Twelve days.
He ran zone nine every day. Sometimes with a contract, sometimes without. Sometimes in the morning before the Dorath team mission, sometimes in the evening when the zone was quieter and the creature signatures had settled back into their resting distributions.
He was not hunting the Mantle Cat. He was learning the zone.
There was a difference, and it mattered. A hunter who went in looking for the kill arrived with a fixed outcome in mind, which meant the environment had to serve the plan. What he was doing was the reverse: letting the zone teach him what it was, and building the plan from what it taught.
The zone taught him several things.
