Six days.
The Bronze register's contract board was clear by the end of the first two days — not because the team rushed, but because the pattern Markus had designed for the calibration week was methodical enough to cover the lower tier's available work in that window. The Tier 1 and Tier 2 contracts were calibration material, not achievement, and the team understood this. Every engagement was a data point: the air resistance confirmed and quantified, the mana over-saturation problem mapped and corrected, the gravitational differential in defensive footwork identified and adjusted for.
By the forty-eighth hour, the adjustments had become instinctive rather than deliberate. The team's combat physics in this environment had a working baseline.
The Silver register opened on the third day.
The Tier 3 work was different in character from the lower tier — the monster ecology in the mid-valley zones was adapted to the full environmental density, which meant the threat profiles didn't scale uniformly with what the tier numbers implied at home. Markus mapped each engagement in advance, the Fate's Eye's read providing the targeting data that let the team engage at the appropriate level rather than discovering the threat's actual capability in real time.
The tactical synchronisation that had been developing since the academy years was running well in this environment. He watched them from the perimeter and made the adjustments when the data indicated them.
By day five, the senior registrar at the Brimstone Conclave was having the specific professional experience of watching a ranking tier's purpose not quite match the people who had been placed in it, and doing the accounting of which contracts would be appropriate for Gold without waiting for the standard probationary period to conclude.
Gold rank opened the access Markus had come here for: the frontier anomaly boards and the survey contracts that covered the territory between the settlement and the mountain range where the innkeeper's map had placed Vorash's citadel.
He was not ready for the citadel. But he wanted survey data from the territory.
The Tectonic Dread-Wolves were in the sulphur-choked crags at the frontier zone's near edge — a pack of seven, each one the kind of creature that high-density earth-element mana produced when an apex predator spent decades accumulating it in a pre-framework environment. The obsidian-lattice hides were not aesthetic; they were functional armour that the animals had grown, the silica crystallisation process in their skin producing a material that their biology had developed specifically to handle environmental impact.
The copper-infused vascular system was the interesting detail. The Fate's Eye mapped it on approach: the gravitational bursts the pack used as their primary attack vector ran through the vascular network rather than through a mana core in the standard framework sense. Disrupting the circulatory pattern disrupted the attack.
"The shockwave attack cycles with their heartbeat," he said, from the ridge above the clearing. "The frequency is readable through the Ghost Sense protocol — you feel the atmospheric pressure shift approximately half a second before the burst expresses. That's the window."
Rosanne looked at him. "Half a second."
"You've been working at 140-millisecond windows since second year," he said. "Half a second is generous."
She looked at the pack.
"Right," she said.
The engagement took eleven minutes. The team used the half-second window correctly from the first engagement — the Ghost Sense training's atmospheric pressure sensitivity producing exactly the read he had predicted it would in an environment where the ambient density made the pressure shift more pronounced rather than less.
He ran the herb survey on the clearing's perimeter while they worked.
The Ashen Lotus was growing in the rock crevices where the sulphur concentration was highest — a plant that had apparently developed a metabolic relationship with the sulphur as a nutrient source rather than a toxin. The Fate's Eye mapped the root structure and the silica vein architecture before he harvested. The comparison with the Violet-Veined Ashen Stalk from the previous visit would be useful for Isolde's compound refinement work.
The Blood-Veined Ginseng was less immediately obvious — the root system was deeper than the surface growth suggested, using the copper-mineral soil layer as its primary nutrient base. He extracted the root intact using the same geological block technique from the estate laboratory sessions.
Both specimens were documented and stored correctly.
The Tier 4 cores from the Dread-Wolves were significantly different from the Tier 1 cores the team had absorbed on the first day.
Not dramatically larger in physical size — the primordial world's material tended toward density rather than scale. Different in what the Fate's Eye mapped: the mana concentration was at the level where the core's own gravity became a factor in how the material had to be handled.
He was honest about what he knew and didn't know.
"These are four tiers above what you absorbed on day one," he said. "I watched the Tier 1 absorption closely and the channel stress was manageable. The Tier 4 absorption is going to produce more stress. The question I can't answer with certainty is exactly how much more."
"What does your estimate say," Rosanne said.
"Based on the channel progression I've been tracking across the week — the density increase from the calibration work plus the day-one absorption — your channels are meaningfully more adapted than they were when we arrived. The Tier 4 cores are still going to be demanding." He looked at them. "Same protocol as before: I watch the signatures, anyone whose channels go into stress response stops, we document what happened."
"And if none of us hit stress response," Jessica said.
"Then we have better data than before," he said.
The absorption ran for ninety minutes.
He watched continuously. The Fate's Eye tracked all four signatures in parallel, the channel stress indicators present and real but staying below the threshold the previous week's data had established as concerning. The density integration was proceeding at the rate that the week's adaptation had made possible — the channels meeting the cores' output from a higher starting point than the day-one absorption had.
When it completed, the team had the specific quality of practitioners who had done significant cultivation work and needed time to let it integrate.
"Rest today," he said. "The integration is still in process. Tomorrow we do the second survey contract and start mapping the territory north of the settlement."
Rosanne looked at her hands with the attention she brought to cultivations changes — the practitioner's instinct to check the baseline and confirm it against the previous state.
"Different," she said.
"How," he said.
"The atmospheric density feels like it's inside rather than outside," she said. "Like I'm the same pressure as the air."
"Your channels are running closer to the ambient frequency," he said. "You're less in friction with the environment."
"That's what it feels like," she said. "Less friction."
"It'll continue," he said. "The process isn't complete from one week. But this is the direction."
He looked at the frontier crags and the mountain range visible at the far distance where the three suns were converging toward the horizon.
The survey contract for tomorrow would take them three hours north.
The citadel was visible from the survey's endpoint.
He was not going there yet.
But he was getting a map.