Chapter 97 – The Floor of the Fifties.

Diana's second day at the Iron Cauldron Outpost began before dawn.

The Commander walked down the wooden stairs of The Smoking Boar Tavern wearing her long black leather coat with the hood pulled down to her brow. The ground-floor hall was already packed with hunters and porters eating deep bowls of offal stew washed down with dark beer, even before the reddish mist of the valley had cleared outside.

Diana walked to the door and stepped out onto the main street.

She quietly activated [Command Eye], adjusting her vertical pupils with golden rings to appraise the crowd moving through the packed-dirt lanes.

And that was when the weight of the Third Circle's reality became evident across every square meter of that city.

On the walkway to her left, a baker's assistant unloaded two-hundred-kilogram sacks of black rye flour from a wagon, carrying two sacks under each arm with effortless ease. The man's status flickered in gray lettering: Level 50 (Rustic Porter).

Further down, a blacksmith forging meat hooks on a cast-iron anvil was rated as Level 53.

Two mercenaries shouting at each other outside a butcher shop over the price of a manticore leg registered as Level 55 and Level 58.

And on the corner of the plaza, three sentries of Beelzebub's guard patrolling with poleaxes displayed badges of Level 60.

In the Second Circle's Ivory Citadel, anyone above Level 30 was considered a respectable guild member, and Level 35 hunters like Lord Cassius commanded entire legions.

Here in the Third Circle, Level 50 was the baseline floor. It was the starting point for those who swept tavern floors and chopped firewood for cauldrons.

The reason was purely bureaucratic and biological: since the official border portal required Level 50 to grant descent from the Second Circle, any creature inhabiting that valley had either crossed that milestone decades ago or had been born adapted to the dense mana of that soil.

And Diana was standing right among them at Level 38.

***

Diana sat on a wooden bench near a barley tea stall, pulling up the jacket's collar to conceal the amethyst circlet on her forehead.

—Strange being the lowest-level person on the entire street, isn't it, Diana?

The System's voice resonated in her mind, in a good-humored tone of black gold.

—Even the fellow scraping grease off the floor over there is twelve levels higher than you.

Diana took a sip of the bitter tea, watching the movement of the guards out of the corner of her eyes.

“Level measures raw accumulated experience and biological capacity,” Diana replied mentally with calculating coolness. “Yet most of these Level 50 porters have unoptimized stat distributions and mediocre passive skills geared toward manual labor. They have high health pools, but no magical refinement.”

She was technically correct: her 183 Intelligence and her pool of 1,160 mana points granted her destructive magical output on par with a Level 50 archmage.

Nevertheless, the physical disadvantage remained real.

At 550 hit points, Diana could not afford to take a direct blow from a monster or warrior of this Circle. Without Kael to absorb the impact and without Aurelia-Elysia to mend broken bones in an instant, a single positioning error meant immediate death.

She needed supplementary gear and quick-use potions adapted to this new environment.

***

Diana finished her tea, stood up from the bench, and walked toward the Cauldron and Spice Market in the outpost's eastern sector.

The market occupied a two-hundred-meter-wide plaza enclosed by red granite warehouses. The air there was thick, laden with aromatic powders that stung the nostrils: dried red peppers, powdered sulfur, mineral fire salt, and refined fat from deep-dwelling monsters.

Diana walked past the stalls with the eye of Level 20 Alchemy.

She analyzed local reagents with precision:

Fire Salt was a volatile mineral that reacted to body moisture, ideal for brewing fast-acting cellular-burn poisons.

Rift Worm Grease possessed thermal absorption properties, serving as a base for skin balms that cut fire damage by thirty percent.

And Blood Pepper Root boosted blood circulation, enabling the creation of instant stamina elixirs to sustain breath during extended combat.

Diana stopped before an ogre merchant's stall and purchased a curated lot of Fire Salt, pepper roots, and twelve reinforced glazed ceramic vials, paying two silver coins out of pocket.

With that, the total in her vault adjusted to 364 Silver Coins (36.4 Gold Coins), with four loose coins remaining in her coat pocket.

***

Diana returned to her room at The Smoking Boar Tavern around two in the afternoon.

She locked the wooden door with the iron key, slid the inner deadbolt into place, and arranged the reagents on the stone table near the window.

She withdrew the portable alchemy workbench from her dimensional pouch, lighting the small blue mana burner beneath the tempered glass crucible.

The Commander had no intention of spending weeks holed up in the city.

She would use that afternoon to synthesize four vials of Fire Salt Poison to coat her black steel dagger, two Quick Stamina Elixirs, and three Corrosive Smoke Bombs tailored to the dense physiology of Level 44 to 48 monsters.

At dawn the next day, she would cross the outpost's outer gates.

It would be her first solo hunt in a territory where even wild beasts were ten levels above her.

Diana adjusted the burner's flame with the tip of her black claw, watching the mineral powders dissolve into the bubbling liquid inside the flask, her dark eyes and golden rings glowing in the room's dim light.

The Third Circle treated Level 50 as the rule. But Diana intended to break that rule step by step.