. It wasn’t quite as strong as the revenant, but it was far stronger than the war root or the spriggan had been. Its power was dense and thick, and while it might technically have fallen short of my previous opponent in terms of raw power, the Revenant had been locked into only the four or five spells that its shade had managed to cling onto, and was in a state of decay, only able to touch its full power for moments at a time.

This hefty toad suffered no such consequences. It had the full suite of boreal toad magic, and wouldn’t randomly be forced to drop its power.

I sucked in a tight breath and immediately began to draw my power in, drawing it tight around my spirit, and then setting up the upside down whirlwind of a veil that Alvarro had taught me.

I couldn’t cast with my veil active, but that was… Fine. Mostly. Probably. It also limited my mana senses quite a bit, which was much less fine in my estimation, but I didn’t have a better alternative.

The potions in my bag weren’t exactly veiled, however, and there wasn’t anything I could do to hide them, and the moment I started moving towards the frog, I could visibly see the eyelid of the massive frog slightly crack open and Edgar’s mana filled the air.

I took several rapid steps back into the treeline, then took a breath. I knew, based off of the comments that Azalea had made, that the beastial Arcanist ability to direct and command animals was weakened against stronger creatures. Edgar might have been stronger than she was, but he was also stretching himself over a massive distance and keeping his eyes over all the contestants.

As long as I wasn’t stupid enough to dive into a fight with it just because I felt Edgar’s mana, it might be able to shake the influence off…

There was a slight shifting, and I heard the lake snapping and cracking slightly as the frog shifted. I took several steps back, hiding behind a tree.

A moment later, the frog closed its eyes and settled down.

I bit my lip and considered. I couldn’t veil myself, and I couldn’t really go around it, not easily. I’d have to circle around the range of its senses, so I’d need to go well out of my way, off the path.

It didn’t seem like there was an easy or obvious way out of this.

I closed my eyes and thought.

I could maybe attempt to set up camp now, and see if it would move during the night? But that would be a massive waste of time, and wouldn’t guarantee any results.

But the thought of setting up camp had sparked a small idea to life in my brain.

I didn’t know a lot about veiling, but I’d learned how to blend my spatial mana into the weave of space around me when I was setting up a ward. My current veiling technique involved spinning my mana in a circle that forced all of my magic to stay within me, but I was fairly certain that I remembered Alvarro alluding to there being other methods.

Could this be one? If I matched my mana to the environment, then I might be able to blend in and veil myself that way.

I flicked Analyze Space on in order to get a good picture of the weave of space, then began to leak small amounts of my spatial mana. Not much, just a little more than I normally would have.

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Then, as if I was smoothing out the ripples around a Spatial Anchor spell, I began to match my personal mana to the weave of space around me. It took me several attempts, since personal mana, undirected by a spell, was very different from a normal spatial anchor.

In the end, the try that finally managed some success felt uncannily similar to the technique of allowing my mana senses to ride the environment. That made a certain sort of sense, in truth, since both involved harmonizing and surrendering control to the world around me.

I took a step back, and immediately my mana stood out like a beacon, no longer matching up with the world, then I shook my head.

I had proved the theory, I just needed to actually get it working.

I took slow, methodical steps, working on matching my spatial mana with each step, but that was actually somewhat backwards, in the end. Rather than changing it each step, I needed to change it constantly. The weave of space shifted slowly over time, subtly, but it did shift. And whenever there was motion, space moved too. Trying to change it in bursts wasn’t the solution. I had to change with every motion, constant, unending change, not something sharp and discreet.

Once I’d matched my spatial mana, I moved onto my other mana types. Temporal was easier, to my surprise. Time did fluctuate somewhat, but all things considered, the amount it changed was like a mosquito landing on top of an ocean – it really made almost no impact. Once I learned to blur the temporal mana in with the steady stream of time that my Internal Pocketwatch told me about, it required almost no on the fly adjustments.

Feeling optimistic, I dove into my life mana.

It was awful. There were small specks of life and death everywhere, in the air and soil, but they were so diffuse and broad that it was hard to match them. This far north, there was also much less for me to ride along, and I kept slipping into the technique of riding the wind, and in the end, it took me over an hour to manage to get my veiling-not-veil technique to the point I could walk around with it.

Death was slightly easier, but it still wasn’t exactly easy.

Once I finished each of them alone, I started working with them together, hiding all four aspects of my mana at once. I started by combining life and death, since I figured that would probably be the hardest.

It was hard, but not in the way that pushing a boulder uphill was hard. It was more like trying to do math in your head, while also patting your head and rubbing your stomach.

Once I finally worked out matching life and death to the environment, I moved on to space. That was easier to work in, but it still wasn’t exactly easy. It was adding in the need to read some poetry while doing all of the previous tasks.

Thankfully, adding time was easy, hardly an extra task at all.

Once I had all four together, I started walking, until I was confident that I’d be able to walk by the toad without losing the technique, before I finally moved onto the next step, coating the potions in my mana. By saturating the air around them with spatial mana, matched to the weave of space, I was able to overpower my potions and effectively hide them.

That took even more time, and the sun was hanging high in the sky by the time I was finished, but I still thought it was quicker, and it was definitely safer, than going through the wilderness and trying to get around the frog's senses safely.

Then with some trepidation, I took a step out of the treeline and into the clearing with the pond, and almost slipped control from sheer nerves.

Nerves causing my limbs to shake slightly, I slowly made my way, step after step, across the clearing, until I heard a creak. My heart started hammering, and I turned slowly to the giant toad, trying not to make any sudden movements.

The toad was just settling himself on ice.

I let out a soft wuff of relief and continued my slow, yet steady, gait, until I was past the toad. Once I was quite a ways out of the clearing, I allowed myself to sag in relief.

My method had worked.

I doubted that I’d been the first person to discover it, and I’d definitely be swinging by a library to check out some materials on learning how to do this more effectively.

But I’d still done it. And I thought I could use this method with a lot more ease than I could have used the standard whirlwind method, since it did so much riding along with my mana senses.

If I didn’t have an aching arm and pounding, blistered feet, I’d likely have literally jumped for joy.

As was, I just allowed myself to smile before trudging on. As I walked, though, the path of the mountains started to curve, almost moving away from the direction that I needed to go.

I continued on at first without much thought. The paths needed to wind around the mountain in order to get up it without having the need to perform literal rock climbing.

But as the path continued to wind, and when I got a good look at it using Surveyor’s Eye and floating overhead, I thought I was moving in a large C shape. It seemed to be absolutely massive, from what I could tell, but based on the feedback I was able to get with Sense Directionality and the very changing angle, I did think I should end up at the end of the Beastgate Trial Trail.

But the curve was going to be long, and it would take a lot of time. I tried to do some calculations to figure out how long, but I’d never been able to do math well, and trying to figure out how long it would take, and my own speed was too much for me to manage.

Instead, I focused on the more social aspect of it, trying to figure out what Edgar had expected.

When he had said that the path was a hundred and fifty miles, had he meant in a straight line? Because if that was the case, I’d need to book it in a straight line through the wilderness in order to get to the end on time, and my extra time would probably still only barely be enough to allow me to pass if I kept up a strong pace.

If Edgar had meant along the trail, then cutting through the wilderness could potentially save time at the cost of a lot of risk to myself, but it wouldn’t be needed at all, and would be throwing myself into a bunch of risk for nothing.

I bit my lip as I contemplated.