[Time slipped away like fine sand between your fingers. Before you knew it, the calendar had turned another page, quietly ushering in 2013.]
[The annual system card draw arrived right on schedule.]
[Yet so-called "good luck" seemed, as always, to have passed you by, a traveler struggling through the mire of fate. Once the radiance faded, what emerged was still the ordinary white glow that signaled the standard outcome.]
[Pore Physical Lockdown [N]]
[Effect: Through conscious intent, forcibly contracts the openings of all hair follicles and sweat glands throughout the body for up to several dozen minutes.]
[Tactical value: Scent and pheromone isolation.]
[This did not reduce your presence. It simply stopped the release of sweat and body odor on a physical level, making tracking dogs, cursed spirits that located targets by smell, and chemical sensors completely lose their target.]
[Looking at the card floating silently in your sea of consciousness, you raised an eyebrow slightly, feeling little stir within you.]
[This card retained the same old character of an N-rank card: neither good nor bad, offering little appeal yet too useful to discard. By itself, it certainly could not bring about a qualitative leap in combat strength.]
[You could incorporate it into your ultimate stealth card combination: first use Low Presence to strip away the anchors of your existence in other people's awareness, then layer Natural Perfection over it to erase your presence further, add Pore Physical Lockdown to cut off the physiological release of pheromones and scent completely, and finally use the Ten Shadows Technique to slip silently into the depths of the shadows...]
[With that entire combination, you would practically become a ghost in the truest sense of the word.]
[Unless it was Satoru Gojo, with the cursed energy perception granted by his Six Eyes, you were