For a moment, I considered simply cutting through the wilderness to save time.

If I’d been fresh and healthy, I would have given it serious thought, but… One of my arms was almost completely useless, and I wasn’t confident that using my Foxstep and Immovable Lock to navigate my way through the sheer cliffs wouldn’t count against me.

And all that was ignoring the fact that away from the trails, there would be far more powerful beasts, ones that had learned to avoid where the humans often tread through.

No, it was better to stay the path.

I let out a long, rattling, sigh and started trudging onwards, occasionally fending off the odd attack from a magical creature. That night while I was asleep, I was forced to abandon my camp briefly, as another powerful aura bear decided to investigate. I let it tear through a Material Echo while I grabbed two handfuls of my nutrition potions and teleported away.

It nosed around in the remains of my scent suppression and warmth potions, but those seemed to bore it, and after half an hour, it wandered away, and I was able to return to camp and restless sleep.

As I resumed my plodding walk, I could feel the palliate-blacksalt starting to finally wear off. My arm, which had been partially immobilized and achy, but not overly painful, started to have thin spindles of pain turning through it. My feet, which had been painful, started to devolve into a fiery mess, like they’d been stung by plasmatic ants.

Worse, the blisters started to pop, and the yellow-white blister slime started soaking into my socks. I was sure the fluid had some sort of official name, but I didn’t really care about it. It just… Hurt.

But still, I kept going. My pace slowed to a crawl, and though I thought that I probably only needed about a three or four mile day, that became a tall order.

Combat became worse. My body’s reserves of excess energy were drained into keeping me running, since a month of constant hiking and pushing had driven them to the brink of empty, and I wasn’t getting enough rest each night to actually recover them, not with the need to fend off three or more attackers throughout the night.

By the third day after the palliate-blacksalt wore off, the infection started to set in, the blisters turning from a white-yellow to a yellowish green color, and the skin around them turning bright pink.

I was running a fever, and with the warming potion combined with the fever, I was burning through water and energy even faster than before, and I wasn’t sure that the nutrition potions would be able to provide enough.

It was a horrid sort of misery, forced to put one foot after the other, even with the pain swirling through my body, without the energy to keep going, but needing to keep going, or else I’d fail, only a stone’s throw away from the finish line.

I considered giving up anyways. What was thirty points, in the grand scheme of things?

But Edgar hadn’t shared the method he used to score things. It was possible that losing thirty points from giving up would let me get a C or D grade mark, but it was also entirely possible that it would mean I failed the test entirely.

It was almost a relief when I was able to detect the snowstorm setting in the following day, and the air began to fill with more of the deer-bird creatures. I threw my mana out around me, doing what I could to match it to the environment, though honestly, with my exhaustion and lack of focus, I was doing a terrible job.

One of them charged me, and I just teleported out of the way, leaving another echo behind me for it to tear through, then kept moving. Each time it dove, I repeated the strategy, since I didn’t have the energy left to fight it.

Scattering my senses around, I eventually found a small cave, occupied by two other sources of mana, a boreal toad and… Something. It was hard to get a proper sense for it, but it had strong tinges of lunar, abnegation, death, mental, and other, more subtle aspects. Whatever it was, it was at the peak of second gate, and probably just needed to absorb enough mana and energy to try and break through, while the toad was early third gate, probably having just broken through.

I drew my mana up, only just now noticing that it wasn’t cycling in the pattern of the Depths of Starry Night technique. Considering that I’d mastered the first and second layers of that technique enough to cycle my mana reflexively, that… Probably wasn’t a good sign.

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By the time I got to the cave, my vision was flickering and fading, and I was struggling to even stand upright. I had just a moment to take in the appearance of the two creatures.

The boreal toad was about the size of a small grapefruit or large orange, and was pale blue and white, with streaks of greens and browns that probably gave it a versatile camouflage in the trees. A boreal aura of cold light surrounded it, but drawn in close, so as not to alert the bird-deer-things.

Its companion looked like a ferret of some sort, maybe a fisher cat or an ermine? Unlike the normal, nonmagical ones, its coat was speckled with blue, black, and silver, in a pattern that reminded me of a mage’s cloak wrapped around a normal ermine.

The mana rushed out of me in a sudden burst, as it slipped my control, and I started falling. I threw my hands out, barely managing to catch myself before I cracked my head open. My bad arm failed to fully support me, but my good arm was enough that I only hit the floor sort of hard, angled to land on my chest, so I didn’t explode my backpack’s potions.

Then my vision blacked out, and I wondered if I was going to die.

I didn’t die, which was actually somewhat surprising, but I was fading in and out of lucidity. I had faint memories of one of the deer-bird creatures trying to force its way into the cave, and the fight between the three of us and it. I was still on the floor and couldn’t stand up for some reason, but I threw Briarthreads at it. It didn’t do a whole lot, but the ermine and toad unleashed their own magics.

The ermine unleashed bands of darkness that rotated around itself, but the magic seemed to cloud the eyes of the deer-thing, while other spells slipped into its spirit, binding it down and slowing the deer-bird’s magic.

I remember deciding to name it a hex-ermine, while streaming out more Briarthreads.

The boreal toad, on the other hand, had a far more straightforward method of attack. It let out a loud croak and released a wave of multicolored aurora light like a breath weapon, which struck the deer-thing and left freezing burns along it.

I didn’t remember much after that, and I think I passed out again.

I remembered undoing my backpack briefly, tossing the solidified mana aside, and wrapping myself in the tarp. I thought I might remember the boreal toad sitting on my forehead, while the hex-ermine curled up in my arms.

That memory was shaky, though, and I wasn't entirely sure it happened.

After that, I remembered gathering up some snow in my empty potion vials, and using a quick ungated spell to melt the snow. It probably wasn’t entirely safe to drink, but I was already infected, and I needed more fluid than what I’d attached to my potion. It was better to risk catching something else than to accept certain death from dehydration.

I thought I also remembered the hex-ermine lapping out of a second vial, while the toad sat on top of my head.

I had several memories of melting the snow and drinking from a vial, and they started to come closer together. This time, I was pretty sure that the hex-ermine was cuddled up against me, probably trying to steal some of my warmth, not that I honestly minded. It was the closest to sleeping alongside Dusk that I’d had in a long time.

By the time I was fully coherent, the snowstorm had dissipated. Fearful of what I’d find, I used a pulse of Internal Pocketwatch.

Seven and a half days.

I’d been out of commission for over a week, which meant I’d gone over the one-month time frame.

I let out a low, quiet curse, not wanting to disturb the toad that was currently still sitting on my head, nor the ermine against my stomach.

I considered my options. I’d gotten pretty close to the end of the trail, and I hadn’t needed to activate the shadowstep enchantments in order to escape. I could probably, hopefully, possibly, complete the trail. I might complete it late, but that would cost me a maximum of twenty points. Hopefully less.

I swept my attention over my body. My feet were achingly sore, and I thought the blisters might turn into scars, but they weren’t as brightly painful as they once had been. My socks were crusty with puss, which was frankly disgusting, but I could still walk.

My arm… Well, it wasn’t really entirely operational, and I thought my fall may have strained it even more, but I hoped that it wasn’t anything that Kene wouldn’t be able to fix.

Hoped, at the very least. I wasn’t entirely sure. But at this point, my arm was so damaged that taking an extra few days to get to the end of the trail wasn’t going to actually improve the odds of it being able to be healed.

I packed up my things, and to my surprise, the boreal toad hopped onto my head, while the hex-ermine grabbed onto my pants with its little claws, and then hauled itself up onto my coat, then draped itself around my neck like a tiny, footed scarf.

I scratched it under the chin, then stroked the back of the toad, and took a step out of the cave. The motion was tender, and it pulled at my unstretched muscles, but I kept walking, slowly feeling better, save for my arm and feet.

A couple of pulses of Sense Directionality and Analyze Space let me get my bearings, and I started heading back to the trail again.

While I wasn’t able to manage a ten mile day again, nor even the eight mile per day that I’d done at the start, I was able to manage a solid four to five mile day.

Even with the couple of spare potions I prepared, I was down to two remaining nutrition, heating, and scent suppression potions when I finally spotted the end of the trail in the distance. It wasn’t much, just a small cluster of perhaps five or six large wooden cabins, situated around a lake, with multicolored glowing lights in the windows and scented blue smoke rising from their chimneys. The hamlet – though it was so small I thought even calling it a hamlet was generous – looked like it was still another seven or eight miles down the mountain from where I was now, but just seeing it sent a flood of relief flooding through my body.

Being that close to the finish line gave me the burst of energy that I had needed, and the following evening, I finally stumbled under the massive arch made of a carved, blue-white stone that emitted an icy magic, marking the end of the Beastgate Trial Trail.